Chris Kilham has conducted medicinal plant exploration in more than forty-five countries. He has taught yoga and meditation since 1971, has appeared on over five hundred TV and two thousand radio programs worldwide, and is the author of fifteen books, including The Ayahuasca Test Pilots Handbook and The Lotus and the Bud.
Chris is an adventurer par excellence in both the big world around us and in the deep, mysterious, sometimes exceedingly strange inner worlds of journeys with medicines like ayahuasca. In those realms, just as in his travels around the planet exploring medicinal plants, Chris has ventured farther and wilder than most.
As Chris describes in his moving, eloquent, and often entertaining chapter in How Psychedelics Can Help Save the World, the deeper waters of sacraments like ayahuasca are not for the faint of heart. Here are some snippets from the chapter that confirm that.
Chris’s title for his chapter in the book is “Out Past the Shipping Lanes,” an analogy from the days of his youth when he often kayaked among the islands off the coast of Maine in the United States. As he says, “Nobody kayaks out past the shipping lanes” where “the water is deep, the currents unfamiliar, the winds stronger.”
But in the jungles of Peru in the care of extraordinary shamans (ayahuasqueros), out past the shipping lanes was exactly where Chris often found himself—learning to ride the curl and navigate strange and turbulent waters, “a spirit wind in my hair, the depths of the space around me unknown. I sense large and powerful entities around me, shifting and swirling tides. . . My body is dissolving in the warm night air, the boundaries of my physical form melting into the darkness. . . The spirit world yawns open as it always does when I drink ayahuasca.”
Over the past couple of decades, the term “set and setting” has moved from a niche concept familiar mostly to researchers and keen psychonauts, out into much of the psychedelic mainstream. In case you’re unfamiliar with the term, simply put, set is everything you bring to the meeting of mind and medicine. That includes any past experience with grounding practices like meditation and with these powerful mind-manifesting medicines themselves; your mindstate both long term and immediate; and your intentions regarding what you want from these sacraments. Are you willing to be changed, to be open to facing both past hidden wounds and vast new realms that—as the shamans sometimes say—are more real than the world we’re temporarily leaving behind.
Setting refers to the environment of the encounter itself and is an equally essential component of safe and effective journeying. Is the container solid—guided and protected by a properly trained and ethically impeccable ceremonial leader, therapist, or trip sitter? Or is it a free-for-all setting without protective guardrails, like experienced-based support for someone having a hard time? Are the other participants in a ceremonial setting appropriate for doing this kind of deep work and in a general sense do they share similar intentions directed toward emotional healing and spiritual opening?
When the essential components of set and setting are in place, as Chris writes, you may experience “the suspension and dissolution of old neuronal channels. Instead of thinking, feeling, or reacting according to old grooves, we expand . . . the possibilities for new thoughts, feelings, and reactions are endless.”
In Chris’s experience, no small aspect of that expansion includes encountering the presence of entities. For example, an anaconda almost always showed up in his ayahuasca journeys. “The anaconda embodies the medicine. It delivers and conveys energy and mystic awareness and a sense of gigantic nature—of the expansion of my being—so broadly and vividly, that there is at times very little left of me at all. Occasionally the anaconda has swallowed me whole, and I have returned the favor.”
There are at least two key points Chris makes in this chapter I want to make sure come across. Here’s one of them. Chris says about the kinds of experiences described above, “It is altogether weird.” As I noted on the issue of setting, experience-honed skill is involved and protection is required. The journeyer needs to know what to embrace and allow and where to stand firm. Chris learned over time how important it is that for, “Every ceremony, I make the declaration that any entity that is kind and wise and has my best interests at heart can come close, and all others must stay away.”
There is far too much valuable insight and information in this chapter to do full justice to what Chris has shared in his chapter in How Psychedelics . . . “. Among a number of topics he addresses that can be of great use to journeyers in the medicine realms, he talks about the essential role of a skilled and ethically unimpeachable shaman/ayahuasquero, and how “The strange visions that come and go are all part of a healing process that may seem utterly nonsensical yet results in an overall sense of profound refreshment of self, a renewal, a topped-off tank, and batteries fully charged.” He also offers simple yet profound guidance for navigating the sometimes turbulent waters out past the shipping lanes, such as, “Come back to the center. Stay focused, aware. Breathe.” and, “I learned in my first ceremony to let go, to abandon resistance, to breathe and get into the center of the energy, to be swept away by the medicine while remaining alert, focused.”
I’ve learned from my own encounters with ayahuasca, guided by the kinds of skilled shamans Chris talks about, that the healing songs known as ícaros (ee-kah-rose, or ee-kah-ro in the singular) are another essential component of the work. As he says, “The songs cleanse and beautify, illuminate and galvanize me.” I’ve been in ceremonies where the ayahuasquero sang an ícaro for me that instantly propelled me from barely sensing the medicine’s presence to a full-on powerful journey. In my first ceremony way back in 1992, the medicine came on like an overwhelming freight train and scared me. The ayahuasquero sang an ícaro for me that called in a large jungle cat who briefly took charge of my body and flipped me in no time at all from scared and shaky to joyous and blissful. I have no doubt that ayahuasca has a penetrating and unpredictable intelligence that can completely bypass conventionally understood “reality.”
As a kind of sidebar at this point, I believe it can’t be emphasized enough that anyone daring to call her or himself (or “themselves”) an ayahuasquero and lead ceremonies in which this powerful mind-manifesting medicine deeply sensitizes people, must engage in a rigorous period of training, preferably under the tutelage of one of these impeccable maestros. The same admonition applies to people leading or wanting to lead people into the deep with other psychedelics. There is too much at stake for people to put themselves forward without that kind of grounding and processing. With ayahuasca, the knowledge of how to connect to and work with authentic ícaros is a key component of the required skill set.
I said above that along with all the other beneficial information Chris shared in his chapter, there were two key points I don’t want to miss sharing with you. I’ll give the talking stick to Chris to put it in his own eloquent words. ” . . . we will need to carry this medicine forward into every aspect of our lives. It is not enough to sit mind blown and heart suffused in the maloca, diving into the luminous ocean of healing, realization, joy, gratitude . . . Beyond the brilliant immersion into La Medicina in the dark of the jungle night, our task is to carry that light, that sense of connectedness, that obstinate compassion and determination to keep our hearts open . . . we can bring back treasures.”
The last word here and in the chapter itself also goes to Chris. “May all beings be happy. May all beings find peace.”
~ ~ ~
Next episode in this series:
The Role of Visionary Art in Elevating Global Consciousness
featuring Martina Hoffmann
Martina Hoffmann is one of the world’s leading visionary artists. Her paintings are detailed views into her inner landscapes and portals into other realms—imagery that has been inspired by the dream state, meditation, and shamanic journeys in the Amazon rain forest. A world citizen since her childhood in West Africa, Martina lives and works in the United States and France. Much of her stunning artwork can be viewed on her website: www.martinahoffmann.com.
