Mark’s Reviews > Singing to the Plants: A Guide to Mestizo Shamanism in the Upper Amazon > Status Update

When don Roberto drinks ayahuasca he's attended by outer space visitors who speak computer language. Dona Maria says they sound like beepboopbeepbeepbeepboopbeepbeep while don Roberto says they sound like pingpingdandan.
Of course, any spirits could be caused by gap filling. They could be manifestations of the mind but the opposing idea is less pseudosciency, and they might actually be real from another dimension.

According to the book, the first stage of ayahuasca administration involves rotating and swirling geometric patterns which lead into the second stage, possible contact. The third stage is the comedown. Mapacho, tobacoo, is also considered cosmically hallucinogenic but the tobacco people smoke in cigarettes in the states contains a relative little amount of nicotine, so it doesn't work. Without tobacco no plant works.

Shamans keep two kinds of magic stones - invisible ones kept in the stomach and visible ones kept in a bag around the neck. After preparing the stone by feeding it tobacco; etc, the shaman drinks the stone, the spirit of which appears in a dream, and shows the shaman what he or she seeks. If the shaman fails to feed the stones tobacco daily, he dies. Knowledge of herbal medicines & shamanism is not mutually exclusive

It's interesting how quickly things go cosmic with the administration of psychedelic chemicals, or "drugs", or medicines. The shamans would use ayahuasca and go to other planets and galaxies, and receive visions of far away people or events in order to locate them and sometimes lost items. They use trance, lucid dream like states to accomplish these goals. I wonder what the success rate is, how often it works?

Sorcerers are what humans ought not to be - individualistic, self serving, and opportunistic. They lack empathy for other humans and act for purely personal motives of jealousy, envy, resentment, and revenge.

This chapter was titled "Sex". It's about the well known lore that prospective and established shamans must abstain because the spirits don't like the smell of it, or menstruating blood. However there can be a sexual component to the spirits when taking the various medicines, particularly the ayahuasca in the jungle. The idea is to keep the body below a certain temperature to avoid activating the latent darts.

This is truly dark subject matter, and a dark subject indeed. The only way I can see someone being interested in this is out of pure curiosity. And curiosity did kill the cat, indeed.

Do humans share a desire to harm other humans? The lack of self control is what distinguishes shaman from sorcerer. Those who give in to desire, and lack the self control, are followers of the easy path.