When the Impossible Happens (15 page)

I visited Prague twice before during my second Saturn return. The first time, my visit coincided with the celebration of the seventieth anniversary of the founding of Czechoslovakia (in 1918). The large pedestrian zone (Na příkopech), adjacent to the famous Wenceslas Square, was at that time lined with two rows of tall cylindrical pillars covered with enlarged newspaper clippings from various periods of Czechoslovakia’s history. They were arranged chronologically, so that walking by them and reading the texts, I was literally reviewing and reliving the most significant times of my life.

The reason for my second visit, in June 1992, was the International Transpersonal Conference entitled “Science, Spirituality, and the Global Crisis: Toward a World with a Future,” of which Christina and I were the program coordinators. This was a major closure and completion for me. In the 1960s, I began my independent research with psychedelics in Prague, and now, thirty years later, I was bringing to Prague transpersonal psychology and Holotropic Breathwork, the fruits of many years of this work. The three weeks of immersion in death, from the beginning of the Findhorn training to the end of my stay in my mother’s apartment in Prague, seemed like an integral part of my second Saturn return and its completion.

BLESSING OF THE GODS: Don José Matsuwa and the Huichol Rain Ceremony

During the early years of our stay in Big Sur, California, we connected with Prem Das, a young American from San Jose, who stopped at Esalen to sell artifacts of Huichol Indians from north-central Mexico. They were all inspired by the Huichols’ psychedelic visions during peyote ceremonies and included exquisite yarn paintings depicting mythological motifs, carved wooden animals and gourds decorated with intricate bead designs, God’s eyes, and prayer arrows. He also brought richly embroidered shirts, pants, dresses, belts, and bracelets. At the time when Prem Das came to Esalen, he lived in Mexico, in a Huichol village near Tepic, the capital of the state Nayarit, and was apprenticing with Don José Matsuwa, an extraordinary centenarian shaman.

As we found out, Prem Das had a very interesting spiritual history. When he was eleven years old, he participated in a research study conducted in the Laboratory of Hypnosis Research at Stanford University by Ernest R. Hilgard. Although Hilgard’s intention was simply to study hypnotizability in children, Prem Das had during one of the sessions a powerful mystical experience that awakened in him a deep interest in the spiritual quest. In his late teens, he traveled to India and studied Agni Yoga with Haridas Baba, a famous guru known among others for his vow of silence. It was Haridas Baba who gave him the name Prem Das.

After his return to the United States, Prem Das traveled to Mexico, and during his visit to Tepic he saw a Huichol yarn painting depicting the journey of the shaman, or
mara’akame,
to the solar realm. The path of the shaman on the painting was punctuated by seven flowers and reminded Prem Das strongly of the yogic system of the chakras. Fascinated by what he saw, he decided to trace the painting to its source, convinced that the people who had made the painting had to have a belief system similar to Kundalini yoga. His quest took him to a Huichol village, where he discovered Don José and was accepted as his apprentice. The main spiritual vehicle of the Huichols and Don José’s principal teaching tool was ingestion of peyote, a psychedelic cactus with the botanical name
Lophophora williamsii
or
Anhalonium lewinii.

Prem Das described to us the tragic situation of the Huichol Indians. These people, descendents of the Aztecs, lived in small communities scattered through the canyons and valleys of the rugged mountains of the Sierra Madre in the states of Jalisco and Nayarit. They lived off the land, cultivating corn, beans, and chili peppers on the steep mountain slopes. The Huichols were representatives and guardians of an old pre-Hispanic tradition of their remote past, which they had been trying to preserve and protect against various external onslaughts. They called themselves Wixalika, or Healers, and believed that conducting proper ceremonies was essential in order to heal the Earth and keep nature in balance. The Huichols had successfully withstood the invasion of the Spanish conquistadores and now they were trying to keep their culture alive in spite of the ever-increasing encroachment of their Mexican neighbors.

In the 1970s, the Mexican government, determined to integrate all indigenous peoples into mainstream society, opened schools, clinics, and agricultural stations to introduce the Huichols to the new ways. Since that time, airstrips had brought small planes carrying tourists and government officials into the most remote areas of the Sierra. Ranchers coveted the high, grassy plateaus on which the Huichols lived and tried to appropriate them as new grazing lands for their increasingly large cattle herds. Christian missionaries and religious zealots had made numerous efforts to convert the “pagans.” The young Huichol generation was exposed to the temptations of the consumer society, with its television, transistor radios, motorcycles, and alcoholic beverages.

Modernization of the Mexican society also seriously interfered with a critical element of Huichol ritual life. The Huichols had traditionally obtained their main sacrament peyote in an annual pilgrimage to Wirikuta, or the Land of Flowers, their spiritual home located at the western edge of the Catorce mountain range. This three-hundred-mile journey used to be made on foot, and the first-timers had to walk it blindfolded. According to a millennia-old story, Wirikuta was the land where the Huichols were created and where their ancestors witnessed from Cerro Quemado, the Burnt Hill, the birth of the sun; this was also where the first deer hunt took place.

The Huichols believed that peyote grew in the footprints of the Deer Spirit Kauyumare and they obtained the sacred cactus by imitating a deer hunt. During the pilgrimage to Wirikuta, they ingested peyote ritually and they collected a sufficient supply to last them for the entire year. Private ownership of land and a system of fences now compromised the numinosity of this event by forcing them to use trucks and the highway system for this journey.

The last onslaught of the industrial civilization had been detrimental for the village where Prem Das lived. Since time immemorial, the staples of the Huichols had been corn and beans, a combination that constituted a perfectly balanced diet. To increase the production of corn, the Mexican government introduced into Huichol land herbicides that made the land incapable of growing any crops other than corn and forced the Huichols to buy beans on the market. When the price of beans suddenly tripled, this staple became unavailable to them. The undernourished Huichol children were now showing a variety of health problems related to this deficiency.

Having heard this, we decided to help the Huichols to survive and to pre serve their culture and their spiritual life. With Prem Das’s help, we established a connection with Huichol shamans and their artists, a liaison that turned out to be mutually beneficial. Prem Das regularly brought from Mexico his teacher, Don José, and other shamans as guest faculty in our monthlong seminars. They regularly carried with them large amounts of stunning Huichol artifacts, which were articles highly valued by the Esalen community, by workshop participants, and by visiting guests. This exchange represented extraordinary enrichment of our program and generated enough money to provide the necessary supply of beans for the Huichol village.

For us, the greatest benefit of this enterprise was the opportunity to meet Don José, a venerated Huichol shaman or mara’akame, and to spend some time with him. During his visits to Big Sur, Don José regularly stayed as a guest in our house. He was one of the most extraordinary spiritual teachers and human beings we have ever met. Don José was more than one hundred years old at the time we first met him. He had only one arm, having lost the other one as a young boy in a fishing accident. A machete injury had cost him the loss of two fingers on his remaining hand. And yet, he personally harvested every year five tons of corn and believed that the best guarantee for good health and longevity is to produce sufficient amounts of sweat every day. His vitality was astonishing; he walked up and down the mountains with such a speed that Prem Das, a young and athletic man in his late twenties, could hardly keep up with him. Despite his age, he showed active interest in sex and repeatedly made advances to women in our groups.

The all-night ceremonies with Don José were truly unforgettable events. He attended them wearing a large hat and his Huichol costume, both richly embroidered and decorated with intricate geometric designs and sacred symbols of his tribe—Deer Spirit Kauyumari; Great-grandfather Fire Tatewari; peyote cactus Hikuri; the double-headed eagle, representing the shaman capable of seeing in all directions; and many others. Don José always ingested before the ceremony a large bud of peyote cactus that helped him to transcend the limits of ordinary sense perception and to “see with the mind’s eye and the heart of the Great Spirit the interconnectedness of all things, seen and unseen.”

In spite of the impressive amount of peyote he had ingested, Don José performed all the ritual activities and healing interventions with impeccable precision, holding his prayer arrow with eagle and turkey feathers in his three remaining fingers and carrying for hours a sweet and haunting sacred chant. Prem Das accompanied him either with rhythmic compelling beats of his drum or playing a handmade wooden string instrument. The group joined in by adding the energetic sounds of Huichol rattles made of gourds and dry beans. Don José had an inimitable capacity to balance the sacred and the earthy. While the drumming and chanting was happening, he was very serious and created a solemn and numinous atmosphere in the room, but, during the breaks, his very mischievous trickster side took over. He laughed out loud and exchanged with Prem Das hilarious and often dirty jokes.

The most extraordinary and memorable ceremony we have experienced with Don José took place in the Big House at Esalen in the late 1970s, in the middle of a catastrophic California drought that lasted several years. During this entire time, the water shortage was critical. The agriculture in California was seriously threatened, and people living in expensive houses were unable to flush their toilets and wash their dishes. As the ceremony was beginning, one of the participants jokingly suggested: “Don José, there is a terrible drought in California; maybe we should make a rain ceremony.” Everybody in the group took it as a joke, except for Don José. After a short period of deliberation and to everybody’s surprise, he agreed.

For those of us who did not understand Don José’s chanting in the Huichol language, the ceremony seemed to resemble others we had done in the past. There was continuous drumming, chanting, and music all through the night, with the exception of a few breaks. In the middle of the ceremony, Prem Das led the group in the Huichol Deer Dance, during which we moved around the room in a stylized way combining forward steps with rotations of our bodies along the vertical axis. At dawn, Don José took out of his medicine bag a large abalone shell and a rabbit’s tail and invited us to go with him down to the ocean to receive
limpieza,
or purification, and give offerings to the ocean as a thanksgiving for a good ceremony.

We walked out of the Big House to the cypress-covered cliffs of the stunning Big Sur coast, still experiencing the “afterglow” of the ceremony. The view of the Pacific Ocean in the morning light was breathtaking and overwhelming. As the entire group stood there motionless, staring at this spectacular panorama, somebody noticed that it had started to drizzle. “In credible unbelievable ... fantastic...” were people’s comments about what in the middle of a disastrous drought seemed like a miracle. But Don José remained calm. “It is
kupuri,
the blessing of the gods,” he said. “It always happens; it means we did a good ceremony.”

As we walked down the stone steps to the ocean, the drizzling rapidly turned to a shower. Don José reached the ocean shore and stood on a flat rock, about ten feet above the water line. He placed his offering on the surface of the rock near his feet and started to chant. The ocean was very calm that day, but, after a few minutes of his prayer, as we all watched in astonishment, a single giant wave formed on its surface and moved rapidly toward the rock on which Don José stood. This massive body of water reached the rock with tremendous force, but it formed at its end a spiral crest that gently swept the offerings from the rock without spraying Don José’s feet. There was no doubt in anybody’s mind that the extraordinary
mara’akame
had interacted with the ocean as a living being and that it responded to him by receiving his offerings.

Don José filled his abalone shell with ocean water and, dipping his rabbit tail into it, blessed and purified one group member after another as we were standing there in a line. By that time, it was literally pouring, and we were all soaking wet, receiving limpieza of another kind. When we climbed back up the hill, we all danced in the rain on the lawn in front of the Big House around a beautiful eucalyptus tree, some people after taking off all their clothes. This might seem somewhat unusual behavior to an average American, but in Esalen, known for its cult of bodywork and integrated bathing, it seemed quite natural. We were astonished by what we just had experienced, and the mood in the group was ecstatic.

When we later related this experience to Joseph Campbell, he shared with us a similar story from his own life. Several years earlier, he had been invited as a guest to a rain ceremony on the Navajo reservation in New Mexico. Like our own ceremony, it took place during a severe drought. When they arrived at the ritual site and the ceremony began, the sky was blue and there was not a single cloud in sight. Joseph confessed that he felt very amused by the vain effort of the Navajo shaman, who carried on with great determination what seemed like a silly and foolish activity. Seemingly ignorant of all the odds he was against and with everybody watching, he kept chanting and beating his drum. But then dark clouds started to gather on the horizon, and they traveled rapidly in their direction. And, before the ceremony was over, they all were soaking wet.