Picaflor: A Memoir Sequel to Spirit Matters: The Continuing Adventures of Shamanic Explorer Matthew (Mateo) J. Pallamary, #2

DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to M.A. the face of the Cosmic Feminine who nurtured me in this life and the spirit of the Cosmic Feminine she connected me with in the revelation of Santa Teresa de Avila. By proxy this dedication includes Ayahuasca the mother of all the jungle plants and the voice of Madre Tierra who nurtures all life in this three dimensional realm at the junction of unconditional love with the Cosmic Father.

Together they bless us with the Great Mystery of existence. 

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Rob and Kim Gubala, Ken Symington, Mary Conrad, Jacques Olivier, and M. A. whose support  made this book possible .

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction             11

One: The Song Remains The Same,

But Hopefully The Dance Has Improved     13

Two: Row Your Boat          20

Three: Shadow Dancing In The Mirrors       26

Four: The Coming Crash          31

Five: The Waking Dream Revisited        38

Six: The Journey And Passage Into The First Launch      45

Seven: Immersion           51

Eight: Dancing With Death Between The Agony And The Ecstasy  57

Nine: To Hell And Back Again        64

Ten: On The Wings Of The Condor        72

Eleven: The Numinous Apinaré        78

Twelve: The Dark And Light Condor Blessing Of A Spirit Father  84

Thirteen: Caught Between The Worlds       92

Fourteen: Moving From Light Through Dark Desperate Panic  99

Fifteen: The Prophecy Of The Eagle And The Condor    105

Sixteen: The Condor’s Kiss         109

Seventeen: Stories In The Dark        113

Eighteen: A Premonition Before Meeting My Many Selves   117

Nineteen: The Heart Of The Mother       123

Twenty: Lucid Dreaming          128

Chapter Twenty One: Thirteen Condors Converge     135

Twenty Two: Shamanic Prayer From Beginning To End   141

Twenty Three: Andean Adventures        148

Twenty Four: The Elementals Speak       154

Twenty Five: Cross-Cultural Shamanism       158

Twenty Six: Picaflor Flirts First        165

Twenty Seven: A Deepening Animal Spirt Connection    172

Twenty Eight: Shamanic Story Time       178

Twenty Nine: Shepherding Goddess Royalty Across The River Styx 186

Thirty: Death Comes Knocking Again       194

Thirty One: Mama Coca Welcomes Me To The Jungle    202

Thirty Two: The Color Of Expansive Love Power     208

Thirty Three: Two Ayahuasca Firsts       214

Thirty Four: A Marathon Of Light And Dark      218

Thirty Five: My Psychic Surgeon        224

Thirty Six: Soaring From Blue Deer To Condor Mountaintops   234

Thirty Seven: The Magical Embraces Of Sting And Picaflor   241

Thirty Eight: 5ME-NO?           244

Thirty Nine: The Devil Made Me Do It       251

Forty: Chiric Sanango          256

Forty One: Treasure Island         259

Forty Two: Homeless Bound         269

Forty Three: Torn Between Two Narcissists      272

Forty Four: From Bad To Worse        279

Forty Five: Embracing The Void        293

Forty Six: Purificada           298

Forty Seven: The Peace Of Zen Emptiness      305

Forty Eight: My Hidden Empath        310

Forty Nine: Freedom           315

INTRODUCTION

I am a storyteller who was taught by gifted writers that information is the enemy of drama. This tale, which is the second installment of my passage through this dream we call life has plenty of drama and it is also a map I am leaving behind for those who might follow. Unlike classic story structure the terrain of this deep inner and outer journey often defies logic. The fact that much of it is nonrational doesn’t invalidate the dense gems hidden within its alien, nonlinear symbolic language. The information will get dense, nonsensical, and hard to follow at times, but this is in the service of accuracy. The chaos of my recorded dreams and visions may often come across as excessive, but I felt it important to record my deeply personal subjective experiences, particularly when my dreams and their interplay with my visions were stimulated by the teacher plants of the Amazon that bring life changing revelations in the isolation of shamanic plant dietas.

Remembering dreams and visions comes out of sequence, typically though not always moving backward from the most recent memories. While analyzing them I realized that the nonrational creative side of my brain was putting on plays and telling stories in its own unique language of metaphor and symbolism which is what we do with our art, books, music, and movies. Instead of communicating by stringing thoughts in linear sentences, our right hemisphere uses this symbolism as its own unique language to convey its concerns.

As far as my human interactions with the external world go, the names have been changed to protect the guilty.

ONE

The Song Remains The Same, But Hopefully The Dance Has Improved

At the time of this writing I have spent more than a quarter of a century traveling the mountains, deserts, and jungles of North, South, and Central America pursuing my studies of shamanism. The majority of that time has been focused on hunting the most cunning, treacherous, predator known to man deep in the primal heart of the Peruvian Amazon. I am cognizant of the fact that the act of hunting makes me a predator, but I am also the prey and I sense my quarry stalking me, ready to pounce and overwhelm me at the first sign that I am not paying attention. 

There's a tacit agreement in the back and forth of my predator/prey dance where they mirror each other so precisely that the predator becomes the prey and the prey becomes the predator, often from instant to instant. Although opposites they are complementary and inexplicably bound to each other until it becomes indistinguishable as to who is who.

Many of us like to think that we are beings of the highest light; hue-man beings, but if you take an honest look at the human condition and our relentless drive to consume more at the expense of fellow human beings, plants, animals, and all other forms of life along with the natural resources that we exploit to our detriment, the sad truth is that we are far from the light.

We are ravenous beasts that destroy practically everything we come in contact with, driven by greed and senseless addictions to what we think of as power. The irony of this makes it a futile attempt to fill an emptiness that can never be filled, and the more things we acquire in this transitory blip in the Cosmos that we call life, the more attached we become to them and the more acute our emptiness becomes. Our collective instinct is to deny and distract ourselves from these obsessions to obscure the truth of our existence at the expense of everything else.

All anyone needs to do is examine the state we find ourselves in amidst the aftermath of an environment that we have destroyed in our rampant quest for more, regardless of the cost to what sustains us and all of the life that we share our planet with.

We are living a lie, or better still a canon of lies, and the sad state we live in with our supposed brothers and sisters, and the widespread death, suffering, extinction, and destruction of all living things cannot be denied. The catastrophic events we are living through and perpetuating are the results of our own actions. Our self destruction is self induced and the collapse of our environment is manmade even when these events appear to be natural disasters like hurricanes, floods, tsunamis, pandemics, and tornadoes. More often than not these are the result of the damage we have done to our environment by destroying the natural world we were born into.

We all share variations of the same demons of self-deprecation, self-destruction, martyrdom, stubbornness, greed, arrogance, and impatience. Some of these are in greater proportions than others depending on individual manifestations, but collectively the path of the inner work is the same, although the terrain can be radically different for each of us.

If you have not figured it out by now, the demonic predator that I so desperately seek in my inner and outer jungle is myself, or better still my shadow, which is of my own making. We all harbor the same denied abandoned monsters and we all try to deal with them in our own unique ways of distraction, which adds to the collective madness we are all drowning in.

From as far back as I can remember I have never been comfortable in a world of lies and hypocrisy in a system that is doomed to failure pursuing fleeting gratification to the relative few by taking advantage of the larger exploited masses.

Many of us love to think of ourselves as spiritual beings of light, but the bigger truth is that we are beings of light and darkness. We deny the darkness we have created in ourselves as defensive egoic personalities huddling in the darkness, abandoned as unloved children we have fostered. We refer to them as our shadow, which is both intensely personal and collective.

How can we become whole when we ignore our dark, hidden nature by cultivating endless lies and distractions designed to keep our attention focused outside of ourselves when the real work of self discovery lies within where the terrifying truth hides in the darkness?

From my very first inklings of awareness I have longed for and dedicated my life to searching for Truth in a lie filled world. A quote from my first published book, a short story collection titled The Small Dark Room of the Soul shares this sentiment.

Through the ages, countless spiritual disciplines have urged us to look within ourselves and seek the truth. Part of that truth resides in a small, dark room—one we are afraid to enter.

This has turned out to be the driving force of my existence, literally to the detriment of all else.

What is it like to seek out the place where your deepest fears are amplified and there is nowhere to hide, and no one to save or protect you, forcing you to face the darkness head on and embrace awe and terror? Where is such a place where the predator becomes the prey and the prey becomes the predator? In ancient South American shamanic cultures this is called being swallowed by the jaguar. In other ancient cultures it is referred to as being decapitated and/or being dismembered.

Looking back, I was amazed to discover my dawning awareness evident in my first published collection of short horror stories. I didn’t realize it at the time, but all of the monsters in my stories are human and collectively the writing of them turned out to be an examination of humanity’s shadow.

What you are reading now is titled Picaflor, meaning bite or sting flower, the Spanish name for Hummingbird used in Peru. It is the continuation of my life’s journey chronicled in my memoir Spirit Matters which ended in the year two-thousand at the turn of the century. I am gratified to see after more than two decades that the song remains the same, and though I have reached higher and more refined levels of awareness, I am comforted by the fact that I will never become fully enlightened because spirit is infinite. Any delusion of enlightenment implies boundaries and limitations to what is ineffable, incomprehensible, and infinitely beyond any conception of what I or anyone else can ever conceive of within the boundaries of the three dimensional dream that we share.

Though it is more than twenty years later with lifetimes of experience behind me, the starting point is the same, as everything does come full circle, something the ancients knew on many levels. Infinitely expanding circles take the form of spirals that begin at a point, which by definition has no dimension and which also defines spirit as it has no limitations and no place in three dimensional reality, except as a starting point of spirit into matter. This expanding circle coming into existence from the no dimensional point of beginning is the essence of the word inspiration, which is what my life and my work have been. 

In the spirit of this sacred, inspired circle of existence that encompasses birth, death, rebirth, and the ever expanding journey of the gift of this adventure we call life, I am resuming this journey of my passage through three dimensional reality with the beginning and end of my memoir Spirit Matters.

In many respects this opening from Spirit Matters is where it all begins and where it all ends. 

It is returning, at last it is coming home to me – my own Self and those parts of it that have long been abroad and scattered among all things and accidents.

—Nietzsche

Thus Spoke Zarathustra

A WAKING DREAM

I am outside of time and space where the normal rules of perception no longer apply. Colors with hues that defy description bombard me, then unfold in multicolored geometric progressions that could be microcosmic quantum expressions, or unfolding galaxies. Within these realms I have lived as an insect devoured by still bigger insects, which have in turn been devoured by lizards and snakes with long ethereal stomachs that have passed me into nonrational dimensions that both amaze and terrify.

Outside of my physical body the frogs, birds, insects, jaguars, and other creatures of the Peruvian Amazon fill the night air with their calls, cries, twitters, and buzzes. For me there is no difference between the infinity expressing itself outside of me and the infinity that I soar through inside of me. It is all one. Outside of time and space a noise from deep in the jungle sounds as if it is right beside me, startling me. Sometimes I feel myself fully present and aware in two places at the same time, often in different times and dimensions.

After experiencing the consciousness of predator and prey in the lower worlds, I have flown first as a Condor, then as a Hummingbird into sublime and exquisite high frequency realities exploding with neon luminescent pastel manifestations that defy rationality. While my spirit soars, my body quivers and my insides teeter on the verge of both vomiting and shitting.

I soar between agony and ecstasy as each experience awes my soul with a palette of emotions that range from heavenly bliss to a hellish, maddening terror that cannot be articulated, much less comprehended. I am vaguely aware of others sitting around me in the humid jungle night inside a circular open air hut called a maloca. Many of them vomit and sometimes cry out in fear or bliss as they pass through their own visions. I feel my soul connected to theirs.

Our visions are directed by the music of a white clad mestizo shaman who sings magical songs, plays different flutes, and a stringed mandolin like instrument called a charango. He is the keeper of a vast body of knowledge of Amazonian healing plants that dates back to prehistoric times. His specialty is a unique combination of plants that have brought me to this visionary state that continues to unfold outside of three dimensional reality.

In this waking dream where time and space become fluid, I not only soar through alien vistas of sight, sound, and feeling, I also travel through events of my life, both good and bad, often reliving them and their emotional content. Throughout my journey, I often confront hidden aspects of myself that have been ignored and denied because of the negative emotional charge that they hold. I sometimes vomit when confronted with something particularly unpleasant, which clears it out energetically in what is called a purge.

I have come a long way to this remote spot deep in the primordial rain forest, far from civilization to spend extended time isolated in nature to learn what the plants have to teach me, especially about myself. To be healed I must confront the forces that have driven and tortured me throughout my life so that I can understand the lessons that they have to teach me. To get to their root, I must travel back to my beginnings so I can come to terms with the energies that brought me into this life.

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EPILOGUE

If I ever had any doubts about the reality of my jungle experiences, my conversation with my mother proved to me deep in the recesses of my heart that spirit does matter. In my inner journeys I have discovered that I am a warrior with my many selves who has hunted the darkness where the lost and forgotten aspects of my Self have raged in fear and hopelessness. Fear and death have been my greatest teachers, but it is the spirits of the plants who have shown me the many faces of Mother Earth, Father Sky, and the Oneness that binds them all to the infinite Cosmos that lie beyond this narrow and fragile dream we call reality.

My story is a myth, a word whose original meaning meant, One’s truest and deepest story, and it is in this spirit that I have laid my life before you to show the many paths I have walked in search of truth, meaning, and my endless fascination with the boundaries, real or imagined, that blur, define, or redefine what each of us thinks of as real.

We all have personal truths that we carry in our hearts through the agony and ecstasy of each transitory moment of our existence that transforms who we are from moment to fluid moment. These inner truths made manifest in our conscience are proof of a greater reality made painfully evident in the fear and helplessness that grip us in the face of our own inevitable deaths.

My path has taken me from early, lost innocence in a civilized jungle, to the real jungle where spirit did indeed touch my soul and show me the infinite teaching of the limitless expanse of consciousness that Spirit truly Is. 

My inner and outer sojourn from splintered dissonance has led me toward an evolving wholeness that is itself evolving toward an even greater Oneness encompassed by All That Is, so that my divided and chaotic selves can continue transforming from a dark chrysalis of selfishness into a magical butterfly of selflessness that will wing its way homeward, back to the One.

My explorations into inner worlds have shown me that we are far more than we ever imagined. In them spirit has revealed to me that I am star dust, manifest in the wind, the rain, the rivers, the lakes, and the oceans. I am the rocks and the mountains and the ground that gives life. I am the grasses in the fields, the flowers, trees, vines, bushes, funguses, mosses, and molds. I am all of the creatures of the earth; my brothers and sisters who fly, walk, crawl, slither, and swim, for I am a keeper of the cosmic fire that burns within every one of them. I am in all of the plants and all of the animals because I come from the heavens, but I am of the earth. I am all of these things and all of these things are within me, because I am a child of the stars, born of the earth. Though I come from spirit, I will never forget that I am my mother’s child, and I would not have come into this magical place we call the earth were it not for the union of my mother and father.

The gift of their complementary wounds polarized me, forcing me to rise above the paradox of anger and sorrow to a transcendent, emotionally balanced perspective. It is truly a miracle that I survived the darkness and difficulties that I faced in my early life. SomeOne loves me. SomeOne has been watching over me, guiding me, and protecting me each step of the way, and as it turns out, I wasn’t unloved and abandoned after all. I got lost. Now me and my shadow are finding our way home.

TWO

Row Your Boat

Stories from the jungle tend to carry a more profound impact when you hear them in an altered state and more often than not they contain valuable pointers in navigating Ayahuasca journeys and life in general. I think this comes from the fact that you are far more subjective to what you hear because you are listening with more parts of you being opened. What follows is written in this same spirit of openness. 

In the lore of the jungle, Ayahuasca is broken down into colored varieties which are primarily red, black, white, and yellow with variations. In terms of botanical classification there is no difference, but there are big differences at the energetic level. They say that yellow Ayahuasca comes on slowly and the visions are celestial and angelic. Red Ayahausca is more physical and purgative and brings no visions. Black Ayahuasca is much stronger, comes on quicker and lasts longer, and white Ayahuasca is reputed to facilitate light or dark magic. 

Within this lore it is said that after experiencing deep and profound life changing effects on his psyche and the drastic behavioral changes it engendered, a man asked an old wizened vegetalista about the nature and validity of what Ayahuasca shows you.

After considering the question for a moment, the elder shaman said, One third of what Ayahuasca shows you is the truth, and one third of what Ayahuasca shows you is not the truth.

The man waited for the old man to complete his response until it became apparent that nothing more was forthcoming, so he finally said, What about the other third?

The old shaman shrugged and threw up his hands.

This is an indisputable truth that I discovered both in the messages from spirit that Ayahuasca opened me to in my dreams and visions, and what I learned the hard way in the life’s lessons that came to me in the years following my first Ayahuasca experiences. 

This is what American Indians call Coyote.