A Farewell to Crazytown

It’s been a slow and steady rain for hours today, after a vicious windstorm that thrashed the palms from the trees and grounded all bird traffic. One of those contemplative afternoons that don’t come nearly often enough. No motorcars or noisy neighbors, just the sound of the rain and a nice breeze. It’s fine weather for thinking the thoughts that one thinks.

Today I am thinking about the appeal of trying to ‘unscrew the inscrutable,’ to use Ken Kesey’s phrase. I have a whole group of friends who are into conspiracy theories of one sort or another. Their eyes light up and they lean in close when you get on one of their favorite subjects, whether it is 9/11, crop circles, UFOs, or what have you. There’s a distinct pleasure in feeling like you are more in the know than your neighbor, that the internet is full of little bits of hidden knowledge that can be excavated… that the esoteric truth behind the lies can be glimpsed if you sort through enough chaff.

There was a time when I spent a fair amount of time on the Internet following this stuff. Currency-manipulating, king-making Bilderbergers? Boilerplate. Secret alien breeding labs producing hybrid humans with shadow government cooperation? Now we’re getting somewhere. The Illuminati are in ranks with shape-shifting lizards from the Pleiades? Talk to me.  There’s a nationwide underground railroad complete with fleets of United Nations prisoner transport cars, fully operational for the martial law of the new world order? Wow, tell me more. So those jet chemtrails in the sky are really spreading nano-robotic viruses? Awesome! What’s that you say, the President is a secret Muslim socialist foreigner? Sorry friend, move along, that’s just the crazy talking.

So it turns out that everybody has their limit. You can only go so far down one of these paths before you can no longer ignore the giant flashing signs pointing the way to crazytown, and you think, do I really want to go down there, with those people who actually believe that? No, you really don’t. Conspiracy theories are like an exotic spice that you can sprinkle across a conversation, but try to subsist on it and you’ll go mad from starvation. Even when there’s good reason to be suspicious. I think a great many normal, sane Americans believe there was something funny about 9/11, but how many of us are going to lose sleep or devote valuable work hours to trying to solve the puzzle? It should be somebody’s job, for sure, but it’s not mine.

Still, who doesn’t like a little spice now and then. I mean, I’ll be honest, I’ve seen a UFO with my own eyes, right outside of Iquitos on a very clear night. I got a good long look at it, and my two friends did too. That’s a game-changer in terms of one’s outlook on the world. It caused me to re-evaluate a lot of the things I had learned in school. And I can see now that if aliens are among us, and there has been a history of contact between ourselves and extraterrestrial beings, then the world of X-Files is a lot closer to reality than a lot of folks would be comfortable with. Let’s face it, if an alien craft landed at a major airport tomorrow, in broad daylight for the world to see, there would be panic and mayhem in the streets. I don’t even want to imagine what kind of chaos that would unleash. I’m sure that the Powers That Be feel the same way.

As it happens, an alien spacecraft did almost land at a major airport, O’Hare in Chicago, back in 2006. It was witnessed by a dozen people, including pilots and supervisors. You’d think something like that would attract some major media attention, and some serious public debate about the consequences. But if you don’t remember it being in the news, that’s because it was largely ignored. The FAA’s official stance is that it was ‘weather phenomena’ that would not merit further investigation. Sounds pretty crazy, doesn’t it?  Read for yourself:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_O’Hare_International_Airport_UFO_sighting

The problem here is that this was not some flash of light out on a country road that some hayseed saw while driving home half-drunk.  It happened right out in the open, with multiple unimpeachable witnesses. And yet it was successfully swept under the rug. To me, this is where a conspiracy theory of a whole different magnitude starts to actually look plausible. I mean, who am I going to believe, the FAA or my lying eyes?

The O’Hare incident took all the fun out of UFO conspiracies, because it made UFOs seem all too real—perilously real. It’s natural to be afraid of something you don’t understand. But the national response wasn’t panic—it was apathy. The few national news outlets that did briefly cover it, did so with skepticism and even mockery. And if an incident like that can be successfully ignored, with no consequences, well then… maybe we’re already a lot further down the road to crazytown than we even realize. What’s worse, it’s turning out to be a nearby suburb, within easy commuting distance from where we live now.

I don’t know what this all means for the human race. I don’t know what all the greater implications are. It’s not my job. I guess I’ll just wait to watch it on the news.

God’s Cartographers

I’ve been thinking about a line that Lee Smith said once in a writing class that good fiction brings forth news of the spirit. Dispatches from other lives, and insights into who we are, as a people.  I’ve always remembered that. Reading a good book, especially fiction, is an intimate experience. It lets you inhabit, for a time, a perspective or experience that’s outside of the world that you know.  You could say it’s a way of leading many different lives.

I’m thinking about this because I’m writing a book that examines the realm of the spirit, through the subjective lens of people who travel to the Amazon in order to take part in ayahuasca sessions. There has been a lot written about ayahuasca, and the trend seems to be growing. There was a writer here on assignment from Vanity Fair recently, and just the other day a feature piece on ayahuasca appeared in the Washington Post. The Washington Post! But readers, there is good reason for this. Ayahuasca is the next great frontier in the evolution of consciousness. It is a big neon sign pointing the way to the future. I truly believe that. And as its popularity grows, and more and more people break open their heads with ayahuasca in order to experience a larger reality, the more it can be understood in the context of the way we live now.

Why do I assign such an important role to ayahuasca? Because it is a master teacher. It can heal you, show you the future, and most importantly, show you who you really are. But more than all of that, it seems to have been designed by a divine hand. It can introduce you to states that are not unlike what I imagine enlightenment to be–it can give you temporary access to states of mind that are so far advanced from our normal state, that describing it starts to sound like science fiction. But it’s not. It’s a sneak peek into the potential consciousness of a more evolved human race. That is to say, I believe that as a species we are still trending upwards, getting smarter and more efficient at thinking with each passing millennia.  I suspect that ayahuasca is the most powerful tool in the carpenter’s kit, pure molecular engineering genius hidden a plant that lifts the veil between this world and the next for a few hours, and lets you experience, for example, things like telepathy and astral travel and psychic communication with a whole array of different spirits.

Believe me, I know how crazy this can start to sound. But frankly I don’t care. Ayahuasca is not for everyone, only those who seek it out. If you’re really curious about the possibilities of the human brain, you have to leave behind a lot of preconceived notions about what ‘mind’ is, and what it is capable of. When I go looking for news of the spirit, I want to learn something new… something newsworthy.

There’s a definite taxonomy to the spirit world—you’ve got the spirit of mother ayahuasca herself, then you’ve got the souls of deceased people, then there are aliens and transdimensional extraterrestrials, healing spirits, angels, evil or demonic spirits, and a great number of entities that defy any easy definition.

This is all terra incognita. Everyone who drinks the brew has to decide for themselves what is real, and how to put a value on it. Besides actually drinking the stuff, which I do not do very often, most of what I have learned has come from reading books on the subject, and talking to lots and lots of people, novices and experts alike, to hear about their experiences. It’s a bit like the cartographers did during the age of exploration—they couldn’t visit all these places themselves, but they met with every explorer who returned to port, made a copy of map that the explorer had sketched along the route, and stitched together all those different pieces of the whole, until a coherent picture began to emerge.

The picture that I have assembled is very much in keeping with the world of quantum mechanics. For example, objects can be in two places at once. Particles have memory– matter once joined and then separated can act as though still one, even though they may be a great distance apart. And perhaps most importantly, there is a unifying principle of non-locality at work—in the zero point field that makes up the fabric of the universe, all matter and all information is stored in such a way that it can be accessed instantly from any point. Physical distance is not a barrier at all. In fact, it is an illusion. Prior to the 20^th century, these notions would have been considered absurd. But now it’s considered cutting edge science.

In ayahuasca, I have experienced 180 degree vision. I have mentally been in more than one place at the same time, sometimes moving simultaneously between as many as half a dozen distinct places or mental projections. I have left my body and seen it from above. I have experienced astral travel. And I have communicated psychically with a host of different spirits. These are the types of confessions that, in days past, could cause one to end up highly medicated, or locked up in a padded cell, or both. But now they are the confessions of a growing number of citizen psychonauts, brave amateurs from all around the globe who drink ayahuasca and come in contact with spirits and intelligent entities of seemingly infinite variety. They’re all out there, swimming in a vast ocean in which the fabric of all sentient beings is intertwined. Perhaps that place has always been there, present but out of sight in the deep water, while humanity wades in the shallows.

In ayahuasca, the questions “where am I?” and “who is here with me?” are often the same question. And so drawing a map and taking a census are really two sides of the same coin. Once you know the lay of the land, you can begin to get a sense of the population. I imagine that, in times to come, measuring the cartography and taxonomy of ayahuasca will be an exponential leap forward towards mapping the hinterland that lies between physics and metaphysics.  The indigenous indians of South America have known how to navigate the spirit world for thousands of years. That’s what shamanism is, and it was all self-taught, through centuries of trial and error. And now, in our quantum age, this ancient practice is finally having its coming-out party with the modern world. Or rather, the modern world is coming to the jungle. Because in order to make any progress, you have to get out of the lab and into your own mind. You can’t make a map, in this case, without seeing the territory for yourself.

The thought of ayahuasca getting exposure to a wider audience is exciting. Until recently, I would have said that all the weird, dissociative ‘out-there’ qualities of the ayahuasca experience were enough of a social taboo to keep it from ever catching on. But now that National Geographic and Vanity Fair and the Washington Post are on the ground reporting, it’s fair to say that the ayahuasca phenomenon is going mainstream. And that’s a great thing, because the more that smart, serious people experience what’s possible in the human mind, the less it will seem strange and, well, alien. As Terence said, nothing human is alien to me!

So my hat is off to those in the vanguard of human curiosity, the bearers of torches at noon, all the citizen psychonauts who come to the Amazon to experience ayahuasca, and the inner frontier, for themselves.

Fruit Trees

Later we were driving home and stopped to get some aguaje. It’s that palm nut with the fleshy orange fruit, the favorite snack of Iquitos. Women sell it on street corners everywhere in the city. We stop by Plaza Bolognesi around dusk, and I recognize the people in front of us- the guy with the brillo beard and guitar slung on frayed twine and the girls wearing outfits pilfered from the costume trunk of a traveling theater troupe–they are none other than the Argentinian hippies from the art opening the other night, Lassi’s friends who came with him to the afterparty at the restaurant and tried to steal a table arrangement. It was just a simple frosted pinecone and some fake flowers, not even worth anything. They had already eaten and drank, they stole it just to steal, while they were making out in the hallway as a distraction, and the owner caught them and made them put it back. “Well you didn’t pay us to play music,” they said. “We came here to play, and you didn’t let us.” So it’s peace, love and fast fingers with these people. That was pretty poor form, I must say, and as Iquitos is a city of thieves, it serves one well to have a long memory for these things.

And then there’s Lassi himself, that rum-soaked sadhu mystic who will always be a drunken Irish sea captain at heart. So he could quote the Nag Hammadi scrolls and Krishnamurti and could speak about Theosophy. So he had read the Gita and was a Buddhist monk for two years, and studied ayahuasca with Shipibos for three years, and spent time with Osho in India as a teenager. Sure, that might open doors among certain circles. So what? If that was a resume, you’d call him a job-hopper.   All I know is, every time Lassi went into the kitchen, the bottle of rum reduced itself by two fingers.

He’s got the gift of gab, you’ve got to give him that. But from the looks of it he’s not got much else these days, broke and out on the street selling jewelry, making such a living as one can in a poor country with a silver tongue. A friend of mine talked to him for a whole evening, and thought he was some kind of prophet, emerged from the jungle to speak truth to men. And he really looked and sounded the part. There’s no denying that Lassi has a first-class intellect and he’s a hell of a storyteller. It’s a heady combination. So my friend gave him a place to stay, free food and drinks, and for what? When you add it all up, wise words alone are little more than a parlor game, a performance. It gives all the appearance of depth and meaning and purpose, with none of the action to back it up.

When it all shook out, what we saw was someone networking with people in a position to help him out, and then following every one of those leads until they burned out. I mean, you’ve got a barefoot guy in a turban with feather quills through his nose and a jaguar tooth through his ear, who hasn’t bathed recently and acts like a fifty-something guitar player for the Rolling Stones on the second week of a bender. He looks you in the eye and speaks eloquently about the spiritual path as he eats your food and drinks your wine. He gets blind drunk and tries to climb over the concrete wall to get home, instead of walking back to ask for the key. He falls fifteen feet on the concrete and nearly busts his ass. The next day he brings over six friends and expects you to feed and shelter them, and when you don’t, they turn up their noses and curse you as soon as you turn your back!   How long until a guy like that wears out his welcome?

In short, he’s the type of guy, like a lot of these people around here, who expect things to be free forever. But when they’re no longer getting anything from you, they move right along and you never see them again. Sorry, but that’s what it is. I don’t know what path to call that, but it’s not the one I’m on.

And having said that, I should also say that I do not make these pronouncements from some higher perch. I see a lot in Lassi that inspires empathy. He one of those characters you meet in life who are fascinating in proportion to their flaws. And I don’t pretend to walk the straight and narrow path all the time. I understand that the effort to better oneself is a war with many battles.  At the art opening, they had one of Slocum’s notebooks under a glass display, and Lassi showed me a passage written there:

“If you bring forth what is within you, what you have will save you. If you do not have that within you, what you do not have within you [will] kill you.”

It’s a line that I know by heart, attributed to Jesus, from the Gospel of Thomas, perhaps the best-known of the Gnostic Gospels unearthed at Nag Hammadi. Lassi said that this was what he was struggling with at the moment. When I think of these lines, and I think of Lassi and the way he wore out his welcome with my friends, it’s impossible for me to dislike the guy, because I see that in seeking to understand the world, in being open to whatever comes, he’s just like me. I’ve always tried to judge people when they are at their best, instead of judging the low moments. I don’t doubt the truth of any of the stories he has told me or my friends. But I do question the fruits of his actions.

Because how else do you represent what you’ve learned in life, except in your actions.

The tree is known by its fruit, no?

Saturday

Today is Saturday, which means everyone is taking it easy. It was overcast all day, which is great when you are driving around shopping for rental houses. You have to do this because your upstairs neighbor is a no-class perrita who yells at her kids and makes her baby cry and boils over with anger at the most minor incident. You don’t want to be around people who are trapped in the private hell of their own mind like that. So you take a deep breath as you accept this fact, and then you go out to look for another place to live.

The way to do that here in Iquitos is to drive around on a motorbike in the neighborhood where you think you would like to live, and look for the ‘for rent’ signs taped on doors. Then you knock on the door, or call the number, and meet the person and then go inside and for a tour of the dark, dusty, windowless rat warren that is only ten feet wide and extends back in a narrow-shouldered column from the noisy street and ends in a tiny walled concrete square called a ‘patio.’

After a few days or weeks of this punishment, you finally break down and go to an agent. Because the agent’s fees are paid not by you but by the property owners, they traffic in high-priced or hard-to-rent places. Of course, high-priced is relative—five hundred bucks a month gets you a nice house in an upper-class neighborhood with all the amenities. We went to see one that was fifteen hundred bucks a month, a fortune for Iquitos, and it had a pool, a Jacuzzi, four bedrooms and three baths, maid’s quarters, a hand-carved wooden bar built into the living room, and included the piano and all the furniture, most of which was imported from Europe. But then, in Iquitos only executives and high-rollers can afford to rent a place like that.

After realizing you don’t want to work with an agent, you drive around aimlessly for days, seeing the same places over and over again. Each place you see has a fatal flaw. Many are plagued by the incessant roar of the motorcars, others only have water for part of the day, still others (most in fact) only have windows at the front and back. Safety is an issue. Noise is an issue. It’s all a hassle. You drive by the stadium, where there is a crowd gathering. It’s game day. You are so sick of looking at crappy houses, you stop and shift verb tenses again, and buy a couple of tickets to the game.

Then we went to the game, which was cool because the local team won, and we were right behind the goal on the far end, where the cheap seats are, and we got to see the goals up close. They’ve put up a proper scoreboard this year, so it’s easier to track the match if you get there late. But hilariously, the clock read “0:00” the entire match, either it doesn’t work or they just don’t use it, not sure which, but neither would surprise me. Also, the tickets I bought at the stadium box office were for another match that was apparently played back on May 2. It was a different team and a different kickoff time. They have these leftover tickets, right, and they don’t want them to go to waste, so they just stamp them with a rubber stamp that says, basically, “this is an official ticket, don’t worry about it,” and with recycled tickets we got into the stadium. And this is the professional Peruvian soccer league, folks. Nothing goes to waste.

So, there we are, in Max Augustin stadium, buzzing with Latino passion for the home team. The vibe is visceral and real. It’s energizing, it rocks. And for the in-between times, there are vendors passing by selling popsicles, roasted jungle peanuts, banana chips, even fried hog skin, something we would call “cracklins” down south. The quality of the soccer was tepid, but hey, it only cost three dollars to get in. And afterwards the motorcars fly banners and organize into honking columns down the main streets, celebrating victory while it lasts.

street art

A follow-up on that stencil of Brother Paul… the artist is a young local guy named Sose and he has his own blog, check it out. I mean, what else are ya gonna do, get on with your workday? I don’t think so.

http://iquitostencilartsose.blogspot.com

The stencil art fits right in on city walls because there’s a long tradition of stylized mural painting in Iquitos, from expressions of social protest to political propoganda to Amazon landscapes where voluptuous jungle girls beckon. You see this stuff everywhere around the city. Check out “Recuerdo de Iquitos” edited by Iquitos native Christian Bendayan, if you can find a copy, it’s an excellent introduction. Or check out some of Christian’s work here, definitely worth a look:

http://www.33bendayan.blogspot.com/

Anyway, thanks to Gart for the tip on Sose’s blog. It hasn’t been updated recently, but that probably just means he’s hard at work out in the streets.

Who knows, he could be the next Banksy.

vignette of the day

I have to relay this anecdote, it just happened to a friend of mine, and it’s a great  illustration of life in Iquitos. My friend, we’ll call him Federico, is a native charapa, born in the jungle, and he’s still here.

Federico was driving home the other night on his motorbike, and he’d been drinking. All of a sudden he hit something in the road. It was a cop, who was not at all pleased to be mowed over by a drunk driver. The following exchange went something like this:

“Hey you, come over here. You’ve been drinking! Why don’t you watch where you’re going?”

“Well, OK officer, I’ve had a few. But you weren’t wearing any reflective clothing, I didn’t even see you. What are you doing in the middle of the road at night?”

“Never mind that. You’re drunk! I’m confiscating your bike. It will cost you 200 soles ($70) to get it back.”

“Officer, please. I’m broke. All I have is 50 soles ($17). Can we make this problem go away?”

“I’ll take that, for hitting me with your bike. Look what you did to my uniform! It will still cost you 200 soles to get your bike back.”

“OK. But please, now I’m broke. Give me back 10 soles to catch a ride home.”

So the officer gives him back 10 soles from the 50 he had just taken. Here a bribe is called a propina (a tip) and what makes it so great is that Federico paid the bribe, then turned around and asked for some of it back, and the cop gave it to him.

It’s pure charapa. I love it. If that had happened in the States, Federico would have gone to jail! But I have to say, there’s a lot of liberty given to individual freedoms here in Peru, and most rules are like rubber–they bend easily.

The Trials of Brother Paul

Riding home in a motorcar from the city center of Iquitos, in the Peruvian Amazon, there’s some new graffiti blooming along one of the main streets. It’s a fairly realistic stencil of the face of Paul McAuley, probably done from a photograph.  There’s a red circle around his head, and vines flow from it. It’s a clear badge of grassroots support for a man whose life has gotten very interesting lately.

Brother Paul, as he is known here, has spent the last decade tirelessly working to further the rights of the indigenous in the rural jungles of the upper Amazon. As President of Red Ambiental Loretana (RAL), an environmental watchdog group, he has been for years at the front lines of the battle between oil and timber companies and environmental advocates to influence the fate of the Amazon rainforest and its inhabitants.

This “incendiary gringo priest,” according to the right-wing Peruvian press, is a lay brother of the De La Salle Christian Brothers, a very large and respected organization within the Church that is dedicated to education. The 62 year old British missionary, born to Irish parents and educated at Oxford, has spent twenty years in Peru promoting education and humanitarian causes. For his contributions to Peruvian education, he was made an MBE, Member of the Order of the British Empire, by the Queen of England

But on July 2nd of this year, the Peruvian government decided that he was no longer welcome.  Paul received a letter from the Interior Ministry informing him that his residency had been cancelled, and he had seven days to leave.  Brother Paul requested habeas corpus and appeared before a judge in a Loreto courtroom.  The judge granted a temporary stay against expulsion, a decision that is now being challenged by a high court. Brother Paul’s court date is now pending, and will probably determine whether he stays or goes.

A July 19 letter of support sent to the Interior Ministry from a broad-reaching international group of academics, activists and policymakers stated in part that “we are deeply troubled that (McAuley’s) efforts to ensure due process for indigenous peoples, including free, prior and informed consent regarding resource extraction projects, could be construed as a basis for his expulsion from Peru.”

Now that his predicament has made international headlines, Paul and his supporters are reaping a windfall of free publicity. With the public support of the Roman Catholic Church, Amnesty International, Amazon Watch, and many other prominent policy and watchdog organizations, Brother Paul has become emblematic of the larger struggle for human rights and environmental protection in the Amazon.

McAuley’s situation has all the elements of high drama: a lone protagonist crusading against injustice, shadowy titans of industry pulling strings from corporate boardrooms in distant lands, and all the moral relativism you might expect from a government who seeks popular support from the people of the Amazon even as much of the wealth from its natural resources ends up elsewhere.

Why is this happening, and why now?

In recent years under President Alan Garcia, there’s been a literal and figurative gold rush happening in the Amazon. Enormous swaths of the rainforest have been leased by the government to various corporate interests on a larger scale than ever before. Those in on the deal stand to collect record profits. But land use policies have upset locals, and oil contamination has caused a number of casualties in indigenous communities. This tension between corporate profits and human rights has led to violent incidents at Bagua and Andoas, and similar episodes could easily erupt elsewhere as development continues in coming years.

The violent nature of these incidents has generated passionate debates throughout Peru. Where some see criminal behavior, others see groups of citizens out of options and fighting for justice. Lacking a sense of proper representation from their own government, they take matters into their own hands through protests and blockades.

McAuley’s work over the past decade has been dedicated to these disenfranchised groups. While he has great popular support among these communities, he has also generated a lot of criticism. To get another opinion, I spoke to Oscar Olavarría Saldaña, Director of La Región, the largest pro-Garcia daily newspaper in Iquitos.

“The problem is not with the natives, it is with the environmentalists,” Saldaña told me.  “They come to Peru thinking that they know everything, and they try to come in and tell the indigenous what to do. Most of the natives are not educated people, they don’t have the intellectual understanding of these complex issues. If you tell them to fight and defend themselves, they are going to do it.”

It’s no secret that McAuley has made some powerful enemies through the years. He’s been called the Noam Chomsky of the Amazon. His erudition and understanding of complex social issues is on par with his grasp of the bureaucratic machinations of governmental institutions. His access to facts on the ground seems unparalleled, and comes from years of building relationships with many of the most remote tribes in the upper Amazon.

He began working with the youth of the upper Amazon while doing pastoral work in Iquitos. There he was introduced to the indigenous university students. He found them working in fairly poor conditions, and McAuley tried to arrange better living and study arrangements for them. They soon asked him to be their sponsor, and through these initial friendships he was introduced to their families and communities in the jungle. He has relationships with a whole catalogue of Amazon tribes. Some, like the Bora and Cocoma, are relatively close to Iquitos. Others are more remote, such as the Achuar, the Awahun, the Kandoshi, the Shawi, the Wampis, the Tikuna and Matses on the border with Brazil, and the Huitoto on the border with Columbia.

“I get lots of energy, being around these people, “McAuley says. “There’s an appreciation for traditional values, such as giving importance to the individual person and learning respect. They know how to live in the moment, without being influenced by wealth or social status or who you were with last week, nothing but the present moment. You’re there, I’m here, we’re in the hut and it’s raining out, and that’s all there is.”

McAuley says that, despite past conflicts, he is hopeful that a future of reconciliation between big industry and indigenous populations is possible.

“Prior consultation, true consultation, is the sticking point,” he says. “Not just arriving and telling people what’s going to happen. That’s not consultation, that’s information. Prior consultation is already required by international law, but it is not the practice here. It will empower the local people, the river dwellers and indigenous, to feel really responsible for their natural resources, and that national and international law will support them.”

Saldaña pointed out to me that the indigenous already receive money and healthcare from the oil companies, although he did not get into any specifics. In essence, he suggested that the progress of the greater good should not be impeded by the conflicting needs of small minorities.

“There’s only one solution,” he said. “How will we be living without the extraction of oil? The whole world runs on petroleum, it provides jobs and energy for Peru.  If you leave our natural resources completely alone, for the benefit of the indigenous, it would be at the expense of everyone else.”

The Peru Free Trade Agreement put into law a few years back requires that the rights of multinational companies—primarily timber, oil, and minerals—must be protected. In several high-profile conflicts recently, this has meant using the reach of government power to protect the interests of corporations over the human rights of indigenous Peruvians.

McAuley cites as an example the case of Perenco, a British/French company that have gone to into an area on the Napo river recently. Two anthropologists, independently cited in an environmental impact report, recommended against any presence in the region, as there are still non-contacted indians there. That part of their report was taken out of the final environmental study before it was published.

(Note: the presence of non-contacted natives in this area is disputed. See Rory Carroll’s report for the Guardian here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/jul/04/peru-amazon-rainforest-conservation )

“Natives in the area blocked the river with rope for ten days or so,” McAuley said. “The Perenco president went to go see Alan Garcia in the Presidential Palace, and the next day Garcia declared the lot to be of ‘national interest.’ Now that phrase opens all sorts of doors, in which you can use military and police action to protect the national interest.

“Two days later, a naval frigate with two smaller fast boats went up the river, broke the blockade and escorted the Perenco barges through. So you’ve got the irony of 500 years later, after the Spanish came down the Napo river, with no help from the Peruvians, you’ve now got a British/French company breaking through a barrier to go up the river, accompanied by the Peruvian Navy.

“Three or four weeks later, the company decided to launch a hospital boat,” McAuley continued. “They invited me to the launch, and I got hold of the French Ambassadress and I spoke to her in French. I said, ‘Madame, you understand that the way that Perenco entered into this area was very unfortunate. It was an invasion.’ And she smiled at me, and she said, ‘there are friendly invasions.’

“That just shows you the delicate side of diplomacy. You would expect your ambassadors to hold up certain values, respect for human rights and consultative processes and that sort of thing. But most diplomats, to a large extent, are there to further the aims of the national companies.”

The indigenous are at a disadvantage in this equation for many reasons. Geography impacts their treatment, as some areas are so isolated that it’s hard to know that some places exist at all. And other groups have decided that they don’t want any further contact with the outside world, and discourage visitors.

Basic health care is difficult to establish in remote areas, and in many places the petrol companies have filled in for the government. Brother Paul is quick to point out that not all companies working in the Amazon have a poor track record with the indigenous. Some are bending over backwards to repair relations with native communities. Some offer healthcare and give free transport to the community. One company created local jobs in this way, by giving eight fast boats to the community, and training locals to use them. Now they hire them to offer a transportation service back to the company.

That said, some of the same companies who provide employment and basic services for Indian communities were also killing them, slowly, over thirty years. Brother Paul says the official figure they received in 2005 was that 1,200,000 barrels of salty, contaminated wastewater was released into rivers of the upper Amazon, every day. The impact of 1.2 million barrels daily on three principal rivers–Rio Tigre, Rio Corrientes and Rio Pastaza—resulted in large numbers of indigenous casualties as well as areas of environmental devastation.

For his lobbying efforts on behalf of these indigenous populations, Brother Paul has come to be seen as a “foreign agitator” according to elements of the Peruvian government.

“What makes me angry is that a foreigner comes in, and he doesn’t have sufficient authority to provoke resentment in the native communities,” Saldoña told me. “Not even to speak to the legacy of the ancestors of these people.”

At times, Brother Paul has been described as an undesirable, even a white terrorist, whose activities incite unrest and threaten the progress of democracy. I asked Brother Paul to respond specifically to these accusations, and he offered a few examples to help set things in perspective.

“The day I received the letter informing me that my residency was revoked, I was schedule to meet with members of the regional government,” he said. “We’ve been working with them for two or three years on projects to protect the environment. So it’s difficult to understand why a regional government would work with an agitator. The judicial powers here last year founded an anti-corruption panel, and they asked me to be on it, as one of only five members. So, the judicial powers and formal government groups know who we are, and we work well with them. They are not going to work with so-called agitators.

“So what Lima understands as agitation, we understand as education. That means giving people information that they didn’t have before, that wakes them up to human rights and the conditions in which they really live and how they could be treated better.”

He went cited another incident from 2004, in which RAL was helping the community in Masan to put in an injunction against forestry concessions there, because environmental studies were never done and the concessions were thus illegal. (Concessions are the legal mechanism through which tracts of forest are claimed and approved for timber removal.) One injunction was accepted, and the other was rejected and went to the Constitutional high court in Lima where it was overturned and the court ordered the suspension of all major concessions.

“That sentence of the Constitutional court never been applied,” says Brother Paul. “President Garcia never signed the document. Let me give you yet another example. Agreement 169 of the international work organization, which gives indigenous people the right to be consulted prior to any new legislation that might affect them directly. That’s now been approved in the parliament, and it was a great victory. It came twenty years after Peru had signed it at an international level but never agreed to it at a congressional level. The agreed to it two months ago, but Alan Garcia has put a brake on it, and won’t sign it.

“So on the national and international level, there are two examples of undemocratic behavior, of a leader who won’t obey his own high court and parliament.”

* * *

What does the Catholic Church think about Brother Paul’s situation?

“I don’t really know,” he said. “They are supporting me publicly, which is wonderful. I have had calls from several bishops, who tell me privately that they support my cause and they think I am doing the right thing by fighting this. But I think the Church would like this situation to go away, if the truth were told.”

Brother Paul pulls out a copy of the Aparecida, the official declaration of the 5^th conference of Latin American Bishops, held in 2007.

“The documents of the Latin American Catholic church are fairly radical, and it’s a side of the church that most people don’t know,” he said, and translated a passage: ‘We have to insist that in the interventions where natural resources are involved, the interest of economic groups don’t have the final power, these groups that rip out irrationally the sources of life in prejudice of whole nations and the entire humanity . . . In this process, the present economic model has an enormous responsibility since it gives privilege to the unlimited desire for wealth above the value of people and populations and respect for nature.’

“And here, this is where I’m going to defend myself,” he said, thumbing to another passage.  “‘Look to alternative models of development that are integral, based on solidarity, based on an ethic that includes responsibility for true natural and human ecology, and that are based on a gospel of justice, solidarity and the universal destiny of creation.’

“How about that?” he smiled. “Creation is for everyone, it’s not for a limited group of people. And all the things that come out of it, be it wood or petrol or whatever, have to be for a common good. So the church’s theory is excellent. The church is very clear. It says here: ‘the church’s preferential option for the poor is one of the characteristics that marks the physiognomy of the Latin American church.’”

“The social order now is a disorder, the disorder of the jungle and the fight over its resources is desired by those in power. They want that disorder to continue, because that’s how they operate. So if the people want to organize a march or whatever, we’ve got to support them in pursuit of their rights.  Between the poor and the powerful, you have to choose. There’s no sense being a member of a religious order, and being a part of a family that supposedly makes you free to take on risks, and then not take on the risks.”

Though he is a lay member of the La Salle Brothers, Brother Paul took the same vows of chastity and poverty that priests take.  One of the reasons for the vows, he points out, has always been so that members are free to do the work of the church without fear of repercussions from the outside world.

“People who work in the municipal, regional or state government can’t talk, because if they talk, they lose their jobs and their family suffers. I can talk, because my food and lodging are taken care of. That’s what it comes down to at the end of the day.

He quotes again from the Aparecida. “’We’ve got to go towards creating the conditions . . . that are essential for a just social order.’ And that’s precisely what we are doing, and that brings you to a head-on collision with the status quo.

“I am hoping that in the public space I’ll be given in the court, I can have a head-on clash about the major issues. I don’t want to dwell on the minor questions. They are trying to limit my participation to religion, but if you have a philosophy of life, you’ve got a right to go from your principles to practice, and even an ethical obligation.”

According to Paul, no one really knows who is pulling the strings to have him removed, and only time will tell. But it’s clearly someone high up in the geopolitical food chain. The courage that Brother Paul has shown in openly challenging the powers that be, and consequently to make himself a lightning rod for his critics, has won him great respect among indigenous communities.  He also has the full support of the La Salle order, even as the situation begins to reveal the complicated web of allegiances within the church itself. What happens when the Order’s activities differ from Rome’s agenda?

“As Catholics, ultimately, we owe obedience to the Church. But first obedience to our conscience. Because the church, at any one moment in history, is not necessarily right. History has shown that much.

“The structural church, because of the historical weight it carries, is totally mixed up in the power structure. And I feel like I’m being dragged two ways. As part of the official church, to keep things on a fairly safe level, and as part of the real work of the church, representing the poor and indigenous, for whom we’ve made a preference in our documents.

“Traditionally, those clashes have come on a personal level. Joan of Arc, for example, you let the person go up in smoke, but you don’t let the institution go up in smoke. You canonize them, and just keep going. You ritualize everything into domestication.  You ritualize the life of Jesus without understanding what actually happening to him, and which is happening every day to someone else.

“Now circumstances have made me a symbol of this larger struggle for human rights. I don’t really like being a visible figure, but I have to continue, because I can’t turn my back on the people who are depending on me.”

While Paul has received his fair share of hate mail and even death threats, his heightened profile has succeeded in moving the conflict into more civilized corridors of debate.

In a moment of levity, Paul joked that, whoever ‘they’ are, they could have done away with him when they had a chance.

“They could have made it look like a robbery, put a bullet in my head and solved their problem,” he joked. “No one would have known the difference. But now that I’m in the news, it’s too late. They have to deal with it.”

So what’s the difference, I asked, between a terrorist and a freedom fighter?

He thought for a moment, and then replied, “Well it depends on who’s telling the story, doesn’t it?”

 

Update: Happily, Brother Paul remains in Peru to this day. The shadowy forces that tried to have him expelled remain anonymous, as do the Powers That Be that lobbied against them on his behalf. However the decision was reached, up there out of sight in the high corridors of power, we’re glad that Brother Paul is still here among us in Iquitos.

Patch Adams and the wisdom of fools

So, speaking of wise fools, Patch Adams and his band of apprentice clowns are in town this week. This is the real Patch Adams, not the Robin Williams caricature from the movie, and he comes to Iquitos once a year, for a week, with a large group to visit schools and hospitals and practice clowning in the streets. A lot of these people are in their 20’s and are studying psychology or medicine or social work. And they have actual clowning workshops where they go out in the street and try to make people laugh. One of Patch’s helpers told me that they went to the mental hospital outside of Iquitos, and the resident psychiatrist ordered the bars removed from the windows in honor of their visit. They threw them in a pile and then danced on the pile. It wasn’t clear whether they intended to put the bars back on later, but still, a beautiful gesture.

These are intelligent people, these clown doctors, and I was impressed with the work they were doing. They had filled up two hotels with the groups that accompany them to Iquitos each year. The schedule taped to the wall showed a full slate of activities: clowning demonstrations and workshops, and a lot of social work-oriented projects as only clowns can contribute: painting houses in lower Belen in bright psychedelic colors, staging parades through the market, visiting hospitals, that sort of thing. And then there were these informal talks.

Well, they seem like a fun group, I thought, so I went to go hear a talk tonight with Patch and his partner in crime Carl Hammerschlag, a Yale-trained psychiatrist who does mind-body-spirit healing work. Someone told me he had done some peyote ceremonies with the Native American Church. I was interested in what this guy had to say.

Typical Iquitos fashion, we get there to the hotel and everyone is sitting around on the floor of the lobby, about forty people, more latinos than gringos. They were having fun with the clown bling: rainbow socks and baggy pants, bicycle horns and magic wands, poofy skirts and glitter.  And there’s Carl wearing a jester’s cap and polka-dot pants with big red pointy jester shoes, holding forth in rambling stentorian tones. Definitely an eclectic crowd.

The whole vibe with Carl and Patch has a children-of-the-60s feel to it. And I mean that in a good way. They were talking about revolution as something that happened on a personal level. Love and inner peace and healing energy are real quantities that are discussed openly without a trace of irony. Carl talked about altered states of consciousness, defining it loosely as something that makes you see the familiar landscape in a brand new way. It doesn’t have to be something mind-altering in the sense of chemicals or drugs. Although he has used ketamine for end-of-life situations in hospices, with great success. He spoke about peyote as well. But he mainly focused on the value of humor and love and breaking out of repetitive patterns of thought and being open to the energy of other people around you.

And when he mentioned that he was the eldest son of Holocaust survivors, and someone who has grappled with managing fear and anxiety his whole life, he revealed himself as someone who had transcended tremendous sadness. He pointed out that the figure the fool has a traditional role in the way he uses comedy to speak truth to power. Often the fool is the smartest guy in the room, signifying as an idiot to say the words no one else is allowed to say. The fool is the only one at the party who is unencumbered by ceremony or circumstance, the only one free to call things what they are. In that freedom lies true power, and it’s an important role in society, for it’s the fool who keeps everyone else honest. I don’t know if there is an archetype in history for the jester-healer, but if there is, these shamanic holy fools are the living embodiment.

Patch also spoke briefly. He has long white hair that reaches to his waist, parted in the middle, and the whole left side is dyed purple. He sports glasses and a fetching upcurled white moustache a lá Colonel Sanders.  With his baggy clothes and his band of clowns, he cuts quite a figure. Listening to Carl was like hearing a latter-day Ken Kesey as channeled through Rip Torn, while Patch was more like Gandalf among the Merry Pranksters.  Patch spoke about some other kinds of altered states, things like “loneliness, which murders millions every year in the form of suicide.” (I must say I had never thought about it like that before.) And energy, both personal and cosmic, in all its forms really. And kissing, I believe, was the third one he mentioned. Kissing as a transformative, mind-altering experience. I’m all for that.

Patch says he answers every letter he receives, but doesn’t do email. He implored the people there to hand-write him a personal letter, to ask for book recommendations, talk about your life, ask a question, whatever. He said, I really mean it. I’m all caught up on my letters, I answer every one. I’ll be your friend for life—it’s easy.

Who hand-writes personal letters anymore? Patch is old-school. I think what really struck me about the whole thing was the lack of irony. Nothing cynical or jaded, not a trace of snark. He exudes sincerity and seems to genuinely care as much for others as he does for himself. When I think about the legacy of the 60s, that’s what it feels like–in the best possible way, there’s a peace and love vibe going on there, and it may be a hippy vibe from earlier and more innocent times, but it’s genuine. I mean, I can’t remember the last time I attended a lecture that ended in a group hug.

Patch’s clowns are staging a parade through Belen market on Saturday, and then there’s a blow-out party at Nikoro for their last night in town. I definitely plan to attend, so I can get to know these compassionate jesters a little better.

cool camoflauge

Check out the camoflauge on this moth. I spotted it hanging out on a palm tree. It had a wingspan of maybe 9-10 inches across, it was enormous.

As someone who can be a bit of a geek about camoflauge, I was very impressed with the outfit. Nice job, Nature.

nice camo, dude

Wine and Roses

I’ve met a lot of interesting folks over the years who come to Iquitos seeking soul medicine. Some are neurotic, others are depressed, but the majority in my opinion are addicts of some form or other. I’ve sat in ceremonies with them and spoken for hours before and after about the transformations they experienced.

These people come from all over the world, and they tend to be successful, professional types—therapists and teachers, bankers and doctors and entrepreneurs. They are people with the means and intellectual curiosity to travel to a remote jungle outpost to work with traditional medicine and be willing to take a harrowing look inside, to the deep, dark corners of the self that are always, always easier to ignore. They proactively seek their own healing. Simply by being there, they have made the greater part of the journey.

What puzzles me is not the variety of accurate divinations received through these visions, but the relatively large recidivism rate that follows. What I mean is, most people who go looking for answers in the spirit world, receive answers, Usually they are in the form of good, practical advice spelled out in very clear terms. But how many of these people actually follow this great advice and go on to change their lives? There are no statistics on this, but it’s surely a small minority. Why do so many relapse? I have seen a lot of these people come to Iquitos time and again, repeating the same formula, and vowing to do better for themselves. Perhaps part of the problem for many people is that intentions and actions are casual acquaintances at best.

It is said that insanity means doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Why do so many people seek healing, and do so much of the hard work of improving a life, only to fall even further? Why are some humans wired this way? It seems to make no evolutionary sense. This is a question that keeps me up at night.

There was a guy here last year, I’ll call him Charlie; he really crystallized it for me. He worked long hours for an environmental non-profit in San Francisco. He was a very hard worker. He was financially successful, but his private life was a mess. His work ethic was an analogue for a larger pattern of addictive behavior. Control, after all, is also a form of addiction. And when he slipped, he slipped all the way. He had a bad habit of going off on crack-smoking binges during times of stress. This behavior concerned his friends and family to the extent that they sponsored his trip the jungle, hoping ayahuasca could do better for him.

During his time here, he came to terms with his addiction and seemed to really turn the page. A few months late, back in San Fran, he ran into a personal crisis and went AWOL. When the dust settled, he had lost two weeks to smoking crack and had to be hospitalized. His wife left him and he almost lost his job as well. Yet just a short time before, he had appeared to be a changed man.

I suppose what I’m really asking is, what does it take for a person to truly change? And it doesn’t have to be about plant medicine, the impetus could come through religion or therapy or any other form of counseling. I was talking to a friend about this the other day, a psychologist with training in addiction counseling, and he told me that the recidivism rates in all of these modalities are about the same. The problem is not the cure but in the stubborn and complex habitual tendencies of the human soul. People may understand and accept the cure, but still not act on it.

In Charlie’s case, he knew it, but he could not do it. Talking the talk is one thing, but at the end of the day it’s still only talk. I’ve been thinking about all of this because in my own research on the plant medicine, I’ve done informal interviews with dozens of subjects, and the pattern is almost always the same. These medicinal plants are capable of showing you world-shattering revelations, but it is up to the individual to walk the walk, every day. Understanding one’s maladies and imbalances are but the first step. Acting to correct them is the journey of a lifetime.

This point was driven home for me in a very painful way recently. I have a good friend who has been in Iquitos for about a year, and in the beginning she was assisting curanderos at an ayahuasca retreat center in the jungle. She was doing regular ceremonies, and making great progress towards a balanced life. But circumstances intervened, and financial and personal hardships led her down a different path. When I saw her again recently, she was just about at the end of her rope.

She asked me for 100 soles, about 35 dollars, for food and medicine. She was expecting money through Western Union the next day, it was just going to be a loan. I gave it to her, even knowing she had been smoking pasta (the local form of crack cocaine) only weeks before. She acknowledged this and told me that she was done with it. I gave her the money knowing that she might not use it for the reasons she had said. I gave it to her because friendship means giving someone the benefit of the doubt, especially when others give up.

But the next day, she was back on the pasta and nearly died. It made me so sad, for a lot of different reasons. I don’t expect to get the money back, but I was hoping that the gesture would be a reason to increase the trust in our friendship, instead of eroding it.

Then other night I watched Days of Wine and Roses, a great film from the early 60s about the descent of two alcoholics played by Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick. I thought the film was superb, especially the way the actors played out the latter stages of depravity and addiction. Harrowing stuff. By the end (spoiler) he straightens out, and she doesn’t.  But when his young daughter asks him if mommy is ever going to get better, he says, “well, I did, didn’t I?”

I still believe that people can heal themselves, and can get their lives straightened out, at any point along the way. I believe this because once in awhile I am still surprised by an example of someone re-inventing themselves, and finding the inner strength to walk a different path.  And I wish my friends the best. I have seen up close that the descent into a private hell of one’s own making is usually only the first act of the story. Only a fool would remain there for very long, or return very often.

Like Blake said: “if the fool would but persist in his folly, he would become wise.”