Iquitos, Peru: Ayahuasca. (Part 13.4)

Interviews with Shamans, Part Six.

Interview with Ron Wheelock, Part Four.

Wheelock, shirtless and barefoot, led the way into the house through the back door, through the kitchen, and into the cavernous living room, almost bare of signs of personality, no great signs of himself as a man dominating the space, no photos of family or events, no posters of rock stars or movie stars, no glowering Che decals stuck on the inside corners of mirrors, and in fact, no mirrors at all in the place. Unlike so many successful self-made men, Wheelock is diffident, not so thrilled with his own success in life that he must pause frequently to gaze in wonder at the reflection of the man he is. On the mantel above the giant flat screen TV playing music befitting a man of his age, i.e. something pleasant and bland, is an absolutely massive alligator skull he cannot discuss the pedigree of, and on the floor are two upright electric guitars, either unmoved since my last visit, or, because everything is spotless and dustless, meticulously replaced after wiping and cleaning and polishing. Wheelock, in contrast, is coated in soot, a black swath across his face that the sweat magnifies as he turns his head to speak, the light catching and accenting his unshaven face and large mustache. Wheelock is short by today's standards of young men well over six feet tall. He's not skinny, which is surprising given his constant use of ayahuasca, a weight shedder of maximum power, a diet aid that must be heaven to anorexics and bulimics across the wasteland of Modernity today. He works hard enough to stay trim at 57 years old, though he is a middle aged man, not a young Adonis. He pads across the sparkling tile floors and sits comfortably in a leatherette sofa, joined by a medium sized green parrot that perches on the towel over the sofa, that takes half an apple in its claws, that bites hard and sprays apple bits around, Wheelock sitting back and playing absently with a new pit bull puppy he has yet to name, wanting to wait till a name is revealed, till the dog shows some signs of personality, I would venture. The puppy is rambunctious, and Wheelock pets it and pushes it away when the dog becomes over-excited, stopping a couple of times to tap the dog on the nose when it becomes too aggressive. A large woman, Wheelock's longtime love interest, joins him on the sofa, curls up, and falls asleep as our conversation continues solely in English, of which she understands not a word. At some point I realise she is no longer there, and she doesn't return for the duration. She doesn't live with Wheelock, only coming and going as things go. Wheelock says he built the house for her, but she hasn't yet committed to living in it. Wheelock lives alone, aside from the dogs, the parrot, the chickens, and the ayahuasca. There is a steady flow of visitors, and one has come from England to take ayahuasca with the Gringo Shaman. The young man is covered with tattoos, many of them elaborate and polychrome and expensive, some even attractive for tattoos, one being a romanticised portrait of a Turkish dancing girl, a few others Celtic geometric, and some so elaborate I can't find the right visual distance to make them out. He sits and listens as we talk, being taken with the mystique of the master in the jungle. He asks if I will take his picture with a machine I have never seen the likes of, something so fancy I have to ask him how to make it work. He and Wheelock stand side by side, the lad smiling and proud to be in this epic show of student and master, in the master's home, a showcase of the lad's coolness when he returns to his own place and is among his envious friends. Wheelock is accustomed to this, and he poses with complete unconcern, smiling but seemingly unaware of the moment beyond its significance as one of millions in a day. He's made the lad's day for years to come, and maybe for all of the lad's life. Wheelock is standing in his own living room with a visitor. He sits back in his black leatherette sofa and we talk again, about what it is to be a shaman. Perhaps some will expect Wheelock to transform hereforth into a dynamo of a Las Vegas showroom impresario, a towering Tony Robbins, a Titan of Wealth and Healing and “Feel the Power!” energy that will permeate the room and leave us all gasping at our previously unfelt greatness as we later leave the auditorium in a herd, minds awhirl, stumbling and amazed by the performance that turns us however momentarily into little gods of great feeling and joy at our own tremendousness. But no.

Wheelock is, in spite of his shy demeanour, the most famous, the most Tony Robbins ayahuascaro-proper of our time, though others, not shamans themselves, are probably better known in the ayahuasca business, men who appear at sterilised scientific conferences, and mystic middle class hippie symposia, and the high life cocktail party circuit of New Age dilettantes of Modernity's wealthy and bored inner core. Wheelock is a middle aged guy in a lovley big wooden house at the edge of a rotting Third World dump of a poverty-stricken village in the Amazon jungle. People go to see him. One drops in without need of an appointment if one doesn't care about missing him and about the lost time and the dirt one accumulates on the walk through the muck to get to his place. Being 90 minutes late? No problem. It's the Amazon jungle, not Beverly Hills. He's Ron Wheelock, not one of the McKennas. He's a guy at home. So there we sat and chatted about him being a shaman.

Ones expectations about this dope-dealing ex-con who packs a gun and has killer chickens and pit bulls running around his jungle compound while he ships high-powered drugs world-wide to happy customers and makes a name for himself as the best ayahuascaro in the area due to the potency of his brew is a man who bears a striking resemblance to my grandfather. The likeness for me is disconcerting. They could well be twins. Yes, Wheelock and I could be brothers, not only in appearance. But there are differences, and they are extreme.

He says, and others look in bewilderment, “I'm not ['ain't,' he said,] a full-time shaman.”

"Shaman." Wheelock is the only other man I have yet to meet outside home who accents the first syllable of the word, careful enough to use a short vowel, but speaking naturally otherwise. I've had this conversation earlier in the mud with Sophie who asked why I don't accent the latter syllable like every other person one meets who bothers to use the term at all. She's not familiar with the word pedantic, so I explain that the word is Russian/Mongolian, and to emphasis the last syllable is to avoid the sound of “shame” from it. Me, I don't care. Wheelock is a bit more careful, but not pretentious. “Shamm'n.” I couldn't say it's better for others.

“I'm only a shaman when I'm working.”

This was followed by silence from the audience. The question unasked is how one can be an occasional shaman when it is the vegetable gods who call one from the multitude to bless them with the illimitable spirit of the Arcane. One must be special, no?

Wheelock is an American dope dealer from rural southern Kansas. He makes a good living selling ayahuasca to drug tourists and others abroad. He has a small business and employs a few people and provides a welcome service. He sells snake oil. It's what he does, not who he is. Diabetics beware: he loads his foul-tasting ayahuasca with litre after litre of cane sugar. He makes his ayahuasca so potent that his is the number one best in the business. “As a shaman when I'm working I'm an empty vessel. 'A hollow bone,' as the Shipibo say. A clear glass.”

People pay roughly $65.00 for a glass of ayahuasca, a mat to lie down on, a plastic bucket to puke ones guts into, and access to a toilet. Often enough even Wheelock's cielo brand ayahuasca doesn't give the geometric patterns, the creepy-crawly hallucinations, and the grand inner-Tony Robbins-that-one-truly-is cosmic exultation of self that most long for and pay for. Many's the time folks just get sick. Even with Wheelock's super-cielo ayahuasca life is not special beyond what one is. Those who spend so much and come away without the expected transformation often confess to me that they feel there is something wrong with them. Their chakras are blocked. They are too closed to life itself and are now in ever deeper need of healing. Far away in a muddy village where the streets are all the same and everyone else is poor. Where the streets have no name and children do not expect anything. Sophie and I were lost, but then we found Wheelock's house and chatted while he boiled shredded vines in tubs in the scorching heat of flaming hardwood trees. Being a shaman? This is what Wheelock told us.

Years ago Wheelock married a local woman and she and he had a child, though Wheelock had had a vasectomy in his early 20s. She left. The woman and her family, he says, were bad, and even evil, resorting to witchcraft at times to destroy him in his attempts to regain custody of his son when the wife deserted and later returned and took the boy away. Lawyers repeatedly cheated Wheelock, who didn't understand the court system. Of his own accord he demanded a paternity test, which conclusively showed the child was not his own, and Wheelock then said the child would bear the Wheelock name because it is so. Literal fideism. When once we had dinner together, I met the boy and he hugged me and laughed and was good. I had brought Sophie for hours on a trip that ended us lost in the mud so we could meet this shaman and find out about the Mystik. This is what Wheelock told us.

That his wife had poisoned his son's mind against Wheelock to the point Wheelock was and remains still convinced the wife and her family used witchcraft, not a bad supposition here in the Amazon. But Wheelock continued his attempt to regain custody of the boy from the mother and her family whose resistance was beyond reason, as it were. "My life was like the movie The Exorcist," he said. On the face of it, the mother had kidnapped the son, and Wheelock should have retained custody of the boy. Wheelock said he was so angry and frustrated that he had visions of killing the woman and all of her family, other than, of course, the boy; but then what of the boy himself? The wife and mother-in-law are evil, Wheelock told us.

Wheelock has another child many years ago, and he is a grandfather, the story private now and tragic. There is nothing about that story that Wheelock can do. That is a story Wheelock told me.

Long, long before, the fat lady on the couch has disappeared. That is the Wheelock story I saw with mine own eyes.

Wheelock, sitting alone on his black leatherette sofa, the parrot gone to eat its apple elsewhere and the dog out of sight peeing on the sparkling tile floor behind us, told us this, that: He raises and trains and puts his chickens in the arena to fight and die.

Thus, that: He gains respect.

Four people sat in Wheelock's living room and Wheelock told us. He told us this:

That he is a Christian, and he asks God for permission to take ayahuasca.

That he is a shaman and he asks the plants for permission to take ayahuasca.

Wheelock did not tell; and now I know.

Sophie noted that it was coming dark, and thus we said our goodbyes and Sophie and I walked back to the road. I sat beside Sophie inside the wooden bus after we had walked to the pond sized mud hole where the buses assemble for the long ride back to the city. I looked closely at Sophie's tangled blond hair in mats and knots and frayed tiny braids, and I thought of her life of travel and adventure and her grey hair hidden in the yellow, the fine lines around her lovely sky blue eyes, the small white marks on her golden tanned skin. Sometimes I looked out the window, and eventually I looked out the window in alarm due to the realisation that we were utterly lost in a city half a million strong and I knew not wherein we were. The bus driver accelerated pointlessly on crowded and narrow streets, honking at mototaxis, crashing through deep pot holes till we we all flung around like rag dolls, and we were lost. I considered killing this evil driver, but then, what of Sophie? How would she get home again?

Later by some days I asked Sophie something unrelated to all of this, and she laughed. She told me this: “We have no home to go to.”

That, in short, is what I learned about shamanism from Ron Wheelock: That a man is a man and has a home wherein he lives alone and is alone. That we are lost and there is no home to return to. That one lives and loves and is left alone at home with chickens who kill each other and die so that when the day is done and others have had their day and the bills are paid, one is an empty vessel and the dog pisses on the tiles out of sight because though one wants to kill evil people one encounters, what then does one do with the child left behind alone. We are alone. We will die like chickens, though some might die like roosters, for all it ever matters. Our driver is insane and dangerous and we are lost, and there is nowhere to go. This is what I know now about shamans.

Now I know all I care to know about shamans and ayahuasca. All that remains is that I know it ayahuasca.
 

A gentle reminder that my book, An Occasional Walker, is available at the link here:

http://www.amazon.com/Occasional-Walker-D-W/dp/0987761501/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1331063095&sr=1-1

And here are some reviews and comments on said book:

http://nodhimmitude.blogspot.com/2012/04/dagness-at-noon.htm

Iquitos, Peru: Ayahuasca. (Part 13.3)

Interviews with Shamans, Part Five.

Ayahuasca

Interview with Ron Wheelock, Part Three.

Wheelock has four tattoos on his arms ….

The plan was to see Ron Wheelock for a wrap-up session, to ask him about shamanism in general, to get an American, a "gringo" perspective of it all, and a man's opinion. That went according to plan till I got to the village where Ron lives, and then the plan went selva, going its own way and leaving me and my companion for the day, Sophie, to make our way as best we could in the rain, the mud, and through thickets of jungle growth one can't hardly see through, let alone walk through. I'd been there before, in the village of sameness and the streets without names. A snap. 'Where is this place again?” And then, like an episode of The Twilight Zone, no one we talked to had ever heard of Wheelock, didn't know no gringos in the village, and couldn't recall ever having seen one. I decided to call him and ask for directions.

On one sun baked and water beaten grey storefront, an open space where on could see a few shelves with tins and packaged plastic wrapped goodies of whatever, the sign with the telephone nailed up and giving me hope of contacting the man we had come to see and were late to meet, the man whom the locals swore they had never heard of and had never seen, the sparkling sign giving up hope of talking from a distance, the telephone! it was decorative. There was no phone there, and had probably never been a phone. It was a nice looking sign and added some class to an otherwise broken down and rotting old shack with a protruding awning of tin and old boards thrown up to keep the wind from blowing everything away and into the grass and the mud. So we walked, looking for stretches of concrete sidewalk that were passable, not the crumbling lengths not worth climbing up that had huge gaps from place to place, grass growing and nails lurking unseen in the ground. We wove our way back and forth over muddy ridges and across wide puddles and through slush we couldn't avoid, stopping occasionally to ask about the gringo shaman, ever unknown, and becoming almost an obsession to find if only to find that the world of common reality existed in the village as well and in my own mind. I knew he was there-- somewhere-- but there were no signs of him. Lost. Lost in a sudden tropical downpour in the Amazon rain forest. We held hands and went ever farther down, down the sloping slick mud track of the village main street with the puddles and the pools of slime of sticky and sometimes creamy wet clay goo that sucked the flip-flops off my feet with every second step, the intermittent steps being slow and careful treads that had me slipping and sliding sideways down into the slop of the road ankle deep in oozing slurp as I held onto Sophie's hand and promised to let her go if I were to fall all the way, giving her the possible impression I'd be some kind of gentleman and wouldn't take her down with me into the mire. Then the actual phone hanging on a real wall just barely out of the rain, and inside the rotting wood shack with the huge flat screen TV blasting out cartoons I could never comprehend, the jumble of images coming at us like jihadis at Omdurman in waves of suicidal exaltation, the tv hanging over the chickens pecking the floor in the dirt by the kids and the sleeping dog, mother and grandmother and flies, we made the call to Wheelock for help. But there was no connection. The number failed. We slumped onto plastic chairs out of the rain, more or less, and watched as the floods poured off the roof in curtains and the rivulets flooding the mud track washed up against the row of buildings where we sheltered, and I said to Sophie, picking up from the day before about learning of Dutch ladies way back when who would wash the sidewalks ever morning because they were so fastidious, that the Amazonians too wash their sidewalks, right off the face of the earth, leaving deep gouges twixt the house and the street, small flooded ravines where soda bottles whip past in torrents of light brown gush and snot thick gobs of the neighbourhood landscape. I stuck out one foot under the water pelting down from the tin roof, hoping to see my sun-browned skin emerge again, but that didn't happen, the mud sticking tight to my legs to the knees. But it was warm water, and I felt good even though the trip otherwise was one of loss and worry. Perdido. I was lost and no one could tell me where to find my hoped-for destination.

My companion for the day, Sophie, is a tall and slender woman of some age older than a girl; and I see her in my mind's eye even when she walks in the mud beside me on a blowing warm and azure blue rainy day in a wreck of a grey and caramel village yellow green in the Amazon, the beautiful dancer on the floor, moving light and graceful as a flickering candle flame, her smile lighting my terrible murderous moods, her thin fingers moving up and down like a Balinese enchantrass as she sways and hops and dances to reggae music, her braided, tangled, matted locks bouncing, and her blue eyes smiling, she grinning and girlish forever, perhaps, and childless and gay in a life of pleasure. I don't have a gun, but I feel all is well with as I hold Sophie's hand while we pick our way through the slime to nowhere in the hope of finding the gringo shaman they say does not exist here.

 

Eighteen year old American Kyle Nolan died in the jungle at Puerto Maldonado, Peru at an ayahuasca lodge in August 2012. His corpse wasn't found for two weeks after it was dragged off into the bushes and buried. The shaman involved and two of his assistants were arrested. Unfortunately, that doesn't make much difference. The lad is still dead. Experts in the field tend to agree that he will remain in that condition permanently. The shaman supervising Nolan's ayahuasca drinking at the “lodge” has other claims to make, far more interesting if true, than to suggest that death is eternal. Otherwise, all that remains is a dead teenager.

Clark Mason, The Press Democrat. Santa Rosa, CA. 3 November 2012.

Maestro Mancoluto claimed to be descended from Martians by way of Atlantis and Lemuria. And he further claimed to be able to monitor from his scaffold tower the ayahuasca participants in their tents, or as they wandered in the jungle, using extra sensory perception and telepathy.

[Nolan's father] quoted a member of Toronto Ayahuasca Facebook Community familiar with the shaman:

”After sending all of the ceremony participants into the jungle, he climbed into his room and would watch Peruvian soap operas while sitting on a bank of batteries.”

“If I had known my son would wander into the jungle alone and the shaman said he used ESP to control jaguars and scorpions, I would never have let my son go there,” Nolan said.

Initially, the shaman told police that Nolan had left the center and he didn’t know where he had gone, according to Peruvian news accounts.

But he later said the teenager died during the ritual and he buried the body to avoid adverse publicity for the center.

http://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/20121103/ARTICLES/121109852/1042/opinion?p=2&tc=pg

Death is for a long time, I think. It could well be eternal. I would never know.

The Flames

 

Sophie soothes me with her good nature and cheer. We stop to get out of the rain, a shack where Sophie buys little packets of gum to give out to the children standing nearby, they staring at the tall blond woman so strange in a land of short dark haired people, Sophie looking striking no matter where among whomever. As she hands out a pack to a child the child smiles in delight, amazed at the gift, the eyes widening and smiles of happiness spreading as the shy child holds her gum, the ones beside standing silent. Then Sophie gives out another pack, and the child receiving it is filled with wonder that she too is granted such a gift, as if there is doubt that this would happen, that there would be some left out and that there will be nothing for them. But one by one, each gets a gum, and one by one each in turn is utterly surprised that this good gift has come, no expectation at all, even as Sophie hands out one packet after another and knows, as I know, as we know, that each child will get his own. They don't know. We are lost.

[Ron Wheelock] was a pot grower in the States before he picked up a copy of Shaman's Drum, then going on one of the tours it advertised, and later apprenticing himself with two healers, Don Augustin Rivas Vasquez and Don Jose Coral Mori. He's been living just outside of Iquitos, Peru since 2000.

http://people.tribe.net/impboy/photos/d7aaa1ff-db8a-4f01-87df-aae9b5232854

Photo credit.

Ron did seven months in a state prison in Arkansas, a 22 thousand acre plantation, reminiscent of the slave era.

I don't have a gun, and if I did I probably wouldn't shoot anyone anyway, there being no one who threatens me, there being no castle or kingdom I care to take by force. I have enough, and Sophie's good nature calms me even in my moodiness in the mud. She has enough within herself. We walk and slip in the rain. We are lost in the mud.

    'Tis time! 'tis time!

 

    Double, double toil and trouble;

    Fire burn, and cauldron bubble*

Sophie is tall and objectively beautiful, and no matter how she might scrunch up her face to make a theatrical emotional point she remains beautiful. I hunch, frowning, staring with deep concentration at the mud, standing in the middle of the track as I ponder our lost condition; and as I frown those who see me silently close their doors and blow out the candles and draw blankets over the windows while Sophie hails a mototaxi and negotiates our passage with a young man much taken with her. He attempts to wipe dry her half of the bench by using his shirt sleeve. He starts the motor and off we go as I begin to climb in beside her. Maybe the impassible ponds in the bottom sections of the track are truly impassible, the track disappearing at our end and emerging way over there at the slope, or maybe the boy wants to keep glancing as long as he can in rearview mirror at Sophie; so we jolt as he misses, but doesn't at all miss, the giant craters in our path, though one suspects that they being three abreast it might not matter which we deep holes we crash and splash though at full speed so as not to sink and be stranded, but we take the longest possible route to where we hope to find the path in the jungle that will lead to our meeting with the Gringo Shaman. Though I feel like a toad next to Sophie she is somehow more aquatic than I, and she seems to glide across the mire, the mud building up between the plastic sole of my shoes and the shrivelled sole of my foot, the effect making for awkward discomfort for me and intensifying my hobble. I am, however, graceful in the mind as I sort through my questions lined up for Wheelock, all about shamanism and the horror of his war against the plant daemons of evil that haunt the hurt of Modernity to the point they must venture, as we have ventured, into the Amazon jungle in search of the man who heals with ayahuasca.

I see the green wood roof of the house through a gap in the leaves of the trees in the breeze blowing and I know we have come home, though not to our home, nor Sophie's home now sold so she can continue to wander indefinitely forever, and me going to see the man to talk. We are not lost. I even feel secure now that the path is so narrow that the razor grass is close enough to reach out for if I should slip in the slime and need to grasp it to keep from falling. I stride almost confidently toward the Wheelock house shrouded in cloud and thin wisps of scentless smoke, the air thicker with the trumpet calls of a dozen caged killer chickens waiting like ignorant gladiators for death at the Coleseo del Gallinos arena five days coming. We pass around the chained pit bulls and I knock on Wheelock's balsa wood framed screen door. He is not home. I look in and call to him. There is no answer. We are only 90 minutes late.

From around the side of the house comes a short and thick fellow who brings to mind the dull-minded thug who kills for the counterfeiter in the movie To Live and Die in L.A., the man who shoots a snooping retired policeman, dumps the body in the trash bin, and spits a gob of chewing tobacco on the corpse before dropping the lid on the man's eternity. I look for our man's shotgun as I feel sick at the lack of a pistol at my side. He smiles and beckons up to the side of the house where we see down back Wheelock at the oven with blackened half-drums steaming in the blaze atop the grate of hardwood burning. “Hi, Ron, sorry I'm late. I brought a companion, Sophie.” I can hardly see, my glasses broken recently, and the steam from six half size barrels boiling misty under the palm frond malocca roof in the shade making all things dark for me and hazy. I walk on and shake Wheelock's hand, seeing his sallow face smudged with soot and ash from the cooking fire that burns so hot we all step back to exchange our further greetings. Tis time, tis time. I will speak again with Wheelock and try to find out the depths of the shaman's art of ayauasca.

 For a charm of powerful trouble,

    Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.

 Double, double toil and trouble;

    Fire burn, and cauldron bubble*

Our hellos said, I beg off to tour the outside grounds with Juan, assistant, and, leaving Sophie to charm our host, I see, turning the corner of the house, the wood chipper that sends so many into frenzies as they dream of the sacred vine ground to mulch between two parallel spiked steel cylinders that grab and grind and spew out mangled bits of shredded Mystery. Any man at home would have such a machine were he living on a woody lot. But for those who sentimentalise, it is a sin to treat ayahuasca in such a Walmart way, ayahuasca, She being so sacred and all. Ground.

Under a thick black plastic sheet I see cords and cords of split wood and I ask if this is ayahuasca cut. No, it's fire wood. 'Ah,' I say, 'How interesting.'

Hardwood burning so hot there is no smoke and little ash

 
I have seen the wild vine, and I have seen strong young men return from the brew, lads laid low for weeks in bed with bronchitis, leading me to my usual prayer, “Pater noster, post hoc ergo propter hoc.” I wanted to see for myself the vines, being a cautious and careful man. And there they were, growing like vines, thin vines growing.

Ayahuasa vines

I demanded ever more. I demanded chunks; and chunks I saw. Sacred chunks to some.

Wheelock employee holding ayahuasca chunks

 
More. More. I wanted to see it all so I could know the Mystery. I saw more and chickens.

Ayahuasca growing wild as fighting cocks strut in the background unaware of  upcoming challenges

Between a small shock of wild ayahuasca and chained pit bulls silently eyeing my food stuff stood the chicken coop, bright red roosters crowing and pacing, as oblivious to fate as vines. And there the chickens lose me, they being incapable of bravery, not able to know the terror of violence they must overcome to fight and die like men. Uh, yes, they are chickens. They know no Latin.

Wheelock doesn't use chakruna

It is the dualist who comes to Wheelock for the experience of ayahuasca. He comes with expectations. He comes with anticipation, perhaps some nervousness, even a bit of fear. He comes with the certainty that he will leave as a better man, healed and whole and free from inner torments, disease of body and mind then long gone. His challenge is to drink and vomit and see another reality better than this we share, a world of his own expectations fulfilled. He comes to conquer and to heal. He is no chicken. Audentes fortuna iuvat. “Is this chakruna?” I ask my guide beside me, and he says no, it is..., I can't retain the term, something else, but not chakruna. It is the content of the ayahuasca capsule. It is what they come for and call ayahuasca. But the name of the leaf that flies intrepid voyageurs shitting across the astral planes, I cannot recall it.

Morituri te salutant.... Well, whatever, buddy. “Kikiriki,” the cocks crow loudly.

I am at Wheelock's house to see into the mysteries, to learn a little more, to find out about stuff. But really, my mind is elsewhere than on the intricacies of ayahuasca and imbibers in the jungle. There is a war, so they say, between demons in the outer gloom of other planes, spirits who harm if properly summoned and controlled by masters of arcane cunning. “Why should I have this psychic pain?” they ask at the bank booth as they examine their accounts and ponder where to vacation this season, thinking of ayahuasca and the Amazon at a lodge of luxury and ease and the curative powers of jungle vines. Perhaps those paying $500.00 per week want more than a dormitory in the jungle and a bland diet of mush and gruel for their money while they puke and hallucinate as a man sings in Shipibo they can't begin to understand. They might leave their desks at corporate headquarters to spend a week or two with a shaman who tells them of devils in the trees and how such things come bidden by the bad to harm them, how he, the shaman can give them medicine to heal their hurts and make them happy with themselves as he battles their demons on their behalves, they sitting in to feel the glory of their inner peace arising from visions of their perfection revealed. There is a war, and the spirits fight it out for lost souls, the shaman setting the scene, attending the wounded so they might make a victory of defeat. Five hundred a week for rough bunks, it's not for everyone in the jungle. It's possible too that they don't really believe in the spirit world of war. Maybe they want a bit of fun instead. I'm there for a look at the war. Not the war Wheelock fights, but that other one we all fight now, however poorly. I'm there to see The Mystery. “Ah, what's this?” I ask my guide, knowing I see white flowers growing on a green and reedy bush. “Muy malo, senor,” he says, passing on and leaving me to steal three leaves unseen. I have seen The Mystery and I have held it in my hand.

Boiling down the ayahuasca

I return to the side of the house where Wheelock has cut down 50 gallon drums to half and in which he boils shredded ayahuasca, adding five gallon white plastic bucketfuls of sick green water from the still creek hidden in the bush back of the house till the drums boil down to contain little more than a few gallons of coffee black and motor oily liquid that he drains and strains as he strains to pull the pots from the blazing grate and across the dust to the place he puts them upended for dripping through the cloth covered pots into other pots to boil again. I stand watching as the heat threatens to melt the camera in my pants pocket, that seems hot enough to singe the hair off my bare legs. The heat is unbearable as I stand six feet away trying to chat with Wheelock as he works pulling off a pot and wrestling it to the ground to go round again with draining and straining and dumping anew the brew. I give up and sit down on a stump to wait. If I had gloves I'd pitch in to help, but then Wheelock would have to know he could trust my strength, lest I dropped my end and his ayahuasca would go into the ground and be wasted with his labour and money and time. I sit and survey. Wheelock, shirtless and dirty, sweats. He smears soot and sweat and dirt all over his nose and cheek and sits.

Wheelock Strains Ayahuasca

There's too little smoke, too little ash, so I have to ask. “It's hard wood,” Wheelock says, “and if anyone wants to save the trees, they can't. I thought about using gas for the cooking, but I didn't do it.” I couldn't seem to follow the explanations that followed, though they must have made some sense. “Hickory is hard wood. But if you try heating your house with it you'll freeze your ass off. No heat from it. Splitting it means you use wedge after wedge and it still won't split.” Wheelock lived for years in the Ozarks, and I come from “the South of the North.” We know stuff about trees. Wheelock, though, is a master of growing, having been in the marijuana business for close to 20 years before he was sent to prison for it. And now, foregoing that, he is a master of ayahuasca.

Filtering the potion

Wheelock uses 150 kilograms of ayahuasca vines per brewing, close to 350 pounds. He puts in 20 to 25 leaves of some sort, and he adds ingredients I didn't inquire about. His ayahuasca is cielo, sky, though he has used other kinds, naming a dozen varieties, claiming each has a special effect, even if blended the ayahuasca experience changing according to the influence of varieties coming to the fore. It makes a difference, he says, when the harvest comes, just before sunrise of a full moon being better, though he buys in bulk from the locals who come with it unbidden to the point he had to stop them. Surplus goes missing, so it seems.



Wheelock shuffled barrel off the fire and onto the ground, pulling them across the dusty earth to a slab to dump the contents through a seive and into a pot he then drained into another, back and forth till there was nothing to do but watch the fire. Ayahuasca was in the making, but there was little more to say about that. We retired to the inside of the house to discuss shamanism. Inside Wheelock's home I saw the man as he is and learned about ayahuasca in a new way, and about shamans, too. And about chickens fighting to the death.

The heat is unbearable

 For a charm of powerful trouble,
    Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.

 Double, double toil and trouble;
    Fire burn, and cauldron bubble*

For the ingredients of our cauldron.
   
Double, double toil and trouble;
    Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.
 
    Then the charm is firm and good*

Next, the conclusion of Interviews with Shamans.


*The Weird quotations are from William Shakespeare, Macbeth.

A gentle reminder that my book, An Occasional Walker, is available at the link here:

http://www.amazon.com/Occasional-Walker-D-W/dp/0987761501/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1331063095&sr=1-1

And here are some reviews and comments on said book:

http://nodhimmitude.blogspot.com/2012/04/dagness-at-noon.html 

Iquitos, Peru: Ayahuasca (Part 13.2)

Interviews with Shamans, Part Four.

Interview with Ron Wheelock, Part Two.

Meeting Ron Wheelock, Gringo Shaman

Most houses in the area outside Iquitos are cobbled together from scrap wood, discarded sheets of corroded tin nailed, more or less, into something boxish to create a family dwelling space, something the residents can call home. Some times the roof is braided palm fronds laid like shingles, one length overlapping the other, to keep some of the rain out, to keep birds from dropping in from the sky, to keep out the direct sunlight. More or less. The walls are sometimes mud brick, the mortar oozing down in sharp-edged clumps one must be careful to avoid for fear of cuts and infections, if not to worry about disturbing the nesting places of spiders and lizards and small black parasites that squiggle madly when they drop into ones soup, waterborne creatures that live forever undrowned yet unable to climb out of the bowl and back into niches and crannies in the darkness. Who knows what one steps on or steps in as one makes ones way across the dirt floor trod continuously by men and beasts and birds and bats and bugs. Rat droppings, dead bug shells, piss, mosquito-breeding pools in dim-lit corners, moldy blankets, discarded food the dog chews on and tosses up only to eat it again, and garbage. All enclosed in a cozy, homey house of boards yanked out the mud and hastily nailed up on the sly before anyone comes to claim them, long red thick boards and thin short white boards, and broken ended unpainted boards, it don't make no nevermind when one is providing ones family with a home off the roadside dirt-track of massive wide and imagination deep pools of creamy mud that sucks ones shoes from ones feet and mud that clings like leaches to the skin and hair and clothes one destroys in walking. This mud eats, as surely as any predator in the selva; and it eats concrete quick. There so few stones, so little gravel, that all is soft and gooey and slick as one make ones way from the dust to the greasy mud to wherever; and surrounding it all, sprouting from every sliver of space is the green of growth, vegetable exiles of the jungle trapped in close cracks between bricks, huddled in clumps by deep tyre tracks, trampled over beside doorways, locked out from the greater green. Comes the darkening sky and the pelting rain and the rise of the water in flood and fury running down and grooving and sweeping away all that falls till at last there stands in silent defeat the heaps of the dead and long forgotten in muddy biers rotting under reproachful black wood trees and screaming lime leaves. One mounts the ridges between tyre tracks in hope of remaining upright on the slick mud path to the house where the Gringo resides, a different kind of place, a different kind of man, house resident rather than one living there like the trees and the snakes and the vines all twisting toward the light. Squeezing between cracked shacks slumped in the muck and plodding gentle down dark ways in the tangled wood one comes to the light space surrounding the house of curandero Wheelock. The light shines on the paving stones and the broad tree datura leaves and household wares stored up side the house. The house's thin wooden frame door invites a knock. Wheelock calls to enter in. A look. A glance. This man's house and home. My mother would approve.

In the jungle of overgrowth and decay and constant death and striving for food and life and space one enters in to Wheelock's home to find a space so at odds with the shacks of the villagers' razor thin rays of light passing between them, one place fair mingled with another as if to be a foot apart is fear itself, one finds in Wheelock's living room the wide open spaces of Kansas, the flat floor tiled earth tones, the hand-hewn beams painted startling white and shiny. No partitions, no high rising impediments to sight, no crammed jumbles of hoarded goods piled and forbidding. There are no obvious hidden things in secret places. One could rollerblade in Wheelock's living room and have space to fly and fall and land in large leather overstuffed chairs and couches spread apart so far one has to shout across the spotless, dustless, clear clean distance from man to man. This is Kansas in something of a nutshell. Kansas as Wheelock is fly-over country in something of a nutshell.

Wheelock's living room is close to 40 square metres of polished tile and wide open spaces that opens into the kitchen organised for convenience and practicality and good use, like a fine farmhouse. Jars of stuff I don't inquire into, pots sparkling and spotless, cupboards closed and clean, a bright, a nice, a middle class place for an American man to live in peacefully. And beyond the kitchen, at the far other side, almost out of sight, a low space enclosed, a light shining through the chicken wire cage wherein are roosters or chickens or some such birds, penned and safe from predators, or laying eggs or some farm thing I can't no longer recall 'cause the chef does my cooking and I don't know anymore about stuff like killing to eat. Having peeked to see enough, having used the small and deliberate bathroom functional and clean and nary a trace of self-indulgence but to be clean, I enter again the domain of Wheelock, taking my seat away from him in a large black leatherette armchair, easy to clean in this humidity, my own leather jacket mouldering daily, wiped and shined and next day grey and damp and sickly.

I spoke with Wheelock, let him do the talking as I listened without taking notes that would give away my devious game. I am not a journalist, though, not committed to my crusade to tell the whole awful truth on a daily basis and to hell with the damned by their own words and my righteous indignation as I silently cheer my scoops and their devastation. Wheelock said and I listened and I remember. I remember cringeing as he spoke and told the truth and how the truth he told flopped like flightless birds at the snake pit at Quistacocha zoo where anacondas lazed in the gloom till they struck stricken chickens. He told me things I can't believe he told me. I'm not Wheelock's babysitter, and I cannot protect him from those who would, given any chance to feast, strike at him and wrap his words in their suffocating grip to drown and devour. Wheelock is on his own; but I am not a snake, last I looked. I know what he said, and better yet, I know the language he used and what it means. Better yet still, I know the kind of man and what the man he means to me. I won't say what he said because twisted men would twist his words and make him suffer for it before they dragged him down to drown. I'll tell the truth about Ron Wheelock.

We sat in overstuffed black chairs under a sparkling white wood beam ceiling, our feet resting on golden brown tiles running on to pristine clay brick walls that make this house whole, and talked about home.

I've spent my life among books and blood and gibbering idiocy and universal genius; I've traveled from Jerusalem to Damascus, from Alaska to Manhattan; I've known Bach and Kant and Weil and Novalis. I've known love as screaming bleeding hungry hatred; and life as nothing more than a moment ended in shuddering agony and the long grief of soulless survival. Wheelock smoked a lot of pot. He rode in cars with laughing buddies and saw the spider web cables of sheet lightening spread for miles across the black Kansas night, empty beer bottles bumping against each other on the floor of the back seat, and the hypnotic hum of the road and the white lines of the Interstate Highway passing barbed wire fences nailed to gnarled, withered posts atilt on the slopes of the treeless prairie berms to take pizzas to Joey's house to get high and screw some girls and play electric guitars till the sun comes up and sleep descends till it's time to get up and make the bed and I know you don't care that you live like dogs but this place looks like shit and you should have some respect for yourself, and to wash up the dishes and sweep the floor and make some money tending the pot plants till it all comes crashing down and ends in prison and a record for life. I look at Wheelock and I see my grandfather's face, gentle and peaceful and somewhat wondering but not too much because there is work to do. I cannot for the life of me spot a printed word in Wheelock's house. He speaks, and I hear the driven boy hearing the driven professor say: “You're smart enough, but you're illiterate.” Wheelock talks, and his words are those of those I left when I left the mountains for the world and lost my home.

'If'n ya don' know what the fuck, then please shut the fuck up,' as I see myself walking across the room of the third floor of the apartment at the university where a tall blond from my department has thrust her luxury coat at my wife and left the girl standing there embarrassed as I take it from her hand and toss it out the window where it hangs out of reach caught in tree branches below and everyone stares and the blond says, “It seems I've made a faux pas,” a general laughter forced across the room very quietly among the stunned, the blossoming career of Dr. Dag as hung up in the trees as any old rag upon a stick. 

Wheelock says: “I said I would.”

He says: “I paid off my house.” “I kept my word.” “I worked....”

He says: “They say we come from the land of the free, but Ah ain't never got nuthin' for free. Ah hadda gotta pay for ever thang Ah ever got. Ah gots ta pie for mah VEE-hickle...” and so on it goes, and I go home, back to the mountains where I gots to pay for stuff or I don't get none, and that's the truth where I come from and where Wheelock lives, though this is a foreign nation to some homosexual vegetarian animal rights activists who might be able to talk about Peter Singer, a fool I spoke with at great and deep length and whom I know too well. “If I ain't got the money, I wait and save it up till I gots it.”

Toto, I don't think we're in Kansas anymore. I think America is gone off the map and that we live in a jungle somewhere.

Wheelock told Walker about stuff about family things, and you don't have any right to know. I know, and that's likely why he told me. If you know, then I don't have to tell you.

I could hear every word Wheelock said, though we were very far apart, his chairs spread wide across the room, and he told me about a boy from back home come to visit and out at a restaurant where the boy burped and farted and every time he did he's say “eshucha.” Wheelock finally got fed up, he said, as people all turned to hear the boy, and he told him that because the word might sound like the Spanish version of “excuse me” it means instead, “Listen.” I could hear it coming because I know that kind of joke. In turn I told a joke I wrecked so badly that there were no survivors among the litter of words that fell half dumb from my mouth. Could write it out, but it would take another page and it would likely only appeal to those who get elaborate puns in Attic Greek, not those who write AUTOCHTHONOUS,* (a neologism (1845)) rather than the word any self-respecting Classical Athenean intellectual** would use instead, chthonic, for example. But this is not Wheelock's world, a world where he bought his mother a VEE-hicle, (which I pronounce as he does and I don't care) that he insisted be in his name as well as hers so his step-brothers don't take it if anything should happen to the mother in her eighties because Wheelock paid for that vehicle and they ain't go no right to take it that ain't they'ern.

There are those who don't get it what “Mine” means. They don't know.

And about those fighting chickens? I never asked, but Wheelock felt compelled, though he had no idea why I would wonder, to tell. I waited till he told me.

I will write this about the fighting cocks Wheeler goes to America to buy and brings to Peru to train to be fighters, his training as good as one can give, his desire to have not only the best but to make money from winning, to gain respect for his effort and skill, much as he needs to get money and respect from making the best ayahausca in Peru. So there it is. There's nothing to add.

Wheelock told and I listened and here I report some of what I heard. Others might tell what I won't, and Wheelock might well tell. I'm not a babysitter. Wheelock is on his own.

I haven't hinted at the kind of man Wheelock is: it's as clear as a summer Kansas sky. This is not to suggest that it will make any sense to those who don't know what America is about. This is not to say that more than half of Americans won't be bewildered by the man. More than half will see nothing but a man they would attack and harm for being the kind of American they think they are supposed to hate. I do think it more than passing strange that those who would hate Wheelock and harm him are those more likely to want ayahuasca from him than those who would sit as guests in Wheelock's living room and chat up the man for hours with next to no interest in drinking ayahuasca at all, not with him or any other shaman of the jungle at Iquitos, Peru.

About the man, I said what I said about what he said about stuff about him, his life, his family, our nation; and I keep much of the rest locked away 'cause it's much about him as it's much about me because we are very much alike, him and me, and you ain't got no right to know it if'n you don't know it.

There is more to this story than what I've told so far. It might be that I won't be welcome back to Wheelock's house again because of what I've written so far. If, though, the man will have me in again for conversation I hope next time to write at length about Wheelock the shaman and the best ayahausca on earth. “It's not always only about the ayahuasca,” he says, “It's also about the person who leads the ceremony.” Now we know the man. Or we don't.

Next, Wheelock's ayahuasca.

* AIDESEP worker December 22, 2012 at 1:56 pm
http://dawnontheamazon.com/blog/2012/12/01/gringo-self-loathing-and-ayahuasca/#comments

 **For a lengthy discussion of the term intellectual and the concept of, please refer to my upcoming book, A Genealogy of Left Dhimmi Fascism, Vol. V: "Intellectuals, Nazi Intellectuals, and Plato." (2013)


Meanwhile,

A gentle reminder that my book, An Occasional Walker, is available at the link here:

http://www.amazon.com/Occasional-Walker-D-W/dp/0987761501/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1331063095&sr=1-1

And here are some reviews and comments on said book:

http://nodhimmitude.blogspot.com/2012/04/dagness-at-noon.html

Iquitos, Peru: Ayahuasca (Part 13.1)

Meeting Ron Wheelock, Gringo Shaman

I can kind of see that if one were to sit in a totally dark room with a bunch of strangers in a country far from home where one is then further isolated from the familiar by being in a grass-roof hut, sitting on a thin mat in the Amazon jungle, and one is determined to drink a sludge of boiled vines and leaves that are meant to make one puke ones guts out and then shit everywhere, all this for the sake of going psycho for about four hours hallucinating about being attacked by giant snakes and demons and thinking one is dying, then yes, this might make one fussy about who one chooses to lead one through this “ceremony” of sickness and madness as one is more or less helpless and incapacitated and at the mercy of anyone who cares to be aggressive and hostile and harmful, one who might call himself a shaman or a curandero, the leader of the ayahuasca drinking session so dearly paid for and done in high hopes of an interesting, even life-altering encounter with ones inner self. The thrill of an altered state of consciousness that leads so many to ayahuasca is better done with some experienced baby-sitting, the general concensus insists, and one needs think through who that babysitter might be. A bad shaman, a bad trip. Drinking ayahuasca leads some women to being raped, some people to being robbed, others to being abused psychologically to the point they return in a state of terror from the experience. If one chooses to take ayahuasca, then one must choose wisely who ones babysitter will be during the period ones own self-parent is absent. But, hey, it gets a bit gay for me, this talk about the shamans who are so enlightened and spiritual and wise and who are so this and so that to the point one wonders why anyone ever voted for Obama when these other folks are so available. If the shaman of choice doesn't rape you, rob you, kill you, or mind-fuck you beyond repair, the rest, it seems to me, should be up to the individual seeking an altered state of consciousness, the shaman's role being limited to standing by with a cell phone to call for an ambulance if needed. But such is not the case, from what one hears of shamans. They aren't just special, they are special special. I've met some but I'm not yet a groupie. Maybe I just haven't met the right one so far. This all leads to meeting Ron Wheelock, the Gringo Shaman of Iquiots, Peru. 

Ron Wheelock is from southern Kansas. He's a fifty seven year old American. He first went to Peru on 7 March 1996 for a brief visit and returned for a longer period 7 Nov. 1999. He currently lives just outside of Iquitos, Peru.

In an interview, he says of himself:

I mean, I'm still the same person I always was. But I've changed a lot, and when I go back and visit my old friends that I've been around for most of my life [in Kansas], I just don't resonate good with ‘em. I can visit ‘em, but after a short while I wanna go. They're still in the same place, they haven't changed. And some of ‘em's been judgemental to me, like Ron, you've changed so much. Do you not remember where you came from? And yes I remember very well where I came from.

http://www.realitysandwich.com/wheelock_interview

Whatever else one might say of Wheelock, it's clear from the start that he's semi-literate and what some would call a hillbilly. “He's known around town as the Trailer Park Shaman,” said one long time resident of Iquitos. It's not surprising, then, that such a man would raise killer chickens for fun and profit. It's not surprising that such a man, surrounded by people attending him as shaman, would fire a pistol in the dark of night while high on drugs. Call it medicine, then. The man is what he is. What is this hillbilly about? Who is he? I decided to find out for myself. If one is to sit in the darkness alone and entirely vulnerable to the mercies of a stranger when ones life hangs in the balance and one must depend on the character of the babysitter one has chosen, then one must hope one has chosen as wisely as the situation itself allows for. If one is comfortable with a middle aged man who makes his ayahuasca brew by running the woody vines through an industrial wood-chipper “because it makes a finer brew” than the result of rising first thing in the morning to hammer the vines to bits and hope, then one if fine with man and the result, even if both destroy any pretence of high Romantic, suicidally sensitive young Werther or a Rilkesque sensitive poet type. If not for this curiousity of mine and this desire to meet a “type” for the sake of rounding out this look at shamans, i.e. to meet a shaman from America who is, on top of all else, an outsider even at home, I wouldn't nod at a man like Wheelock if I saw him on the sidewalk. But I decided to meet him anyway. What better way to club the drug tourist thrill seekers from home who come to the Amazon to be cooler than cool and to love their vanities evermore deeply than before they drank ayahuasca in a “ceremony” with a man the would despise at home than to meet and write about this trailer trash old guy backwoods hippie who cons the urban affluent out of lots of money and then laughs at them as he counts his money in the jungle? 

This German girl I am so mad about could very well sit as I take her out for dinner and tell me how she would like to strip me naked and duct tape me to a plain wood chair and torture me with a propane torch and a dull edged rusty spoon and a bottle of vinegar; and as she described the horror of my torture I would love every word she spoke because she is lovely and I feel good about her talking about anything at all. Except not exactly. She said once that I look like Ron Wheelock's older brother. She has mentioned this a number of times. I respond with a friendly grin and tell her to bring on the needle nose pliers. I can take it like a man. Recently she said Wheelock and I are much alike, the same kind of person in many ways.... And I am a gentleman and I say step on my wounds, I can deal with the screaming. She goes on about Wheelock and me, and I have happy visions of my knuckles being crushed and my ears being cut off so I don't have to clench my fists and listen to more of this beautiful woman tell me I have anything in common with Ron Wheelock. As it turns out, Ron Wheelock and I have much in common, but not the important things.

Ron grew up in small town Kansas, the kind of place some fool wrote a book about called, What's Wrong with Kansas? meaning everything is wrong with those hillbillies living in rural places the intelligentsia in coastal cities refer to as “fly-over country,” as if those who live in the centre of the nation and live private lives are fools who don't know stuff, idiots, fools, bigots, racists, and greedy, stupid pig people. Why do we cling so bitterly to our guns and religion and other

Ron Wheelock

out-dated and dangerous ideas when all we have to do is ask the cool people in the resort areas of California or New York how we should think and how we should be grateful for the wisdom doled out by the Left elite. I meet the leftard minions at least once a week, usually a girl in her mid-20s, bright, smooth-faced, clean, pretty, and so full of self-assurance that one feels a need to step back and let this princess float past as she turns and bestows a benign smile at those standing worshipful on the sidelines of life. Sometimes stopping briefly to drop some words of wisdom on such as we ignorant peasants, she will tell us about the healing powers of ayahuasca and how general use would end all wars and bring women to places of empowerment from where they could create a more perfect union of the cosmos and womanhood for the happiness of all, particularly Mother Nature, the loving earth, and the matriarchy in waiting. They come to Iquitos to take “medicine” with shamans, to expand their awareness of the good, to find their inner goddess, and so on. At home, rather than working with NGOs in remote villages where they teach the locals important life skills that thousands of years of history and simple living have failed to convey, they are, nine of ten so far, waitresses. The boys are gentle things, delicate and lovely. They play guitars and write music and draw and paint in little hardcover notebooks, and they are pretty and sweet and kind to old guys. Mostly they work in restaurants. They aren't educated much, not like the girls who all have undergraduate degrees. The boys, though, are almost always gentle and smiling. Ron Wheelock is not like that, and he comes from the wrong place to be like that, and it shows in almost everything he does and when he speaks and when one sees him. He's south rural Kansas. Poor white trash.

Ron Wheelock

For this discussion of shamans I wanted from the beginning a range of shaman types, a local who lives in the jungle and has little contact with the modern world, Modernity, someone naïve and isolated and “authentic” in a sense Modernists can call the real thing; and I wanted a woman included because in spite of what women in Modernity might claim and do, women are not a better version of men at all, they are women, unique and strange and not men; and finally, I wanted an American hippies, someone so different from the expected, and yet so typical of what we would all assume a hippie in the jungle to be that he would be some cartoon caricature of a hippie shaman. I found one of each, and now it's Wheelock's turn to grace these pages. I called him up and made arrangements to meet him at his home, telling him nothing about myself, leading him to believe I am a curious person interested in ayahuasca, but not more about the man I am or what I do. He met me, I entered his home, we sat in his living room, and we spoke for hours. He would have spoken about ayahuasca all that time and more, but I guided the conversation away from that so I could find out about the man who is the Gringo Shaman of Iquitos. I wanted to know Ron Wheelock, guy in living room at home.

In a generation or so it will be near impossible to convey the reaction of most middle class white Americans toward a man like Wheelock back home. He is despicable to most successful people in that he has little to no formal education, can't speak about social concerns that obsess the majority of well-heeled middle class people, seemingly has no clue about sophisticated philosophers of rights like Peter Singer. He would be in jail if most had their way; and they world. Or, they would were Wheelock not perhaps exempt because he lives in the Peruvian Amazon and is a shaman dealing with ayahuasca. He is now world-famous as a man to be reckoned with in the Arcane. Without that, he would be abhorred by those who now adore him. There is no blanket absolution, of course. There are the leftard religious fanatics who can't stop till everything is pure beyond purity. For them, all must burn. For them, Wheeler would be high on the list. Wheelock probably wouldn't be able to explain the frenzy that drives the Left Savonarolas; and though it's too clear the latter can't explain themselves either, they do have their doctrines, and it is that that would leave Wheelock baffled. He hasn't rejected Modernity in favour of a more sophisticated post-Modernity. The world left Wheelock behind decades ago, and he has caught it only by chance, a figure of awe and wonder among the haters only because the Mystik is strange and those people who would hate his type love the man in spite of themselves. Mostly.

Gart van Gennip February 16, 2011 at 7:20 pm

[A] fraud like Ron Wheelock. This man claims to be a shaman, but in reality is nothing but a greedy charlatan. He uses a woodchipper to produce large quantities of ayahuasca, which apparently he sells to buyers abroad, thus raping the local culture and the spiritual essence of ayahuasca. Apart from that, this fool organizes cock fights -which are illegal in his own country for very good reasons!- and breeds pitbull terriers (god only knows for what purpose). In my humble opinion, people like Ron should be tarred, feathered and run into the Amazon River.

[The above quotation and following are from the blog: http://dawnontheamazon.com/blog/2011/02/12/another-iquitos-evening/]

I get concerned when religious fanatics spout off about violence they would do to others, especially when they claim they are only emoting under the pressure of the moment. They are willing to cleanse the world of those they dislike, and they wait only for the mob to join them so they have the power of righteous fury en masse to back their rage with a veneer of legitimacy. They are not harmless. The Righteous Angry Prophet lurks in dark places and rises up in blood when the mob gives him permission. He has, he does, he will again. 

[Apart] from [being] an openly gay atheist, I am also a vegetarian. I haven’t eaten any meat or fish since 1984 and I am a strong believer in animal rights. If people don’t stand up to defend animals against other people, then who will? 

The writer above devolves into illiterate idiocy when he finds he cannot tell the truth about himself directly. His purity announced for all to admire, he then claims that he must “stand up” to defend the weak; but will not write this openly. He writes instead some dishonest rubbish because he won't admit his longings to be the strongman at the head of the violent mob. “If people....” If I, G. v.G., do not....” He will not say. “I can’t stop Ron Wheelock or anyone else from doing what they do,” he writes, and he makes me nervous. He can't stop others, but the desire is there in the wings waiting its cue. The fascist mind flutters like the falcon in the fist. Who, then, is Wheelock, and why the covert frenzy against? I'm curious about the man. I want to know about the person himself, but also about the limits of shamans. Who is, and why?

Gennip continues:

Gart van Gennip February 17, 2011 at 9:32 pm

[A]yahuasca is considered a sacred teacher plant. It is part of a very old tradition and culture. It has huge spiritual significance to many people, locals as well as visitors. The way Ron Wheelock produces ayahuasca and sells it at great monetary benefit is nothing less than an insult to this cultural and spiritual significance. It is void of even a shred of cultural and spiritual sensitivity.

I don’t get how anyone who takes ayahusaca seriously can even consider supporting this guy with their money, let alone recommend him to others. To me, it is shocking and offensive.

If you really want to have a true ayahuasca experience, there are countless of alternatives; ayahuasqueros, healers, who offer an authentic, traditional ceremony, maybe even at a better rate as well. But if it is just the power of the brew that matters to you, then why don’t you admit that you just want to get high, and that the rest of it is a load of bullshit.

[….]

I like to think that a true shaman lives a holistic, spiritual lifestyle, has respect for Mother Nature and doesn’t care too much about money. I haven’t seen or heard any evidence that these things apply to Ron.

[….]

[H]ow can anyone who engages in despicable exploitation of animals for fun and monetary gain be a good shaman? I am already far beyond Ron Wheelock as a person or a shaman,

[….]

At Bill Grimes blog a further comment quotes an interview: 

Andy Metcalfe April 12, 2011 at 12:25 pm

Steve: There is a tendency — and I talk about this especially in relationship to María Sabina — to romanticize and to spiritualize shamans generally, and shamans in the Upper Amazon in particular. I think that does them a disservice. It takes away the depth of their humanity.

Howard: And their suffering, too. This is another important aspect of Singing to the Plants. You show that life in the Amazon is harsh, and in no way is it a soft and easy reality. The tragic death of doña María illustrates this. It is candid and direct, and no attempt has been to make the Amazon world romantic or “cosmic.” In my experience the shamans are not cosmic. They work to help everyday people in their suffering, their illnesses, and their protection. It is about the nitty-gritty of survival, and that’s one of the impressive aspects to your book.

Steve: Shamans are people who are engaged in dealing with envy, resentment, jealousy, disease, sickness, marital problems, business failures, interpersonal conflict. These are people whose job it is to deal with mess.

And they have their own sometimes messy lives. They have the dirty, difficult, and dangerous job of trying to make sick people better. And I think we do them a disservice when we spiritualize them, romanticize them, and try to turn them into some kind of religious icon. They deserve better than that.

http://www.ayahuasca.com/creativity/howard-charing-talks-with-steve-beyer-part-one-2/

Gart van Gennip December 3, 2011 at 6:08 pm

I apologized to Ron for writing my inflammatory comments during a friendly conversation we had during the recent shaman’s conference. I also found Ron to be a genuinely nice and decent guy; modest, friendly and sincere. I found I had been misinformed about some of the things I accused him of, particularly by an annoying young video-documentary maker who had interviewed and spent a lot of time with Ron, and who I thought at the time was a reliable source. Turns out he was a flake!

So, I was wrong to fly off the handle and I was wrong to write what I did about Ron.

http://dawnontheamazon.com/blog/2011/02/12/another-iquitos-evening/



There is more at the link. As well, there is something left to be said about G. v.G.s moral, what we have discussed earlier as philobarbarism, sentimentality, and what I write of extensively, the reactionary longing of the primitive fascist for the return to an imaginary Golden Age of pure perfection as neo-feudalism; the love of poverty as if it were ennobling; what I and others have termed “povertarianism.” The poligion of scientism and Romantic reaction scream out in every sentence of G. v.G. He is not unique. He is legion. He is so particularly in the areas of ayahuasca Irrationalism among anti-Modernist sympathisers of the German Revolution. This obscure reference is important only in light of other works I write, some of which I hope will in time come to light in the world. For now, I simply put it on the record and leave it at that. What we can take away from the dialogue above is that some people claim to be purer than others in the same ayahuasca field, and those like Wheelock are shunned because of their “hillbilly” ways by ayahuasca elitists. To know about ayahuasca and those who use it, those who administer it to others, those who promote it, I looked at as well-rounded an array of possible shamans as I could. Wheelock is at one extreme of the spectrum. About ayahuasca, more later. For now, what about the man in the living room who causes so much frenzy among his fellows? My feeling is that it is a resentment from peasants who live in the Modern world and cannot accept the idea of equality of Man. I mean by this that there are those who pass as ordinary Modernists in all ways but the essential ones, men and women who live in the Medieval economy of scarcity, privilege, and entitlement. They are, thus, generally unconscious adherents of the German Revolution, those who follow unknowing the State socialism of Bismarck, those who would create the perfect Prussian state of aristocratic rule by Philosopher Kings for the good of all others. Modernist seeking ayahuasca utopia are the very people who seek the Golden Age of heroes and grand sacrifice for the glory of self and everlasting nothingness, to flame out in a Grand Gesture of Romantic death. They would take us all with them in their mad longing for gnostic godhead. Where does a hillbilly from Kansas fit in? Where does an uneducated middle aged drop out belong in this pantheon of ayahusaca-dispensing demigods fit in with the hippest of cool elitists who despise him and all he otherwise stands for? He's from fly-over country. How can he take up the titles of the elite? How can he justify having anything more than the miserable life of a starving peasant? How can he presume to live like a noble, a man with a title, i.e. a titled man, in this case shaman or curandero? He's a hillbilly. He's not our kind. Ergo: the man must be a fraud.

A reputable shaman lives, as we have seen, in a hut in the jungle and he takes a chicken in payment for his services as intermediary battling spirits in the vegetable aether on our behalves. Like our general understanding of holy men, he has taken vows of poverty because he is not really of this world of dirt and shit and puke at all, the stuff noble people do not have or know about because they are spiritually above it all. Nor do they care about stuff in general, like giant flat screen televisions and shiny black electrical toys and guitars and electricity and an automobile and cell phones. they might have loads of money, it's true, as much as the most noble of politicians and their multimillion dollar yachts they move from state to state to avoid paying taxes on while they lecture the little people about burning too much electricity with wasteful light bulbs in their apartments. Of course the noble are rich, and it's good because they are so far above it all we can see that to them it doesn't mean a thing. They treat wealth like the worthless bauble it is, pissing away fortunes the low among us cannot begin to dream of. They do it all for us to teach us that poverty is good.

The reputable shaman is poor, like all good people are, with the notable exception of those born to privilege, those entitled, i.e. those with titles, titles such as Executive Director of Sharing and Caring for the Poor at X quango.  Or, better still, think political figure who battles for the rights of the poor. Think of the ever-golfing multi-millionaire current U.S. president who is often on vacation at today's equivalent of Versailles. He is a great man, a lover of the poor, and entitled to his perks because he carries the suffering of the world on his broad shoulders. Who is Ron Wheelock to have small toys in imitation of such great men? The man is a hillbilly, and thus must be a fraud. He is not an elite member of the ruling class; and worse, he has no class. He's from Kansas. Rural Kansas! A fraud! He should be pure and poor. "I am already far beyond Ron Wheelock as a person or a shaman."

I got on a local chicken bus to see the man for myself. I do honestly hang on every word homosexual animal rights activist vegetarians say about anything at all, but still, I figured I'd see Wheelock myself, me being a worthless kind of guy with lingering doubts about what others say about almost everything. A every right-thinking person knows, this kind of spiteful questioning of the anointed shows me to be a fascist. I should probably be killed for this, but so far there is no mob of Conformity Hippies to assist the Righteous Angry Prophet in ridding the world of me. There is always tomorrow.

"Wooden Bus"

It doesn't seem to have occurred to Wheelock to have a limousine to carry his guests to his home. A real shaman of the American type so successful as to be among the elite, the true Al Gore type saviour, would have an airport for private jets arriving. For Wheelock, it's come by chicken bus-- or walk.

Decal of middle finger salute, fingernail sporting a scorpion, hand with naked woman and marijuana plant growing out of her foot; stuffed monkey hanging from rearview mirror; cross on chain; and a pile of coins; all the things that truly matter in the jungle life.

I sat on a huge tyre at the back of the bus because the last seat was vacant, meaning it wasn't there, and I had to squat on the tyre or stand for an hour as the bus jolted over and in and through endless giant watery, muddy, sticking holes in the jungle road toward the village where Wheelock has his place. It was that or walk. Which is OK with me because I left my private jet at the cleaner's.

Wheelock kind of blows the authentic by living too close to civilization, and one can more or less get a ride right to the path that leads to his front door, no need to buy a really cool wardrobe of jungle attire so one can follow behind the train of baggage carriers to his place like other, and up-scale, places do for you. Wheeler just lives close to a Third World shit-hole village in the Amazon where a deaf person's television on Main Street is blasting a Lima-based soap opera across the distant river from an open doorway. 

The Road to Wheelock's House

I stopped in the centre of the village with the idea of bringing a surprise breakfast from McDonald's to Wheelock's place, but damn, there isn't one downtown. Insrtead the locals live on a very healthy and natural diet of rice, potatoes, yucca and cane sugar booze they make fine with human spit. Where is the Amazon rain forest going? Cane fields to make a low-life version of aguardiente de caña. Hiss, McDonald's. Hurrah, cane fields where once was jungle.

Downtown at Ron Wheelock's Place

Not knowing any better I took the chicken bus from close to the Plaza de Armas to the terminal at the edge of town and paid 1.5 sole, about $0.50. I then hired a mototaxi for another 1.5 soles to take me into the village of Delfines, at the back of which lives Sr. Wheeler. By the time I arrived my kidneys were killing me and I needed to take a piss to rid my unhealthiness of the morning's cup of coffee. I stopped in the bushes to relieve myself only to have some ten year old kid pop up and tell me I was lost and he would personally  take me to the Gringo Shaman's house. For this I paid another sole. The mototaxi drivers downtown Iquitos told me it would cost me 15 soles to the exchange at Delfines. Now I know I can take a bus from Belen the whole way for 1.5 soles and walk on my own to Wheelock's house without a guide, pissing as I please along the way. I call this enlightenment.

The Road to Wheelock's House

I got to Wheelock's house, deep in the remaining jungle, and knocked on the door, not knowing if I would again be attacked by vicious pit bull dogs like I was when the geriatric beast at the German girl's place tried to eat me. I knocked and waited for the sound of fangs and slobber. Instead I heard a gentle but masculine voice asking me to enter in. Ron Wheelock's place. I stayed and talked for the next three hours.

The next installment is going to piss off anyone expecting to read about ayahuasca. I talked to Wheelock about being Ron Wheelock. Now I know stuff about the man. That's next.

A gentle reminder that my book, An Occasional Walker, is available at the link here:

http://www.amazon.com/Occasional-Walker-D-W/dp/0987761501/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1331063095&sr=1-1

And here are some reviews and comments on said book:

http://nodhimmitude.blogspot.com/2012/04/dagness-at-noon.html