I traveled from Tarapoto to Pucallpa (with a stopover in Tingo Maria). In Pucallpa I went to visit the gallery of the visionary artist Pablo Amaringo. He died in 2009 and his gallery is now maintained by his son Juan Vásquez Amaringo.
The gallery is a large room, with about two dozen of the artist's paintings arrayed along the walls. In particular there are two large canvases. They have a wealth of detail, inspired by the artist's ayahuasca visions. There are animals, mermaids, UFOs, men, women, snakes, castles, flowers and other plants, and lots more, all in a swirl of psychedelic colors and designs. All very interesting.
I told Juan that I took ayahuasca twice in Tarapoto, and I would like to take it again in Pucallpa. Juan was quite receptive to my request and told me to come back the next evening and he would take me to his friend, a médico, to take ayahuasca.
Next evening Juan drove me to the house of the médico, not far away. His name is Felix Paredes and he looks quite old, though maybe only in his 50s. His house is a ramshackle affair, like all the houses in this neighborhood, which is not exactly a slum, but obviously is inhabited by poor people (at least, materially poor).
There were some young men sitting in the front room when I arrived. Felix took me to the back room, which had only a chest of drawers and three well-worn foam-rubber mattresses on the floor. He showed me a small adjacent room where he says I could sleep later. Felix told me to disrobe and led me to a shack outside where there was a tub of water containing leaves of some kind and indicated that I should pour water over myself from the tub, which I did.
Finally we were ready to begin the ayahuasca session. The three young men I met previously came in and sat on the mattresses. Only one was going to take ayahuasca that night. In contrast to the curanderos in Tarapoto, Felix wore no shaman-paraphernalia such as a feather headdress or beads, just his everyday clothes. Next to him he set up what he needed: a bottle of ayahuasca and some other bottles, and some objects such as rocks and stones, maybe fossils (presumably with some magical significance). He filled a small cup with ayahuasca, chanted over it and blew smoke on it, then invited me to drink it. I did, and as usual it had a revolting taste. He then gave a cup to the Peruvian man, and drank one himself.
During the next half-hour or so, the the Peruvian man seemed to be affected, covering his eyes with his hand. The ayahuasca was having no effect on me. Felix was regaling the Peruvians with some story, apparently occasionally amusing. After about an hour Felix turned off the light. The room was then almost totally dark. Felix began to chant icaros. I was still not feeling any effect, no psychedelic effect and no nausea. Felix came over in the dark and asked if I wanted more ayahuasca. I said Yes, and he gave me another cup.
After a while I lay down, but there was still no effect. I could almost have gone to sleep. Felix continued to chant icaros and there were strange sounds. Some of it was probably dogs barking, but Felix appeared to be making grunts and other noises, as if engaged in some battle with entities in the spirit world.
Felix came over again and began a healing upon me. This was not like the healings of the Tarapoto curanderos, which consisted mainly of chanting and shaking the chacapa (made of leaves) over various parts of my body. Felix also chanted, but was hands-on, rubbing my joints and massaging my shoulders, back and stomach. Apparently he was brushing away whatever bad things he detected in my body. Also he blew smoke over me.
Someone or something (I assumed it was Felix) placed a large stone of some kind in my hands. This was presumably some kind of power object. Since the room was almost totally dark I could not see how it looked, but it was heavy, and felt smooth but with bumps and hollows. I suspected that it was a meteorite. After further massage Felix took back the stone and returned to his seat on the other side of the room and I lay down.
Soon I started to feel sick. I sat up and took the bucket beside the mattress and vomited into it, twice. I was still feeling no psychedelic effect, but I was thinking about stuff from my earlier life. I remembered a couple of instances where people acted badly toward me, and I asked myself whether I was still angry at them. I decided that they acted from ignorance and that there's no point in feeling angry about it, and I forgave them.
In the early hours of the morning Felix was ready to retire and told me to go to the adjacent small room and sleep. But I was still feeling sick, diarrhea was threatening, and I didn't sleep. Eventually I went out to the next room and to the adjacent toilet and vomited, or tried to. The toilet was a sit-down toilet with no seat and no flush, and the floor looked none too clean. I was now feeling very sick, and could barely stand up. I went back to the bedroom and tried to sleep, but the threat of diarrhea kept mounting and eventually I went to the toilet again and shat. Back in the bedroom I lay down and eventually fell asleep.
At 7 a.m. Juan and Felix woke me. Juan had come to take me back to my hostal. I was still feeling sick. Felix had me lie down and again massaged my stomach. I then asked about the stone that Felix placed in my hands last night. Felix opened a backpack and took out various stones and shells. But these were too small, and didn't have bumps and hollows such as I felt the previous night. I said, No, where is the larger stone? Felix denied any knowledge of it. He said that it must have been a stone that I saw in my imagination. But no, I felt it for sure; it was large and heavy. Felix might have denied knowledge of it from not wanting to show it to Juan. Or it was a stone that some spirit had materialized and placed in my hands. I definitely did not merely imagine it.
They asked about my possibly doing more ayahuasca sessions with Felix and I said, No, my body can't take this any more. All three of my ayahuasca sessions in Peru had been negative: no psychedelic effect and mainly nausea, vomiting and diarrhea, with just a few psychological insights concerning my earlier life. This third session had been as bad as the second, even worse, considering that it was conducted in an environment that I'd prefer to forget. So at that point I was ready to give up on ayahuasca, and at present, years later, I have not changed my mind.
Two final comments: (1) In the week before my ayahuasca session with Felix I had been coughing up a lot of yellow phlegm. This stopped the day after my session with him, so I have to credit Felix with curing me of this. (2) These reports of negative ayahuasca experiences should not be taken as a condemnation of all ayahuasca use. Ayahuasca is made in different ways in Peru, Colombia, Brazil and other countries, both in respect of (a) how the harmaline-containing Banisteriopsis vine is treated prior to boiling and (b) the relative proportion of the vine to the leaves of the DMT-containing chacruna plant (or other plant admixture intended to produce visions). It's likely that all three curanderos mentioned in these reports used ayahuasca which either had too much of the vine or was prepared from vine which had not been stripped properly of the bark, and thus had additional chemicals in it besides harmaline. If intending to do ayahuasca it's important to find out as much as you can about your curandero and how he makes his ayahuasca, or from whom he gets it.
In all three ayahuasca sessions I was hoping for an experience somewhat similar to my several past experience with N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT), including the presence of DMT entities. None appeared. In fact there was nothing at all in these ayahuasca sessions that I’d call “psychedelic”. Three ayahuasceros, and none of them delivered hoped-for results, just mostly very unpleasant physical effects. Admittedly I had not undergone the lengthy “cleansing” that Amazon natives traditionally aspiring to become ayahuasceros must go through (unless they are brujos). So these experiences that I described were of little value or benefit, except as a warning to others of what could go wrong if one ventures on an ill-prepared experiment with ayahasca.