Maestro

[Vladimir]

The Shipwreck 

With the beauty of Divine orchestration, I ended up in Marosa after spending two nights at Casa Morey. Kay and I made a deal with Tony, the owner of Marosa, that I would pay him $1,000 and stay at Marosa as a volunteer for “a time.” It wasn't clear how long I would be allowed to stay there, but at that point I wasn't concerned about having every detail figured out. I was simply grateful for the opportunity to stay in a place that, from the moment I arrived, felt so different from AyaMadre. Before Tony accepted me into his center as a volunteer translator, he asked me to speak over the phone with one of his American friends who was planning to come to Marosa in a few months. During our conversation, something this man said stood out to me. He told me that on this path of power, “there is a possibility of making a mistake.” I immediately replied, “There are no mistakes, and that is the Truth that I stand in.” He responded, “Good, very good.” 

I remembered Tony from five years earlier. When I first discovered Marosa, the maloka was just beginning to be built, and Tony approached me and tried to talk to me. At the time, he was bad-mouthing Maestra Estella, saying things like, “She is doing day ceremonies because she is scared.” I remember hearing him say this and quickly walking away from the conversation. The same Tony had also approached Victoria and me while we were eating at a restaurant called The Dawn of the Amazon, a touristy, Ayahuasca-dieta-friendly restaurant next to the Amazon River. Somehow, he managed to sell us one of his paintings for $100. I am now pretty sure that the painting wasn't actually his own work, even though he claimed and insisted that he was the artist. These encounters had left me with a strong first impression of Tony. I perceived him as someone with a big ego, and I also felt that he had problems with alcohol. So it was interesting that, five years later, I would find myself making an agreement with this same man to stay at the center he had built.

Despite remembering these first negative impressions of Tony from five years earlier, I was thrilled and deeply grateful to be accepted into Marosa as a volunteer. Whatever my previous impressions of Tony were, the center itself felt beautiful, peaceful, and alive. After everything I had experienced at AyaMadre, Marosa felt like a completely different world. The tambos were beautiful and well maintained, the food was lovingly prepared, and the whole place had a sense of tranquility that I had been longing for. Maestra Angela, who was the main curandera there radiated love and kindness. I felt like I had finally found the Ayahuasca center I had been searching for, the kind of place where I could settle down, work, learn, serve, and continue exploring the Paradise that I had discovered within myself.

Kay and I parted ways at this point because she wanted to travel somewhere else to attend a Spanish school. Even though we were going our separate ways, we stayed in touch, and she offered to support me financially with $500 a month while I was at Marosa. After everything we had gone through together, knowing that she was still there for me meant a lot. I felt that I had found a real friend and ally, someone who had witnessed my journey closely enough to understand at least some of what I had been through and who was willing to continue supporting me as I moved forward.

At Marosa, Maestra Angela opened my master plant dieta with Noya Rao, which is considered an extremely rare and special kind of dieta. I had heard that there were only a handful of Noya Rao trees left in the entire world, perhaps something like five to ten. One of these trees happened to be growing about a twenty-minute walk from Marosa, and we went there once to see it. Noya Rao is known in Shipibo as the Flying Tree and the Tree of Light. 

During the ceremonies at Marosa, the medicine began opening up very deeply and powerfully for me. All of the ceremonies at Marosa took place at night, and I continued experiencing both beautiful visions of light and distorted, dark visions. I felt that I had to put tremendous effort into staying as concentrated as possible throughout every ceremony. It wasn't simply a matter of watching visions come and go. To me, it felt like I was constantly having to choose where to place my attention, constantly working to remain connected to beauty, love, and light while something darker seemed to be pulling in the opposite direction. It felt like a constant battle between light and darkness, between good and evil, and I had to remain present and focused through the entire process.

Every time I went outside after a ceremony and turned on my flashlight, I would see the familiar visions of wolf heads appearing on the ground around me. Immediately after stepping out of maloka with my flashlight, my body relaxed, realigned and I would  would feel safe again. After the intensity of the ceremony, stepping outside into the darkness of the jungle with the beam of my flashlight illuminating the path felt almost like returning to another world. I felt the presence of the Divine Mother Wolf and the light around me, and my nervous system would finally begin to settle.

During one of the ceremonies, I finally felt like I had connected to my Noya Rao dieta. I experienced what looked like a spaceship, and it felt as though my dieta was welcoming me aboard. I heard the words, “Captain!, Captain!, Captain!, Captain!” At the same time, I saw many tiny Russian flags surrounding the beautiful central vision. The experience immediately touched something extremely deep inside me. A huge smile filled my face, and tears of joy effortlessly flowed from my eyes. I felt safe. I felt held. I felt truly loved. It was as though I had finally encountered a vision that I had been waiting my entire life to see and connect with, and in that moment I felt that I had finally arrived somewhere I was meant to be.

I would later see the Russian flags appearing in other ceremonies, I saw them defending me from the visions of darkness that seemed to be coming toward me from all kinds of holes, portals, and doorways. Whenever I saw the Russian flags during the ceremonies at Marosa, I knew that I was connecting with my dieta. I began connecting Noya Rao, the Flying Tree, with the tiny Russian flags and with the spaceship vision that I had seen in San Marcos just before my first descent into Hell. The connections between these experiences became stronger and stronger in my mind, and Noya Rao eventually became, for me, “the Russian spaceship from the future.”

Then another maestro began showing up at our ceremonies. Tony didn't even bother introducing him to the group. There were six pasajeros at the center at that point, and eventually one of the young women asked who the new man was. Tony simply introduced him as “Maestro Willy.” From the very beginning, I noticed that something was very different and strange about Willy. His body language expressed rapid, jerky movements, almost as if he were extremely anxious, and I could feel what I experienced as a tremendous amount of fear coming from him. He also kept smoking Mapacho throughout the entire ceremony. When he sat in front of me during the ceremony and blowed the tobacco smoke directly into my body, I felt my beautiful visions of light becoming even more blocked out by darker and more distorted visions. During one of these ceremonies, I received what felt to me like a clear message that Maestro Willy was trying to shamanically fight with me because he was jealous of and afraid of my power.

Then came the ceremony that I believe took place around June 7, 2024. Willy was especially anxious that night. He couldn't seem to sit still for even a moment. His behavior was so unusual that I almost asked Maestra Angela what was wrong with him. At the same time, I had a few fleeting thoughts about not participating in the ceremony that night. Something inside me seemed to be telling me to reconsider, but I ignored my intuitive guidance. When I approached Maestra Angela to receive Ayahuasca, she asked me a question she had never asked me before: “Do you want a small cup or a big cup?” The question confused me. I almost asked her, “What kind of cup have I been drinking in all the past ceremonies?” I remember hesitating and pausing for several seconds before the word “grande,” meaning “big” in Spanish, came out of my mouth.

I drank the medicine, and the ceremony began with the familiar battle between beautiful visions and frightening ones. I couldn't fully relax my body during the process because the dark visions didn't feel like mere visions. To me, they seemed to be charged with an actual energy of fear, and I felt that I had to remain intensely focused in order not to be pulled into them. I had become very familiar with this process by then, so I knew how to work with the medicine and how to concentrate my attention, but that night something felt different. The darkness seemed unusually powerful, and I felt that maintaining my connection to the light required every ounce of concentration I had.

Then I saw it.

A vision appeared that looked like a vertical line filled with colorful symbols. It immediately stood out from all the other visions because it was extraordinarily clear. Most of the visions I was experiencing were smoky, blurry, or foggy, but this one was sharp and defined. It seemed to enter my visual field from the right periphery and move toward me. My attention immediately became focused on this colorful vertical line, and I remember having a fleeting thought: “Is this how I connect to my dieta?”

The moment I focused my attention on that vertical line, all of my beautiful visions of light disappeared. It happened in what felt like split seconds, as if someone had suddenly unplugged a cord or switched off a light. At that exact moment, I heard one of the women in the ceremony gasp. I felt like I was right back in the state of separation that I knew as Hell. The connection with love seemed to disappear completely. I was seeing dark visions and I knew that I was in the dimension, state, and presence of pure evil.

Shortly after this happened, I made my way back into my tambo and turned on the light, hoping that the light would bring me back to connection and love, just as it had many times before. My purple shirt with the image of my Divine Mother Wolf was hanging in the center of my tambo. I looked at the image and said a prayer: "Матушка, помоги мне! Спаси меня!“ - Dear Mother, help me! Save me!” I kept looking at the image of the Mother Wolf with the light turned on, expecting that the familiar presence of her image would reconnect me with the love and safety I had experienced so many times before. Instead, I saw what appeared to me to be dark vision seeping through the image. I immediately felt that this was the same darkness, or evil, that I had connected with by looking at the vertical line.

I also tried looking directly at the light of the lamp. When I did, I began seeing black dots in the light, and I had the same feeling that this was the darkness now preventing me from connecting with the light. The very things that had previously helped me return to love and safety now seemed unable to reach me. The Mother Wolf image, the light of the lamp, and the familiar methods I had used to reconnect with Paradise all seemed to have been cut off from me. I felt completely trapped inside an experience of darkness that I could not simply turn away from.

The rest of the night became a constant battle that required everything I had. I had to maintain an almost unbearable level of focus and concentration so that I wouldn't completely lose my mind. This dark force felt like it was sucking me into what I experienced as pure madness, where infinite torture was awaiting me.

I was guided to start smoking Mapacho and to inhale the tobacco deeply into my body. The tobacco helped keep me disconnected from my feelings, centered my mind, and prevented me from connecting more deeply with the darkness that I was experiencing. I focused on breathing, smoking, and keeping my mind together through the intensity of the experience. I feel like smoking Mapacho saved me that night. I barely made it through.

But the darkness did not end when the ceremony ended.

I would spend the next thirteen months in a second Hell, a state that I experienced as pure evil, fear, and separation. I began drinking as much alcohol as I could every day and smoking as many cigarettes as I could find, just like I did in my first 18 month Hell. I had already spent almost two years rebuilding my life after the first Hell. I had gone through death and rebirth, and then I had spent those years discovering true Paradise. I had been creating beauty everywhere I went. I had been experiencing an extraordinary joy of love, feeling gratitude for existence, finding meaning in the simplest things, singing, creating, swimming in the ocean, connecting with people, working with sacred plants, and experiencing the world as a masterpiece of Divine creation. I had finally learned what it felt like to live on the other side of Hell and what it's like to feel fully alive and awake. 

"There is a possibility of making a mistake." ~Tony's friend

"The main thing is that your ship doesn't sink." ~Mom

"In the Ayahuasca ceremony, the trauma may resurface" ~Lisa, Munay 

Once again, I felt like the Divine has done absolutely everything in it's power to protect me and warn me about the danger of the possibility of returning to Hell. 

How could I not have seen all the warning signs and messages? 

This was a shipwreck of a cosmic magnitude. 

I had found Paradise. I had just been welcomed on board of my starship and connected with my Noya Rao dieta. 

And then I lost it all in an instant. 

Now I would have to find my way back - once again. 

[Vladimir]

I left Marosa as soon as I could the next day, clumsily throwing all of my sacred and precious things into my luggage bag. I wasn't carefully packing anymore. I was trying to get away. Everything that had felt so beautiful and sacred only a day before now seemed connected to the darkness I had entered, and I wanted to leave the place as quickly as possible. As soon as I arrived at a hotel in Iquitos, I bought myself a bottle of Red Label whiskey. It was time to begin “celebrating” my return to Hell for the second time.

Strangely, as I became drunk from the whiskey, I began feeling as though I had temporarily returned to my “normal” state. For a short while, the unbearable separation seemed to lift. I could feel something that resembled the ordinary state of consciousness I remembered from before my descent into Hell. But the feeling didn't last long. I eventually puked the alcohol out and drank a lot of water in an attempt to sober myself up, and almost immediately I found myself right back in the separation. Looking back, I developed my own theory about what had happened. Perhaps the alcohol temporarily diminished, suppressed, or numbed whatever part of my mind was responsible for connecting me with what I experienced as the Spirit Realm. Since I felt that I was connected to pure evil at the time, temporarily losing that connection through intoxication gave me some relief. I didn't understand the mechanism, but I knew that for a little while, alcohol could make the unbearable experience disappear. I also resumed my heavy smoking of Mapacho.

Words can only do so much to describe an experience like this. I started drinking and smoking because I knew the Truth that I was embodying, and I wanted to do everything I could to numb myself, distract myself, and run away from that Truth in whatever way I could. I already had eighteen months of experience from my first time in Hell, so I knew exactly what I was running from. The Truth that I was embodying was that I had become evil, that I was trapped in eternal Hell, and that I only wanted harm for myself and for the entire world. I felt completely disconnected from my soul and from love. I didn't feel alive. I felt dead, and in my experience, I was dead.

Being in the present moment became unbearable. I couldn't rest for a single moment. I barely slept at all, and when I did manage to sleep, it wasn't restful. Time dragged on with excruciating slowness. Every moment felt painfully long, and I desperately wanted the present moment to end as quickly as possible, only to return to the next present moment of my hellish reality. There was nowhere to escape to because every moment followed me. I couldn't outrun my own consciousness, and I couldn't find relief simply by waiting for the day to pass. The passage of time itself became part of the torture.

Eventually, I met a local man who helped me find a small place in a village near Iquitos for $100 a month. I stayed there for about a month. During that time, I was drinking Ayahuasca, drinking alcohol, and smoking enormous amounts of Mapacho. At that point, I didn't really care that I was mixing Ayahuasca with alcohol. I wasn't thinking about whether it was safe or whether it made sense. I simply wanted something that would allow me to forget the present-moment reality, even if only for a little while. I was desperately searching for any doorway out of the consciousness I was trapped inside.

Some of the Ayahuasca experiences during this period were extremely frightening. Mapacho helped me again and again because it seemed to disconnect me from my feelings enough that the darkness wouldn't completely consume my mind. I would smoke and focus on the tobacco, using it almost like an anchor that could keep me from falling deeper into the experience. One particular Ayahuasca experience stayed with me more than the others.

I was near The Dawn of the Amazon restaurant, the same place where Victoria and I had spent time together in 2019, shortly after our spiritual wedding with Ayahuasca. I looked up at the sky and saw what appeared to me to be a gigantic White Dragon enveloping the entire Sun, as if the Sun were a Golden Egg that the dragon was protecting. I also saw many white sailing ships appearing in the distance, seemingly emerging from the white clouds. For a moment, the sky became an enormous mythological landscape filled with symbols.

Then my attention was guided toward a grey cloud.

Within it, I saw what looked like a skeleton-devil wearing a horned helmet or crown. The vision then transformed into what appeared to be a gigantic gate to Hell. I quickly looked away because I was afraid that if I continued looking, I would see what was behind the gate. I didn't want to know. But intuitively, I knew what I was seeing: what I understood as the gate to eternal Hell.

While I was living in that room near Iquitos, I still had my phone and an Internet connection, and I became desperate to find some kind of myth or spiritual tradition in history that described what I was going through. I searched for anything that could explain the idea of “two deaths,” because I felt that I had already died once and somehow returned, only to die again and descend back into Hell. I couldn't find anything that matched my experience. Jesus had died once on the cross. The closest parallel I could find was the story of Osiris, who was killed by Set and, in some versions of the mythology, experienced a second destruction or dismemberment. But even that didn't give me the answer I was looking for. Osiris couldn't simply return to the land of the living. He became the Lord of the Underworld. That mythology didn't help me much because I was desperately searching for a story that told me how someone could go through death twice and still find a way back.

Eventually, I reached out to my friend Ken, the older man from the La Jolla Cove swimming club who had taught me how to swim. By this point, I was in such a desperate state that I needed help getting out of Peru. Ken agreed to buy me an airplane ticket back to San Diego. I was deeply grateful to him. I didn't know what would happen when I returned, but I knew that I couldn't remain where I was.

When I arrived back in San Diego from Iquitos, the first photograph I took while I was still inside the San Diego airport was of a jacket displayed behind glass with an image of Mother Mary on its back. After everything I had experienced, seeing Mother Mary there felt deeply significant to me. I had been searching for signs, searching for guidance, searching for some indication that I wasn't completely lost.

Ken came to pick me up near Lake Murray and drive me back toward McDonald Sharp Center. As we were walking toward his car near Starbucks, I noticed a green SUV. Its license plate read:

FINDSOS.

I took a photo of it.

I had spent months desperately searching for a way out of Hell, searching through Ayahuasca, alcohol, Mapacho, mythology, memories, visions, and whatever fragments of Truth I could still hold onto. And now, as I returned to San Diego, the first signs I encountered seemed to tell me exactly what I already knew deep inside:

Find help.

Find a way out.

Find the way back.