By JUAN JOSÉ GARCÍA PIÑEIRO
THE SILENT AWAKENING OF THE MUSHROOM
Foreword
Dedicated to all those imprisoned
for defending sacred plants and fungi,
with the hope that the prisoners of their own closed minds,
those who attempt to prohibit nature,
finally recognize the human right to freely explore
our own consciousness.
PRELIMINARY WARNING
“So books are real to me, too; they not only link me to other minds, but to the vision of other minds, to what those minds understand and see. I see their worlds as clearly as my own.”
PHILIP K. DICK
FOREWORD
In May 1995, I found myself once again at Barajas airport, from where I had departed the previous year, bound for Brazil.
Thus ended a journey whose true dimension, at that moment, I was far from fully understanding. Those who read In Search of the Sacred Plants will remember the state of strangeness I was in at the end of my trip, following my initiation into the world of shamanism and my encounters with various sacred plants.
Upon my return, I had not fully integrated the experiences I had lived under the effects of power plants. These experiences had shown me another reality, a reality beyond the ordinary, which I had not the slightest possibility of denying, for the simple reason that I had entered it.
I had not only seen it; I had been there, I had merged with it, and I had ceased to be myself, without ceasing to be myself—quite the contrary—and finally, I had understood that all that reality was part of an unknown world, but no less real for that than the world habitual to us.
I have described what happened on that journey previously. In the book In Search of the Sacred Plants, I recounted in detail how meeting the men of knowledge I encountered throughout my journey through South America affected me, and how those experiences transformed me.
Upon my return, I faced the difficult problem of integrating all those experiences into my being, of existing fully in everyday life, having assimilated my entheogenic experiences and accepted the existence of unexplored dimensions of reality. At the same time, I sensed there was an ultimate reality, and I tried to maintain the intent to reach one day—preferably by sharing a collective intent—the ultimate goal of the warrior: total freedom.
Another fact I had to face and integrate into my daily life was to stop seeing sacred plants as a simple instrument to modify our state of consciousness, merely as a kind of vegetable microscope or telescope that allows us to explore inner and outer space.
And of course they are, but over time I have discovered that shamanic plants are also living beings with a kind of consciousness different from the human one, but consciousness nonetheless; beings with whom it is possible to establish intimate and direct communication by integrating them into our metabolism, who have an interest in showing us their world and knowing ours, and who possess knowledge that most human beings lack.
My own experience has taught me that master plants, by helping us expand our consciousness and know other worlds, are our allies, co-participants in our evolution as a human species.
Most species do not evolve in isolation, but interconnected, in a relationship of evolutionary symbiosis. Hence the great importance of entheogens and the urgent need for the normalization of shamanic substances.
Only the ignorant, the mentally poor, or those imprisoned by dark economic interests and pressures from the head of the Empire, could be capable of attempting to prohibit something that is part of nature, such as sacred plants and fungi.
And only a castrated and subjugated society can accept, with barely any resistance, the attempt by those who try to control us to stop the evolution of our mind, trying to deny us—from the moment we are born until the grave—the direct experience of reality.
For how long will our society accept the prohibition of the unhindered exploration of human consciousness?
But are we really accepting it? Because fortunately, attempting to prevent the human being’s encounter with shamanic plants is an attempt that is not only aberrant, but in the long run, is doomed to failure.
The books that appear in the extensive bibliography included in this and the previous book are documentary evidence of how the entheogenic experience has been and is part of the human experience. And it will continue to be part of it, whether those who try to control our lives and our consciousness like it or not. The broad community of people who, despite everything, risking our physical freedom or even our lives, challenge the dictatorship of perception that others insist on perpetuating every day and every night, is taking care of that.
I will not describe in this book, except when necessary, my experiences between the journey whose chronicle is In Search of the Sacred Plants and this new journey through the lands of America, of which this book is a faithful testimony. Nor are the events that occurred after the return from my second trip to America reflected here.
And it is not that I consider them lacking in importance or utility for people interested in shamanism and altered states of consciousness. Simply, this decision is the result of a matter of priority. I consider it of greater interest to make public the facts in which I participated on this new journey; the teachings I received from the different men and women of knowledge I met during it; my new experiences with power plants; and the provisional conclusions I reached after listening to them.
In short, I find it a priority to share the fruits of the continuation of my peculiar apprenticeship in shamanism. However, one day it is possible that the moment will come to make public the chronicle of my travels through less exotic places; places close to us where there are also encounters with the unknown, women and men of knowledge, centers of power and energy, and where, above all, we have the opportunity to learn, to awaken, to see, and to act as a warrior; places where there is also the possibility of meeting, of loving, growing, and evolving freely if that is our intent.
The main recipients of this new book are, therefore, all the people who in the West, slowly but surely, have begun to know and recognize ourselves in recent years.
The women and men of knowledge I met in the lands of Mexico see us as parties of the nagual without a nagual; they see and value us as the tribes of the south, an inseparable part of the western tribes, of which the Inca men of knowledge spoke to me, just as I already related in my first book.
Those people of power trust us more, despite our current limitations, than most members of their culture who have come and continue to come to our countries to bring knowledge that they corrupt with their misuse of personal power, money, or sexual abuse of the people who more or less blindly follow them.
They know that although we are apprentices, we have not abandoned nor will we abandon the path of the heart.
The spontaneous birth of this kind of group or the development of a new kind of learning is not an isolated or casual fact, as will be verified during the reading of this book. On the contrary, it is a characteristic of the times we are living in.
The fact is not very well known due to its existence in the world of the internal, rather than as an organized social presence; because although many of the people who take part in this intent are unaware of it and feel isolated, we exist, we really exist.
They see us, we see ourselves, we see them. We are an emerging minority of humanity, even though, as I say, at least in this reality, we do not all know each other. The trend, however, is the continuous increase of physical encounters; encounters that have great power, have been occurring for years, and will increase in frequency and depth.
In any case, even if nothing more than meeting gives us the intense sensation of recognition, and we rejoice, and laugh together, the physical encounter is not even important, but rather living and growing with the awareness of the existence of other warriors—or whatever each person prefers to call them—whose intent is the same, and whose mode of learning, challenges, longings, and difficulties are similar.
A challenge we have before us is to eliminate the great disconnection that exists, even the isolation and ignorance, between the people who are sharing the same intent.
The non-existence of a name for our community and the absence of a structure is a fact that should not discourage us, but rather the opposite: it should show us that we are in something different from the old groups of followers of supposed masters, whose task it is necessary to affirm has already concluded. More and more people are verifying in their own lives, and thanks to their experience, how their permanence today is more of an obstacle than a help in the search for freedom.
The times we live in demand that we be our own shamans, united more by sharing and maintaining a new intent for the human being than by being part of the same tradition.
We are getting closer to being able to express our true nature in our lives. Every day, more human beings refuse to submit to the dictatorship of perception, because we have experienced—rather than read or heard—that we are multidimensional beings, and we refuse to live anesthetized and limited in the only reality we had been told existed, and for which we had only been trained.
More and more human beings are enthusiastic about exploration and not evasion, discovery and not ignorance, novelty and not habit, the expansion of our consciousness and not the robotization of our lives, real love and not slavery disguised as tenderness.
In other words: more and more human beings yearn for freedom and not false security.
With the awareness of not undertaking an individual journey, we explore and live other dimensions of our being, although we also still live and suffer and enjoy ordinary reality most of our time.
Just as I discovered in the Mexico of the naguals, we are Quetzalcoatls, feathered serpents, aware of our animal and wonderful nature, in an exciting state of transition, on the final branch that forces us to choose between continuing to be serpent men and women, or becoming eagle men and women, before becoming capable of departing.
Who knows for whom among us the moment will come, one day, to undertake the flight of freedom. I intuit that it will be for anyone who impeccably maintains the decision and determination of this intent.
The path of knowledge today demands breaking with old habits. As hard as it may be for some people to hear, I reaffirm that the time of masters, as we knew them, has ended.
Today, whoever wants to know must take the reins of their life and accept the responsibility of being their own master; learning and growing with the beings of this and another reality; evolving individually together with the rest of the other human beings, of the other living beings, within nature, Gaia, and the universe.
We do not need intermediaries to learn and have a direct experience of reality. We do not need masters, naguals, gurus, or shamans to follow and submit to, although we can learn from them, as from all of us, always maintaining our freedom.
We do not need to submit to people, traditions, or belief systems that act as true hallucinogens—according to the dictionary, a hallucinogen is something that obfuscates, seduces, or deceives us, causing one thing to be taken for another. Masters can be any person, entheogens, and also situations that serve to provoke our awakening, our internal change, and our evolution.
Evolving is not hallucinating. Living in an unconscious and limited way is living hallucinated. Believing that reality is only a part of reality, the most palpable one, is hallucinating. Hallucination is a kind of blindness, a refusal to see what existence really is.
As long as we live hallucinated, as long as there is any place in our lives for mirage and hallucination, as long as we do not awaken totally, we will need de-hallucinators, being fully aware of what they are, without creating new dependencies, maintaining sovereignty over our own consciousness.
Nowadays, if we need anything, it is free access to entheogens and other means of experiencing ultimate reality in our minds and in our guts, as we do when we know the highest states of human consciousness. We do not need second-hand experiences; let no one tell us what the great mystery is, but rather let us link ourselves to it and be capable of experiencing its existence.
We need to go beyond the mutilated and castrated consciousness considered normal in our society. We need more transcendent experiences, and deeper experiences. We need to enter into the unknown, with prudence but without fear. We need to explore other dimensions of our consciousness and of reality. We need to reach the stars and the infinite, starting from the earth on which we were born.
***
Today there is a new mode of learning, which I have previously described as peculiar, as it does not occur through the attachment for years to a single master or nagual, but rather through direct contact with knowledge, through shamanic plants and fungi, through various techniques of modifying human consciousness, and thanks to encounters with women and men who, as they claim, successively take charge, in a way I have not yet been able to fully understand, of the apprenticeship of the western warrior. These men and women have mastery; they are neither masters nor guides in the old style. They simply appear in our lives, confront us with the mystery, allow us to penetrate it, and then disappear, often without leaving a trace.
I attributed those contacts to mere chance, but upon arriving in America again, I very soon discovered that chance did not exist at all. These people seemed to act in coordination, they appeared and disappeared at the exact moment, at the same time that it was I who made the decision at each moment about the course of my journey.
There and here, there are people and facts that only mark a direction for us that we are free to follow or not, but those signs on the path exist, and it is fundamental to be attentive to them. We have the opportunity not to advance blindly, always maintaining our freedom of choice, of success and error.
To say anything more would be to speak of the Great Mystery, and for me, the Great Mystery continues to be just that: a great mystery.
I do not claim to have found answers to all the questions. On the contrary, I assure you I have found a means by which each person can find their own answers, and this book is a small sample of that.
I also affirm that each one of us possesses some pieces of the puzzle, and one of our possibilities is to put them on the table, with the hope of, among all of us, seeing something of the general picture that we have before us today. Sharing the results of our searches with total sincerity is becoming increasingly essential.
Our transformation as individuals is our entire responsibility. There is a realm where our sovereignty is absolute. At the same time, it is fundamental to maintain the awareness that our internal change is part of a collective transformation in which an important part of humanity is immersed.
Our difficulties are real, but so is our intent. And our intent is none other than to transcend our limits: limits imposed by ourselves, by the old structures of the society in which we live, by our culture, and by our current human nature. Our intent is none other than to transcend the ego and our attachments, and when the moment arrives, to be capable of transcending our bodies to become pure consciousness, fully conscious energy.
Our intent is none other, then, than total freedom.
This intent requires discovering the answers to the three great questions that have interrogated the human being since its beginnings: where we come from, who we are, and where we are going. Three questions frequently formulated without meaning, but which are, without the slightest doubt, three questions of power that hide in their answers the strength, energy, and wisdom that we need today.
Entheogens help us explore, but I do not deny that there are other means of discovering, as the curious animals we are, answers to those questions of power, especially to reach a glimpse of where we are heading.
I intuit, and it is only an intuition, that it is toward some point where at some moment we will all meet, even if it is on the last step.
If I have learned anything from master plants and the authentic shamans I have met on my travels, it is that the human being already possesses capabilities that most mortals or immortals lack.
Healing, telepathy, clairvoyance, clairaudience, divination, out-of-body experiences, and exits from linear time, contacts with other beings: these are some of these possibilities to be developed by most of us. Not to mention the possibility of transcending death as it is conceived in our culture.
I affirm, based on my own experience and that of people who have seriously investigated it, that our brain and our current nature already include these capabilities, and many more, for now only in a latent state for most of us.
Activating them, awakening them, is one of the effects of entheogens and one of the future expressions of the evolutionary project inscribed in those fragments of DNA that the Genome project is still trying to decipher.
The human being of the future will be capable of traversing the journey that goes from the interior of our cells to a dimension where they will simply encounter the infinite.
There is something else that characterizes the times we are living in today: it is the supremacy of novelty over habit, even when the latter continues to be so powerful and difficult to banish from our lives and our society.
Today we are surrounded by new appearances, subtle or evident advances of all kinds, which only the youngest can manage to apprehend in all their complexity. The changes affect all areas of the social, and for the new warriors, they demand acting in freedom, open to new discoveries, with our minds prepared to flow with life and with the energy of the universe.
One of those novelties is the increase in the number of human beings who cross the threshold of separation between dimensions and universes that coexist in reality, although now we barely intuit or glimpse it. And another novelty is a greater quality of those entries into the unknown.
We are reaching dimensions more and more frequently that not only belong to inner space or other parts of the outer universe, but we have the possibility of exploring worlds outside of linear time, dimensions outside of space-time, outside of the known universe of “height, width, depth, and time.”
Until now, basically, other planes of reality had been explored which, even outside the material world, still belonged to universes within space-time.
Some members of the human species—if some exceptional beings have not already achieved it—are finding themselves closer and closer to the real possibility of breaking with linear time, more thanks to the expansion of human consciousness than to technical advances.
The door of entry, or exit, is no machine or black hole in outer space, but our inner space, some unknown dimension of our consciousness. The consequences of crossing that door fall within the field of the literally inconceivable, and the generalization of this experience would simply transform the world as we know it now in a radical way.
To put it another way, and making a long story short: if until now more spatial dimensions were added to habitual reality, now we are even glimpsing the moment when we will be—or our continuators will be—capable of adding temporal dimensions in a daily way, something that would increase the richness and variety of life and the experience of being in such a way that, as of today, no one can even imagine.
And it will only be an intermediate step, a stop along the way.
I do not know the impact of crossing that decisive threshold on humanity as a whole, on the Earth as a whole; I do not know if there will be human beings who will cross it “definitively” in the coming years, if there were those who already crossed it and “return” to our here-and-now; I do not know our full potential, a potential that we try to know and experience in all its consequences.
The infinite is until now a simple word that no one knows what it really means. For the human being of the future, although we do not know of what future nor its proximity, it will be part of their reality and their vital experience. We can only carry the baton for the time that corresponds to us, in the long march that will have led us—or them—there, since about 50,000 years ago there were beings so similar to us that we could already consider them human.
Words are totally insufficient to even conceive what the next evolutionary step of our species might be, perhaps the one that means ceasing to be Homo sapiens, to become what?
One would have to return to speaking of the Great Mystery, and be silent afterward.
All these discoveries are described in detail throughout the book. They are transitory conclusions based on my experience or that of people I met.
This time I have not been forced to hide excessive data or experiences, with the exception of some whose description would cause general rejection among people who consider themselves open-minded, but who remain limited by taboos of different kinds, even if they are capable of reading and enjoying books like this one.
The passage of time and the generalization of this kind of experience will make possible the publicity of facts that will then cease to seem like simple delusions to people dominated and limited by prejudices of cultural origin and belief systems accepted without question, despite their evident capacity to mutilate the possibilities that life offers any human being, and the disastrous consequences for the survival of the planet.
I have also been forced to hide the identity of some people. Given the special legal and political situation, both in Mexico and the United States, guaranteeing the safety of some of the people who appear in this book has forced me to transform some situations to make them totally unrecognizable. These modifications in no way affect the veracity of the facts described, nor even less that of their real essence.
Other modifications affect the names and some situation related to the people closest to me.
On one hand, it has seemed fundamental to me not to hide some aspects of my life, including the doubts, uncertainties, and difficulties I encountered during the journey, because the concept of personal and private is something that is also being modified in a decisive way lately.
The times we are living in lead us to share and reflect on all aspects of our existence, understanding that we are part of a whole, learning from the experience of the other.
Especially people who search more decisively will know how to recognize the problems and difficulties to which I am referring, and which appear openly reflected in this chronicle of a journey, which would remain only partially reflected here if I omitted them.
On the other hand, I have wanted to respect as much as possible the intimacy of the people deeply related to me, and to whom I allude in the text, so as not to decisively mutilate the account of my experience as a man faced with the same challenges and trials as the people who accompany me and whom I accompany, in this exciting—although sometimes hard—journey through and toward freedom.
Maintaining this balance has not been easy, but it has not affected the final veracity of the narrated facts.
I have included again the way to get in touch with me, but I would like to make it clear that, as I said before, I do not claim to have all the answers. The vast majority of people who read In Search of the Sacred Plants and contacted me understood it perfectly, and I hope that on this occasion it happens again.
I have used only the real names of the people who wanted to appear that way. If other people have preferred to remain anonymous, I will not reveal their names nor how to get in touch with them in any way.
***
This book is not a book of anthropology, although whoever wishes may understand it as such; it is not a scientific book, although open-minded people who try to use it as a basis for some of their research will be able to do so; this is not a book of ethnobotany, theory, or a simple travelogue; it is not a book based on dogmas, a faith, or a closed belief system either.
The Silent Awakening of the Mushroom is the reflection of another reality; a truthful account of my incursions into an unknown world.
It neither can nor intends to replace personal experience. Here I speak of a really existing world. Whoever has doubts about its reality, or whoever wants to know it, has nothing more to do than—as a scientist does—repeat the experiment, in this case, the crossing of the outer and inner journey.
Here I carefully describe all the steps I have followed. The opportunity to also live these experiences is the fundamental proof I provide, and it is sufficient. Any other proof is banal.
I find it appropriate to reproduce here again the words of Terence McKenna in Food of the Gods, also valid for psilocybin mushrooms or any other entheogen, except regarding the duration of their effects:
Naturally, I do not expect my words to be taken at face value. However, these conclusions are based on an experience that everyone can have if they take the time to investigate DMT. The experience itself lasts less than fifteen minutes. I do not expect criticism from people who have not taken the trouble to carry out this simple and definitive experiment. After all, how seriously can critics approach the problem if they are unable to invest a few minutes of their time to experience the phenomenon personally?
I hope these sentences make those who are tempted to simply deny the experiences or conclusions contained in what they have read or are going to read next reflect.
Robert Anton Wilson warned in Cosmic Trigger II against self-styled skeptics who accept the dogmas of the reigning belief system without question, being cynical only toward ideas that are new, original, or heretical.
RAW rescued from Greek philosophy the word zetetic, which would be one who is skeptical of all dogmas, and he tried to summarize the lesson of his book in two imperatives:
1. Never totally believe anyone’s belief system.
2. Never totally believe your own belief system.
Borrowing words from some friends, I would add: It is usually due to an excess of creed, or excessive skepticism, the reason why the fields of any research are seen, in most cases, widely limited.
The force that drives all research with global and honest ends is the need for gradual approximation to the coming truth, and this approximation is only achieved by fleeing from our current truth, forward.
I would like to address, with deep gratitude and solidarity, and to finish this foreword, the women and men who will understand without the need for further explanations what I am talking about:
The content of The Silent Awakening of the Mushroom is brought from the nagual to the paper you feel now between your hands.
After my return to Granada, in December 1996, my first intent was to write a book that would give an account of my journey through the lands of America. However, I soon verified that I was totally incapable of doing so. Time passed and the days did not bring the words.
Nevertheless, I had the feeling that somewhere something was happening. Time proved to me that, in effect, the book was being written in a reality different from the one most known to most of us.
After a few months, I began to write unexpectedly. The words flowed and I wrote without stopping for hours.
Soon, during the spring of 1997, I discovered that the book was already written in an unknown dimension of reality, and that I only had to, from that moment on, limit myself to bringing it here.
The words came in compact blocks, which is why I did not write it chronologically. They were complete scenes that I wrote, just as they arrived, and they did not follow a precise order. Later I ordered them just as they had happened throughout the journey. As I did so, the previous parts were mysteriously rewritten.
I finished the writing of The Silent Awakening of the Mushroom in September 1997.
Describing how this book was written has importance for the reader of this work, because it has been proven that if during its reading one enters a state of consciousness different from the usual one, reading this book more in another reality than in the ordinary one, it will act as an authentic book of power. And as such, it can serve as a gateway to the place where we readers, and the women and men of power whose knowledge appears limitedly reflected in these pages, will be able to meet.
Whoever wishes to access that knowledge directly, without the inevitable limit of words, will only have to reach it through this book, used as a gateway to another reality.
Power, spirit, the great mystery, made a promise to all human beings: it gave us the possibility of reaching total freedom.
And very far from the world of every day, beyond time and space, where the last steps of all paths with heart arrive, in the very center of the mystery, the true women and men who decisively abandon, at the precise moment and forever, the illusory spider web of this reality, are and will be found again.
Thus we will truly be, and thus we will cease to be.
The other reality is there. The decided intent to access it is enough. If the intent is clear, and the decision firm, each person will find their own way to penetrate the unknown.
