Tripping in Holland @ 207
blue trousers, and blue bow ties-stood ready with a score of sheeted
mattresses to receive the purged and ailing trippers.
My worst fear was to restimulate a nightmare that had occurred when
I was nine years old. Overdosed with nitrous oxide by an overzealous
Helvetian dentist, I either died or suffered a near-death experience dur-
ing which I viewed my body from the ceiling, reviewed my life up
until that moment like a film run backward, then found myself in a
whirling void in which an inner voice informed me that nothing else
existed in the universe: that I was it, and it was I, with no relief and no
way out. Huis clos! To avoid this nightmare I had ever since foregone
ether and chloroform, opting for local or spinal anesthetics. Only many
years later did I discover from Steiner that this was an elementary form
of initiation, that the baptisms performed by John the Baptist in the
Jordan amounted to near-death drowning; and were actually initia-
tions into the Christian mysteries.
What had me now perturbed, afraid the yaje might precipitate me
back into that void, was the reminiscence of the description in a book
written by Allen Ginsberg with William Burroughs in the 1950s of the
"awful solitude of the universe." Then there was Steiner's dictum:
"There are two poles between which lie all vicissitudes: fear of the void
and the collapse into egotism."
I nevertheless perdured in my intent to drink the stuff. I had talked
with a member of the Daime community who had been talung the
drug regularly for seven months, and I had tried to understand from
him the mechanics of its spiritual overtones. He explained that aya-
huasca acts as a key into the spirit world and that the visions can enable
one to see the spiritual causes of one's own problems or physical illness
and that catharsis frequently accompanies these visions.
What came next is recorded in the first person.
The time is now! At a signal we all take our places.The masters of
ceremonies are two Brazilian men and one woman. She is dark haired,
in her forties, slim, intense, with a tiny diamond embedded in the left
side of her nose. She speaks English as the lingua franca.
The Brazhan shaman, a solid fellow who could have been in the lum-
ber trade, dressed in gray slacks and a green windbreaker, leads the