FOREWORD
THE PLANTS GAVE ME LIFE
I owe my life to plants, and they have informed everything I have done. From the time when I was very young, I liked to work with plants and knew that they gave me daily sustenance, not just as food for my body, but in my soul. I loved and admired them greatly. In my adolescence they became even more important to me. I was very unwell in my heart,a but I healed myself with the sacred plant, ayahuasca, after years of suffering—something that medicines from the pharmacy were unable to do.
After years of healing myself in this way, I saw a curandera (female shaman) heal my younger sister, also using ayahuasca. My sister had been in mortal agony with hepatitis, but with this single healing from the plants, she was cured in just two hours. That motivated me to start learning the science of vegetalismo.b Later I began dieting with la purga,c and she taught me how to use plants for healing and how to understand their application through visions. That’s how I came to be a shaman, ordained by the spirits.
My visions helped me understand the value of human beings, animals, the plants themselves, and many other things. The plants taught me the function they play in life, and the holistic meaning of all life. We all should give special attention and deference to Mother Nature. She deserves our love. And we should also show a healthy respect for her power!
Plants are essential in many ways: they give life to all beings on Earth by producing oxygen, which we need to be active; they create the enormous greenhouse that gives board and lodging to diverse but interrelated guests; they are teachers who show us the holistic importance of conserving life in its due form and necessary conditions.
For me personally, though, they mean even more than this. Plants—in the great living book of nature—have shown me how to study life as an artist and shaman. They can help all of us to know the art of healing and to discover our own creativity, because the beauty of nature moves people to show reverence, fascination, and respect for the extent to which the forests give shelter to our souls.
The consciousness of plants is a constant source of information for medicine, alimentation, and art, and an example of the intelligence and creative imagination of nature. Much of my education I owe to the intelligence of these great teachers. Thus I consider myself to be the “representative” of plants, and for this reason I assert that if they cut down the trees and burn what’s left of the rainforests, it is the same as burning a whole library of books without ever having read them.
People who are not so dedicated to the study and experience of plants may not think this knowledge is so important to their lives—but even they should be conscious of the nutritional, medicinal, and scientific value of the plants they rely on for life.
My most sublime desire, though, is that every human being should begin to put as much attention as he or she can into the knowledge of plants, because they are the greatest healers of all. And all human beings should also put effort into the preservation and conservation of the rainforest and care for it and the ecosystem, because damage to these not only prejudices the flora and fauna but humanity itself.
Even in the Amazon these days, many see plants as only a resource for building houses and to finance large families. People who have farms and raise animals also clear the forest to produce foodstuffs. Mestizos and native Indians log the largest trees to sell to industrial sawmills for subsistence. They have never heard of the word ecology!
I, Pablo, say to everybody who lives in the Amazon and the other forests of the world, that they must love the plants of their land, and everything that is there!
This expression of love must be a sincere and altruistic interest in the lasting well-being of others. We are not here simply to exist, but to enjoy life together with plants, animals, and loved ones, and to delight in contemplation of the beauty of nature. A shaman has in his mind and heart the attitude of conserving nature because he knows that life is for enjoying the company of this world’s countless delights.
Any painting or book or piece of art that spreads this message is to be respected, and every reader who picks up a book on this subject is to be honored.
I invite you to read on and to learn from the greatest teachers of all—the plants, our sacred brothers and sisters.
PABLO C. AMARINGO, OCTOBER 2005
(TRANSLATED BY PETER CLOUDSLEY)
Pablo Amaringo is one of the world’s greatest visionary artists. A member of the Shipibo tribe, he trained as a curandero (shaman) in the Amazon, healing himself and others from the age of ten, but gave this up in 1977 to become a full-time painter and art teacher at his Usko-Ayar school. His book, Ayahuasca Visions: The Religious Iconography of a Peruvian Shaman, co-authored with Luis Eduardo Luna, was published in 1993 by North Atlantic Books. He has a Web site at www.pabloamaringo.com.