By Jonathon Miller-Weisberger
Kindest most appreciated boon companions of the designs path – as some of you may know, I had the honor of spending some outstanding times with maestro Pablo Amaringo. His art graces with commendation the cover of my book Rainforest Medicine, a book he encouraged and helped blow into existence.
This exquisite painting, which graces the cover of Rainforest Medicine, illustrates a ceremony held among the deep forest Ashaninka, where a vision is revealed that the wisdom of the sacred plants will one day reach all regions of the globe. Standing witness on left are spirits of the Inka, predecessors of the tradition who brought forth the knowledge of the preparation of ayahuasca. To the right, mystical wisdom sages of alternate dimensions. Celestial angels descend from above, to instill the occasion with their divine energies, heartening the expansion of opportunities for this blessed wisdom to infuse its auspicious potential far and wide, into the hearts and minds of people the planet over.
It is a high honor and joy to be eligible to offer you, my beloved reader, the option of acquiring high quality giclée prints of maestro Pablo Amaringo’s masterpieces to bless your space. Please visit our Maestro Pablo Amaringo Visionary Fine Art Gallery to explore fifty fine art masterpieces. Proceeds from the sale of the prints are channeled to ground level rainforest conservation and cultural heritage preservations initiatives. Email Jonathon if interested in purchasing a print.
To remember maestro Pablo Amaringo is to awaken the memory of truth to the memory of deep integrity, to a magnificent and wonderfully auspicious spirituality—the kind that holds deep understanding for the human predicament that sustains a deep understanding of the difference between right and wrong. One that sees other people’s joys as one’s own joys and other people’s sorrows as one’s own sorrows. The kind that enjoys not getting used to anything at all, not even to what part of one’s house one will throw down a bed roll to sleep on that night. And to the ever-majestic universal culture of service that don Pablo so gracefully practiced. Allow me here to honor don Pablo Amaringo with some experiences I was able to share with him. The kindest hearted, high-level wizard maestro, spiritual teacher, visionary painter and Amazonian sage whose legacy continues through his art and teachings.
Don Pablo lived a life of love and selfless service and through teaching art tirelessly, worked to instill a moral compass in his students at the Usko Ayar “Spiritual Prince,” School of Amazonian Painting in Pucallpa, Peru. Years living alone in the wilderness, where he became friends with jaguars and wild boars, sleeping with no fire, foraging on fruits, roots, and leaves strengthened his deep essence.
Followed by many years of upholding the practice of a shamanic ayahuasquero doctor of the people, where he was attested to have once even healed a president of Peru. Every night for ten straight years he drank ayahuasca, healing dozens of people at a time in a single night. His stories are fantastic and beyond measure, encouraging deep respect for his old school training and the majestic world this revealed to him. So much of which he worked to preserve for us through his books and the accounts therein. And I have quite a few journals from my time with him of wisdom and stories I plan on continuing to share.
Riding a Heaven Disk
Once while drinking ayahuasca, don Pablo visited a temple with a high roof. There were people there, women who were organizing these long strands of gorgeous multicolored threads. The women sang wonderful songs as they wove intricate weavings. He noticed there was a river and a dock. There were multicolored boats, like yachts that looked like fish, made of opalescent translucent material like leather, which were breathing, expanding, and contracting as if inhaling and exhaling. He heard a person tell another, “Let’s go for a ride!” They entered the vessel, and the motor ignited. A disk began to spin, and a soft hum resounded. Up the boat went, up into the air and he heard them laughing and talking as they rose up and away. He saw a ladder and he asked a woman there, “Can I go up there?” She replied, “You’re not ready yet to go there. Every rung of that ladder, as you walk up it, you must know more about how you function, about your disposition. You have to know more still about how your mind and heart work. To climb that ladder, you have to be well prepared. If you try to climb that ladder now, you’ll surely fall far below.” Don Pablo said, “I drank ayahuasca with the inquisitiveness of a scientist, devoted to investigating life.”
Don Pablo related that the ayahuasca reveals magnificent realities, but we must not forget our mortal place. This helps keep us humble and wise. When following a dieta correctly, one can experience realms beyond one’s capabilities, and that is okay. To witness these realms fills one with energy that can then be applied in our everyday life. It is an inexhaustible spiritual science that at most one can only scratch the surface of.
Then a time came when he was obliged to renounce ayahuasca shamanism. The account he shared with me is fascinating. A time came after a series of incidents that occurred, which escalated into him making this decision.
This is what he shared. Many of his patients were suffering from sorcery. When the healer removes the malice, this flies back like a dart and jabs the sorcerer in the back or belly while he is sleeping, and he then in turn falls ill. The Sorcerer begins investigating the visions about why they got ill and determines the cause being the healer returning the darts. The sorcerer tries to damage the healer but sees his arkanas, spiritual protections were too powerful.
In his glory as a great healer, don Pablo Amaringo healed many patients damaged by different sorcerers. However, the sorcerers realized that separately they could not harm this great healer because his arkanas, spiritual protections, were too powerful. After some time, the different sorcerers meet up and conclude it’s the same healer that is making them all sick. They collude and join forces to topple him. While this is happening, don Pablo’s healing spirits keep beckoning him to just give them the orders and they will kill all the sorcerers. Don Pablo refused as his commitment was to God and to healing. He did not give them their life; thus he could not take their life.
The spiritual battle escalated. His spirits that helped him accomplish many marvelous and complex cures, healing illness no doctors could understand, insisted that if he does not give them an order to kill the sorcerers, it was his life they would take. “How can I back out of this?” he insisted. “I did not give them life, I cannot take their lives, nor do I wish to die either,” he said. They said, “We’re going to make you transform into a bat; if you can stop that from happening and not transform into a bat, then you must abdicate from drinking ayahuasca and you’ll be relinquished of all liabilities and can walk a free man”. He drank ayahuasca and started transforming into a bat, needing to use all his might, like never before, to return, already half transformed, into his human form. After that Don Pablo stopped drinking and swore to never drink again and never did drink again!
He did not, however, renounce the universal path of service. He learned many wonders from the spirits and divine methods for healing such as the use of medicinal plants in certain ways and the miraculous copal incense cleanse (link here) for cleansing one’s aura. Many patients still came to him, and as a true friend of the people, he continued his healing with the copal incense cleanse, herbal recipes, listening to people’s tribulations, and offering life guidance and counsel. Years after he refrained from drinking ayahuasca, oriental celestial spirits would come to him at three in the morning in his meditations and advise him how to heal his patients, and he knew well the symbol of Tai Chi of the Yin Yang.
by maestro Pablo Amaringo
Words of Wisdom from maestro Pablo Amaringo
The world today is much too unsettled,
to be rigid, or disorderly.
To make a difference in the turbulent world of today,
we need spiritual abilities.
The development of your spiritual capacity,
comes through training your heart,
and deepening your level of awareness.
Spend time in nature,
so that, from seeing plants swaying in the wind,
you can learn to be adaptable and flexible.
Learning to appreciate mother nature’s simplicity,
will help you obtain Mother Earths’ innate orderliness.
Being orderly is, in and of itself,
a form of spiritual and intellectual training.
Creative efforts align your body.
The heart works with your mind,
and consciousness works with your spirit.
Learning to talk, think and do good purifies the body.
Compassion purifies the heart,
Self-reflection purifies the mind.
Understanding this,
we can see that meditation is a practical discipline.
Meditation as a form of self-control
bringing self-reflection to all you do and say,
refining your spiritual nature,
and bringing you closer to spiritual mastery.
Don Pablo was someone who could hold people’s sufferings and help them transform this. A man of absolute integrity, he knew how to help people “cross turbulent waters and reach the golden shores.” His abilities as an artist grew and he eventually, with help from friends, opened the “Usko Atay” School of Amazonian Painting. Don Pablo was like a father to thousands of riverine locals from his region. He left an indelible mark on everyone who was fortunate to have met him. The influence of his therapeutical artistic creations continues to inspire countless people world-wide. He passed to return to the glory of the heaven that brought him forth, on November 16 of 2009. Maestro Pablo Amaringo’s legacy is one that will not be forgotten, as his visionary legacy continues to effectuate Heaven on Earth.
Years back, after spending some time with Don Pablo in Iquitos, I was blessed to return with him to his home at the Usko Ayar School of Amazonian painting and spent an entire month living in don Pablos’s home. That was a profoundly moving experience in so many ways, some of which I wrote about in my book Rainforest Medicine. I was once also invited to be his translator when he was summoned to share his wisdom and art at a most unique botanical convention called Voyage Botanica (voyagebotanica.net), held by genius herbalist Michael Cottingham at the Eden Hot Springs in Arizona. The legendary pools, also known as Indian Hot Springs, are where Geronimo himself was believed to have bathed. Later I brought don Pablo to Costa Rica on four occasions to share his art and wisdom at our Rainforest Medicine Council Gatherings.
Over the years I knew him I served don Pablo as one of his representatives, and he issued me a letter granting me authority to sell his art and issue prints of his work as well. I was able to place many of his fine art masterpieces in the homes of people who I’m sure to this very day are relishing these exquisite pieces of paper made sacred by the stroke of his brush and the purified gaze of his eye. And all kinds of funds from the sale of his works were channeled to ground level projects aimed at preserving ethnobotanical wisdom, supporting local and indigenous peoples’ projects and for the conservation of the vital and mighty rainforest.
Although he offered, I never kept any commissions from the sale of his art. Rather, given my passionate devotion to the cause, I was overjoyed to collaborate in his mission of the Usko Ayar School of Amazonian Painting, where he selflessly served his community like a wholehearted father.
It was moving and eye opening to see the location of the school, on stilts over a swamp, in an impoverished slum in the outskirts of the Amazonian city of Pucallpa in Peru. The funds from the paintings I sold for him, he was kind to inspiringly inform me how with that he was improving the school, and he even built a new smaller jungle school deeper in the forest as an outreach to more rivereños, river dwellers. I would take all opportunities of folks traveling to supply him with copious amounts of high-quality pigments, brushes, and his all-time favorite, Arches paper.
Years later when I was building the main lodge at Ocean Forest Ecolodge, I was able to sell two of his paintings. Never asking, he sensed my financial need and insisted I keep half the sales’ proceeds. At that moment I did really need it, and with his divine support, we finished the construction of the Lapa Lapa Lodge at our center in Costa Rica.
Don Pablo also joined me on four occasions to visits the Secoya (Siekopai) territory in the Ecuadorian Amazon. On these early sojourns, organized between 1997-2000, don Pablo had already years back left the path of ayahuasca shamanism. His skill though, in helping people interpret their visionary experience in modern language, was as homed in as ever! And this was a wonderful contribution to the retreat after the all-night, powerful ceremonies of yagé, with our most high Siekopai traditional elders, maestro Cesareo, maestro Delfín, maestro Tintin, maestro Esteban, and maestro Jójó, joining in the reverie camaraderie. By day don Pablo was interpreting participants’ visions and teaching art classes to the group of visitors and Siekopai youth alike. Many of them have gone on years later until this day creating marvelous paintings of their rainforest home. Those were some far out trips!
On one such trip, we had the unforeseen incident of our canoe being stolen from right in front of Siekopai traditional elder don Cesareo’s homestead! That story is written in Daniel Pinchbeck’s book Breaking Open the Head (who was with us on that trip) in Chapter 22, “My Shamanic Vacation.” After a series of adventures, the canoe was retrieved from a Shuar Indigenous village some hours downriver.
After that, Cesareo had us taking turns, “watching the canoe,” and these were all night shifts. Out of sheer coincidence, the night that was my turn to watch the canoe, a ceremony of yagé coalesced to occur. It would be the first time I would sit out one of the seasonal celestial summer ceremonies. All the elders arrived in tunic, bead, and crown, and the participants alike left the camp to the ceremonial lodge some distance removed behind the old man’s house. One of the participants, Mark, who had enough on the prior ceremony and opted out stayed back, too. And the Kofán elder, Emilio Lucitante, endearingly called “Jójó,” at the last moment rather than going to drink yage, said, “I’ll stay with you!” A fella in the group came up to us, feeling sorry we couldn’t go to the ceremony. He said, “Here, if you get bored, try some of this.” He left a small blue dropper bottle on the table and walked off saying, “Three drops will light up the night!”
An hour or so later, the singing began at the ceremonial lodge, and we could hear this loud and clear. It was powerful! This got me thinking that anyone and everyone coming up or down the river around here would’ve clearly heard all the singing that’s been going on. That had me entertained for a while. Jójó, Mark, and I were sitting there and as some hours went by, we ran out of things to talk about. The continual chanting of the elders in the ceremonial lodge was at that distance by now purring us to sleep. “Hey, what about that little blue vial?” Mark says. “Three drops, eh?” Three drops later, and the drop of the moment in time stretched over the river’s borders, over-bordering the canoe that we were watching and dissolving the river’s edges and that of the forest and the sky into an ocean of heavenly designs. Jójó the Kofán elder, dropped too and was quietly content, watching!
Suddenly the quiescent stillness of the night was shattered with Mark starting on a bad trip! He got vocal and was screaming, “Spines in my head.” He wanted to run off, and we had to hold him back. I said, “I’ll call don Pablo.” “Yes, he’s the only one who can save me,” he said panting. Don Pablo was contently sleeping in the hut not too far off. “Don Pablo, don Pablo,” I said to him as I nudged him to awaken. He awoke and sat up, and I explained, “Don Pablo, Mark is bad tripping’, we need your help!” He came over, and Mark was losing it hard poor fella; moaning and groaning, and all lull and limp, he was a mess! Don Pablo sat Mark before him, and he raised his hands to the sky. Whispering a subtle prayer, Pablo lowered his hands onto Mark’s head, and right then Mark gasped in relief. Don Pablo went back to his hut to sleep, and Mark was flying high as a kite, feeling better than he had ever felt, the rest of the night!
To me this was an amazing show of power. Don Pablo in his humble presence calmed Mark down just by placing both his hands on Mark’s head! It was a rare and miraculous moment we witnessed that solemn night, all whilst “watching the canoe,” on the banks of the moonlit Aguarico River in the reverberations of an all-night ceremony of yagé, where the elders chanted full blast ahead, all throughout the night, until the sun gently rose, glistening with all its glory in the eastern sky.
The personal spiritual energy don Pablo embodied was also delicately instilled in his paintings, which is why he would say his art is therapeutic. Try looking at them for a while and see how you feel!
Don Pablo also shared that his art, being therapeutical in nature, is more effective when hung covered with a cloth. Choose a pleasing pastel color that may by itself have pleasant designs. When one wishes to view the painting and the curtain is opened, a therapeutical transmission can occur.
