The Ultimate Raconteur

Italy, not far from the Swiss border. Zonka, a little village in the mountains. Huge stone houses with wooden balconies running around them, facing the steep slopes covered with trees. Most were empty. The rooves were thick slates, as grey as the walls. Magnificient.

One of these houses belonged to K, the guy with the grey hair and beard who was leaning over me when I was shouting to God and the ceiling, the first time I took Ayahuasca.

I found myself entrusted with the noble task of picking up flowers to ornate the room where the ceremony would take place in the evening.

Ayahuasca. We called it Daime. Santo Daime.

The room was big and wide. We were thirty or forty people feeling at ease, forming the circle. There were no wallpaper, no plaster, just stone and wood. To go to the toilets, we had to get onto the wooden balcony, walk up to its extreme end, and sit facing the mountains. When your poo was done, it dropped 20 meters below, between the trees. Better not to feel dizzy.

It is not possible to follow a rational or chronological order… Bear with me... We had drunk the first glass. We were sitting and singing.

I felt my intestines being untangled, which feels incredibly good. I didn’t know that there were so many knots. I realized that the state of belly I used to consider “normal” was actually just knots, knots and knots…

I suddenly saw my belly full of snakes - or rather long worms sliding against one another like in a big bag of happy compost. It is difficult to remember how it feels, because to feel paradise, you need to be in paradise. But it’s so easily lost. We live stressful lives, we believe life is like that, we keep creating pressure, more and more, we don’t know how to stop, we are too lazy, too busy, we keep creating stress, more and more, wasting of resources, torture of Earth Mother, concentration camps, genocides, century after century, it can go on like this forever, and it will stop only if we stop. Stop!

Hell is the collective hallucination we live our everyday lives in.

Stop! Breathe in, breathe out. Keep calm and stop!

An incredible experience happened to me during a break. I lay down on the mattress set in a corner of the room for those who might really need one and...I found myself drifting away and reaching the presence of the ultimate origin of everything. I don’t say “God” because it didn’t feel like “God”. I can’t even remember how it felt. It was the absolute origin of everything. It appeared to me like an evidence that whatever happens is absolutely ok, that we have decided of it all, that’s our great adventure, and ultimately, everything is absolutely alright. These are just words. This was an intense feeling, more intense than anything I knew.

Later I would write a story as the best way to evoke this moment. I called it “The Ultimate Raconteur”

Nowhere used to float a great feeling of happiness for nothing.

A magnificent love was there before any presence of whatever to be loved.

A Being,

A Feeling,

A Sensation…

The Ultimate Raconteur settled down in an armchair, lit a good pipe for himself, and started to dream…

I would love to live a good story!

A love story indeed… A story with a happy ending, obviously. …. A story that ends up so well that it never ends! Here is a great idea! I am already delighted!

Alright. I need a few ingredients for my story. Events, suspense, catastrophes, last moments where everything looks lost… and at the last moment of the last moment… A wonderful magic!

My love story could be a story in which the characters try to meet the author, in order to collaborate writing the scenario. That’s a good trick that’s sure to work very well.

But to make sure they search and search without failing, they will know thirst. They will be lost, as lost as one can be, they won’t even remember that there is somewhere an Ultimate Raconteur, a magnificent love, a great happiness for nothing and everything… but they will be thirsty of it, whilst believing in solitude, suffering and death…

However, I will always be there, living their lives, laughing their laughters, crying their distress, dying their death… I’ll be closer to them than their jugular vein.

I think I’ve got the outline of a very good story there, said the Ultimate Raconteur to himself. I’ll sort out the details as it goes along, let’s now leave room to improvisation!

He poured himself a glass of a Beverage of Oblivion and in the middle of the sideral void, there was a big Bang!

The Ultimate Raconteur is telling you:

My loves, my darlings, my babies

I love you

Forever…

Para siempre…

Of course, it is impossible to imagine or even remember how it feels. Just imagine anyway.

I had been given a glimpse out of the book of life. I had had an instant of awareness of the Writer, and I felt, intensely, that beyond all suffering and death, all was ultimately, absolutely well…

I found myself back in the room, I sat on the mattress and made eye contact with a guy passing by. He had a little rejoiced smile on his lips. He looked as if he’d got the ultimate glimpse as well. I burst out laughing....

...and my laughter banged and broke against something that felt like the wall of a cemetery.

Nobody was talking in the room.

Everybody was listening to this Italian girl. She was singing with a beautiful voice the most poignant traditional funeral song. Everyone was in a state of communion with the eternal human grief she expressed from the depth of her soul.

I had burst out laughing in the middle of it.

I could. I had just met the Ultimate Raconteur.

She didn’t get it. I had spoiled her peak moment. She was deeply hurt. She told me, as talking to the deepest idiot ever, what her song was. She left the room and kept on singing outside, for herself and the mountain, on the wooden balcony...

I felt so sorry for her. I didn’t explain, how could I have?

I sat on the threshold, and listened to this girl’s pain. Next to me was an empty chair. I thought: “It would be great if Elizabeth was there to listen to her” Elisabeth was very caring. She was the presence that soothe and make feel loved those who don’t.

As I thought this I had a one second vision of Elisabeth sitting on the chair, hands clasped on her lap and her head slightly tilted as to listen better… It was just a vision, no one was sitting.

A few moments later, Elisabeth arrived and sat on the chair, in the exact position I had just seen her.

It’s good to listen gently to people in pain, even if their pain is due to illusions...

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