REAL DE CATORCE, Mexico – From atop the sun-scoured mountain called Cerro Quemado, the vast basin below might seem like any other desolate corner of the northern Mexico desert.

Ribbons of asphalt and dirt cut through dun-colored landscape choked with cactus, creosote and the occasional tree. Trains, as if trudging ants from these heights, move north toward the border and on to Houston bearing auto parts, clothing and other treasures conjured by Mexican and Chinese hands.

Iquitos, Peru – It’s been more than one month since Peru’s government sent investigators to the Amazon to probe the brutal murders and mutilation of at least 14 shamans, traditional healers or medicos, of the indigenous Shawi people of Peru’s northern border region near Ecuador.

Since then, the government has remained mum and, so far, has made no arrests, or at least has not made any known. Early reports focused on the Evangelical Christian mayor of the river port town of Balsapuerto, citing officials who accused him of instigating a fanatical religious purge.

Recently, CBC aired an episode of The Nature of Things with David Suzuki called The Jungle Prescription, which follows Vancouver physician and author Gabor Mate into his work using ayahuasca for the treatment of drug addiction.

Mate works at the Portland Hotel Society in the downtown east side of Vancouver, a neighborhood with one of the most dense demographics of drug users in the world. The publication of his most recent book, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction, in 2008, established him has become one of the most celebrated thinkers in the field of addiction and drug policy. Since then, Mate has gained an interest in traditional plant medicines, particularly ayahuasca, for their ability to accentuate the root emotional disturbances that lead to addiction, and for the blessing they bestow by offering a safe space to re-integrate those traumatic experiences. The Jungle Prescription interviews several of Mate’s patients who participated in his independently organized ayahuasca retreats in several locations around BC.

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Peru’s government said Tuesday that 14 shamans in the country’s north-eastern jungle region of Loreto have been murdered in the past 20 months, newspaper La Republica reported.

Deputy Intercultural Minister Vicente Otta Rivera said the murders occurred in the Balsa Puerto district, near Yurimaguas in the Alto Amazonas province.

The provincial prosecutor’s office said that the murders were allegedly ordered by the mayor of Balsa Puerto, Alfredo Torres, and carried out by his brother, Augusto, locally known as “the witch hunter.” Only seven bodies have been found, however —either shot, stabbed or hacked with machetes. The seven other shamans have been reported missing.

“In a hut, in a forest, in the mountains of Colombia, I am puking into a bucket. I close my eyes and every time my body convulses I see ripples in a lattice of multi-coloured hexagons that flows out to the edges of the universe.” Vaughan Bell’s description seems to be typical of the ayahuasca experience – at once unpleasant, frightening and enlightening.

Ayahuasca – meaning ‘spirit vine’ in Native South American Quechua languages – is a foul-tasting hallucinogenic brew that has been used for centuries by rain forest shamans as a religious sacrament. The infusion facilitates mystical visions and revelations, and is said to have healing properties. To date, there have been very few studies of how it affects brain function. Now, though, a team of Brazilian researchers reports one of the very first functional neuroimaging studies of the drug’s effects.

When I asked the shaman about their healing methods they told me, “ask the plants,” explains Enrique Barbano Quijano. Henri, as he is called by his friends, is an herbalist and traditional healer. A former Seventh-Day Adventist minister and evangelist that preached with the likes of Billy Graham, he spends most of his time now in the jungles of the Amazon researching medicinal plants with traditional healers.

“I stayed almost two months with one tribe in Peru. They live like they lived 300 years ago. I saw how they gathered plants and made medicine,” Henri related from Palm Beach, Fla., where he spends time when not doing field research in the Amazon and Mexico.

I’m sitting on the lawn of the village church in Ticehurst, East Sussex, clutching a copy of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. In between swotting up on the hierarchy of the afterlife (the paradise of the gods, the realms of the demi-gods, men, animals, hungry ghosts and hell beings) I glance up at the passing snowy-haired gentlemen in crisp linen blazers talking of cricket, and they’re starting to freak me out.

It probably wasn’t a great idea to leave the Singing Rainforest sanctuary, a frosted-glass locale on the village high street, sandwiched between Cheryl’s Dry Cleaning and CLeach the greengrocer.

Whether you realize it or not, we are all dreaming the world into being. What we’re engaging in is not the sleeping dream we’re familiar with, but the waking dream we craft with our eyes open. When we’re unaware that we all share the power to co-create reality with the help of the Universe itself, that power slips away from us and our dream turns into a nightmare. We begin to feel we’re the victims of an unknown and frightening creation that we’re unable to influence or change. Events seem to control us and trap us. The only way to end this dreadful reality is to awaken to the fact that it, too, is a dream, and recognize our ability to write a better story, one that the Universe will work with us to manifest. The nature of the cosmos is such that whatever dream you have about yourself and the world will become reality.