Program Notes
Guest speaker: Hamilton Souther
[NOTE: All quotations are by Hamilton Souther.]
“Even they [the shaman] do not know what ayahuasca is, because you’re never experiencing ayahuasca. You are always experiencing ayahuasca plus you, and that combination is not ayahuasca. That combination is you and ayahuasca. And that means ayahuasca then is undefinable, we don’t know what it is, which then always allows us to continue to explore the unknown. And it becomes an unlimited journey for us to be able to continue to go further and further and further in our understanding.”
“The shamanism becomes a guide, and the ayahuasca becomes a guide for an exploration of the purity of consciousness.”
“[When interviewing a shaman] especially look at everybody in the eyes. The eyes in ayahuasca tell you everything. If you see people with eyes that get really glossed over and become really shifty, it’s letting you know something there is going on that maybe you don’t want to become like that. Maybe that’s not why you’re there.”
Hamilton Souther, Medicine Hunter
Blue Morpho Ayahuasca Center
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic
00:00:23 ►
salon.
00:00:23 ►
This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
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And today I’m going to have to keep my own commentary to a minimum because if I don’t,
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I’m going to put off this podcast for another day yet while I continue reading a novel that just seems to have totally captured my imagination.
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And I’m sure that happens to you from time to time as well.
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You know, it isn’t often that a story catches you, and even then, the state of mind that
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you’re in when you began the book could have a big bearing on how deeply you get into it.
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So it’s not that I don’t want to spend some time with you here today in the salon, it’s
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just that I’ve got some fictional characters on my mind that, well, they need me to read
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them out of the current situation they’re in, because if I don’t get back to reading their story, they may stay stuck there
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forever.
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Well, now I’m completely lost as to what I wanted to say to get things rolling today.
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So let me start once again.
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Greetings from cyberdelic space.
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This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
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And today we’re going to hear one of the last of the Planque Norte lectures that were delivered at the 2012 Burning Man Festival.
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When Pez stopped by to see me a few weeks ago, he reminded me that I still hadn’t podcast Hamilton Souther’s talk about his experiences with ayahuasca.
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And then he went on to allow us how, well, he thought it was one of the best talks of the series,
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one for sure that I shouldn’t miss.
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Well, I have a confession to make.
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Having been a member of an ayahuasca circle for the past 14 years or so,
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and having spent a lot of time in discussion with people about the Vine and
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people who’ve been participating in these sessions for many more years than I have,
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well, I guess that I probably thought I’d heard it all.
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But was I ever in for a surprise when I just now finished editing Hamilton’s talk?
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And by editing, I mean I eliminated a few quiet spots where someone in the audience
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asked a question that wasn’t picked up in the recording.
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And looking back, I’m now quite anxious to listen to this talk again.
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By the time I’d heard, say, the first 20 minutes or so of Hamilton’s talk, I was really hooked.
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As I said, I’ve participated in ayahuasca circles many times over the past 14 years,
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participated in ayahuasca circles many times over the past 14 years, and yet I’ve never been able to come even close to being able to provide the brilliant commentary and clear commentary that
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Hamilton has done about explaining not only how to participate in an ayahuasca ceremony, but
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well, what takes place in one’s own mind during a ceremony. It’s really so good to know that our elders now are
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quite young, at least when compared to dusty old farts like me. And that means that knowledge about
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this global expansion of the vine is, well, it’s not going to be lost. Well, at least it won’t be
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lost for enough generations to affect the changes in consciousness that Hamilton speaks about.
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So let’s now join Pez as he introduces Hamilton Souther in his 2012 Palenque Norte lecture at that year’s Burning Man Festival.
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So Hamilton has studied and practiced traditional Amazonian shamanism with a focus in ayahuasca tree and Sanago
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Sanago shamanism in the Peruvian Amazon for the last 10 years he became
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interested in how the shamans utilize sound chant and music to guide and
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affect trance states as well as healing his practice as a healer at the blue
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morpho Center specializing in using ayahuasca and sound to heal depression
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to generate transcendent experience of consciousness.
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Please welcome Hamilton.
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It’s fine, do this, that, whatever, really mellow.
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This is awesome because it’s just us, at least for now, right?
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So I spent the last 11 years drinking ayahuasca.
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So, you know, that’s really what I’ve been doing.
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In the time building Blue Morpho and expanding in shamanism and stuff like that,
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but really drinking ayahuasca, doing diets and things like that.
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So, I don’t know, we can put it somewhere, you know,
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1,100, 1,200, 1,300 ceremonies in the last 11 years.
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We drink about 100 to 120 times a year
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so um we can just talk i don’t have to give a talk this is small enough that we can just
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ask questions and talk and stuff like that i guess you guys been hearing a bunch of other lectures
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and ideas about you know the use of psychedelics and shamanism and stuff like that.
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And so I’ll start, give it like maybe, you know, five or ten minutes, and then let’s just wrap.
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How long do we have, Paz?
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How much time do we have?
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Okay, perfect.
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So how many of you guys have you, how many of you have heard of ayahuasca?
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Okay, everybody.
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And then how many of you have drunk ayahuasca? Okay, everybody. And how many of you have drunk ayahuasca?
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Okay, less than that.
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All right.
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For those who haven’t drunk ayahuasca,
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ayahuasca is a potent Amazonian traditional medicine form
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considered in the West to be a psychedelic,
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potent hallucinogen.
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And all of those terms don’t really fit the way the traditional amazonian shamans look at it they look at it as alive a being that is connected to a world
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and in that world there are hundreds of thousands millions of of spirits. And they have organization and civilization and community and society like humans.
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But they live within these visionary realms.
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And the ayahuasca is a medium to enter into those realms and interact with those spirits.
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And the interaction with the spirits produces the journey that you go on, as well as
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the transformation that takes place through that journey. And what is going to define the nature
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of that interaction are the beings that you interact with, the actual specific spirits that
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you’re meeting with and the places that you go. So inside ayahuasca, once you drink
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and you start to go into the visions, it’s like a gateway that’s opening up through the first
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gateway being the mouth and then the ingestion of the ayahuasca. The ayahuasca goes through you
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and it is considered that the medicine spirits are now in the physical body. So those medicine spirits are going to utilize
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the mind, the egoic structure, emotions, feelings, understandings that you have, language,
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and then they’re going to start to uncouple you as a being from body and from normal mind
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and start to transcend you into their world. So they’re going to draw you through this
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gateway, take you into their world, take you on a journey through their world, and transform you
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based on really the intent of the shaman and your intent being in the ceremony. So a mixture of both
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intents, your own and that of the shaman. And you start to go on the journey,
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and you begin to interact with these different kinds of spirits.
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And the spirits will come in a variety of different forms.
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They’re going to come in shapes, patterns, and colors.
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They’re going to come in entity form.
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They’re going to come in changes to the energy or the vibe of the space that you’re in,
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and they’re going to come in the form of the actual spaces that you go into,
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the worlds that you go into.
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Once you go through the gateway drinking the ayahuasca,
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you then start your journey.
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So that journey can take the shape of really an unlimited number of forms.
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There are some journeys that stay really lucid, coherent in body.
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There are some journeys that are very, very mind-oriented, some very emotionally oriented,
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some that are incredibly visionary and travel-oriented, going to places, some that are all about realizations,
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and then some that are a mixture of all of those pieces that can form one complete
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journey. So the journey itself usually lasts somewhere between three and five hours, and the
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longer ones go anywhere from 10, 12, 13, 14 hours. By that point, usually people are starting to calm
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down and come out of it. And the duration has a lot to do with the way the ayahuasca is prepared.
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down and come out of it. And the duration has a lot to do with the way the ayahuasca is prepared.
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Ayahuasca is the term given to this tea, this mixture of plants. So it’s not just one plant,
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even though there is a plant called ayahuasca. So ayahuasca is a term meaning vine of the soul or vine of the spirit or vine of the dead. And the translation vine of the dead doesn’t really mean dead in the same way
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like Westerners conceive of death, but rather two forms.
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One, the ending of one world that you’ve been in and the beginning of a new one,
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so the death of the world that you came from to enter into another one.
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And also an understanding that dead in the essence of spirit,
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into another one. And also an understanding that dead in the essence of spirit, like another way of just saying soul or spirit is this idea of the dead, like what’s left of you if the physical
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body were no longer there. So really it’s all about this idea of spirit and interaction with
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spirits. And shamanism itself is fundamentally a methodology of how to interact with all of these different kinds of beings and spirits that are found through the journeying of consciousness.
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Now, in typical Western views of shamanism, they play a dualistic game called ordinary consciousness, non-ordinary consciousness.
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This is ordinary because we have a tremendous amount of time
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associated with it saying this is what’s normal and now that’s altered. I would rather transcend
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that definition and look at consciousness as being bound to what we’re experiencing in that very
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moment and saying that we’re not in an altered state, we’re in our state.
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We are in consciousness, and now consciousness is looking like this whole expression,
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and we’re going to continue in that expression,
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and we’re going to come into new expressions of consciousness,
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and we’re never going to go back to what was.
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We’re never going to go from ordinary to non-ordinary to ordinary. By the time
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you get back to that idea of ordinary, things have changed. And that’s the whole purpose of
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the transformative journey in ayahuasca, that you’re going to have a transformative experience.
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So you’re not going to come back to ordinary, but you are going to come back to sane, lucid,
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stable, clear, aware, and present in a way to be able to function with
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physical reality.
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So we transcend that idea of ordinary, non-ordinary, and we go into an idea of consciousness, expansion
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of consciousness, pursuit of learning about consciousness, growth in consciousness, and
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doing it through these beings.
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The spirits themselves have a variety of different kinds of function.
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The spirits have purpose, and they are unique.
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And so the different spirits you interact with will be able to share different kinds of wisdom,
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different kinds of understanding with you, and different kinds of healing.
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And so this creates a pantheon of spirits within the and different kinds of healing. And so this creates
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a pantheon of spirits within the ayahuasca world. Then the medicine spirits, it’s a grouping of
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spirits that are there. The doctor spirits are typically called ayarunas and sincharunas.
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And they are the head medicine spirits of all of the different plants in all of the different realms.
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And they govern medicine within ayahuasca. So you drink the ayahuasca,
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you go into their world, and you start to engage and you interact with these spirits,
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and it’s these spirits that produce the transformation and the healing that takes
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place in ayahuasca ceremonies. That’s a basic foundation. Are there any questions about that?
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All right. So then the effects of ayahuasca can be wide, wide, wide, wide, wide,
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wide. And so when we try to pin down what is ayahuasca and what is common to ayahuasca,
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we find that we can’t. We just can’t. And so we don’t have to. We can just stop that whole pursuit
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and just say, what we’re really doing is continuing to explore beyond our understanding. We’re continuing to go into the unknown and finding and discovering
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new realizations and understandings and transformations and healings through that
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pursuit. When I was working with the maestros that taught me, Alberto Torres Davila and Julio
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Jarena Pinedo, who are both tremendous master shamans in the Amazon, Julio is now deceased, and I still work with Alberto, when I would find
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things out and I would have realizations and I would come to them with these tremendous
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stories of what had happened and what I had learned, they’d be like, ah, you have discovered
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that. Like, oh, yes, you have discovered something new, right?
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Yes.
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Okay, let’s go.
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Let’s keep going.
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And we’re not done yet.
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That discovery is one piece of this tremendous, tremendous, tremendous cosmology called ayahuasca.
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The visions that we have are teaching us, but vision in shamanism, and especially with visionary plants, we get asked
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this all the time, why do I not have more vision? How do I make my vision clearer? How do I expand
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my vision? And my answer to that is, you can’t. You’re having vision. It’s how you relate to
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vision. Vision is sensory experience. It is perceptive experience. It is sound, smell,
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feeling, awareness, understanding, knowledge, visual context, all at the same time. So the
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moment you go in, the moment you participate, it’s happening. The question is now, what’s
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happening? It’s never going to be our preconceived idea of what’s supposed to happen.
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The preconceived idea of what’s supposed to happen
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was what was guiding us during the time up to the ceremony.
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You begin the ceremony.
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Now there’s no preconceived idea about what’s going to happen.
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You’re in it, and you start to work with what you actually have there.
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You start to work with everything that’s going on
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inside of you, all of it. And the spirits are going to start to work with everything that’s
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going on that’s inside of you. What that sets up is a process common to ayahuasca called purging.
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So purging often is found to be something that is about releasing in the form of vomiting or defecating.
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But I think that’s a very limited understanding and definition for the concept of purging.
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And I would just like to think of purging as releasing.
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And when you release something, it allows you to be able to grow and change.
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And so there are many different kinds of ways to purge.
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And it is absolutely not necessary to purge physically. The only reasons
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people are purging physically is when there’s something physically wrong in the body, some
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ailment that is being coalesced into the intestines or into the stomach, and it’s coming out,
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or you’ve drunk too much ayahuasca for your body to be able to handle, and it’s purging itself.
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You don’t overdose on it because you throw it up.
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And if you look in somebody’s bucket, it’s filled with ayahuasca, just filled, right?
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So they’ve had too much ayahuasca.
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Or a person is in a part of a ceremony where the intensity of the experience
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is too much for them to be able to contain anymore.
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And so their psychic structure, mental structure, emotional structure, physical structure
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is going to be broken apart. And in that, pieces are going to be filtered out of it,
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pieces are going to be released, and a new structure is going to be built that’s going
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to allow you to continue forward and pursue more in that ceremony.
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All right, so we can get completely outside of the idea of having to wait for, you know, the physical
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experience of purging, and we can get right into that ceremony, and we can start to release. Often
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people have anxiety before going in. They’re a little scared, you know. That’s the first thing that can go.
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Just start letting that go as soon as you go in. And then the process of purging is just a tracking and a following of anything that isn’t
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being represented as whole within you anymore. So it gets fragmented and there are these thoughts
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and pieces, they go, emotional stuff comes up, it goes. You know, resistance happens, it goes.
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And then you just continue to release. At some point, if you need to, you’ll throw up or you’ll have to go to the bathroom.
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Or you won’t.
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And in both of those cases, you’re still in the ceremony, it’s still working, the medicine’s still having an effect, and you’re going.
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One of the most powerful ayahuasca ceremonies I see for people is when they go in and they think nothing happens.
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Because what happens is all of a sudden they start doubting. They start getting really confused.
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They start challenging all their preconceived ideas. They start wondering why it’s not working
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on them. They get really self-conscious. They wonder if ayahuasca doesn’t like them. They have
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all of this stuff start happening. And in their mind, they’re still saying nothing’s happening,
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nothing’s happening, nothing’s happening. And I’m like, what do you mean nothing’s
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happening? You weren’t thinking like that before we got started. Now you’re completely thinking
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like that. You’re fixated in that. You’re being completely guided by that. And that’s all the
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stuff that needs to go. Let’s start purging and releasing. Let’s start connecting to the
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ceremonial experience that we’re actually having.
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And then if you get through all of that and let all of that go, all of a sudden you realize, wow, it’s really, really, really happening.
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This is really happening.
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Another part of ayahuasca that’s really pertinent to the experience is the concept of lucidity.
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Ayahuasca ceremonies are not about being high or like wasted they’re about being really clear really lucid in medicine and being able to be very discerning and very very active and so you’re
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participating in the ceremony with the ayahuasca as i said in the beginning it’s not conceived in
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the amazon to be a drug trip it’s conceived to be a visionary medicine of pure consciousness that is interacting with you, and it is waiting to interact with you. So the more you
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show up, the more you participate, the more you get involved in the ceremony, the more the ayahuasca
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forms a give and a take with you that becomes this incredible expression and experience.
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that becomes this incredible expression and experience.
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That is fundamental to shamanism.
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That’s what the shamans are doing.
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The shamans don’t drink the ayahuasca and then just sit there and then do nothing.
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The shamans drink the ayahuasca
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and they start to then work it.
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They start to play their instruments that they have.
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They start to create the rhythms and the beats
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found within the ceremony.
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They start to guide the ceremony with their chants, and they immediately go into a system of communication
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with the ayahuasca.
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So that system of communication takes three different forms.
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The first is in the form of ikaros, which are sung during the ceremony.
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The second is the words in the ikaros themselves,
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so a language that’s being spoken.
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And the third is what is happening inside the mind.
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And the mind for the shaman is working with the spirits.
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It’s connecting to these individual spirits,
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engaging them, talking with them, receiving from them,
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and continuing to move the ceremony.
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So as a participant in the ceremony, you also have the same role, hence participant.
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You are participating.
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And so the ayahuasca is there as consciousness inside of you, working with you, saying, come
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on, we’re going to do this together.
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I’m not going to do this to you, but rather we’re going to engage and interact together,
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and we’re going to go on this
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journey together and I’m going to guide you on this journey together. And the shamans are there
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helping to guide you on the journey together. And so in essence, the more you participate in the
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journey, right, which is a give and a take, it’s not a control, it’s not a lockdown. It’s an active process and a receptive process to the spirits
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found within the ayahuasca. And people say, well, how do I connect with these spirits? And it’s
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really simple. You focus on them. You focus. They call it concentrar down there, which means to
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concentrate, but it’s not a kind of concentration typical to Western thought.
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It’s in focusing, you shut down the active thinking part of the mind,
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and you connect to what it is that’s actually happening.
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You’re connecting to the experience of the ceremony itself.
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And so it’s common in ayahuasca ceremonies, for instance, to see colors and patterns.
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It’s in all of the ayahuasca art, to see colors and patterns. It’s in all of the ayahuasca art,
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these tremendous colors and patterns. People go into ceremonies and they start seeing these colors and patterns. They want to know what the colors and patterns are. And they go and ask the shaman.
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I think, well, why didn’t you ask the colors and patterns? That’s how the shamans found out what
00:22:01 ►
they are. Right? But what do you mean? How am I going to talk to these colors and patterns?
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You focus on them and you say, what are you?
00:22:08 ►
And through that focus, this channel opens up
00:22:11 ►
and the answer comes.
00:22:13 ►
Right?
00:22:15 ►
Right?
00:22:16 ►
And then people say,
00:22:17 ►
well, I heard these incredible stories of these people
00:22:19 ►
that went on these amazing journeys and I didn’t go.
00:22:21 ►
What happened?
00:22:21 ►
I go, well, did you go through the colors and patterns?
00:22:23 ►
And they go, they say,
00:22:24 ►
can you go through the colors and patterns? And I said, well, did you go through the colors and patterns? And they go, they say, can you go through the colors and patterns? And I said,
00:22:27 ►
did you try to go through the colors and patterns? Again, your participation,
00:22:35 ►
right? Which takes us to the fundamental key to all shamanic practices, because all shamanic practices are visionary, and it is a redefinition of the
00:22:46 ►
imagination. Shamanism is inherently an imaginative practice. The imagination in shamanism is considered
00:22:56 ►
to be limitless, and it’s not considered to be a place of fantasy or fabrication. It’s considered
00:23:02 ►
to be possibly a place of fantasy and fabrication, It’s considered to be possibly a place of fantasy
00:23:05 ►
and fabrication if you are fantasizing and fabricating. But if you’re not, the imagination
00:23:12 ►
is used as an unlimited visionary gateway that allows you to interact with spirits and
00:23:16 ►
to travel. And so you use your creativity through your imagination to test the boundaries
00:23:24 ►
that you’re experiencing in the
00:23:26 ►
ceremony so it’s found in the imagination the idea i could go beyond these patterns
00:23:30 ►
and if you project yourself through that focus to the other side of them all of a sudden you’ll
00:23:36 ►
start going you’ll experience movement in a certain direction the direction that you’re
00:23:40 ►
intending the patterns will all of a sudden be all around you as if you’re in a tunnel
00:23:45 ►
of them and you’ll be going through that tunnel all of a sudden to a place that doesn’t have any
00:23:50 ►
patterns and colors. It won’t have any icaros. It won’t have any physical ceremonial center.
00:23:56 ►
It won’t have anything that you ever noted to be this normalcy and it won’t have your body in it,
00:24:07 ►
this normalcy and it won’t have your body in it but you’ll be there intact whole complete and experiencing now the worlds of ayahuasca that becomes the gateway through
00:24:12 ►
right but you have to be ready to go the ayahuasca is going to say you know are you ready to go are
00:24:19 ►
we going to do this together otherwise you stay on this side of it right and you’re looking at
00:24:22 ►
the patterns and colors.
00:24:27 ►
That’s what allows you to be able to transcend and go through and then start to explore this incredibly imaginative space.
00:24:33 ►
So the question becomes, well, is that real?
00:24:34 ►
And the answer is, well, how would you ever know anything’s real
00:24:37 ►
other than the fact that you agreed that it was real in the first place?
00:24:40 ►
So in essence, you make it real.
00:24:42 ►
It’s real for you if it’s real for you.
00:24:43 ►
And if it’s not real for you, it’s not real for you.
00:24:46 ►
But if you experience healing in that space and you come back out of it and the healing has taken place mentally, physically, and personally, and it’s integrated, was that real?
00:24:57 ►
By Western logic and understanding, they would say yes, and then it creates a mystical conundrum, which is how could that be real?
00:25:03 ►
would say yes and then it creates a mystical conundrum which is how could that be real right and so i like to look at that from a perspective that it’s all real and let’s just
00:25:10 ►
take unreal out of it let’s take that duality completely out of it let’s make it all real
00:25:14 ►
and start to look at it for what it actually is is this taking place in the mind is this taking
00:25:20 ►
place in the imagination is this taking place emotionally is this taking place in astral planes
00:25:24 ►
is this taking place in the worlds that are accessible in these incredible
00:25:27 ►
shamanic cosmologies? If yes, then that’s exactly what’s happening. And it’s not a question
00:25:32 ►
of whether it needs to be defended or not defended or proven or anything else. You’re
00:25:36 ►
the one having the experience, which is the beauty of learning in shamanism. Shamanism
00:25:40 ►
is not taught intellectually. It is taught experientially. You have the experience, you participate.
00:25:47 ►
Shamans function as guides, they support you,
00:25:50 ►
and they use these tremendous medicine forms,
00:25:54 ►
like ayahuasca, to be able to do that work.
00:25:57 ►
And they become masters of this communication.
00:26:01 ►
When you go into an ayahuasca ceremony,
00:26:03 ►
you are not losing your autonomy to that ceremony, you are not losing your autonomy to
00:26:05 ►
that ceremony. You’re not losing who you are on the country. You’re using all of it.
00:26:11 ►
You’re using everything to be able to get into that ceremony and to be able to continue to grow
00:26:17 ►
and push those boundaries and those barriers. The way we learn in ayahuasca is by going beyond
00:26:27 ►
The way we learn in ayahuasca is by going beyond where our imagination became limited.
00:26:32 ►
So we get a thought like, it’s too much, I can’t go any further.
00:26:35 ►
Yes, you can.
00:26:37 ►
Yes, you will.
00:26:42 ►
So in my first ayahuasca seminar, I thought I couldn’t go any further after 15 minutes.
00:26:51 ►
Four and a half hours later, we were still pushing that envelope. And we kept going further and further and further and further. You’ll hear people talk about ayahuasca and conceptualize ayahuasca for you. And I had,
00:26:58 ►
you know, a really amazing gift in my life to have the opportunity to receive the love and dedication
00:27:06 ►
of the two maestros that I trained with
00:27:08 ►
to open that world for me
00:27:11 ►
and to invite me into their tremendous world.
00:27:16 ►
I mean, it was an absolute,
00:27:17 ►
absolute tremendous, tremendous, tremendous gift.
00:27:21 ►
But what they showed me
00:27:22 ►
over and over and over and over and over and over again
00:27:24 ►
is that even they do not know what ayahuasca is.
00:27:29 ►
Because you’re never experiencing ayahuasca.
00:27:33 ►
You’re always experiencing ayahuasca plus you.
00:27:37 ►
And that combination is not ayahuasca.
00:27:40 ►
That combination is you and ayahuasca.
00:27:43 ►
And that means ayahuasca then is undefinable we don’t know
00:27:46 ►
what it is which then always allows us to continue to explore the unknown and it becomes an unlimited
00:27:53 ►
journey for us to be able to continue to go further and further and further and further
00:27:57 ►
in our understanding when you go into an ayahuasca ceremony and you come out on the other side of it
00:28:03 ►
transformation has taken place.
00:28:06 ►
As you continue to integrate through the day,
00:28:08 ►
and then you drink the next night and the next ceremony,
00:28:11 ►
you’re not the same person you were when you went in the night before.
00:28:15 ►
So it’s new again.
00:28:16 ►
Now it’s ayahuasca plus you, but you’re now this new being.
00:28:22 ►
And so for me, when I was going through training,
00:28:25 ►
once I got comfortable with the idea, I would release a whole world, my whole universe,
00:28:32 ►
every single night. And I would be born into a brand new world and a brand new universe every
00:28:38 ►
single morning. And within it, the definitions found within my own imagination and my own understanding,
00:28:46 ►
like gravity and distance and time and these physical laws, start to change.
00:28:55 ►
I start to realize that those are only defined coupled to this state of consciousness,
00:29:01 ►
but it’s not defined to consciousness as consciousness evolves and
00:29:05 ►
changes and that we’re not limited by all of these specific concepts we had before and we go into a
00:29:13 ►
new world again to explore who i am as consciousness today with ayahuasca as a guide once more
00:29:21 ►
you know which then sets up the ability to participate
00:29:26 ►
in many, many ceremonies.
00:29:28 ►
And after 500 ceremonies,
00:29:30 ►
have experiences that completely redefine
00:29:33 ►
the previous 500.
00:29:35 ►
Go to 1,000 and have experiences
00:29:38 ►
that completely redefine the previous 1,000.
00:29:42 ►
Drink for three decades
00:29:43 ►
and come back from that and have it
00:29:46 ►
redefined again
00:29:47 ►
and it makes it an
00:29:50 ►
unlimited exploration of life and what that does
00:29:52 ►
is it brings a newness to
00:29:54 ►
our life so that our experience
00:29:56 ►
of our conceptualization
00:29:58 ►
of life does not contain
00:30:00 ►
then reality
00:30:02 ►
it’s not containing what is
00:30:04 ►
it’s saying this is what I think it to be not It’s saying, this is what I think it to be,
00:30:06 ►
not what it is. It’s what I think it to be. It’s how I conceive of it now. Yes, but that’s not
00:30:14 ►
specific exactly to what is. We are going to now go see if there’s a whole lot more going on.
00:30:20 ►
And we’re going to go find out that once again, there is a whole lot more going on.
00:30:23 ►
And we’re going to go find out that once again there is a whole lot more going on.
00:30:26 ►
And so that journey becomes unlimited.
00:30:31 ►
We can continue to push beyond all of these different kinds of barriers and our shamanism becomes no longer specific to these very limited sort of defined intents
00:30:40 ►
like this specific healing and it becomes an exploration of what it is to live,
00:30:46 ►
or what it is to experience, or what it is to perceive. And at that point, the shamanism becomes
00:30:52 ►
a guide, and the ayahuasca becomes a guide for an exploration of the purity of consciousness.
00:30:58 ►
Now, that consciousness that we’re exploring is your own. It’s your own consciousness. Found within that consciousness is every experience
00:31:08 ►
that you’ve ever had, all of your memories, all of your concepts, all of the time, all of your
00:31:12 ►
creation stories, all of your myths, all of your beliefs, all of your ideologies. Everything’s
00:31:17 ►
found within it. Everything that makes up you is found within that. And that’s what we’re exploring.
00:31:27 ►
We’re still in your universe
00:31:29 ►
when we go all the way to a spiral galaxy,
00:31:34 ►
300, 500 light years,
00:31:36 ►
2 million light years from here in your journey.
00:31:39 ►
We’re still in your consciousness.
00:31:42 ►
And we’re still interacting with everything that makes up you.
00:31:46 ►
At which point then we can start to challenge this definition of self.
00:31:51 ►
And we can start to redefine the concept of who we are,
00:31:54 ►
not to just the concept of who we think we are,
00:31:57 ►
again, think, who we conceptualize ourself to be,
00:32:01 ►
and we can start to experience ourselves in a much more expanded version.
00:32:06 ►
to be and we can start to experience ourselves in a much more expanded version we can start to experience who we are as something way beyond the physical way beyond something that’s finite
00:32:13 ►
way beyond the story of birth and death way beyond the story of limited time and then we can bring
00:32:21 ►
those realizations into our daily interaction with others, with community, with society, with our professions, with our families.
00:32:33 ►
And we can start to expand the definition of how those interactions take place.
00:32:55 ►
We can bring in elements of that learning and radically transform how we experience self in our interaction with others, in our interaction with our world, with our community, with our society, with our friends, with our family.
00:33:07 ►
Are there any questions? I found any objective reality within my journeys and experience. Give me an objective like shared between everybody or the objective reality that is universal in every moment of every day,
00:33:16 ►
of every concept, of every form is love.
00:33:20 ►
Love is a term, right?
00:33:22 ►
It’s a symbol.
00:33:26 ►
We can talk about it in many different forms.
00:33:28 ►
We can talk about it as oneness.
00:33:30 ►
We can talk about it as unity.
00:33:31 ►
We can talk about it as wholeness.
00:33:35 ►
You can get religious and talk about it as God.
00:33:36 ►
You can talk about it as divinity.
00:33:37 ►
You can talk about it as light.
00:33:39 ►
You can talk about it in many different forms,
00:33:41 ►
and what you’re doing is talking about it.
00:33:42 ►
Right?
00:33:45 ►
When we look at people, we’re going
00:33:47 ►
to see that in our minds we conceptualize ourselves
00:33:50 ►
in groupings.
00:33:51 ►
We group ourselves.
00:33:52 ►
First we group ourselves as humans.
00:33:55 ►
And then we group ourselves as part of a certain geography.
00:33:58 ►
That’s coupled to a world view of a sphere going around a sun.
00:34:03 ►
I say world view because it’s a world view. It could be challenged or not challenged. Other people had many different ideas about that over the sun. I say worldview because it’s a worldview. It could be challenged or not challenged.
00:34:07 ►
Other people had many different ideas about that over the years. So we have these collective ideas.
00:34:12 ►
We have these groupings. And when we finally get to self in all of this, we’re going to find that self,
00:34:18 ►
the part that we identify with, is made up of really a very limited number of qualities or characteristics
00:34:25 ►
in comparison to everything else that we experience in life.
00:34:30 ►
So I’m these feelings, these thoughts, this body, this time, these stories, this history.
00:34:36 ►
That’s me living in world, which is made up of all of this other stuff,
00:34:41 ►
made up of other people and other places and other times and other stories.
00:34:46 ►
And it creates this incredible juxtaposition where self is tremendously isolated.
00:34:55 ►
And what self experiences as reality is the conceptualization of this give and take
00:35:01 ►
between the definition set of personality and identity within the concept of
00:35:06 ►
other. But how can that be an objective reality when if we look at the content itself that’s
00:35:16 ►
making up that structure, we can see that that structure can be the same or very similar for
00:35:20 ►
many, many, many different people. The content within that structure is completely different.
00:35:22 ►
for many, many, many different people,
00:35:24 ►
the content within that structure is completely different.
00:35:27 ►
Right?
00:35:30 ►
So while we group ourselves in these tremendous collective groupings,
00:35:32 ►
we can do this right now, let’s look around,
00:35:35 ►
and if we really look at each individual,
00:35:37 ►
just the physical body,
00:35:39 ►
we’re going to see that there is more not the same
00:35:42 ►
than there is the same.
00:35:44 ►
If we get into all the details, the whole thing is tremendously unique.
00:35:50 ►
Now if we take that into your history, while history is the same, what fills that history, the experience is very, very, very, very different.
00:36:01 ►
Now if we bring in belief beliefs and ideologies
00:36:05 ►
very very very very different
00:36:06 ►
then if we bring in
00:36:08 ►
personality very very very very
00:36:10 ►
different and so
00:36:12 ►
how could there be one objective reality
00:36:14 ►
when the tools that we’re using to define
00:36:16 ►
and describe reality are
00:36:18 ►
inherently unique
00:36:20 ►
so the only way
00:36:23 ►
to be able to get to that objective reality
00:36:24 ►
is to transcend the use of those tools. Okay. And so as we transcend the use of those tools,
00:36:32 ►
what happens is you go in an ascension, it’s called a mystical transcend,
00:36:36 ►
ascension or a shamanic ascension, and a process gets started that we don’t conceive of before we get into it, right?
00:36:51 ►
Which is that everything, as you go into it, starts to change,
00:36:56 ►
including the definitions you have of life, the definitions you have of reality,
00:37:00 ►
the definitions you have of self, the definitions you have of others,
00:37:04 ►
so that by the time you get, as you’re pursuing this concept of reality, the definitions you have of self, the definitions you have of others,
00:37:06 ►
so that by the time you get as you’re pursuing this concept of reality, the tools that you
00:37:11 ►
would even be using have now all changed.
00:37:14 ►
Who you are is different, how you are is different, and you’re a completely new and unique being.
00:37:22 ►
So we’ll get all the way to a point where you start to transcend the identification with
00:37:28 ►
self itself. It’s no longer seen as separate. It’s no longer seen as part of reality, but rather
00:37:34 ►
the entirety of everything. And this structure and stratification we have of reality to geography and time and identity and universe and beliefs
00:37:48 ►
and history and past, all this content that we’re using to define and describe our reality
00:37:53 ►
starts to go away. It starts to dissolve. It starts to disappear. It’s not there. It’s not
00:37:58 ►
accessible anymore, right? As we keep going, going, going, going, going, going, going, going,
00:38:03 ►
you get to a point what’s called two
00:38:05 ►
At two there’s still a coalesced version of you
00:38:09 ►
And everything else
00:38:11 ►
Absolutely everything else
00:38:13 ►
But everything else isn’t everything else
00:38:15 ►
All broken down into planets and cars and bikes and playa and everything else
00:38:23 ►
It’s now all one thing
00:38:24 ►
It’s all one thing.
00:38:26 ►
It’s all one thing.
00:38:30 ►
It’s identification and one other thing.
00:38:33 ►
In the transcendence of that, we finally meet objective reality.
00:38:36 ►
I call that love.
00:38:39 ►
We could call it anything, but I call that love.
00:38:51 ►
The only thing is, in the movement into that, where two really does become one, the discernibility that you would use to recognize one is lost.
00:38:54 ►
It’s unified.
00:38:55 ►
It also dissolves.
00:38:59 ►
And so in that, we lose self.
00:39:02 ►
And in all different kinds of shamanism, this idea of the transcendence of self,
00:39:07 ►
you know, ego death, all of that is seen as being imperative, incredibly important.
00:39:12 ►
And I would challenge that idea too. I would say if you don’t have a self, you’re not having
00:39:16 ►
experience, period. You’re just not having it. And so the idea of going into a ceremony isn’t
00:39:22 ►
to die and not ever have a way of being able to engage and interact with environment, reality, life, time, space, things, people.
00:39:32 ►
You have to have a self to do that.
00:39:36 ►
So we go through a different process. to never have self, but rather it’s the death of that version
00:39:45 ►
so that you can then have a different version
00:39:49 ►
and go through transformation.
00:39:52 ►
And you still won’t experience a quote-unquote objective reality.
00:39:55 ►
You’ll be experiencing a new reality based in the interplay
00:40:00 ►
between yourself and everything else.
00:40:04 ►
The question is, have I ever seen a spirit leave a physical imprint?
00:40:08 ►
Because I was talking about affecting space itself, affecting physicality.
00:40:12 ►
And yes, absolutely.
00:40:14 ►
I’ve had many, many experiences of the physical manifestation of the beings.
00:40:20 ►
And I’m happy to tell some of those stories.
00:40:25 ►
Sometimes I wonder whether it’s really just me, not a spirit,
00:40:28 ►
not I’m externalizing it at that point, you know.
00:40:33 ►
And so then it’s a question of what do you do with a spirit that’s external
00:40:38 ►
or do you deal with what is a projection that is internal?
00:40:42 ►
And I guess that’s a dichotomy that I’m not fully over yeah yeah okay so we can answer both of those questions
00:40:47 ►
together I mean they’re completely related um I would like to expand the
00:40:52 ►
way that I would personally relate to it and I came to a realization within
00:40:56 ►
myself that everything I was interacting with was spirit it was a spirit so the
00:41:01 ►
pillows of spirit the floors of spirit you’re a spirit the crystals in here are spirit the domes of spirit and so I pillow is a spirit. The floor is a spirit. You’re a spirit. The crystals in here are a spirit. The dome is a spirit.
00:41:06 ►
And so I have in a definition of inside and outside. I have a definition of me and other.
00:41:12 ►
And I can work in my shamanism within that form. Right. But it’s not the only form with which I can work.
00:41:18 ►
I can also work with a definition that all of it’s me. None of it is external. And it’s an interplay of those pieces.
00:41:22 ►
that all of it’s me, none of it is external,
00:41:24 ►
and it’s an interplay of those pieces.
00:41:28 ►
And that decision is going to be made in the moment,
00:41:30 ►
in the shamanism itself.
00:41:31 ►
It’s what you’re presented with.
00:41:33 ►
If you can hold it as all me,
00:41:38 ►
it’s a very fast, very, very, very clean modality in which to work with.
00:41:40 ►
If all of a sudden something triggered inside of you goes,
00:41:48 ►
like, that’s not me, like the car is not me right at that point you’re now dealing with this thing that’s that’s a spirit so um i was in a uh i was in a diet out in the
00:41:54 ►
out in the jungle when i first moved into the amazon i moved into an area that was 24 hours
00:41:59 ►
outside of the city of iquitos in northeastern peru northeastern part of the amazon and i was
00:42:04 ►
living in a community of eight families
00:42:06 ►
on this tiny little tributary to the Ucayali River.
00:42:10 ►
And where I was told and envisioned to place my house
00:42:14 ►
was the last inhabitant on that river.
00:42:17 ►
And so there were no inhabitants upriver from us
00:42:19 ►
for six days of travel overland.
00:42:21 ►
So it was completely, at that point, uninhabited forest,
00:42:24 ►
tremendously isolated and an incredible place.
00:42:26 ►
And it just happened to be 400 yards from where Julio Jarene Pinedo,
00:42:30 ►
the grandmaster who taught me, lived.
00:42:33 ►
So that’s why I did my first ayahuasca ceremony.
00:42:35 ►
In the ceremony, I saw that that’s where I needed to stay and learn.
00:42:37 ►
I still hadn’t even met Julio.
00:42:38 ►
I ended up meeting him and starting to train with him about two years later of sort of earning the right to be first there to live and then train.
00:42:50 ►
And so I’m in a diet.
00:42:51 ►
I’m doing a dieta.
00:42:53 ►
And all of a sudden, we’re in the house.
00:42:57 ►
There’s no electricity, anything like that.
00:42:59 ►
And the house is a rectangular space about, I don’t know, 20 by 50, rectangular space.
00:43:08 ►
In the back, there’s a little room, little sheets of plastic is the wall.
00:43:12 ►
I mean, very, very, very rustic.
00:43:14 ►
And I’m seeing a light going on and off in the room.
00:43:17 ►
There’s a light that’s going on and off in the room.
00:43:21 ►
Okay, so I run back there, grab my pacho, grab some Agua Floria.
00:43:27 ►
My pacho is a jungle tobacco.
00:43:28 ►
Use it to shoo away spirits.
00:43:30 ►
And as I run back there, I open up the door.
00:43:32 ►
There’s a luminous being standing within the room.
00:43:35 ►
It leaps through the wall, runs around the house.
00:43:37 ►
I run around the other side of the house.
00:43:38 ►
It runs all the way down to the port next to the river, runs across the river,
00:43:42 ►
and it’s splashing on the water as it’s running across the river.
00:43:51 ►
This is at about 6.30 p.m stone cold sober no ethnogens no ayahuasca
00:43:59 ►
nothing just this is happening plain as day okay runs across the river and all of a sudden i hear this buzzing tremendous buzzing and i’m looking around and all of a sudden these three to four
00:44:06 ►
inch grasshopper locust creatures, thousands of them at a time, come and hit the house.
00:44:11 ►
Just boom, they hit the house. All right. So we had, everything was screened in,
00:44:17 ►
you know, just like a normal screening. Like you’d have a screen door in your house.
00:44:20 ►
They’re hitting the screens. All right. Within a flash, they’re passing through the
00:44:26 ►
screens and they’re inside
00:44:27 ►
the house now and they’re flying all around
00:44:29 ►
inside the house.
00:44:31 ►
All around inside the house.
00:44:33 ►
I have no idea what to do. I’m only there
00:44:35 ►
with a friend. The master shams I’m
00:44:37 ►
training with are off.
00:44:40 ►
I’m running around so I go to make a
00:44:41 ►
ceremony of fire to use smoke to shoo these
00:44:43 ►
things away. I’m chopping the wood and I bring the mach a ceremony of fire to use smoke to shoo these things away.
00:44:51 ►
I’m chopping the wood, and I bring the machete up, and I see this invisible force move it straight over and drops it right down on my finger.
00:44:54 ►
My finger flays open. Blood starts going everywhere.
00:44:58 ►
I’m still making the fire. The locusts are all flying around inside the house.
00:45:00 ►
Things are going completely crazy.
00:45:02 ►
Luminous beings are coming out of the forest.
00:45:06 ►
Paranormal, off the charts going everywhere right so my friends swatting them away swatting them away swatting away i finally get the smoke going
00:45:14 ►
i sit down to take care of my finger one lands on the table i grab a big flashlight and i smash it
00:45:20 ►
with the flashlight and i leave the flashlight there. We go. We clear the space. Cleanse, cleanse, cleanse, cleanse, clear, clear, clear.
00:45:26 ►
10, 15 minutes later, the energy lifts.
00:45:29 ►
There’s absolutely no bugs in the house.
00:45:33 ►
Nothing.
00:45:34 ►
As if nothing had ever happened.
00:45:35 ►
I go back, and we’re looking everywhere.
00:45:37 ►
We cannot believe what happened.
00:45:38 ►
The finger’s still bleeding.
00:45:39 ►
And I raise the flashlight, and there is a stain physically on the table, on the wood table from it, but its body’s not there.
00:45:50 ►
And it’s stained into the table.
00:45:53 ►
So that’s one example.
00:45:54 ►
I was at another example in an ayahuasca ceremony.
00:45:57 ►
In the Amazon, there’s all of these different kinds of nature spirits that are mythical.
00:46:01 ►
They talk about the Satchamama, the 500-meter anaconda.
00:46:05 ►
They’re these pirawas,
00:46:06 ►
these beasts that come from the underworlds
00:46:09 ►
through water and stuff like that.
00:46:10 ►
So we were in a ceremony once.
00:46:12 ►
The port, like I said,
00:46:13 ►
from where our ceremonial area was,
00:46:14 ►
was behind us about 30 yards away.
00:46:17 ►
I’m sitting in ceremony with Alberto.
00:46:20 ►
I hear this…
00:46:26 ►
Alberto’s super nonchalant. He’s sitting there smoking a mapacho, singing some Icar this. I’ll bet it’s a super nonchalant.
00:46:29 ►
You said they’re smoking a macho, singing some micros.
00:46:34 ►
I’m early apprenticeship, kind of tense, you know, not really sure what’s going on.
00:46:40 ►
And all of a sudden, the wooden boats and canoes in the port start banging.
00:46:43 ►
Crack, crack, crack, crack, crack, crack, crack. And this half-bull-shaped, half-water beast walks out of the port and is walking up the ground, up the area, straight to our ceremony.
00:46:57 ►
And I’m looking back like this.
00:47:01 ►
Like that.
00:47:02 ►
I’m looking up there.
00:47:03 ►
It’s like, are you going to do something?
00:47:04 ►
Are you going to do something?
00:47:04 ►
I’m telling him telepathically
00:47:06 ►
come on man come on and he just sits there
00:47:08 ►
right this thing’s like
00:47:09 ►
15 feet tall
00:47:11 ►
20 feet long like just
00:47:13 ►
coming up right physically
00:47:16 ►
crashing things around and he
00:47:18 ►
just lights another mapacho
00:47:20 ►
takes a big puff at it and goes
00:47:21 ►
and the thing turns around walks right back into the water
00:47:31 ►
and goes away and that was it so another physical manifestation um i was in the city of akitos
00:47:39 ►
and some people came to uh our, and they had a question.
00:47:46 ►
They said, hey, we did this ayahuasca ceremony.
00:47:47 ►
It’s very common through Aikido.
00:47:48 ►
So there’s lots of travelers.
00:47:53 ►
They hear of ayahuasca, and they’re just having an experience, maybe a ceremony or two, something like that.
00:47:55 ►
But they’re not really coming.
00:47:57 ►
At our center, it’s a destination-based center.
00:47:59 ►
So people come for a week to 10 days at a time.
00:47:59 ►
They stay.
00:48:01 ►
We form a single group.
00:48:04 ►
There aren’t any walk-ins, and we hold a collective series of ceremonies.
00:48:07 ►
But it’s very common for these walk-in ceremonies taking place all over the place.
00:48:12 ►
And so they came to me, and they said, I just wanted to check out and know if this was kind of okay, what I saw in ceremony.
00:48:22 ►
I saw that this, like, black-cloaked being formed in the room, ran across the room, and jumped into the heart chakra of my friend.
00:48:22 ►
Is that okay?
00:48:25 ►
And I said, no, I don’t think so.
00:48:28 ►
Like, not in our ceremonies.
00:48:29 ►
Like, that wouldn’t be legit, right?
00:48:33 ►
So I said, you know, why don’t you come back tonight at 830 and, you know, we’ll extract this spirit.
00:48:38 ►
Simple spirit extraction, do an invocation, set the space,
00:48:42 ►
go in, extract it out, remove it, no big deal.
00:48:44 ►
invocation, set the space, go in, extract it out, remove it, no big deal.
00:48:54 ►
So we get in, and we set up the space, and I have, there are some other people that are interested in shamanism, they’d never drunk, they’d never had sort of a shamanistic experience,
00:48:58 ►
and so they were with us, they wanted to watch, they thought it was going to be interesting,
00:49:02 ►
and the ceremony starts, No ayahuasca,
00:49:06 ►
nothing, just an energy cleansing, just an extraction of the spirit, right? And
00:49:10 ►
the gentleman in the chair, I’m standing in front of him, drops down like this.
00:49:17 ►
And he comes up. And he’s completely demonically possessed. He leaps out of his chair to attack me physically.
00:49:27 ►
I grab light and I hold him in the air
00:49:29 ►
and he’s held in the air,
00:49:30 ►
levitating.
00:49:31 ►
I lower him down to the floor
00:49:32 ►
and a two and a half hour exorcism starts.
00:49:36 ►
And in that period of time,
00:49:37 ►
the observers that were there
00:49:38 ►
on three occasions
00:49:39 ►
watched Shadow Beast leap out of his body,
00:49:43 ►
take physical form in the room,
00:49:46 ►
run through the office and leap right through the wall. All right. Physical manifestation of the spirits. I’ve been
00:49:52 ►
in other ceremonies where there’s been devil’s play and negative sort of dark arts being practiced
00:49:58 ►
on us while we were cleansing it. And the roof of the place gets dive bombed and you hear the roof getting just slammed and it goes as these things are trying to get in.
00:50:12 ►
So, yes, physical. Absolutely. If you can, you don’t want to let it get to that level.
00:50:20 ►
It’s much easier to deal with them as just energy patterns and visionary forms.
00:50:26 ►
it’s much easier to deal with them as just energy patterns and visionary forms but when they take on physicality it’s uh you know now you’re dealing with a literally a whole nother beast you have
00:50:31 ►
it in a physical form and it’s in the room right so also common in ceremonies when when people are
00:50:38 ►
are playing with the animal spirits you know it’s they’re they’re not cartoonish if you invoke a black jaguar in your ceremony and it takes on physical form, you’ll have
00:50:48 ►
a black jaguar there like you encountered it in the forest.
00:50:51 ►
It’ll be in the room with you. You know, if it’s hungry,
00:50:56 ►
real, I mean, you’re serious. If it’s hungry, you know, you want to be able to
00:51:00 ►
feed it, but you don’t want to feed it somebody who’s in the room, right? So, yes.
00:51:04 ►
Okay, one more question and then it’s time for me to…
00:51:06 ►
Yeah. Alright, there’s a part to shamanism that not many people talk about,
00:51:11 ►
the sorcery and dark magic, stuff like that.
00:51:14 ►
What’s your experience and can you talk a little bit about protection?
00:51:17 ►
Yeah, the dark arts, sorcery, things like that
00:51:22 ►
are not really shared about.
00:51:26 ►
And typically the medicine concept of it is more shared about in the West.
00:51:29 ►
But it’s a huge aspect of the traditional practices.
00:51:34 ►
And so the first fundamental differentiation is whether the shaman has learned those arts and practices those arts
00:51:41 ►
or whether the shaman has learned medicine and practices medicine or has learned both and does both okay the ayahuasca is not seen again as the specific medicine but rather
00:51:50 ►
the access to all of these different knowledgeable shamanic forms the inherent
00:51:57 ►
essence of them is to destroy that’s all all they are. They break things down. They destroy things.
00:52:06 ►
Okay. So when they’re used to harm another person, they’re used in that form to destroy
00:52:11 ►
certain aspects of that other person. They work in exactly the same way. It’s the harnessing of
00:52:17 ►
different kinds of spirits, using different kinds of ikros to be able to send them, manifest them,
00:52:21 ►
and work with them. And the very best protection is to not get involved with them.
00:52:28 ►
That is the very, very best protection, is to not get involved.
00:52:32 ►
And so the very first thing is to set intent that the only reason you’re in an ayahuasca ceremony
00:52:37 ►
is for medicine and to learn divine knowledge.
00:52:41 ►
That’s it.
00:52:42 ►
Just medicine and divine knowledge.
00:52:43 ►
Medicine and divine knowledge.
00:52:44 ►
The second is to only sit in ceremonies with people practicing medicine. And the best way to
00:52:50 ►
discern that is to use all of the qualities that you would normally use to discern anything
00:52:54 ►
to find out whether that shaman is practicing what you would think of as medicine or something
00:53:01 ►
that you want to participate with or interact with. So I would do a lot of research, get a lot of information, talk to people who’ve drunk with them, and
00:53:07 ►
especially look at everybody in the eyes. The eyes in ayahuasca tell you everything.
00:53:12 ►
If you see people with eyes that get really glossed over and become really shifty, you
00:53:17 ►
know, it’s letting you know something there is going on that maybe you don’t want to become
00:53:21 ►
like that. You know, maybe that’s not why you’re there. You use spirits to protect.
00:53:27 ►
And so it’s a process of invocation
00:53:29 ►
of different kinds of protective spirits.
00:53:32 ►
And you can use energies and shields
00:53:35 ►
and beings themselves to be able to do that.
00:53:38 ►
And the shamans construct their mesas in those forms.
00:53:41 ►
So they set up their mesa, their ceremonial center,
00:53:44 ►
with the uh spirits around
00:53:47 ►
them that are going to do that so they have protective spirits all around the space they
00:53:50 ►
have spirits to ward off those kinds of energies and to be able to have in essence a safe place to
00:53:56 ►
be able to practice and you can do all of those same things for yourself you can invoke those
00:54:00 ►
spirits to be protective for you and to explore that.
00:54:12 ►
It’s not something to be scared of, just like we’re not scared of a common cold or we’re not scared of driving down the road.
00:54:18 ►
But it is something to be aware of and to make your decision very clearly whether you’re open to participating in something like that or not.
00:54:24 ►
I carry a very impartial view of it, but I was trained as a warrior shaman to heal those kinds of afflictions.
00:54:29 ►
You know, so for a period of time, I had great affliction from it. I’ve had many experiences where, you know, I’ve been afflicted by it and then also have healed it.
00:54:34 ►
Is that it? All right. Well, thank you very much. That’s the time that they’ve given me for the
00:54:37 ►
talk today. We have some DVDs of trance ceremonies that we’ve done that we’ve given out as playa
00:54:44 ►
gifts to everybody. So if you would like a DVD, we’ve done that we’ve given out as playa gifts to everybody.
00:54:45 ►
So if you would like a DVD, we’ve also created a kind of electronic music called Source Trance,
00:54:49 ►
which uses the Icaros and the foundation of trance ceremonies to create electronic music.
00:54:54 ►
And so we’d like to share with all of you.
00:54:56 ►
Thank you very much.
00:54:57 ►
It’s been a pleasure.
00:54:57 ►
Are you performing tonight?
00:55:01 ►
We can.
00:55:02 ►
I’ll let them know.
00:55:07 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic psychedelic salon where people are changing their lives
00:55:09 ►
one thought at a time
00:55:10 ►
before I say anything else
00:55:14 ►
I want to say how much I enjoyed
00:55:16 ►
Hamilton’s manifestation stories
00:55:19 ►
just now
00:55:19 ►
they were really wonderful
00:55:21 ►
and yet I’ve not only heard wilder stories,
00:55:25 ►
I’ve actually experienced one or two myself.
00:55:28 ►
And so as I recall these experiences, and then think about putting them into English
00:55:34 ►
and tell the stories as Hamilton just has,
00:55:37 ►
well, thinking about that, I have to ask myself, quite honestly,
00:55:41 ►
how am I, thinking about my own exceptional psychedelic experiences,
00:55:46 ►
well, how am I all that different from somebody who honestly believes that they have been abducted by aliens?
00:55:53 ►
Why is it that I think of those people as weird, and yet I find myself and my psychedelic friends to be quite normal?
00:56:02 ►
Well, maybe we all have a lot more in common than we think, huh?
00:56:06 ►
Now, here’s another observation that is only a hazy question in my mind right now,
00:56:11 ►
but one that I intend to spend more time thinking about. Like perhaps you and many of our other
00:56:18 ►
fellow salonners, I’ve long thought of this life in terms of a game, and if you’ve read or listened to my novel,
00:56:25 ►
The Genesis Generation, you’ve heard my Earth game metaphor. But I somehow now have a gut feeling
00:56:32 ►
that gaming, and particularly multiplayer online gaming, is having and will continue to have a
00:56:39 ►
significant impact on the future of our species. I won’t go into my reasons for thinking
00:56:45 ►
that right now. All I really want to do is to make a simple observation based on
00:56:49 ►
what Hamilton was just now saying about the malevolent spirit beings that he has
00:56:54 ►
encountered and to compare them with the malevolent beings that I’ve seen chasing
00:56:59 ►
my granddaughters while they were in the survival mode of Minecraft. Now what Hamilton was describing
00:57:06 ►
just now is quite similar, and interestingly, to me at least, his strategy for dealing with them
00:57:13 ►
was exactly the same as what my granddaughters use in Minecraft, which is simply to try not to
00:57:19 ►
get involved with them. So the question I have is this, are we dealing here with archetypes or are we dealing
00:57:26 ►
with game designers who spend their holidays drinking ayahuasca in the Amazon? Either way,
00:57:32 ►
I’ll be more than pleased with the answer. Now getting back to Hamilton’s talk that we just now
00:57:38 ►
listened to, I don’t know if it made an impression on your mind as deeply as it did on mine, but as I sit here and recall his rap, I have to admit that I haven’t heard anyone else.
00:57:49 ►
And trust me, I’ve spent time with some highly experienced ayahuasqueros
00:57:53 ►
who collectively haven’t given me the insights that I’ve gained from the talk that you and I just listened to.
00:58:01 ►
So my recommendation is that you not only listen to this talk again, but you also listen
00:58:06 ►
to it right before your next or possibly your first ayahuasca session and see if it doesn’t
00:58:11 ►
provide you with just the right tools to extract the maximum benefit from the experience. I haven’t
00:58:18 ►
yet spoken with some of our other guest lecturers here in the salon about what they think about this
00:58:24 ►
talk, but my guess is that
00:58:26 ►
they’re all going to overwhelmingly recommend it for multiple listens. This is a talk that
00:58:32 ►
now has a permanent place on my mp3 player, and I sincerely hope that you got as much out of it
00:58:38 ►
as I have. So for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space. Be well, my friends.
00:58:47 ►
I’m an alien.
00:58:53 ►
Alien.
00:58:58 ►
Alien.
00:59:03 ►
I’m an alien