Program Notes
Guest speaker: Rak Razam
Today’s podcast features a talk given by Rak Razam this year at Byron Bay, Australia. Rak is an ‘experiential’ journalist, who writes about the emergence of a new cultural paradigm in the 21st century. Rak is the author of the critically acclaimed book Aya Awakenings: A Shamanic Odyssey and the companion volume of interviews, The Ayahuasca Sessions. In this podcast he discusses the Gaian process underway spearheaded by ayahuasca and other plant entheogens healing and cleansing us humans, preparing us to return to the “Garden”, and the sudden popularity of 5-MeO-DMT Sonoran Desert Toad medicine.
Rak Razam (home page)
Aya Awakenings (trailer HD)
Dying to Know:
Ram Dass & Timothy Leary - Official Trailer #1
Bay Area Release Info with Direct links to ticket sales
Film opens Friday July 10th at the following theaters:
San Francisco - Roxie theater:
San Rafael - The Smith Rafael Film Center:
Eugene Center for Ethnobotanical Studies
We are a crowd-sourced, social enterprise dedicated to supporting plant-based, non-profit health and well-being as a viable, sustainable, and growing option to corporate based, for-profit, pharmaceutical options.
Casualties of the State (trailer)
Why watch “Casualties of the State,” a feature-length drama-thriller:
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:19 ►
This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.
00:00:23 ►
And I think that you’re going to get a lot
00:00:26 ►
of ideas out of today’s program because it focuses on some of the things that one can take away from
00:00:32 ►
an ayahuasca experience. It’s a talk that was given this year in Byron’s Bay, Australia by
00:00:38 ►
Rak Razam. And I’m sure that you’re going to remember Rack from his 2014 Palenque Norte lecture that I podcast earlier this year.
00:00:47 ►
Now, after we listen to Rack, in addition to a few comments about what he has to say,
00:00:52 ►
I’ll also be letting you know about a couple of movies that I think you’re going to be interested in.
00:00:57 ►
But now, here is Rack Razam.
00:01:01 ►
Thank you, Ali Ma.
00:01:02 ►
And, yeah, I’m really glad to be back here in Byron Bay and Starseed
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and to be supporting your initiative.
00:01:10 ►
It’s a really great idea.
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The Amazon does need all our help, and not just the Amazon,
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but, you know, we all need help,
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and we all need to help each other helping each other.
00:01:22 ►
And, you know, basically these conventions and gatherings and discussions
00:01:26 ►
are such a great nodal point for us to cluster and to come together
00:01:31 ►
and to meet each other and to recognise each other and to do this work.
00:01:37 ►
And this work is so important, not just on an individual level,
00:01:42 ►
but also on a macro level in what we do once we have been engaging with the planned medicines,
00:01:48 ►
we have been doing our individual healing,
00:01:51 ►
and collectively that means that we can come together as healed individuals
00:01:56 ►
which can then make responsible decisions of how we want to live our lives
00:02:01 ►
and how we want to form societies and tribes and groups
00:02:04 ►
to go forward and to bring in this sort of new paradigm thought, this energy that’s coming
00:02:10 ►
in, to be sustainable, to be joyous, and to be responsible citizens of this galactic ecology
00:02:19 ►
that we live in.
00:02:21 ►
Alima invited me to come here and talk, and I don’t have a prepared talk so I’m going
00:02:26 ►
to do what I do best and just stream what comes to me from divine consciousness. I have
00:02:33 ►
just returned from the Amazon jungle. As Ali Ma mentioned I have done a documentary called
00:02:39 ►
Aira Awakenings which started off as a book called Our Awakenings, which started off as a 3,000
00:02:45 ►
word article for a freelance magazine, which shall not be mentioned.
00:02:49 ►
In 2006, I’ve been on this path now for almost over nine years, it’ll be nine years in June.
00:02:57 ►
What is the path?
00:03:00 ►
You could say the shaman’s path, you could say the spiritual path.
00:03:03 ►
Specifically working with the plant medicines,
00:03:06 ►
I think it’s a path of awakening.
00:03:08 ►
It really is something that tribal people all over the world
00:03:12 ►
have retained the knowledge of.
00:03:14 ►
Terence McKenna has this beautiful little phrase,
00:03:17 ►
I mean, Terence, right, Terence,
00:03:18 ►
the great Moses of modern psychedelic culture,
00:03:22 ►
the one who has brought back a lot of information
00:03:24 ►
and soundb bites and memes,
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for us to digest and to ruminate on
00:03:29 ►
and to make our own
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and to figure out not just what they meant
00:03:32 ►
but how to implement them.
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One of his many beautiful phrases was,
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you know, plan, plant, planet.
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And embedded in that is this idea
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that the planet as an organism
00:03:45 ►
is working through the plants to implement its plan
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and there is a plan.
00:03:51 ►
And so indigenous cultures all over the world
00:03:54 ►
have retained to a large degree their connection with the planet.
00:03:58 ►
They have themselves and their lives on the earth
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and they’re engaging with the planet and the earth
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and the biorhythms and the seasons and the plants
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and they understand energy
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and they understand cycles of time and rhythms.
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It’s almost like permaculture.
00:04:16 ►
But it’s this sense of,
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almost as if societies themselves,
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which engage in this one-on-one with the planet,
00:04:24 ►
it’s almost planet culture, planet permaculture.
00:04:28 ►
And so I first went down to Peru in 2006,
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and I was chasing this story on what was this mythic archetype of the shaman.
00:04:37 ►
Now, in classical anthropology, they’ll tell you things like,
00:04:40 ►
there is no such thing as shaman,
00:04:41 ►
according to most of the indigenous cultures in the world.
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It came from this classic text, Shamanism, by Mersa Eliade in the 1960s when he was looking at the Siberian shaman, the Samans,
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and their work with the Amanita muscaria mushrooms.
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And they’ve applied that in a Western sense,
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almost like a brand name to apply to medicine people across the world.
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But medicine people all across the world have their own names for what they do,
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but essentially they are medicine people.
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They work with their different plants, not all of them psychoactive,
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the vast majority are not psychoactive,
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but they work with what the earth gives them,
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the bounty of the earth, the living organism of the earth,
00:05:24 ►
which gives us everything we need
00:05:27 ►
if we know how to give and take responsibly
00:05:30 ►
and not just take, take, take,
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as Western culture has in its egocentric drive
00:05:34 ►
towards civilization has been doing
00:05:38 ►
over the march of his story of history.
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So this idea of connection to the planet and this idea that there’s a
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plan, there is a right relationship that we can have with the planet in which we are fed.
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We are fed on a physical level, our bodies, but we can also be fed spiritually by almost
00:05:56 ►
like the chi or the ambient energy of the planet herself if we’re in right relationship.
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Many of these plants that the medicine people use all across the world are for healing, and some of them, the very select ones, are entheogenic,
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which is from the Greek for the divine within, something in the plant which invokes this
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sense of spiritual awareness or spiritual presence of the divine.
00:06:26 ►
Now all this language is Western, but this is a real experiential, tangible thing.
00:06:32 ►
When you engage with the plant medicines of all different varieties, whether that’s
00:06:37 ►
the ayahuasca, the San Pedro cactus, the salvia, the acacias, the morning glory seeds, cannabis, even tobacco.
00:06:47 ►
All of these things and more have been considered sacred plants by indigenous cultures across the world
00:06:52 ►
and they’re to be used in a right way.
00:06:55 ►
There’s a right relationship to establish with them.
00:06:58 ►
So the medicine people, the shamans, have retained this knowledge
00:07:02 ►
and I was going down to Peru in search of what
00:07:05 ►
the South American version of the ayahuasca movement and what the shaman meant in the
00:07:10 ►
21st century. And so nine years later, I have a very different perception of what that is.
00:07:16 ►
It’s the same. In a nutshell, many of you probably are aware there’s been this rise
00:07:21 ►
in what I call resurgence in global shamanism,
00:07:27 ►
which is essentially a Western pursuit because the indigenous peoples never lost this.
00:07:30 ►
They’ve had an unbroken thread for the cultures
00:07:32 ►
which weren’t conquered or extinguished,
00:07:35 ►
and they’ve managed to retain this ability and this knowledge
00:07:38 ►
of how to heal with the plants
00:07:39 ►
and to use not just medicinally for healing physically,
00:07:44 ►
but how to connect spiritually to the dimensions that these substances can open up.
00:07:51 ►
And that’s one of the other roles of the shaman.
00:07:53 ►
It’s not just healer.
00:07:54 ►
It can be walker between the worlds, traveller between the worlds,
00:07:57 ►
psychopomp, someone who goes and retrieves his soul from the other worlds,
00:08:01 ►
or gains knowledge to work on behalf of the patient.
00:08:06 ►
But this idea of healing is really important in the traditional role of healer.
00:08:10 ►
And in 2006, when I was documenting this in the book, Aya Awakenings,
00:08:15 ►
even back then, there was this groundswell of interest from Westerners across the world
00:08:20 ►
who were coming in search of ayahuasca and the healing it could provide.
00:08:24 ►
And not all of them were physically sick. who were coming in search of ayahuasca and the healing it could provide.
00:08:27 ►
And not all of them were physically sick.
00:08:29 ►
In fact, probably the vast majority,
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there’s been a lot of documentation with the science of ayahuasca and what it’s doing,
00:08:34 ►
and also with people going down to work on ailments, physical ailments,
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all the way up to things like cancer and AIDS
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or other types of conditions they may have.
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It’s not just ayahuasca,
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it’s basically reconnecting to the flow of life.
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And by being in the jungles and being on dieta, by retreating from the world and a lot of
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the toxins and poisons that the Western culture imbues in us, away from the electromagnetic
00:09:01 ►
frequencies, away from the sugars and the salts and the
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alcohol and just all those things which are really affecting not just our physical bodies
00:09:12 ►
but also our vibrational bodies.
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In the cosmovision or the world paradigm of the Peruvians, they believe that we have a
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physical body, we have an emotional body, we have an
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energy body.
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There’s all these layers to our true being.
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And that sickness begins at these core realms, at these inner realms.
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And that as we go through life, we have experiences, we have joys, but we also have hurts and wounds
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and instances where we vibrationally stall.
00:09:43 ►
Like we’re either open or we’re contracting.
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And in that contraction time, we store a lot of this negativity
00:09:50 ►
and some of those things which are stored can fester and wound
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and grow over time and develop a sickness.
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So a lot of the curanderos,
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which is what the indigenous shamans of the Amazon region call themselves,
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it’s from the Spanish, to cure or to heal,
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they do a lot of their work with ayahuasca
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and a multitude of other medicinal plants to heal their patients.
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In Peru, the city I’ve been most to,
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the area I’ve been to most in Peru is in Quito.
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There’s a few little hotbeds of shamanic activity.
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And it’s interesting because one of the previous talks
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was mentioning the Mama Lacta family in Ecuador.
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And for whatever reasons, you know,
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cultural vectors that have happened,
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Peru seems to have gotten the brunt of ayahuasca tourism
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over the last 20 years or so.
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It’s one of the first countries to open up lodges
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specifically designed to cater to westerners
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to go down and experience ayahuasca
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and it has snowballed
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in the last 20 plus years
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to an industry, you know, and I’m now
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involved in this industry and there’s a lot
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of light and a lot of dark in this industry
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as a lot of money is accruing
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and a lot of people are going down
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and to essentially very poor communities
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but this idea of people getting healed a lot of people are going down and to essentially very poor communities.
00:11:07 ►
But this idea of people getting healed,
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a lot of people are going for physical healing,
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but the vast majority of people who I’ve met and who I’ve documented and interviewed and reported on
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are going for something related but slightly different.
00:11:21 ►
There’s this very tangible sense in Western culture
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that we are disenchanted.
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We have fallen out of right relationship with the planet and with ourselves. And this sense
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of aloneness or this sense of disconnection has resulted in a spiritual sickness. I mean,
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to the degree that most of Western material culture doesn’t even agree on the word spirit. It
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all has to be reduced to a mechanistic view of reality, and they might agree that there’s
00:11:51 ►
a bioelectric field in our bodies, but they still not only don’t agree, but they still
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don’t really know where consciousness comes from, and they won’t entertain this idea that
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consciousness can extend beyond the body,
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which is one of the central tenets of shamanism,
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that you can extend beyond the body and you can experience the cosmic ecology of what you live in,
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that the web of life continues beyond the physical plane into the astral realms
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and into the inner space dimensions all the way up and in.
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And there’s this vast territory of the terra incognita,
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the invisible landscape, that the indigenous peoples
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and the shamans across the world have been mapping
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and also holding space for to keep the awareness
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and the flow of energy which continues from the physical realm
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all the way up into the invisible landscapes.
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So this sense of spiritual disconnection has
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affected all of the West, you know. It’s come through all of our recorded history, and the
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vast majority of Westerners I’ve encountered have been going down to Peru in search of
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ayahuasca, not for a physical healing, but for this reconnection, this sense of connection
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to what, you must ask. Well, in my experience with ayahuasca, there’s multiple levels to this.
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Ayahuasca is a purgative.
00:13:09 ►
It can heal you on a physical level or help facilitate your own healing on a physical level.
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One of the things I think that gets overlooked in the momentum and the global fad that ayahuasca has become
00:13:23 ►
is that it’s not a one-peel, one-shop cure for everything.
00:13:29 ►
It works to engage with you and to reveal your own true nature,
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and you then work on your own healing.
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Ayahuasca does have physical effects
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where it can purge out some physical things from your body.
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A lot of the indigenous cultures still use it
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because in the Amazon basin they’re getting infections from the water
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or infections from mosquitoes and other creatures that exist.
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And so it can be purging out,
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helping you release all those physical toxins and infections you might have.
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The one good scientific study that’s been done on ayahuasca back in the 1990s,
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the Hawaska Project, which was done by Charles Grob and Dennis McKenna and others,
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was looking at church members of one of the ayahuasca churches,
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the Inayol, the vegetal,
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and they looked at the ways that it was helping cleanse
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not just the physical body,
00:14:18 ►
but on a more mental or neuronal level,
00:14:24 ►
it was helping almost defrag the
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neuronal structure and re-link up
00:14:28 ►
the synaptic pathways. It seems
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essentially that as a medicine, ayahuasca
00:14:32 ►
helps cleanse and reset
00:14:35 ►
the mind and the body
00:14:36 ►
back to optimal conditions.
00:14:39 ►
That’s one layer of
00:14:40 ►
healing. Another layer that’s happening
00:14:42 ►
has been recent studies, legal studies across the world by
00:14:45 ►
different organisations and NGOs
00:14:47 ►
where they’ve been looking at things like
00:14:49 ►
LSD, psilocybin mushrooms and
00:14:51 ►
ayahuasca on what it’s doing
00:14:53 ►
in a clinical setting and they’ve
00:14:55 ►
discovered that these substances,
00:14:57 ►
the psychoactives, seem to turn
00:14:59 ►
off these regional clusters of the brain
00:15:01 ►
called the default mode network
00:15:03 ►
and it’s
00:15:04 ►
interlocking regions of the brain called the default mode network and it’s uh interlocking
00:15:06 ►
regions of the brain which collectively give us this sense of ego and identity and make up this
00:15:11 ►
sense of the eye that we think we are but we’re not we’re not just that thing but when those
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things are turned off the default mode network essentially uh the mind at large is open to the
00:15:23 ►
full gamut of consciousness,
00:15:26 ►
the full spectrum of consciousness.
00:15:29 ►
And so part of the healing that can come when these things are turned off with ayahuasca especially
00:15:32 ►
is that a lot of unconscious material floats to the surface.
00:15:36 ►
And that can be in a visionary state, in a dreamlike state
00:15:40 ►
where the dimethyltryptamine in the ayahuasca brew
00:15:44 ►
can help potentiate your own dimethyltryptamine in the ayahuasca brew can help potentiate your own
00:15:46 ►
dimethyltryptamine in the brain, and you can have a very visionary experience.
00:15:51 ►
A lot of those visions are thought to be cathartic.
00:15:55 ►
They’re thought to be related to processing almost like day residues in the way that the
00:16:00 ►
brain will visualize in dreams and things like that.
00:16:08 ►
A lot of the other visionary material in the ayahuasca experience seems to be very cosmic and seems to be very outside the individual experience.
00:16:15 ►
If we look at other mind maps like Jung,
00:16:18 ►
who had this idea that you have the day residues as level one in your dreaming state,
00:16:22 ►
then you might have a collective unconscious
00:16:24 ►
where you’re in this reservoir or pool of shared consciousness so you may be
00:16:30 ►
meeting someone else in your dream or you may be drawing upon cultural archetypes or cultural
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sort of noble points that’s all merging together on the second level and then on a deeper sort of
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level there’s maybe the species unconscious or the interspecies
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unconscious or the canvas of the astral where all those top levels are embedded upon and so you know
00:16:52 ►
ayahuasca and dimethyltryptamine can take you to many many different realms this type of journey
00:16:59 ►
and this journeying into the realms is more specifically the role of the shaman as psychopomp
00:17:05 ►
or the traveller between the worlds.
00:17:07 ►
And interestingly enough, this seems to be where a lot of the Western interest lies.
00:17:13 ►
A lot of curanderos have been sort of confused by this sense that, you know,
00:17:19 ►
tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of Westerners
00:17:22 ►
are going down to the Amazon basin to take ayahuasca,
00:17:26 ►
not in search of physical healing,
00:17:28 ►
but to connect to this idea that there’s something more.
00:17:30 ►
There’s something more than what Western culture
00:17:32 ►
and materialism has taught them.
00:17:34 ►
And that something more is this connection to spirit.
00:17:38 ►
And what is spirit and what is great spirit,
00:17:41 ►
as some indigenous cultures have called it in North America?
00:17:44 ►
Essentially, I believe it’s the planetary spirit itself.
00:17:47 ►
You know, it’s what James Lovelock termed Gaia,
00:17:51 ►
the Greek goddess of the earth.
00:17:53 ►
It’s this idea that in indigenous culture in South America,
00:17:56 ►
they call it Pachamama.
00:17:57 ►
And every indigenous culture will have different language for this.
00:18:02 ►
They have, all across the world, languages of relationship
00:18:05 ►
where they will call the earth
00:18:08 ►
and the earth spirits and the sun and the moon
00:18:10 ►
and the stars and the water.
00:18:12 ►
They will have names for it.
00:18:14 ►
And those names are sort of familial.
00:18:16 ►
They’re interlocking like family
00:18:18 ►
names. Pachamama is
00:18:20 ►
one of the names for the earth itself.
00:18:23 ►
So this brings
00:18:24 ►
up this whole idea of the web of life.
00:18:26 ►
So many times in ayahuasca, what has happened to me
00:18:29 ►
and to the people I’ve talked to,
00:18:31 ►
is this feeling that I transcend or we transcend our individual shells
00:18:38 ►
and we start to connect to the greater spiritual ecology,
00:18:42 ►
the web of life that is all around.
00:18:44 ►
And when you’re in the jungle, you’re in a malacca,
00:18:46 ►
you’re in an ayahuasca ceremony in the dark in Shipibo-type style,
00:18:50 ►
and the curandero is singing the icaros and driving the energy of the ceremony
00:18:55 ►
and steering your consciousness in that ceremony,
00:18:58 ►
you can just explode into this multidimensional reality
00:19:03 ►
that becomes more real than
00:19:06 ►
real, as real as this
00:19:08 ►
but a lot of these
00:19:10 ►
states of mind, you have to let
00:19:12 ►
go of the intellect because it’s not
00:19:14 ►
just about that. I mean
00:19:16 ►
the creator, the great
00:19:18 ►
spirit gave us this vehicle
00:19:19 ►
and in this vehicle with our consciousness
00:19:21 ►
we have more than just what the west has been
00:19:24 ►
rewarding, there’s more than just the intellect and the ego.
00:19:27 ►
When the ego is gone and the default mode network is off,
00:19:30 ►
and the full spectrum of consciousness arises and merges back
00:19:33 ►
into the web of life and the full field of being,
00:19:37 ►
that’s when the juicy stuff really starts happening, right?
00:19:42 ►
And so this web of life, we are part of.
00:19:46 ►
And, okay, I’ll come back to some of my recent experiences in the jungle.
00:19:51 ►
Before, about a month ago or so, there was this beautiful Mexican doctor
00:19:57 ►
and shamanic practitioner, Octavio Reti, who came to Byron Bay
00:20:00 ►
and blew a circuit in our shamanic culture here
00:20:04 ►
with the 5-MeO-DMT medicine of the snoring desert toad,
00:20:08 ►
which is the Bufitinine in the toad, it’s a different medicine.
00:20:11 ►
It comes from this toad that occurs in North America and into Mesoamerica.
00:20:18 ►
And as I mentioned at the start, there’s many, many different psychoactives,
00:20:21 ►
many different entheogens, and the planet herself secretes them.
00:20:26 ►
Terence McKenna had this idea that the psychoactive plants
00:20:30 ►
are actually like, he called them exo-pheromones,
00:20:33 ►
this idea that nature communicates in a chemical language
00:20:36 ►
between the species, and that’s how nature switches on and switches off
00:20:41 ►
different species to act as messengers to fulfill the larger plan that she is initiating and carrying through all the creatures.
00:20:51 ►
Because we are all her.
00:20:53 ►
It’s like we’re like fingers, individual units that start to recognize we’re connected to a hand.
00:20:59 ►
And then all of a sudden you realize the hand’s connected to the elbow.
00:21:02 ►
And then you realize, my God, there’s this giant larger being that we are part of and with shamanic medicines like ayahuasca and the other
00:21:12 ►
entheogens they can wipe clean the veil and they can reveal this connection and so uh after i had
00:21:21 ►
done this frog medicine this toad medicine with Octavia already about a month ago,
00:21:26 ►
I went down to the Amazon and I had forgotten.
00:21:29 ►
I kept thinking it was an extremely, extremely profound and powerful experience.
00:21:34 ►
It was very much beyond most ayahuasca journeys.
00:21:40 ►
But the reason I mention it is because I’ve just come back. After nine years of working in ayahuasca culture globally,
00:21:47 ►
writing the book, which was two books and became the film,
00:21:50 ►
I’m now facilitating ayahuasca retreats in Peru every three months or so
00:21:54 ►
with a very, very beautiful, trusted curandero, Percy Garcia.
00:21:59 ►
And I went into ceremony with Percy Garcia like three weeks ago or something
00:22:04 ►
with a group of Westerners I was leading,
00:22:08 ►
and most of them were doing ayahuasca for the first time.
00:22:11 ►
And, you know, we do all the introductory speeches,
00:22:13 ►
we do the duty of care, we get everyone prepped,
00:22:15 ►
and, you know, a lot of it is this fear of the unknown,
00:22:18 ►
of like, well, what’s going to happen?
00:22:20 ►
And, you know, a lot of people have read the books or seen the films
00:22:23 ►
and they’ve intellectually known,
00:22:25 ►
but as I said before, it’s more than just the intellect.
00:22:27 ►
We have an imagination, which in old magical terms,
00:22:32 ►
the imagination is more than just daydreaming or thinking things up.
00:22:36 ►
It’s how the will carves out the future,
00:22:40 ►
how you carve out the possibilities of all the different probability fields of where things could go.
00:22:45 ►
And if you hold what you want to manifest with your imagination, then you can anchor
00:22:50 ►
it and you can make things happen.
00:22:52 ►
You can make reality bend to your will because it’s interactive and it listens.
00:22:58 ►
You might not always get it, but if you know the protocols and take the right steps, you’re
00:23:02 ►
on the right road to manifest.
00:23:06 ►
the protocols and take the right steps, you’re on the right road to manifest. So you have the intellect, the imagination, and you have the intuition. And for me, I believe this is one of
00:23:12 ►
the core, most crucial tools in your shamanic toolkit, is that when you’re in these spaces,
00:23:18 ►
it’s not just about the visionary state and it’s not just about the healing, it’s really about
00:23:23 ►
what the freak is happening.
00:23:26 ►
And the only way to really know what is happening in this knowing sense is to feel into it.
00:23:32 ►
And you have to use your intuition. It’s like your intuition is empathic and in these
00:23:40 ►
realms you’re basically telepathic. You’re like skinned, you know, and you’re raw in the astral plane.
00:23:48 ►
And you probably may encounter entities that live on that astral plane.
00:23:53 ►
In Western psychological senses, they will say these are artifacts of your subconscious
00:23:59 ►
and representations of whatever’s going on in you.
00:24:02 ►
To some degree, they may be.
00:24:04 ►
This is the challenge of our generation
00:24:05 ►
to sort the fact from the fiction,
00:24:08 ►
to not just take on board the indigenous people’s dogma,
00:24:11 ►
but to honour their wisdom,
00:24:12 ►
to realise that they have generations,
00:24:15 ►
if not thousands of years of wisdom
00:24:17 ►
handed down from tribe to tribe
00:24:19 ►
and curandero to curandero.
00:24:21 ►
And to a large degree, they know what’s going on.
00:24:24 ►
The issues are what’s going on
00:24:26 ►
for them is colored through their perception their world paradigm their view and we have a fresh
00:24:32 ►
perspective that can be very valuable to look at it and not dismiss it but to also try to figure out
00:24:38 ►
what’s happening with us and it’s not just the intellect it’s the intuition so going into these
00:24:43 ►
realms the intuition is your best friend
00:24:45 ►
because there’s some telepathic type of exchange
00:24:49 ►
which is how you communicate in this realm, in that space.
00:24:52 ►
And there’s a knowing, and you might encounter aspects of yourself,
00:24:56 ►
you might work through all your emotional traumas,
00:24:59 ►
you might cascade through all your loved ones and say hi
00:25:02 ►
and work through all your relationships.
00:25:04 ►
These are sort of the processing that happens
00:25:06 ►
as part of the cleansing of the body
00:25:08 ►
to prepare for going higher and higher into the realms.
00:25:12 ►
And as you go higher, you may meet entities.
00:25:14 ►
And it’s like there’s a lot of tools which have been developing
00:25:17 ►
as this sort of blend between Western psychology
00:25:21 ►
and transpersonal psychology
00:25:22 ►
and shamanic sort of protection and shamanic warriorship,
00:25:27 ►
where you can engage with entities and sort of pulse at them and beam
00:25:30 ►
and say, are you good, are you bad?
00:25:32 ►
You’re going on feeling, you’re going on this gut reaction
00:25:35 ►
as you navigate through the realms.
00:25:37 ►
A lot of the visionary states may or may not be processed stuff coming up.
00:25:41 ►
They may be consensual geographies and
00:25:46 ►
nodal points of connection that exist independent
00:25:49 ►
from us. A lot of the curanderas and a lot of the
00:25:52 ►
visionary art you may have seen, representations of the
00:25:55 ►
ayahuasca experience by artists like Pablo Amaringo,
00:25:58 ►
Andy Debonati or Mauro Rogato, some of the
00:26:01 ►
favourites, anchor this
00:26:04 ►
visionary realm.
00:26:05 ►
And you might see these golden cities or jungle representations.
00:26:09 ►
A lot of them are this sort of blending mishmash of nature
00:26:13 ►
where you’ll see parrots and waters and dolphins.
00:26:17 ►
It’s almost like this kaleidoscope mashup of play of forms.
00:26:22 ►
It’s the web of life.
00:26:23 ►
What they’re showing in these pictures is essentially
00:26:25 ►
the web of life, and then sometimes they go deeper and you’ll see this transcendent, heavenly,
00:26:30 ►
celestial realms coming out of the visions. The interesting thing for me lately on my personal
00:26:36 ►
journey is that it goes deeper, and it goes deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper. And I feel what is happening is that once we have healed our individual bodies
00:26:48 ►
to whatever degree we can,
00:26:50 ►
and we stick to the diet,
00:26:52 ►
and the diet is so crucial
00:26:53 ►
to retaining the sensitivity
00:26:55 ►
for these plant medicines,
00:26:57 ►
and especially ayahuasca,
00:26:59 ►
there’s a lot of confusion around the dieta
00:27:01 ►
and around if you’re going in
00:27:03 ►
as a random sort of seeker for one
00:27:05 ►
ceremony you know you’ve got to be careful of what you’re taking into your body that you’re
00:27:10 ►
not going to have contrary indications from certain foods which may cause complications
00:27:14 ►
the red wine the cheeses you know the fermented foods things like that then there’s a deeper level
00:27:20 ►
if you’re going in regularly as a shamanic seeker or learner or apprentice, where you’ve got to
00:27:25 ►
maintain your energy levels and your
00:27:28 ►
cleansed ability. The shamans
00:27:30 ►
themselves, they do dietas for
00:27:31 ►
months or years at a time
00:27:33 ►
off in the jungle in isolation
00:27:35 ►
so that the
00:27:37 ►
receptivity they have of their
00:27:39 ►
energetic bodies, their bodies are like
00:27:42 ►
an antenna to receive
00:27:43 ►
stellar energy and interspace
00:27:46 ►
energy and to hear the plants. Stephen Bader has this famous book now called Singing to
00:27:51 ►
the Plants. And it’s like this idea that the Icaros they receive and the power they receive
00:27:58 ►
to do shamanic work comes from their ability to maintain dieta and to keep their energy
00:28:03 ►
levels clean and vibrationally pure
00:28:06 ►
so then you can hold more of the energy
00:28:08 ►
coming in. So if you’re
00:28:10 ►
healed on that first level, then you can
00:28:12 ►
go to level two. And this is what
00:28:14 ►
I find interesting because there’s a generation
00:28:16 ►
now, and we’re not shamans,
00:28:18 ►
my little sci-fi shorthand to this is
00:28:20 ►
shamanauts. And that comes from
00:28:22 ►
the Greek to be a traveller. You know,
00:28:24 ►
the astronaut, the cosmonaut, the shamanaut.
00:28:26 ►
You know, we’re going into inner space.
00:28:28 ►
And this, I believe, is a consensual valid realm
00:28:32 ►
that exists where the web of life continues
00:28:34 ►
on interdimensional plateaus.
00:28:37 ►
And we can travel there and we can bring back information
00:28:41 ►
or maps of hyperspace.
00:28:43 ►
So a lot of my current work is involved
00:28:44 ►
with a project called Terra Incognita, back information or maps of hyperspace. So a lot of my current work is involved with
00:28:45 ►
a project called Terra Incognita, which hopefully you’ll hear about in the coming months and
00:28:49 ►
years, which is involved in trying to develop platforms and pathways to bring back this
00:28:55 ►
information about hyperspace and to ground and anchor it in a meaningful way to share
00:29:00 ►
these maps and to have a consensus that, yes, this dimensionality exists.
00:29:07 ►
And it’s not just something the intellect can grasp, it’s something the intuition can grasp,
00:29:12 ►
and it’s something we can hold true and work with in our culture as our culture mutates
00:29:17 ►
and becomes not old world and new world and north and south, east and west,
00:29:22 ►
but becomes a unified planetary culture, which is sustainable and is in right relationship with the earth and with ourselves.
00:29:29 ►
So I see developing around me this generation of shamanauts,
00:29:34 ►
not trained shamans, not yet, to be a proper shaman, 20, 30 years,
00:29:39 ►
to be a banko shaman, 40, 50 years, to really know the song of the plants
00:29:44 ►
and the relationships we can
00:29:46 ►
build with the plant world. Now, of course, at this time as well, it’s getting pretty
00:29:51 ►
urgent out there. There’s this sense of planetary emergency, and in every emergency is the opportunity
00:29:59 ►
for emergence. And I believe the plan is coming to fruition, right? And this is what is meant to be
00:30:07 ►
happening. You know, this is the deadline. This is the kick up the ass to get out of bed and to
00:30:12 ►
start to actually do the work. And we’re all feeling that the water’s boiling and the frog’s
00:30:18 ►
about to jump out of the pot of water because, you know, these are the times and we are the ones
00:30:24 ►
and there is work to be done.
00:30:26 ►
So what is this work? This is the work of the soul.
00:30:29 ►
This is the work of remembrance.
00:30:31 ►
This is a remembrance of who and what we really are, how we connect to the web of life,
00:30:36 ►
how we anchor this energy, and how we then bring in this right relationship of living on the earth
00:30:42 ►
and let the plan come through us. Because
00:30:45 ►
we are part of this. We are the nerve endings of the divine in matter. We are the crest
00:30:51 ►
of the wave, but all the other species and all of history has built this wave that we
00:30:57 ►
are inhabiting the crest of. So it’s a great joy, but it’s also a very great responsibility.
00:31:03 ►
So as more and more Westerners engage with ayahuasca
00:31:06 ►
and many other plant medicines,
00:31:08 ►
we are getting cleansed and we are getting anchored
00:31:11 ►
into the remembrance of the spiritual ecology,
00:31:14 ►
of what this dimension is.
00:31:16 ►
So I feel it’s time to go to the next level,
00:31:19 ►
to train ourselves, to support ourselves,
00:31:22 ►
and to bring back the information and to weave, to reweave
00:31:26 ►
this relationship with the earth and with the spiritual dimensions. And this is the
00:31:31 ►
essence of what religion is. And so of course, you know, religion has got a bad rap because
00:31:36 ►
just look at history. Forget history, it’s over, right? His story is over, this is the
00:31:41 ►
new beginning. But the original Latin for religion is to
00:31:45 ►
re-weave, to reunite, to what? To the planet, to great spirit, to the thing which we are
00:31:53 ►
born from and are going back to and are part of in this great plan. So this generation
00:31:59 ►
of shamanauts is engaging in this remembrance of working with ayahuasca on going deeper themselves
00:32:06 ►
going vertical with their experiences and as on the horizontal axis ayahuasca is spreading all
00:32:12 ►
across the world ayahuasca seems to be the vanguard plant entheogen it has these built-in safeguards
00:32:19 ►
that you purge it can’t really be used recreationally. There is a lineage attached
00:32:26 ►
to it which is what the 60s generation
00:32:28 ►
was missing out on. They wanted
00:32:30 ►
the elders, they wanted the peers
00:32:32 ►
to say you’re on the right path
00:32:34 ►
or to tell
00:32:36 ►
them you’re fucking up, you’re going overboard
00:32:38 ►
with the acid, whatever. We now
00:32:40 ►
have this lineage of curanderas
00:32:42 ►
of shamans, of healers across the world
00:32:44 ►
in many
00:32:45 ►
different cultures, not just in ayahuasca culture.
00:32:48 ►
And remember, these are not gurus.
00:32:50 ►
These are men and women who work with the plant medicines for the benefit, usually,
00:32:56 ►
of their communities for healing.
00:32:58 ►
The Western approach is a bit different.
00:33:02 ►
As I said, I would say, let’s say 10% of people have physical healings.
00:33:06 ►
The sickness that is being healed with Westerners
00:33:08 ►
is this disconnection of spirit,
00:33:10 ►
of this remembrance of what we’re embedded in and connected to
00:33:13 ►
and what we represent.
00:33:15 ►
And so as we come on board,
00:33:17 ►
and as more of us link together into these communities,
00:33:20 ►
ayahuasca and the shamanic modality
00:33:22 ►
is spreading all across the planet.
00:33:24 ►
Here in Byron Bay, all in the west modality is spreading all across the planet.
00:33:27 ►
Here in Byron Bay, all in the west coast of America,
00:33:29 ►
all over the western world,
00:33:32 ►
there are now neo-shamans of the global village.
00:33:34 ►
There’s more and more people.
00:33:37 ►
In the old days, if you took this rough analogy of one shaman in a village of 100 people,
00:33:40 ►
on a 1 to 100 ratio, we had 7 billion people and climbing,
00:33:44 ►
and on that ratio, if my math is good, and it’s sometimes not,
00:33:47 ►
we need something like 70 million healers
00:33:50 ►
or potential shamanic practitioners.
00:33:53 ►
We need, you know, and that’s just so we have a node in every network,
00:33:58 ►
and all those networks overlap in the global village.
00:34:01 ►
We need to have that grounding and anchoring
00:34:04 ►
to make sure everyone’s in sustainability
00:34:07 ►
and in connection with the spirit,
00:34:11 ►
the great spirit which emanates everywhere,
00:34:13 ►
omnidirectionally from the planet,
00:34:15 ►
from the sun, from every core of our being.
00:34:18 ►
We just have to tap into it.
00:34:19 ►
So this generation of Shamanos is going deeper.
00:34:22 ►
And in my recent Ayahuasca experiences
00:34:24 ►
on retreat in Peru,
00:34:27 ►
man, it just goes so freaking deep.
00:34:30 ►
The frog medicine seemed to activate me to these extremely high levels,
00:34:34 ►
almost like an electric fence, right?
00:34:37 ►
That level of intensity, of vibrational intensity.
00:34:40 ►
And as the Ayahuasca came on, boom, it just went past the visionary realm, almost to the white light, to the intelligent, and it is loving, and it is intense. Because as it
00:35:09 ►
tries or as it ingresses into the dimensionality of our individual bodies, we have to be strong,
00:35:17 ►
and we have to be clean, and we have to be the perfect vessel to hold this divine energy.
00:35:26 ►
This is what I feel it was asking of me,
00:35:32 ►
and so this is what I’m sharing with you. What I see the vision for this generation of Shamanauts to be, is to be the best vessels we can be for this divine energy. Because it’s not just us,
00:35:41 ►
and it’s not just the planet which is growing and evolving and becoming the best it can
00:35:45 ►
be. I’m going to use the God word. The God or the divine force or the unified field of being itself,
00:35:54 ►
it is perfecting itself. It is growing and it is growing through relationship with us. And so all
00:36:01 ►
of us are in synergy. We are in hopefully more and more correct relationship with that
00:36:06 ►
and when we do that it’s like a circuit board
00:36:09 ►
and the circuit board doesn’t have any burnt out circuits,
00:36:12 ►
it doesn’t have any broken edges,
00:36:14 ►
it’s all connected up into this perfect symmetrical circuit
00:36:18 ►
which can hold the energy emanating and coming through
00:36:22 ►
and so I have an inkling from my intuition where that could go,
00:36:28 ►
but it’s up to us.
00:36:29 ►
This is the generational challenge of us to just continue what we’re doing
00:36:34 ►
with awareness, with grace, with dignity,
00:36:38 ►
and to help and nurture each other as communities across the globe
00:36:42 ►
and recognize this is a global endeavor. This is not
00:36:46 ►
just here in Australia or in America or in Britain or in Peru or in Africa. This is basically the
00:36:52 ►
reunification of the human species with the planet in right relationship with the divine source
00:37:00 ►
itself. And I don’t think I can say anything else after that.
00:37:05 ►
Thank you.
00:37:07 ►
And that was that.
00:37:16 ►
I will take any questions if anyone has any. Yeah, I was going to say, go for some questions.
00:37:19 ►
So the question was, what is the relationship between
00:37:22 ►
the toad medicine, the Bufo albarius toad and the
00:37:26 ►
5-MeO DMT in the frog
00:37:27 ►
and ayahuasca. Thank you
00:37:29 ►
because that was what I wanted to get to as well.
00:37:32 ►
Ayahuasca usage has been
00:37:33 ►
coming back to the western
00:37:36 ►
modality for 20-30
00:37:37 ►
years and it’s been building and building
00:37:40 ►
and building. It feels to me
00:37:42 ►
like this has been part of the first
00:37:44 ►
steps of the relearning.
00:37:46 ►
And as I was saying before, Ayahuasca has these built-in protections and modalities
00:37:50 ►
where it’s the perfect entheogen to go out into the global village and to rekindle this
00:37:56 ►
awareness.
00:37:57 ►
And as it spreads, people are getting healed and they’re getting illuminated and they’re
00:38:02 ►
opening up.
00:38:03 ►
And Ayahuasca has done such great work and I continue to work
00:38:06 ►
with ayahuasca and I love ayahuasca. And it feels as if perhaps the different entheogens are part
00:38:14 ►
of a larger pattern and a cascade. The human brain has many different varieties of dimethyltryptamine.
00:38:21 ►
There’s the NMDMT, the 5-MEOMeO DMT, there’s pinolene. And if you’re
00:38:27 ►
in one of these tribal darkness rituals for nine days and nights, the brain itself will
00:38:32 ►
start to secrete your endogenous DMT and you’ll go into a visionary state. When it does that
00:38:37 ►
though, it secretes the DMT in different layers. And interestingly enough, so what’s been described
00:38:43 ►
to me is that, say,
00:38:45 ►
all the entheogens that exist are like baubles or decorations on a Christmas tree. Say it’s
00:38:50 ►
the tree of life, right? And all the different entheogens are on the different branches.
00:38:55 ►
And then at the top is the star or the light. And that light is the 5-MeO-DMT. It seems
00:39:03 ►
to be experientially and subjectively
00:39:05 ►
and perhaps even scientifically
00:39:07 ►
the most powerful entheogenic catalyst that we know of.
00:39:11 ►
It’s the pure white light.
00:39:13 ►
It’s the thing which you cannot go any further into
00:39:16 ►
without crossing over.
00:39:18 ►
And the plant-based form of that,
00:39:20 ►
in the cascade, in the darkness ritual,
00:39:23 ►
it’s actually the second one that comes out
00:39:24 ►
and it de-armors the body. As it goes through the body, you start to release
00:39:29 ►
all the tensions and all the stresses and it’s not necessarily just a white light.
00:39:34 ►
So what seems to me is happening, this idea that the five MEOs are the top of the tree,
00:39:39 ►
is that there’s initiations and there’s protocols and there’s commissions on a spiritual level
00:39:46 ►
that we’re meant to go through first before we go to these larger levels.
00:39:51 ►
And it’s not to say that perhaps psilocybin mushrooms are better or worse or less than ayahuasca,
00:39:58 ►
but all of these things are serving similar purposes in sifting and gradiating,
00:40:04 ►
and it’s almost like the washing machine. You on the permanent press or something and they’re getting
00:40:08 ►
rid of all the gunk and cleansing and then when you’re clean you’re ready for
00:40:12 ►
the next levels and so some of these deeper levels lead up to the DMT like
00:40:17 ►
that if you have an end EMT this book would be smoked EMT you can go into very
00:40:23 ►
very deep visionary experiences,
00:40:26 ►
which sometimes you get to on ayahuasca, but not all the time.
00:40:29 ►
Ayahuasca is predominantly more healing.
00:40:31 ►
Westerners are drawn to this idea of visions.
00:40:34 ►
They’re drawn to this tangibility and this authenticity that if you’re seeing it,
00:40:39 ►
it must be real, even if it’s confusing and it’s this weird vision that something’s happening.
00:40:43 ►
So the DMT can take us to many of these realms within the terra incognita, and you can go
00:40:51 ►
to there, but then the 5-MeO DMT is said scientifically to be about 10 times more powerful and potent
00:40:58 ►
than NM DMT.
00:41:00 ►
So if you use an analogy like the Tibetans with the Bardo states in the Tibetan book of the dead
00:41:06 ►
it’s almost like there’s another analogy
00:41:09 ►
the Sufis say there’s 50,000 layers
00:41:11 ►
of illusion between you and God
00:41:12 ►
but none between God and you
00:41:14 ►
and so these 50,000 layers
00:41:16 ►
are like curtains
00:41:18 ►
or they’re permissions
00:41:20 ►
and protocols, they’re layers which are there
00:41:22 ►
for our protection
00:41:24 ►
because as you get closer and closer and closer
00:41:27 ►
to the raw, naked face of God,
00:41:29 ►
it burns, man.
00:41:31 ►
It’s too dense.
00:41:32 ►
It’s too much.
00:41:34 ►
So the 5-MeO-DMT,
00:41:37 ►
and especially from the frog,
00:41:38 ►
and I think it’s very important,
00:41:39 ►
there’s a distinction and a difference
00:41:40 ►
between the synthesized 5-MeO-DMT,
00:41:43 ►
which can take you to the white light tunnel,
00:41:45 ►
the classic mystical experience
00:41:47 ►
where the vibrational field opens you up
00:41:49 ►
and the drop rejoins the ocean
00:41:51 ►
and you remember that you are it
00:41:53 ►
and it is all there is and it’s the source.
00:41:56 ►
The frog medicine has extra alkaloids or trace elements
00:42:00 ►
and this connection to the frog.
00:42:02 ►
People have said to me,
00:42:03 ►
perhaps with the natural entheogens with the plants and the toad sorry that perhaps that spirit
00:42:10 ►
is also accompanying and so we adding an extra layer to the journey there’s
00:42:14 ►
something slightly more maybe not comforting but there’s an extra energy
00:42:18 ►
there so the 5m EO is pure white. In my experience recently with Dr. Reddick,
00:42:26 ►
it was pineal gland pop,
00:42:30 ►
unconditional love was washing down my insides,
00:42:34 ►
became a waterfall until I was drinking it in underwater,
00:42:37 ►
and drowning in pure vibrational density,
00:42:40 ►
heart of the star, the raw naked face of God inside me, and that feeling was
00:42:47 ►
pure unconditional love, like when you get from a baby or a small child.
00:42:51 ►
And we mainly know this feeling of love from connection with another, or maybe if we’re
00:42:58 ►
lucky, from ourselves, but this unconditional love is a vibrational frequency which permeates everywhere, everywhere and everything.
00:43:07 ►
It is the source, the density of the source.
00:43:11 ►
So when I went into the ayahuasca space
00:43:12 ►
after being activated by the five a week earlier,
00:43:15 ►
I went back to this space or very close to it
00:43:17 ►
and the density of vibration was too freaking much.
00:43:22 ►
And so what I think is happening
00:43:24 ►
on a larger cultural and evolutionary level
00:43:27 ►
is that the entheogens and ayahuasca
00:43:30 ►
have been preparing us to hold and receive the light.
00:43:35 ►
And the light at the top of the tree of life
00:43:37 ►
is the destination and it is the culmination of Gaia’s plan
00:43:42 ►
to bring in heaven on earth.
00:43:45 ►
And we are the bridges between heaven on earth.
00:43:49 ►
We are the receptacles that hold space between the worlds.
00:43:53 ►
And so, you know, if we could look at the shamanic movement
00:43:56 ►
in the West and globally now as this…
00:44:00 ►
It’s like baking a cake, you know, there’s these layers.
00:44:03 ►
And so all the entheogens are baking the cake
00:44:06 ►
and making it all ripe and juicy.
00:44:08 ►
And the 5-MeO is the icing on the cake.
00:44:11 ►
And collectively then, it’s the icing and the candles, boom,
00:44:14 ►
and the flame and going on.
00:44:17 ►
And Philip K. Dick has this term,
00:44:19 ►
he wrote a book called The Divine Invasion.
00:44:22 ►
And he was really switched on
00:44:23 ►
because the source is coming through multiple
00:44:26 ►
modalities, not just entheogens and not
00:44:28 ►
just us. It’s coming through the unified
00:44:30 ►
field and physics and it’s coming through
00:44:31 ►
the sun and it’s coming through astrophysics
00:44:33 ►
and the entheogens and, you know,
00:44:36 ►
your own practices because
00:44:37 ►
everything that exists is
00:44:39 ►
an anchor point for
00:44:41 ►
the divine energy to come through.
00:44:44 ►
And we’re now in a different cycle in our orbit
00:44:47 ►
of the Earth around the Sun and the Sun around the solar system
00:44:51 ►
and the solar system around the galaxy. We’re now in a different
00:44:55 ►
phase. We’re in a new world age. The whole Mayan idea of
00:44:59 ►
not just 2012 but the fact that the world ages have shifted. We’re
00:45:03 ►
receiving what I call 5 bar galactic godhead signal.
00:45:07 ►
And all of history has been like one-bar signal.
00:45:09 ►
And then we’ve gone back to ego and we’ve forgotten.
00:45:11 ►
But as more signal comes in, more of this energy comes in,
00:45:15 ►
more and more people are waking up all over the world spontaneously without anything
00:45:20 ►
because we’re being fed.
00:45:21 ►
The signal is rising.
00:45:22 ►
And so if we are being sculpted
00:45:25 ►
by divine energies, and the plants have been helping us remember, what it is to remember
00:45:30 ►
is where we’re headed, and it’s the light, the intelligent, sentient, and oh my fucking
00:45:37 ►
God, such loving light. It is pure love. And it sounds like a word, I can say the word
00:45:44 ►
love, but imagine diving into an ocean of love and And it sounds like a word, I can say the word love, but imagine
00:45:45 ►
diving into an ocean of love and feeling it all around, not just on the outside, but on
00:45:50 ►
the inside. And to know at the core of your being, not that just you are loved, you are
00:45:57 ►
loved. Right? And to know it radiating inside out, and then this is the lesson of the light that the toad has shown me.
00:46:07 ►
And I feel it’s very intense.
00:46:12 ►
It’s very, very intense.
00:46:13 ►
So don’t just rush out and want to do toad medicine.
00:46:17 ►
It is a permission and a protocol and a gift for when you are ready to hold it
00:46:24 ►
because it can fry the circuit.
00:46:26 ►
And as more and more people are ready,
00:46:28 ►
it will manifest in your life
00:46:30 ►
and more and more people will hold that light
00:46:32 ►
and more and more people will share that light
00:46:34 ►
and then this divine invasion,
00:46:37 ►
it’s not an invasion, it’s a remembrance,
00:46:39 ►
will manifest.
00:46:41 ►
And as certain people have related to me
00:46:43 ►
who have been initiated by Australian
00:46:45 ►
indigenous mobs, the aboriginals say the dream time is returning. We are coming full circle
00:46:51 ►
back to this phase in the cycle. And what would that mean? Well, the ayahuasca and the
00:46:57 ►
plant medicines and the antigens are giving us an inkling. They’re giving us a little
00:47:02 ►
taster. It’s coming on and we’re going back to where we are now.
00:47:05 ►
So imagine these are the training wheels
00:47:08 ►
to get ready for the real thing,
00:47:10 ►
for the permanent anchoring point
00:47:13 ►
of the divine energy on earth
00:47:15 ►
where you are connected with like angel mind,
00:47:18 ►
this bandwidth of frequency
00:47:19 ►
that is I’m here, I’m talking, I’m walking, I’m drinking
00:47:22 ►
and I can feel that frequency.
00:47:25 ►
I am connected to pure love and to the divine God,
00:47:28 ►
and it is both at once.
00:47:30 ►
And I can shift and feel that full love
00:47:32 ►
and be in interconnection, the holographic weave.
00:47:36 ►
You know, I can feel the connection to all things at all times
00:47:39 ►
in that unity consciousness,
00:47:42 ►
as the unity, the field of unified being
00:47:44 ►
is expressed in us and connects to everything.
00:47:47 ►
That’s what I think the Toad and the 5MEO
00:47:49 ►
and the Great Spirit and the Plan is doing
00:47:51 ►
as it ices the cake of us.
00:47:56 ►
And I’m going to leave it there.
00:47:56 ►
Thank you.
00:47:57 ►
I’m wrapping it up.
00:48:00 ►
On that note, though,
00:48:02 ►
if you want to come to experience
00:48:04 ►
one of my Ayahuasca Awakenings retreats, it’s ayah-awakenings.com forward slash retreats and to facilitate and help in everyone’s awakening
00:48:25 ►
because the teachers and the students learn from each other,
00:48:29 ►
and I love this work, so please join me. Thank you.
00:48:34 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
00:48:36 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
00:48:41 ►
Now, my guess is that not all that many of our fellow salonners can deeply, deeply relate to what Rack was trying to say just now
00:48:50 ►
about the fact that the core of our beings consists of pure, unconditional love.
00:48:56 ►
While that statement has been made many times by many people,
00:49:00 ►
my hunch is that not all that many of us have actually felt experientially felt what that means
00:49:07 ►
hopefully you’re one of them
00:49:09 ►
I don’t know how many psychedelic voyages that I’ve taken in my life
00:49:13 ►
using a wide variety of substances
00:49:15 ►
but there have been a lot of them
00:49:18 ►
and one of them, only a single one
00:49:21 ►
brought me to an experience of being an entity
00:49:24 ►
consisting only of love.
00:49:26 ►
But trust me, unless you have ever been there yourself, those are only words.
00:49:32 ►
I’ve never spoken about this before because I realize how ineffable such an experience is,
00:49:38 ►
and so I applaud Rock for at least pushing the envelope a little bit farther so as to let people know that,
00:49:44 ►
well, there is something out there that, if you haven’t touched it yet yourself,
00:49:48 ►
nonetheless, you can rest assured that it’s there.
00:49:51 ►
Just keep searching. Safely and carefully searching, please.
00:49:56 ►
And as for Rack’s proposition that nature may be communicating with us humans
00:50:01 ►
through specific chemicals in her plants,
00:50:04 ►
well, I doubt that if there’s a single person who has had a major psychedelic experience
00:50:10 ►
without coming back ecologically more aware, or green as some would say,
00:50:15 ►
it’s universal and that should be of some importance in our continuing discussions
00:50:20 ►
about legalizing the use of these plants.
00:50:23 ►
Isn’t it interesting that we humans have declared some plants
00:50:26 ►
that freely grow on this planet to be illegal?
00:50:30 ►
Now, if that isn’t presumptuous, I don’t know what is.
00:50:33 ►
Now, if you’re interested in learning more about plant medicines,
00:50:37 ►
one of the places that can be found is at a crowdsourced social enterprise
00:50:41 ►
in Eugene, Oregon that I’ve just learned of.
00:50:43 ►
This is a really interesting concept, and I’ll put a link to them in today’s program notes, Thank you. What services do we provide? A comprehensive lending library, an information center and community hub, harm reduction services,
00:51:10 ►
healthy and rational-based drug education for all populations, workshops, classes, and a referral service for addiction treatment.
00:51:19 ►
Their website goes on,
00:51:21 ►
Our project had its roots in the attempt of Eugene community members to donate their books.
00:51:27 ►
Current libraries in operation in the area were willing to accept our books,
00:51:31 ►
but declined to keep the collection intact.
00:51:34 ►
In other words, they would take our books and scatter the collection far and wide
00:51:38 ►
between different institutions.
00:51:40 ►
We envision not only keeping the book collection intact,
00:51:44 ►
but expertly curating the collection in addition to tripling or quadrupling the library collection and registering as a state library association and non-profit organization.
00:51:55 ►
That’s the end of what they say on their website. Actually, they say a lot more, but you can get the link to it in our program notes. But I’m also very pleased to let you know that the founder and director of this center is James Joseph,
00:52:09 ►
who’s been a fellow salonner for our full 10 years now.
00:52:13 ►
Now, another of our fellow salonners is Alan Lamberg, a screenwriter with a real gift, in my opinion.
00:52:21 ►
And like James Joseph, Alan has also decided to stand up and be counted.
00:52:26 ►
Recently, his latest movie was released, and it’s titled Casualties of the State.
00:52:31 ►
And you can find it online at all one word, casualtiesofthestate.com.
00:52:37 ►
And since my fantasy action adventure video viewing runs along the lines of programs like Covert Affairs and Strike
00:52:46 ►
Back, well, Alan’s writing really resonated with me. He tells me that he wrote this movie because
00:52:52 ►
he wanted to subtly get people thinking about the problem of war profiteering. And if you don’t think
00:52:58 ►
that’s a problem, then, well, you haven’t been paying attention for the past 50 years or so.
00:53:03 ►
It’s really a well-written film and has enough twists and turns
00:53:07 ►
that, well, it kept me guessing until the very end as to how it was going to turn out.
00:53:11 ►
So check it out if you get a chance.
00:53:13 ►
And if you move around in the Hollywood crowd,
00:53:16 ►
you may want to check it out as a possible pilot for a series.
00:53:20 ►
I can tell you that I, for one, am really interested to find out
00:53:23 ►
where the main character goes from here.
00:53:25 ►
And again, you’ll find links to Alan’s work in today’s program notes.
00:53:31 ►
Finally, there is one more movie that I want to tell you about.
00:53:34 ►
A week ago, I heard about this film and decided to give it a plug,
00:53:38 ►
but then I had an opportunity to watch it,
00:53:40 ►
and I’m here to tell you that this is most definitely a movie that you want to see.
00:53:45 ►
Well, it deserves much more than a simple plug.
00:53:48 ►
It’s by filmmaker Gay Dillingham, and is titled Dying to Know, Ram Dass and Timothy Leary.
00:53:56 ►
And you’ll find several links about it in today’s program notes, including a link to its trailer.
00:54:01 ►
But trust me, the trailer is barely the tip of the iceberg, so to speak.
00:54:06 ►
You see, while there is a significant amount of historical material in the film, ultimately
00:54:11 ►
what it is about is something that each and every one of us has in common. We’re all going
00:54:16 ►
to die one day. Like it or not, that is a fact, and as the movie points out, it is also
00:54:22 ►
a topic that is more or less taboo in polite company.
00:54:27 ►
Now, what our older salonners will remember, at least if they were online back in 1996,
00:54:33 ►
is that Timothy Leary, for a while, was saying that he wanted to stream his death experience live over the Internet.
00:54:40 ►
I can remember sitting in my home in Florida at the time, following all of the announcements on Leary’s website,
00:54:46 ►
but also making a firm decision that there was no way I was going to watch anyone die over the net.
00:54:52 ►
Ultimately, as it turned out, Timothy decided to keep his death on a more intimate level, and it wasn’t webcast.
00:54:59 ►
Nonetheless, the months of posts and comments leading up to his death were a watershed for many of us in that,
00:55:06 ►
well, it actually did cause us to give more attention to the fact that our deaths should
00:55:11 ►
be a time of excitement and happiness rather than a time of fear and dread. Yet, while the film
00:55:17 ►
makes an important statement about the true nature of the death experience, the bulk of the film is
00:55:22 ►
actually about Leary and Alpert, or Ram Dass, and the
00:55:25 ►
history that they created together.
00:55:28 ►
While you may have seen a few of the news clips before, like the ones where Leary testified
00:55:32 ►
to a Senate committee and was questioned by a very young Senator Teddy Kennedy, there’s
00:55:38 ►
a lot of historical footage there that I hadn’t seen before.
00:55:41 ►
For example, there’s one scene, this isn’t really historical,
00:55:45 ►
I guess, but it’s a scene with Leary and Alpert, who, as you know, is now known as Ram Dass,
00:55:50 ►
are looking through a box from Leary’s extensive archive. And, well, that scene really struck home
00:55:56 ►
with me because I’ve actually looked through many of those boxes myself. And thanks to the amazing
00:56:01 ►
efforts of Dennis Berry, who almost single-handedly preserved Dr. Leary’s
00:56:05 ►
archive over many, many years until the New York City Library took the collection over.
00:56:10 ►
But seeing Leary and Ram Dass happily sorting through the detritus of Timothy’s life should,
00:56:15 ►
well, it should be a thrill for anyone who has or will have visited the Leary archive in the
00:56:20 ►
library today. This is a really well-produced and high-quality film,
00:56:25 ►
and it’s narrated by Robert Redford,
00:56:27 ►
and features a significant number of famous people,
00:56:30 ►
both in old clips and in recent interviews.
00:56:33 ►
And for me, there were several loose ends that were taken care of.
00:56:37 ►
One of them involves some of the specific details
00:56:40 ►
about why Richard Alpert, Ram Dass, was fired from Harvard.
00:56:46 ►
And in case you didn’t know, Timothy Ram Dass, was fired from Harvard. And in case you didn’t know,
00:56:52 ►
Timothy Leary was never fired from Harvard. He resigned after Ram Dass was fired. Now,
00:56:57 ►
I’ve known the background story about the firing for quite a while now, but like most people who have heard the story, I’ve never spoken about it because I had only heard it from third parties.
00:57:03 ►
Well, this movie tells the complete story, and
00:57:05 ►
it’s told directly by the people involved. For that reason alone, this is a very historic movie.
00:57:11 ►
But don’t let me lead you to believe that this is just another documentary about the 60s.
00:57:17 ►
To me, well, it’s not a documentary at all, but rather a film about how a man came to the end of
00:57:23 ►
what can only be called one of the most extraordinary lives in modern American history,
00:57:28 ►
and at the end, how he came to accept and even embrace his final days and the end of his life.
00:57:33 ►
I’m going to post the four theaters in California where this film will preview on July 10th.
00:57:39 ►
My advice to you is that if you are anywhere near one of those theaters, then please don’t miss the chance to see this movie on the big screen.
00:57:48 ►
Just like the great movie about Sasha Shulgin called Dirty Pictures.
00:57:52 ►
Well, it may not get a wide release.
00:57:54 ►
Hopefully it will, but as someone who has missed out on seeing several interesting movies on the big screen,
00:58:00 ►
the way they are created to be seen,
00:58:02 ►
I’m here to tell you that you’ll probably regret it if you miss the July 10th limited release.
00:58:07 ►
So, if you are young and barely know about Ram Dass and Leary back in the 60s,
00:58:12 ►
well then this is a truly important film in that it will give you a significantly deeper understanding
00:58:18 ►
of what all has taken place to get us where we are today.
00:58:21 ►
Just think of it, in half of the states in this country almost, medical marijuana is now available. Thank you. Now, there’s still another reason for some of our fellow slaughters to see this film, and that has to do with its focus on the process of dying.
00:58:48 ►
In a few weeks, I’m going to be 73 years old.
00:58:51 ►
That’s actually just three years short of Timothy Leary’s age when he died.
00:58:56 ►
And if I told you that death was never on my mind, I’d be lying to you.
00:58:59 ►
And my guess is that the same is true for most people my age.
00:59:03 ►
And if they’re anything like me, they’ll come away from this movie with a much more peaceful attitude about dying.
00:59:09 ►
So I’m recommending that if you are young, you should see this film for the knowledge you’ll gain about the history of your tribe.
00:59:16 ►
But if you’re old, you’ll get much more than a history lesson.
00:59:19 ►
And maybe you can take your grandparents to see it, or if you’re a grandparent, maybe you should take your children and grandchildren to see it.
00:59:27 ►
Well, I guess that I’m just running on now and overselling it,
00:59:31 ►
but rest assured I have no financial interest in this movie.
00:59:34 ►
My only motivation here is to do whatever I can to encourage you to watch a truly inspiring film,
00:59:41 ►
and I’m sure that you won’t be disappointed.
00:59:43 ►
So for now, this is Lorenzo, signing
00:59:46 ►
off from Cyberdelic Space.
00:59:48 ►
Be careful out there, my friends.