Program Notes
Guest speaker: Hamilton Souther
[NOTE: All quotations are by Hamilton Souther.]
“In the jungle, the ayahuasca is used traditionally to heal what are known as mystical, non-ordinary, problems.”
“I came to look at it and realize that what we [North Americans] were looking for wasn’t specifically an experience that would produce healing, but we were looking for a shift in consciousness that would produce healing.”
“We are self-regulating, universal beings.”
“There can be negative effects, and that’s very real. The psychedelic plants are crap shoots in their own right, which makes having the presence of someone very trained very important. And that’s a departed point out in the world, like, take it and go and see what happens. I’m not of that group of thought. I think it’s very important to have people there who really, really know what they’re doing, like REALLY know what they’re doing.”
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Transcript
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Greetings from the psychedelic space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic
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salon.
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And sadly, I want to begin today by extending my love and support for the people
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of Beirut, and for the Russians who lost family members when the Islamic State blew up a commercial
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airliner, and to the people of France, all of whom have recently experienced the horror
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that religious fundamentalism has inflicted on us peaceful humans. It’s a sad season for reason, I’m afraid.
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And while I’m not going to spend all of our time together today
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focusing exclusively on the recent madness that our world has been experiencing,
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I do want to point out a couple of things that, well,
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may help us get a little bit better grip on life.
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First of all, if you’ve been using Periscope to follow these events on the ground,
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of all the several dozen scopers that I’ve been watching the past weekend,
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my favorite is a man who goes by the name Euro Maestro, and he lives in Paris.
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And if you are an old Occupy Wall Street alumni, you’re going to understand what I mean when I say that he reminds me a lot of Tim Pool, who videoed us through that experience.
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And the other thing that I want to point out is that while our national governments are responding to the Paris atrocity,
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and I have noted that for the most part they’ve been ignoring what happened in Beirut,
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For the most part, they’ve been ignoring what happened in Beirut.
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But what the big guys seem to think will help us is to begin a massive bombing campaign on the Islamic State’s main city.
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And since any bombing campaign is going to kill more innocent civilians than terrorists,
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it seems to me that these campaigns are morally unacceptable.
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But there is one bright light on the horizon, and that is the non-group that goes by the name Anonymous. So while the big governments are dropping bombs on cities, Anonymous has very
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quietly taken down thousands of Islamic State websites and Twitter posters. In my opinion,
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that is the way to deal with terrorists, one-on-one and not with big bombs. But hey, that’s
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just my opinion. So now let’s see if we can get our heads back together and listen to what I think
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is one of the best talks about the nature of consciousness that I’ve ever heard. Our speaker
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today is Hamilton Souther, and this is the talk that he gave a couple of months ago at the Planque Norte lectures
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which were held at the 2015 Burning Man Festival.
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And just as a little aside for our fellow salonners who have asked me to mention
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any little synchronicities that roll through my life,
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well, here’s one connected to this talk.
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And please don’t read anything into this.
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It’s just, for me, a neat little coincidence.
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But the last time that I went to Burning Man was in 2007, which was when I met Amanda and Jacob,
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a young couple who are close friends with my good friend Matt Palomary, better known as Mateo.
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Well, two days ago I went to Mateo’s 60th birthday party, and once again I got to visit with Amanda and Jacob.
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They told me that they were at the recent burn, but the only Planque Norte talk again I got to visit with Amanda and Jacob. They told me that they were at the
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recent burn, but the only Planque Norte talk that they got to hear was the one by Hamilton Souther,
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which I had just previewed that very day. Again, there’s nothing to read into this other than a
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nice little coincidence. So without any further ado, let’s join Pez now as he introduces today’s speaker.
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Hi, everyone.
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Welcome back to Palenque Norte.
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Thanks for joining us on this dusty afternoon in Black Rock City.
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So I’m going to introduce our next speaker.
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Today we have Hamilton Souther with us. And Hamilton is a master ayahuasquero and the founder of Blue Morpho Tours and Foundation.
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And he’s going to talk to us a little bit today about the work that he does.
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So with that, I’ll give you over to Hamilton.
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Thanks for being here with us.
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Yeah, thank you very much.
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So welcome, Burners.
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Like, why not?
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You know, we’re having a great time out here.
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What I wanted to talk about today is really more about consciousness than it is specifically psychedelics or visionary medicines.
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And I want to dispel a number of kind of common-held beliefs that are now emerging, especially around ayahuasca and the ayahuasca cultures, because it doesn’t really happen very often that the practitioners come
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out and really talk about the nature of the medicine and their experiences. So there’s a
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lot of information out there from people who’ve participated, but there’s very little information
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out there from people who’ve participated a lot and have dedicated their life to the practice of that medicine. So in my case, for those who don’t know, in 2002, I moved to the Amazon in the northeastern part
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outside of the city of Iquitos. And then from there, I moved 24 hours overland journey into
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the bush, into the jungle, and ended up living with two masters and trained with them like
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blood relatives, which at the time was taboo.
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It was taboo to teach foreigners the true medicine arts.
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But the guys that I worked with didn’t care.
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They were kind of like fed up with the whole thing,
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and they wanted to teach anybody who wanted to learn.
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And so I got to have an opportunity to sit with them
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and go through traditional apprenticeship,
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which for me lasted until around 2005. And then from there,
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I was a practicing ayahuasquero or specialist in ayahuasca plant medicine. Now, first of all,
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we have to understand that in the Amazon, the term shaman comes from Westerners coming to the Amazon.
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So there’s lots and lots of different practitioners and they all go by the name shaman,
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and they’re not all the same thing.
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They specialize in different kinds of plants, and they specialize in different kinds of practices of the art,
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very much like martial arts where there’s a whole lot of different styles and kinds.
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The same thing works in and around these plants.
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And so it’s really important to understand when you’re working with somebody what it is that they practiced.
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We were called medico-vegetalistas, which means doctors of plant spirit medicine.
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And the spirit part just means that philosophically they don’t separate out the notion of energy and spirit from healing in general.
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So you could treat the herbs very much like the way we would treat, you know, Western drugs from a pharmacy. It’s the same kind of idea, like, okay, we’re going to make these different plants,
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of which there were anywhere, depending on the shaman, between 300 and 500 plants they would know
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that were, you know, useful in terms of healing.
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And ayahuasca was only ever a tiny little part of the traditional practices.
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It was for very specific issues in very specific cases. Then they’d bring the ayahuasca
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bottle out. But most of the time, 90, 95% of the healing was without ayahuasca. And it was the
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works really much more like that of a doctor, not that much of a mystic, much more, much more just
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about healing colds and flus and when babies can’t nurse and when the elderly are having different
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kinds of problems or mending a broken bone or resetting a dislocated joint or something like
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that is really you know much more of the nature of the work and so it was only really with the
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influx of westerners and the attention placed on ayahuasca that all of a sudden there was like a
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huge amount of ayahuasca being practiced in that whole part of
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the amazon that was a whole advent of people becoming very very interested in those specific
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aspects of the practices but they were just like i say a very finite amount of it the in the jungle
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the ayahuasca is used traditionally to heal what are known as mystical problems, non-ordinary problems.
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So you have kind of like your ordinary medical practices,
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and then when all of a sudden you come up against a true non-ordinary problem,
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like something that for them is just unexplainable,
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then they go to the ayahuasca to be able to figure out what it is
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and how it is that they’re going to attempt to heal that problem.
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And it’s nothing like the the idea of just gathering for an ayahuasca ceremony.
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There’s a diagnostic process that takes place.
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There’s a treatment plan that takes place.
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And there’s like really a huge amount of follow through.
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When Westerners came to ayahuasca, they came with different reasons.
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They had a kind of illness that mimicked Amazonian mystical illnesses,
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like in the way that it looked.
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But it was caused by very, very different reasons.
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The cause that I saw over and over again was a kind of like disenfranchisement
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and a kind of inner illness to the nature of their life, job, family,
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and society that they lived in. And Westerners were looking for a solution for that. And then
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they started to come, you know, in significant numbers as soon as ayahuasca was heard that that
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was possible. I came to realize that that was possible. I wanted to understand the mechanism,
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right? I was really fascinated by the mechanism of ayahuasca because I had a very rare opportunity to be able to be with the medicine
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all the time, like literally all the time. For 12 years, I drank ayahuasca more than 100 times a
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year straight, like every year. That’s all we did was drink ayahuasca, do dietas and heal.
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And so having that much time, it allowed me tremendous exploration to try to understand not only the commonalities, but also the anomalies.
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Like, when it didn’t work, why?
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You know, why would it heal some people of some things, but not everybody?
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Like, what was really going on with the nature of this medicine and i came to look at it and realize
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that what we were looking for wasn’t specifically an experience that would produce healing but we
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were looking for a shift in consciousness that would produce healing and i got really really
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interested in the idea of what is this medium that we have called consciousness like like we’re all using it right now to be alive and in its interaction or however
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we relate to this this you know consciousness we would find that people would have shifts and it
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would result in healing and we would find that people wouldn’t have shifts and then it wouldn’t
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result in healing but it was always the notion of a shift in consciousness that could then over time be duplicated or it would be something that could be integrated from that point.
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And so consciousness became really the nature of my own focus.
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Ayahuasca I saw as a means of altering consciousness and a way to be able to navigate it. of that medicine form was that it’s so potent so fast you could get past all of the blocks and all
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of the things inside of you that would hold back from accessing these different aspects of ourselves
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all of these different fears that we would have and it would also offer us a significant amount
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of time in that space to be able to really navigate so you could go into an altered state
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where you would be able to find a stabilization point within it,
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which I just think that that means, again, you’re cool,
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because when it comes on, it’s not that easy.
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There’s a lot of often physical discomfort,
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and then there’s a beginning of the visionary experience,
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which for some can be very foreign because it’s so strong so fast.
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But once you get in there and you get comfortable, you gain this ability to start to navigate the space and really be able to explore.
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And, you know, often when I hear people talk about ayahuasca, they talk about getting like steamrolled or overwhelmed or blindsided by the power of this thing.
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And I came to look at it as a thing like that’s just too much
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like that’s more than what you can ingest and handle that’s more than what the body can really
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assimilate and so that wasn’t necessary what we were looking for was a co-participatory experience
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where you could really meet and engage the plant and be lucid and awake within that state, not just in the galactic spinning washing machine
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that would be often common for people.
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And when we found that sort of bi-directional sharing with the plant,
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we started to be able to gain an ability to really start to look at consciousness,
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not just from the perspective of I’ve had a shift in consciousness
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and now I’m different, but actually understanding the’ve had a shift in consciousness and now I’m different,
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but actually understanding the nature of that shift in consciousness.
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When I was looking at consciousness, I was like, well, what is it?
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What is consciousness?
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We all have it. We all have it.
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But what actually is it?
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What’s this substance or what is the collective consciousness or what is our consciousness
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or what does it mean to be human or why are we even alive like these questions would come about
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and i saw that the problem in the study was that we didn’t have a way to be able to to
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to know it because we were it so to know it we would have to be it and we would have to allow
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for that and that was kind of anti-science just in general as an anti-empirical way of understanding something if you had to allow yourself to be it
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while you studied it and then it would require you to not only be it but do concerted efforts
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for yourself to be able to make shifts in it and to start to see how you can play with this
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mechanism or this medium so i started to look at well how could we at least
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understand it like what can we use to recognize and i came up with a very simple map for it
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i realized that in every single moment of our lives we experience in different random patterns
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different forms of really four kinds of perception. Like, how do we perceive anything?
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Like, how do we perceive right now?
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It’s like, well, one kind of perception that we have is physical.
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It’s all of our physical senses.
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It’s your taste, touch, sound, hearing, your feeling.
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Another kind was mental, and it was thought,
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and it was really analytical.
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It was like A, B, C, D, E,
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and my brain already
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knows what the rest of the alphabet is. The other was a different kind of cognitive process
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that was much more imaginative. And I realized that the part of that process was to extend us
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beyond our rational capacities. Like our rational capacity has a limitation and to go beyond that,
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we needed another mechanism and we found it right inside our brain in the form
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of an imagination but the problem with the imagination is that it’s highly susceptible
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to delusion you can make up anything in there and if you believe it to be true when it’s not
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you get in trouble like down the road you know and so we had the imagination and then we had
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feeling you know we have like the actual feelings, the emotions,
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like sadness, anger, happiness, joy, peace, all of those.
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And through that tapestry of physicality, imagination,
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analytical process, and the emotional feeling,
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we finally had an understanding of the totality
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of what we use to perceive anything.
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And it’s coming through one of those four realms and if we look at our lives we can see that every experience that we’ve
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had we’ve had through these kind of sensory input mechanisms that was really really important to be
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able to find because it gave us an ability then to accurately describe what we were experiencing
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and when we were pushing states of
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consciousness it allowed us to be able to know what was creating the nature of that vision
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you know what were these things called spirits what were these designs what were these sacred
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geometries how did we relate to the nature of them and so we finally had a model to understand
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the nature of consciousness itself in a very, very simple map.
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Again, just feelings, your physical senses, your thoughts, your imaginations, your emotions.
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Once we were able to understand consciousness, it’s like, okay, we can now create shifts in consciousness that could be used specifically for healing.
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shifts in consciousness that could be used specifically for healing. When you take psychedelics for the purpose of healing, it’s like a crapshoot, even for the best shamans, right? For the very,
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very, very best shamans, they’re going in there and they’re saying, okay, we’re going to give you
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this thing and we don’t really know what’s going to happen because you’re the one taking it, right?
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If I took it, I would know pretty much what’s going to happen after you drink ayahuasca somewhere between 800 and a thousand times you kind of get the map for it you know you kind of
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worked through enough of the the kind of like assumptions you make from peak experiences to
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really have a depth of an understanding for what this plant is and combination of plants are
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providing you know and so with a map it says, we don’t have to just throw a peak experience
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or an altered state at this and then try to do something with it in the middle of it.
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We can actually create it.
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We could create an altered state using very specific methodology,
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which had been already mapped over 5,000, 10,000 years.
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There’s all different meditative states,
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all different yogic states, floating states and float tanks, binaural beats, all different ways
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to be able to generate altered states. Burning man is a totally different state of consciousness.
00:17:38 ►
And I started to realize that consciousness was a medium of great flexibility, like tremendous, tremendous flexibility.
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But we didn’t know how to harness that same flexibility because when you would go to heal, you would find somebody that was now in a repetitive state.
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Where the illness just over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again would repeat itself.
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I thought that’s the hardest thing to do in this universe.
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and over again would repeat itself i thought that’s the hardest thing to do in this universe the hardest thing to do in this universe is do the same thing over and over and over and over
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and over and over again like your atoms don’t even want to do the same thing over and over and over
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and over again your electrons don’t want to do the same thing over and over and over again so
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to have that ability you know proved like a very very very dense very very very
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specific very fixated map that we could then start to look at you know like okay how could we create
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a shift in conscious that would allow us to be able to move through these you know these problems
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and if we could open somebody up and we could take them through a series of movements we could
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start to repattern the nature
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of the being so that a person would have an opportunity to change. And that all we needed
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to do to be able to create healing was create a scenario where there was truly an opportunity to
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change, right? Not a made up opportunity, but one that was real, like, okay, I have been through
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these experiences and now I am feeling X, Y, and Z, and now I have an opportunity to
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change that if I actually want to. And so this idea of exploration of consciousness had always
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been a crapshoot, and what we needed was really a way to be able to go about it, right? People
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always talk about space as having this tremendous importance in shifting consciousness and peak experiences, shamanism, ceremonies, really all of it.
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And so we are also at the same time looking for consciousness,
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looking for a way to stabilize the nature of the space.
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I came to look to understand that we had to look at what are called universal states.
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Universal states are those states that apply to everybody.
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If you’re going to hold a space for whomever’s showing up, it better be a space that can handle whatever everybody’s bringing,
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right? You can’t have a space that’s going to break down because somebody shows up with stories,
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you know, of like really intense things that have happened to them, like exorcisms or possessions
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or whatever like that. So I said, we need to look at universal states to be able to understand
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what everybody’s bringing. And so I started to also
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map those. And I saw that there are lots of commonalities between all of us, significant
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commonalities between all of us, including the nature of our consciousness, and that we needed
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to no longer look at the differences between everybody, but we really needed to look at the
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similarities between everybody. And so the very first similarity that I saw was really simple. It’s that for every moment you’re alive, there’s a universe. Yeah, we seem to
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disregard that universe and take that universe for granted while we’re going about our busy day.
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But the universe is by far the most important thing we have going on other than our own lives,
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because that’s where our lives are taking place. The second one was time. For every moment or for every experience
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that you have in this universe, time has a correlation associated with it. And when you
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have a universe and you have time and you have awareness, you have a human being. You have one
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of us. And it’s all very, very simple. It’s a simple awakening where we all know who we are
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and we’re able to communicate based off of that.
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And once you have a universe and time and you have a being, you have consciousness.
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That consciousness to be alive is in motion and it moves for everybody.
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It moves in a vibration as well as it moves linearly around here.
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So right now you guys are all emitting electromagnetic frequencies and then people debate
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auras but you’re emitting electromagnetic frequencies right now and right now your brain
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is functioning and it burns glucose as light really it’s like a light computer machine and
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that also gives off energy in the form of heat and lots of other things and so we are these vibrating
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you know physics-based beings as well as these incredible consciousness mystic-based
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beings all the time. That motion has turned into the experiences of our whole life. And then,
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ta-da, we as individuals show up. And then I found that there’s this huge war on selves, like
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no one likes being themselves. And so they call it ego and then they make it really bad.
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And I was like, well, that has to end because you only
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get one you get you and that’s the one you’re going to get through this incredible earthwalk
00:22:10 ►
and so that’s the one we need to make friends with to make friends with that I realized there
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was another universal expression within us which was the heart and the heart had within it love
00:22:21 ►
like I don’t know why I didn’t pick it that way i didn’t like create it
00:22:25 ►
but i noticed that we all had these hearts and love was in our heart and it was the only place
00:22:31 ►
i could find that ultimately never got tainted by life experience duality problems issues anything
00:22:38 ►
like that it was like your heart would get hurt from experience and it would like armor itself
00:22:44 ►
before the core of it would ever get truly tainted.
00:22:47 ►
But then it would be scared to ever go there again.
00:22:50 ►
It’d be like, no, no, no. If I surrender to that much innocence again, I’m going to get pounded and I don’t want to go there.
00:22:55 ►
You know, and but I realized at least it hadn’t been touched by life.
00:22:58 ►
It was truly, truly whole, deep, deep within us.
00:23:07 ►
deep deep within us and then i knew that that love meant more than absolutely anything that we had in life because it was the true consistency while your brain could have done anything through
00:23:12 ►
this incredible journey your heart deep inside was always doing exactly the same thing moment
00:23:17 ►
by moment by moment by moment by moment and that was sustaining your life and loving in a very very deep way beingness right
00:23:27 ►
and so i knew that that commonality between us was the most important part to this whole idea
00:23:34 ►
of having a space where we could all be included and then we could all explore consciousness
00:23:38 ►
together it’s that if we could meet in an understanding that we are all put together
00:23:43 ►
in exactly the same way,
00:23:45 ►
we all share universe, we all share time, we all share awareness, we all share consciousness,
00:23:49 ►
we all share perception, we all share movement, vibration, and action,
00:23:54 ►
we all share interaction, our lives themselves, and we are all one complete whole being,
00:24:00 ►
and we all have love in our hearts, and we choose that love,
00:24:03 ►
then we have an infinitely safe space now
00:24:06 ►
in which to be able to explore consciousness,
00:24:09 ►
understand our own beings,
00:24:10 ►
and the entirety of that dualistic paradigm
00:24:13 ►
that plagued tribal societies as well as our own
00:24:16 ►
and also psychedelic expressions could vanish.
00:24:19 ►
And it would be that easy.
00:24:21 ►
It would just be people getting together for exactly the same reasons,
00:24:24 ►
which is to explore consciousness and to be able to heal and grow within themselves but know that
00:24:30 ►
they are infinitely safe the whole time through the entirety of the practice because the people
00:24:35 ►
there are deciding to heal through love and it’d be like you know an unbelievably simple and
00:24:40 ►
unbelievably safe way of going about the nature of that practice once we had discovered
00:24:46 ►
all of these different pieces like i said through you know many many many ceremonies i realized that
00:24:51 ►
we had something that really needed to be shared you know we need we finally had a methodology we
00:24:56 ►
had a way that we could go about these explorations and be completely safe be completely open be able
00:25:02 ►
to have it be a scenario where it could be co-participatory
00:25:05 ►
because the exploration was no longer people healing other people, but everybody healing
00:25:10 ►
everybody through a universal context that we had within us already.
00:25:15 ►
We didn’t have to go outside of us to find these, you know, incredible medicines to be
00:25:20 ►
able to be healed.
00:25:21 ►
We could use the incredible medicine that we already had inside of us.
00:25:24 ►
We just needed to have the wherewithal of how to access it. You know, we needed to have a way to
00:25:29 ►
be able to get through literally all of the stuff and traumas that had happened to us.
00:25:35 ►
And I looked at life and I said, like, well, why? Why? Why are we suffering? Like, what’s happening?
00:25:40 ►
Like, why? Never made any sense to me. I mean, I think that life is the most incredible thing there is. But it seems like there’s this insane amount of suffering that goes on with it, even for like the lucky people, the not so lucky people, whatever. It’s like no matter how it is, everybody was having some difficulty.
00:26:10 ►
And I look back on it and I finally came to a very simple idea just that when we’re little, like when we’re really, really little, we’re not good enough for the space that we’re in.
00:26:12 ►
We’re not accepted wholly just for being.
00:26:14 ►
And we don’t really understand that.
00:26:19 ►
I mean, like one, one and a half, like 18 months, like, you know, six months old.
00:26:20 ►
It doesn’t really matter.
00:26:21 ►
You’re this little baby.
00:26:25 ►
And as this little baby, you can’t even psychologically differentiate from the space around you and everybody knows that’s an adult around you that you have to be
00:26:31 ►
differentiated very very very soon or it doesn’t work out for the nature of our society and it’s
00:26:38 ►
like that’s an experience of a kind of separation that doesn’t specifically have to be traumatic, but it is something that makes us
00:26:45 ►
buy into a concept that’s very foreign to us at that time. And it doesn’t really make sense.
00:26:51 ►
And then from that point on, we’re trying to find ourselves, right? You try and find yourself
00:26:56 ►
through childhood growing up and then through puberty, you absolutely try to find yourself.
00:27:00 ►
And then, you know, through later on in life, you continue to grow. And then we look at,
00:27:04 ►
you know, how do look at who am I?
00:27:05 ►
How do I find myself?
00:27:06 ►
How do I know myself?
00:27:07 ►
What’s this self-realization?
00:27:09 ►
What are these concepts of enlightenment?
00:27:11 ►
What’s this expansion in consciousness?
00:27:15 ►
And I came to realize you knew exactly who you were when you were a little kid.
00:27:20 ►
It wasn’t about becoming somebody else.
00:27:22 ►
It was about fully becoming just who you were
00:27:25 ►
and we didn’t know and nobody really knows who that is because it’s never really been allowed
00:27:30 ►
for we’ve never had a space where people could just be completely truly and 100 percent like
00:27:35 ►
just their own without another voice inside their head telling them who they’re supposed to be or
00:27:40 ►
how they’re supposed to be and i said well if that’s the problem then we have a very simple
00:27:44 ►
solution the solution is that we just decide that that’s how we’re going to roll.
00:27:49 ►
Like we just decide, oh, that’s really, really important. Like, hey, just because everybody else
00:27:53 ►
didn’t do it that way, we can start to make friendships and interact in a way that’s based
00:27:58 ►
just on the idea that you’re you 100 percent through and through. And so is everybody else.
00:28:04 ►
And so just make a space
00:28:05 ►
for everybody to be able to relate like that like unbelievably simple it wasn’t going to require
00:28:10 ►
anything more than just an agreement amongst people and you know burning man has proven over
00:28:17 ►
and over and over again that those spaces can be created there can be spaces where people can have
00:28:23 ►
expression and it doesn’t have to be somehow
00:28:25 ►
harming to the other people around them because they decide within themselves to do it in a way
00:28:31 ►
that works for them you know so when i realized we had this problem of this trauma and this idea that
00:28:38 ►
that we have a kind of internal like you know crisis in a way like who really are we as we
00:28:44 ►
move through life
00:28:45 ►
simply because we got scared to be who we really were from the very beginning you know and i
00:28:51 ►
understood that that would take a lot of trust to be able to be willing to go back to that place
00:28:55 ►
where we experienced an initial core separation or wound you know from early in our childhood but
00:29:01 ►
it would be easy to do if we were surrounded by people in a very loving environment. It wouldn’t be hard at all to go back to that place to really
00:29:09 ►
know ourselves if the environment around us was saying like, hey, that’s what we do here,
00:29:14 ►
right? Like you behave some other way in some other place, but what we do here is just give
00:29:19 ►
you an opportunity to be able to go all the way back through time and go sort it all out and make it really,
00:29:25 ►
really easy instead of this process that’s like really difficult on how to be able to address
00:29:31 ►
like the nature of our past and the kind of stuff that we’re carrying around.
00:29:35 ►
I wanted to solve a very simple problem. The problem I saw was choice, not like do we have
00:29:41 ►
choice or do we not have choice? But like, I didn’t rationally as the
00:29:45 ►
guy named Hamilton choose where I was born as the guy named Hamilton. Like I didn’t choose that. Not
00:29:52 ►
in a way that I know. I mean, other people talk about divine contracts and before this life and
00:29:56 ►
stuff like that, but I’m talking about the guy in the chair. I’m not talking about the guy before
00:30:00 ►
this life. I’m talking about this guy who was like was like okay i got brought into life in a place that kicked off a whole childhood and a whole you know learning experience that then i
00:30:10 ►
evolved in without the faculty skills intelligence and abilities that i have today and so i was like
00:30:17 ►
i want the ability today to go through that same process i went through from one to four or zero
00:30:22 ►
to four i want to have that power back to
00:30:25 ►
get to do it again, this time using the knowledge that we’ve amassed over this much of a lifetime.
00:30:33 ►
I thought like that would be a really good idea. It’d be incredible to be able to go back and
00:30:37 ►
reprogram from early childhood until now within us, you know, based off the knowledge and
00:30:43 ►
understanding and love and support
00:30:45 ►
we have now, because when we experienced trauma in the past, the traumas that we experienced,
00:30:50 ►
like blindsided us, they came from nowhere, we didn’t really understand, we hadn’t lived through
00:30:55 ►
them. I don’t know about you guys. But like, when I got blindsided by stuff, like it freaked me out,
00:31:00 ►
like I get scared of existence anymore, like what’s going to happen next kind of a thing. They could like the the impact could be so strong. And then I was looking at it like, well, then then there’s a fixation on the problems themselves. It’s like, why are we fixated on trauma? Why are we fixated on victimization? Why don’t we just pay respect to the fact that life has really intense experiences and then start to learn how to heal them and move on from them.
00:31:28 ►
In my mind, how a group of people would come together when somebody’s sick or somebody’s in pain,
00:31:32 ►
and that it would be like common knowledge,
00:31:33 ►
not something that would be, you know,
00:31:35 ►
relegated to only those who had studied, you know,
00:31:39 ►
years and years and years on how to be able to help somebody.
00:31:42 ►
I’m like, from our hearts, we know how to help everybody.
00:31:45 ►
We know how to hold a baby and love a baby just because it’s a baby.
00:31:48 ►
And so why can’t we do that for each other at the same time
00:31:51 ►
when people are having a rough time?
00:31:53 ►
Support them and let them receive the kinds of energies
00:31:55 ►
and have them in a space where there could be receptivity
00:31:58 ►
instead of holding back.
00:32:00 ►
And a person could just receive the nature of that love
00:32:02 ►
and then experience a shift in consciousness. And that shift in conscious would be something that we could use for healing
00:32:08 ►
that was like all really big that took me a long time to figure out
00:32:12 ►
took me like over a decade but when i once i understood that it was like okay we can now use
00:32:18 ►
this for healing and i looked at our work in the amazon, which I thought was, you know, for us amazing. I mean, we started with I started with a backpack and a machete.
00:32:28 ►
And, you know, 13 years later, we had one of the largest and most renowned ayahuasca based healing centers in the world.
00:32:36 ►
And we’re, you know, receiving hundreds of people a year and taking them through these really amazing healing experiences.
00:32:44 ►
them through these really amazing healing experiences. But as I started to look at the mental health problem in the world, I started to realize that it was the biggest problem that we
00:32:49 ►
had as a collective group, as a species on the planet. We were talking about all of these other
00:32:54 ►
problems that we have. And I’m like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. How many people are suffering
00:32:58 ►
PTSD, depression, anxiety, and addiction on the planet right now. And I started doing the math and going through
00:33:05 ►
all the stats. And I came up with over 1.5 billion diagnosed. That doesn’t include undiagnosed.
00:33:12 ►
Like, wow, 1.5 billion. That’s wow. Wow. That that’s a lot. That’s a lot. And I was looking
00:33:21 ►
at I say, well, what does that really mean? That means your brain is struggling. That’s what it means.
00:33:28 ►
It means like our brains are struggling when we’re under that kind of duress.
00:33:31 ►
Yet we have to use that brain every single day to be able to make all the decisions that are guiding the nature of our life.
00:33:39 ►
And I said, well, that that’s big enough to to sway the collective global mindset.
00:33:44 ►
That’s big enough to sway the collective global mindset.
00:33:51 ►
If you have that many people suffering, that many people who are struggling in different kinds of forms,
00:33:57 ►
whether it be anxiety or whether it be depression or whether it be addiction or whether it be post-traumatic stress disorder,
00:33:58 ►
it wouldn’t really matter.
00:34:03 ►
That was affecting in different ways literally the entire globe.
00:34:05 ►
And I’m like, we’ve got to do something better than that. And no offense to the great pioneers who are figuring it out. I personally
00:34:10 ►
believe that as a collective, we have not devolved. I think we are continuously evolving and that this
00:34:15 ►
is as far as we have gotten. It’s not like we’re back in history. This is the now moving forward.
00:34:23 ►
But when I looked at a population of over 7. three billion people, I think if we’re going to have a population of that size, we better figure out mental health.
00:34:32 ►
Like we just need to figure that out. How are we going to have a population and a growth that keeps getting larger if we don’t figure out how to become emotionally and mentally stable together?
00:34:45 ►
stable together this is going to cause a lot of problems down the road especially when we know that these kinds of patternings of the psyche and the emotional states are passed on just by
00:34:52 ►
hanging out so the kids are getting it from the parents because they’re there every you know
00:34:57 ►
through great portions of the day and they have no no say over and so it’s just being regenerated
00:35:04 ►
over and over and over and over and over and over again,
00:35:07 ►
generation after generation after generation.
00:35:10 ►
And so I created a charity called the Blue Morpho Foundation.
00:35:14 ►
And I set our mission to cure a million people of PTSD by the end of 2018.
00:35:20 ►
And I was looking at these methods that we had been creating.
00:35:28 ►
And I said, you know, I want to create these and I want to give them to the world.
00:35:29 ►
I want to give them to people.
00:35:37 ►
I don’t want to put them out there and then, you know, hand them over to sort of the greater complex that we already have.
00:35:39 ►
I said, people need access to this.
00:35:47 ►
And so we created the charity with, you know, the main goal to provide now finally cures for trauma-based mental illness.
00:35:50 ►
And we had been told forever that that was impossible.
00:35:53 ►
And it’s not impossible to cure these trauma-based mental illnesses.
00:35:56 ►
It’s impossible with the current tools that we have.
00:36:00 ►
With the current tools that we have, it’s impossible to cure these mental illnesses. But it’s not impossible.
00:36:04 ►
cure these mental illnesses but but it’s not impossible human ingenuity and creativity has created every single tool we have on this planet from an original stone that got reshaped or a
00:36:11 ►
stick that got reshaped into iphones and telecommunication and these incredible technologies
00:36:18 ►
so we cannot say that human beings do not have the ingenuity to come up with solutions for these problems. We just didn’t know exactly how to be able to study them.
00:36:29 ►
So once we knew exactly how to study them, we said, okay, we can now cure these mental illnesses.
00:36:34 ►
And we’ve been curing them for a very long time.
00:36:36 ►
Shamans in the Amazon have been curing trauma-based mental illness for thousands of years.
00:36:42 ►
They do it in a way that’s really special.
00:36:44 ►
The very first thing they do is
00:36:46 ►
they recognize it really early. Like as soon as it happens, they’re like, oh, you got to go heal
00:36:52 ►
that, right? There’s a recognition of, oh, a problem has just occurred and now it needs some
00:36:59 ►
attention. And if you catch it really early, it’s really, really simple to straighten out because
00:37:04 ►
it hasn’t had a lot of time yet to grow and grow and grow and become more and more and more story and more and more and more fixated and part of your identity.
00:37:12 ►
And so you could just come in energetically, release it.
00:37:16 ►
I first started to realize that these guys were operating on a different platform when in their language they did not have words for stress, depression or anxiety.
00:37:25 ►
That vocabulary didn’t exist so i’m like well how do you have a group of people that are all living
00:37:29 ►
together that don’t know those words like those are like key words for us like how have you been
00:37:35 ►
stressed what’s going on i don’t know a little anxious you know like they didn’t they didn’t
00:37:40 ►
speak like that i realized okay they know how to heal this stuff right we had a problem though which was that the plants that they use are controlled substances in most parts of the
00:37:49 ►
world which created a question around legality and i took a stance you know which is one that
00:37:55 ►
i personally respected which is that i would respect the laws you know wherever they were
00:37:59 ►
and we practiced only in peru but it certainly created an issue of reach it was like well we have to move
00:38:05 ►
beyond the limitations of the plants for healing because there’s a huge number of people that need
00:38:11 ►
help and not everybody can have access to the plants and so once we understood that we were
00:38:18 ►
really looking at shift in consciousness we started to understand that the plants were tools as well as many many other tools that could
00:38:26 ►
get us into a receptive state and an altered state and then could start allowing allowing us
00:38:32 ►
to be able to move literally in consciousness and we do it by very specific movements in imagination
00:38:39 ►
very specific movements in feeling very specific movements in in in physicality and and in our uh
00:38:48 ►
in our senses so an example of that would be like there’s a point in we all share this moment
00:38:54 ►
and i think it’s the most important moment in our lives because it starts time for us in this life
00:39:00 ►
and it’s the moment when sperm mates egg and And for the very first time, you are your own
00:39:07 ►
organism. You’re no longer half dad hanging out where you hang out with dad and half mom where
00:39:14 ►
you hang out with mom. You are now your own thing. And in that moment, in that moment, only the
00:39:20 ►
universe and you know each other. Right’s a very very special moment from that moment
00:39:26 ►
time starts in your life and so from that moment we know that there was a first for absolutely
00:39:33 ►
everything and we can go back in time even if we don’t have a memory of it we know it we know it’s
00:39:40 ►
there we know the first time you got angry we know the first time you were sad we
00:39:45 ►
know the first time that you felt pain because it’s there somewhere it’s deep within the recesses
00:39:51 ►
of our being in psychology they used to say it was in the subconscious or the unconscious and
00:39:55 ►
i just think it’s in the not remembered and so i thought okay well we can as an example we can go
00:40:01 ►
back all the way to the beginning of the past and then we can run
00:40:05 ►
forward every moment of a person’s life all the way until right now, which got you right here.
00:40:11 ►
And we could see that in your life, there was not a missing experience. There was not
00:40:16 ►
a missing moment. There was not a missing anything. It was a single flow that was always
00:40:22 ►
emanating now that was stacking up time, allowing the past to just get more and more and more and more and more and more complex with more and more and more and more experiences with more and more and more and more firsts.
00:40:34 ►
And just that is an example of how all of a sudden we could grab the entire past and start healing just that instead of aspects or pieces of the past.
00:40:46 ►
instead of aspects or pieces of the past we could grab the entire past and go literally from that origin moment to very first trauma and then systematically run time forward within us and
00:40:52 ►
create shifts in consciousness that would allow for the healing of the entirety of that trauma
00:40:56 ►
pattern and you could do it literally over a couple of nights like you could do it in a couple
00:41:01 ►
of healing sessions you know four or five hours and have it be done and be completely done with the nature of the trauma and the feeling.
00:41:09 ►
When I looked at people’s past and the way that we were taught to understand our past, I saw that we were taught to be really vested in traumatic experiences that were pinpointed over huge courses of time.
00:41:25 ►
over huge courses of time. And so when people would be telling me their stories, which I listened literally in the thousands to thousands and thousands of people tell me their story,
00:41:29 ►
which is a tremendous honor. And I realized that they were picking 5, 10, 15 experiences out of
00:41:37 ►
trillions and trillions and trillions of experiences to build that story, to build that ability to say,
00:41:47 ►
of experiences to build that story, to build that ability to say, this is why I am the way I am today. And I looked at that mechanism and I thought, well, if that builds the story of why
00:41:51 ►
you are today, what happens if you build a completely different story? You get a completely
00:41:56 ►
different understanding of who you are today. And so I say like, great, if we can harness the
00:42:01 ►
entirety of the past, if we can harness that whole past at once,
00:42:06 ►
then all of a sudden we have an ability to heal all of it, all of it, not just the pieces,
00:42:14 ►
and take all of the beautiful moments and reawaken them in our consciousness.
00:42:18 ►
Bring in all the times that we’ve seen color and bring them into our consciousness.
00:42:22 ►
Take all the ways that we’ve ever seen flowers and representations of beauty, all the way we’ve ever connected with each other in ways that were
00:42:29 ►
loving based, all the awesome stuff about life that we would forget and not be vested in.
00:42:36 ►
And I thought it was really simple that if you look in your past from that perspective,
00:42:41 ►
you’re going to find out that the awesome experiences entirely outweigh the number of difficult experiences that we had.
00:42:47 ►
But instead, the content, the impact of the difficult experiences would overwhelm us in their nature.
00:42:55 ►
And so I realized we needed to take the totality of all of the great experience and bring it to those difficult moments
00:43:02 ►
and use all of that really, really positive energy and all of the really positive understanding and be able to come.
00:43:09 ►
And then we could actually heal those moments with what was already inside us.
00:43:13 ►
And that it wasn’t going to require any sort of medication and it wouldn’t require anything other than the totality of our own beings.
00:43:20 ►
What we’d have to grant each other was a space to get to be total to say you know something in
00:43:25 ►
this space you can just be the entirety of what you have going on it doesn’t really matter
00:43:29 ►
in terms of this or that it’s all of it anyway so why not let it be there
00:43:34 ►
once we learned to be able to turn it all on it was awesome because
00:43:39 ►
we discovered something very very important about. The emotions were like a huge,
00:43:46 ►
huge question mark always in psychotherapy and also in shamanic healing. It was like the emotions
00:43:52 ►
that got everybody all caught up. And so we were taught to use emotions, you know, and fix it on
00:43:59 ►
specific emotions and heal those emotions like this sadness. I have to get over this sadness,
00:44:03 ►
or I feel this despair, or I feel this envy, or I feel this jealousy or whatever. And I came to realize
00:44:09 ►
that that’s a broken mechanism within us. Just really, really simple. That’s our whole feeling
00:44:14 ►
body not really working very well. And I realized it wasn’t working very well because we were taught
00:44:18 ►
to have it function in a way where it doesn’t really work very well, which is to not really feel.
00:44:25 ►
And that what we needed to do was shift the model in its entirety and open ourselves up to feeling
00:44:31 ►
everything, but all at the same time. And it was super counterintuitive because you’re like,
00:44:37 ►
if I open up all of this sadness and I open up this fear and I open up the stuff that makes
00:44:41 ►
depression or anxiety all at the same time, I’ll be overwhelmed. And it’s like, and I realized that was due to a fixation.
00:44:48 ►
If on the contrary, if you opened it all up, including all the happiness, all the joy,
00:44:52 ►
all the love, all the connectedness, all the friendship, all the positive feeling with all
00:44:59 ►
the other stuff, you would get something completely different than what you even knew feeling to be.
00:45:03 ►
It would generate an ecstatic state.
00:45:06 ►
And that the ecstatic state could be something that was amazing.
00:45:10 ►
It was a thing that could generate an altered state of consciousness
00:45:13 ►
just by offering yourself the permission to feel
00:45:16 ►
and literally turning on that valve inside of you
00:45:19 ►
to let all of the emotions and all of the feelings run,
00:45:22 ►
but run together, literally run together.
00:45:26 ►
And then when we did that, we found that literally, literally we have everything we need already
00:45:32 ►
inside of us to be able to heal these mental illnesses as well as be able to heal directly
00:45:37 ►
from the heart.
00:45:38 ►
There was no limitation and there was absolutely no barrier that we have all of it.
00:45:45 ►
Literally, the feelings work in balance with the mind,
00:45:48 ►
that work in balance with the analytical and imaginative thought,
00:45:51 ►
which work in balance with physicality.
00:45:54 ►
And when we allow them to be turned on, when we allow them to fully express,
00:46:00 ►
when we allow them to balance each other and we allow ourselves the gift of that totality, what we get from it is an expanded, healed and very balanced state of consciousness.
00:46:11 ►
Your consciousness gets activated and then it also balances.
00:46:15 ►
And then you can start to systematically change in the nature of your life all of the places where you’re in conflict with yourself.
00:46:24 ►
Life’s really complex.
00:46:25 ►
And so having the ability to be completely conflict-free
00:46:30 ►
is pretty hard considering all the things we run into.
00:46:34 ►
But I recognized if we could approach life in a way
00:46:36 ►
where at least we weren’t thwarting ourselves
00:46:38 ►
as we had to deal with that other difficulty,
00:46:41 ►
it would be a tremendous leg up for us.
00:46:44 ►
So that you would
00:46:45 ►
actually be holistically harnessing all of your capacities naturally to be able to attempt or do
00:46:52 ►
whatever it is that was part of your normal daily life. And that that was literally as easy as
00:46:57 ►
granting yourself that ability, that it was innate within all of us. And we just needed to be able to go deep within our hearts to be able to
00:47:06 ►
connect all the pieces right so you have like this body and it’s made of 60 or 70 trillion cells
00:47:12 ►
and then you have this brain that runs on light and then you have this heart that has an eternal
00:47:18 ►
and infinite amount of love inside of it then you have your organs connected to all of your emotions
00:47:23 ►
right you have this light body you have this universe all around you and you have your organs connected to all of your emotions right you have this light body
00:47:26 ►
you have this universe all around you and you have the mechanism in which that incredible body was
00:47:31 ►
created and in that when it all would sync together we would be able to see a kind of consciousness
00:47:38 ►
that we had never really seen before because the consciousness that we had mostly been seeing
00:47:42 ►
was where there were conflicts between the imagination and the mind,
00:47:45 ►
conflicts in the emotion and conflicts in the self.
00:47:48 ►
And then if we had the ability, which we now definitely have,
00:47:51 ►
to be able to align all of those pieces,
00:47:54 ►
that we could create a freedom within our consciousness
00:47:56 ►
that we knew as babies, but we were never capable of having
00:48:01 ►
as we went through this very long period of time to learn analytical thinking we gave up a lot for analytical thinking it was very very important but it was the birth
00:48:11 ►
of all of our modern science and technology of which i would bet we’re all alive because
00:48:16 ►
like i know if i had been born 200 years ago i would have already been dead about 50 or 60 times
00:48:23 ►
you know and so we paid it as a collective.
00:48:26 ►
We paid a tremendous price for our really strong analytical concepts.
00:48:32 ►
But I think overall it was worth it.
00:48:34 ►
It was worth it to be able to hone a mind that could create wonders.
00:48:39 ►
But now it was time to heal the cost of that and that we didn’t have to lose anymore those tremendous analytical capacities to be able to have a holistic expression of ourselves.
00:48:51 ►
And that if we could grant ourselves that holistic expression, life would finally get to be what we always knew it was, which was just pure love and amazing awesomeness all the time, very, very deep within us.
00:49:02 ►
And that we could use those skills to be able to start to
00:49:05 ►
address in a very real way the conflicts around us and that if we did that, the whole world would
00:49:11 ►
gradually change. It would gradually become an expression that had a lot more peace and a lot
00:49:16 ►
more content in it for everybody. So anyway, that’s my time. Thank you very much.
00:49:22 ►
Thank you, Hamilton. So we have time for about three questions.
00:49:26 ►
My question is I’ve experienced some sacred medicine in Ushuaia, Quechua, Ecuador,
00:49:33 ►
and there’s a lot of Westerners that get help from the ayahuasca,
00:49:38 ►
but my question is where is, like, some of the highest depression rates, PTSD rates, suicide rates,
00:49:47 ►
domestic violence rates are in Native reservations in North America.
00:49:50 ►
And I just really would love to see more connection with that.
00:49:57 ►
And I see a lot of people going to these places and using the awesome benefits of the culture with pure light and love,
00:50:03 ►
but then forgetting about the culture that they, like know were able to be a part of yeah absolutely
00:50:10 ►
you know giving back to the culture is really key um the cultures that have preserved these
00:50:16 ►
medicine forms literally for thousands of years have been in the last hundreds of years in great
00:50:22 ►
crisis and there’s also there’s been a lot of criticism over the years of Westerners
00:50:27 ►
and the Western influx into the traditional medicines,
00:50:29 ►
but they’re also the preservation of those cultures
00:50:32 ►
because it’s the Westerners that really want to learn.
00:50:35 ►
There are a lot of people out there who really want to learn,
00:50:39 ►
and that’s not always the case amongst the locals.
00:50:42 ►
I mean, I found in the Amazon that the revival came around locals wanting to learn
00:50:48 ►
when Westerners started coming and wanting to learn and made it cool again and popular again.
00:50:53 ►
And so I think there’s a tremendous need as part of that to recognize the giving back
00:50:58 ►
and the support of that culture and the spread of it.
00:51:02 ►
First of all, thanks for that great talk.
00:51:04 ►
It was extraordinary.
00:51:07 ►
Would it be possible
00:51:08 ►
to think, I understand your respect for the
00:51:10 ►
controlled substances laws and so forth,
00:51:12 ►
but there are two religions, as you know,
00:51:14 ►
that can use controlled substances
00:51:16 ►
legally. One, of course,
00:51:18 ►
is the peyote religion, and the second,
00:51:20 ►
I can’t remember what it is, Santa…
00:51:22 ►
Santo Daime. Right.
00:51:23 ►
Yeah, and the UDV as well. The UDV also gained rights. Right, and they were defended by the Supreme Court, I can’t remember what it is, Santa. Santo Daime. Right. Yeah, and the UDV as well. The UDV also gained rights.
00:51:26 ►
Right, and they were defended by the Supreme Court, I believe.
00:51:30 ►
Wouldn’t it be possible for you to transform some of, you know, as a branch of one of those,
00:51:37 ►
maybe think of a religion but more of like a way of life that would be able to do what you want to do in America
00:51:44 ►
in the sense that a Unitarian church, you know church came out of a much stricter church?
00:51:49 ►
Yeah, I think that it depends on the evolution of the churches themselves.
00:51:53 ►
And legally, it’s a question of how those churches are defined.
00:51:57 ►
And I think that that’s a piece that often gets left out.
00:52:00 ►
When the Supreme Court passed the rulings in favor of freedom of religion,
00:52:04 ►
it was passed under very strict kind of legalese, really strict definitions and wording that allowed for all of that.
00:52:12 ►
The movement in general is looking for ways for people to receive benefit and healing in the nature of medicine. And what I know is that in the sort of the need that is finally
00:52:25 ►
being understood, the governments are starting to open up now once again to research. And I think
00:52:32 ►
the research could then lead to, you know, medical treatments that would allow for the different
00:52:37 ►
uses of the medicines. I think that there’s a problem in the world right now, which is a problem also of definition, which doesn’t understand yet collectively the psychedelic plants as medicines.
00:52:52 ►
They’ve been classified in a different kind of way.
00:52:55 ►
And, you know, we haven’t had 30 or 40 years of sort of Western scientific exploration and experimentation to really come to our own
00:53:06 ►
understanding and so we’re using traditional understandings of the plants and traditional
00:53:10 ►
methodologies and i think it’s really a need-based thing that has you know the need for psychological
00:53:16 ►
healing gets you know more and more and more understood which is happening, that then changes take place. And I look forward to them.
00:53:25 ►
I welcome them.
00:53:28 ►
I’m curious, when you’re talking about this sort of experience
00:53:33 ►
of allowing all these multiplicity of feelings out at the same time,
00:53:41 ►
how are you eliciting that?
00:53:43 ►
How are you channeling that?
00:53:44 ►
What are you doing? What’s your technique when you’re working with somebody with post-traumatic stress syndrome
00:53:49 ►
or somebody who has significant trauma? How do you help them have that experience?
00:53:57 ►
Yeah. First, it requires setting up of the space that would allow, you know, there to be a container that can hold all
00:54:06 ►
of it without it getting crazy, like craziness that the two agitated, you know, so when you have
00:54:11 ►
PTSD, you have a situation where you have a very specific trauma marked in time that before that,
00:54:17 ►
the person didn’t have those symptoms. And after it, they do. You create the space, you know,
00:54:23 ►
in all of the universal definitions, and you hold that for the other person.
00:54:28 ►
And then as soon as you start to open up the feelings, you go through the different states of consciousness and imagination and thought and physicality to bring all of the support that you possibly can before you ever turn on the feeling.
00:54:43 ►
And so you start to bring an altered state.
00:54:45 ►
That you can use through different methods.
00:54:47 ►
We use rhythms typically.
00:54:49 ►
We use rhythms.
00:54:49 ►
And we use different kinds of chanting and stuff.
00:54:51 ►
Which is still part of the archaic methods.
00:54:54 ►
That are traditional to shamanism.
00:54:56 ►
But it could be done literally through talk.
00:54:59 ►
It could be done through binaural beats.
00:55:00 ►
It could be done through suggestion.
00:55:02 ►
There’s lots of different ways you could open a person without ever touching that problem because you know that that’s a
00:55:08 ►
trigger point. And so you build this huge and I mean like massive support structure around it.
00:55:13 ►
You may take two or three hours doing that until the moment’s right. And then once that space has
00:55:19 ►
been created, the opening of the emotions is innate. it’s like a fear that is holding back that ability
00:55:27 ►
and so as soon as you get the whole space set up around it then that fear naturally leaves because
00:55:32 ►
the feeling’s kind of coming and you can watch it it kind of like comes in in like short breaths at
00:55:37 ►
first it’s kind of like and then it turns on and then the breathing like it’s really really deep
00:55:44 ►
and strong so there’s like
00:55:45 ►
you know very intense physiological transformations that start to take place
00:55:49 ►
but the key is building the whole space around it first it’s making sure that there’s no longer
00:55:56 ►
a reason in the in the energetics to be holding on to that fear. And then it naturally goes. My general belief and understanding is that
00:56:06 ►
we are self-regulating universal beings. Like you are of the universe, made of the universe,
00:56:14 ►
and the universe is self-balancing. It just does it on a scale that we don’t really know how to
00:56:20 ►
relate to. You know, it’s hard to understand us as a you know 60 trillion cell seven chakra prime
00:56:27 ►
you know primary chakra being compared to like the milky way spiral galaxy that we’re part of right
00:56:33 ►
like the scale is just so big when we think about it and so the key element is to to create a space that is so woven in with love and acceptance
00:56:46 ►
that there’s no longer a fragment point for the person.
00:56:51 ►
Thanks for your amazing talk.
00:56:53 ►
Really, really appreciate it.
00:56:55 ►
I’d like to know, as a person that’s experienced ayahuasca 800 times,
00:57:02 ►
the changes in you um negative and positive
00:57:07 ►
your mental state your your mind your all of it okay thank you yeah yeah another talk
00:57:16 ►
we’ll go on for the next hour i guess um yeah no i you, I’ve drunk ayahuasca over 1200 times. The changes are evolutionary. They really are evolutionary. And when you go through apprenticeship, apprenticeship is designed to create acute, acute psychosis. It’s not easy. It’s not like, oh, let’s make make this easy on you it’s meant to break you down and
00:57:45 ►
really really make you confront everything that you possibly could so that you can then hold that
00:57:51 ►
space for somebody else and not be scared of it so you have to work through all of those things
00:57:56 ►
for me it gave me the entire knowledge base that i have you know it was a true teacher plan and a
00:58:04 ►
true teacher experience and a true teacher experience.
00:58:06 ►
And the shamans that trained me trained me telepathically. They don’t teach you in words.
00:58:11 ►
They teach you in vision. And it’s a tremendous experience of trust and awareness and agreement
00:58:18 ►
to go through that. So they’ll just say, follow me, and then they’ll start chanting.
00:58:23 ►
And then visions will appear and open up,
00:58:25 ►
and they expect you to gleam all of the learning through those visions that they’re providing.
00:58:30 ►
And that goes on for years.
00:58:31 ►
You know, that’s like, that’s just how you get trained.
00:58:35 ►
And so, you know, it’s a restructuring that takes place.
00:58:40 ►
It’s a restructuring metaphysically, but it’s also a restructuring of your physics, and you feel it as it’s a it’s a restructuring metaphysically but it’s also a restructuring of your physics and
00:58:46 ►
you feel it as it’s happening and the the overall benefit from it really comes down to what you’re
00:58:54 ►
about but for me what i was about was learning medicine where it was called all medicine and
00:58:59 ►
then another kind of medicine called ikaro medicine and then another kind of medicine called Icaro medicine, and then another kind of medicine called Sabiduria Divina, or divine knowledge.
00:59:08 ►
And so I worked with a great elder who told me that if you’re learning,
00:59:12 ►
there are only three reasons to drink ayahuasca.
00:59:14 ►
And those were the three reasons.
00:59:16 ►
He said, so you can come here for any reason you want,
00:59:18 ►
but there are only three reasons to drink ayahuasca if you’re going to be a medicine man.
00:59:24 ►
Negative to my physical mind.
00:59:29 ►
Not from drinking ayahuasca. Not from drinking ayahuasca. There were negative things that
00:59:35 ►
happened in my physical mind, but that happened because of people that were not very nice who
00:59:39 ►
were administering the ayahuasca that I ended up going to before i met the teachers who were like
00:59:46 ►
true medicine men who taught me um but saying that you you have to understand that normal for
00:59:55 ►
an ayahuasca shaman is an amplitude so intense that it would make most people defecate literally
01:00:03 ►
like they’re normal and there are
01:00:06 ►
people in the room defecating and like when i was first working with alberto who was one of the
01:00:11 ►
shams who taught me even after like three four hundred ceremonies he could sing me to unconsciousness
01:00:16 ►
like where it’s not the substance that you drank it’s just the chanting that’s ramping it up more
01:00:22 ►
and more and more and more and more and he could just
01:00:25 ►
be like and i’d be panting and then puking and and he would always be like well do you want more
01:00:34 ►
and i’d be like oh i’m such a glutton why did i ask for this why did i ask for this as i was
01:00:39 ►
working through all of those those different pieces um there can be though there can be negative effects
01:00:47 ►
and that’s very real the psychedelic plants are crapshoots in their own right which makes having
01:00:54 ►
the presence of someone very trained very important and that’s a debated point out in the world like
01:01:00 ►
you know take it and go and go and see what happens like i’m not of that that
01:01:07 ►
you know group of thought i think it’s very important to have people there that really
01:01:12 ►
really know what they’re doing like really know what they’re doing the guy the two guys that
01:01:18 ►
trained me like both of them had drunk ayahuasca over 3,000 times when they started training me. Like, they knew what was going on, you know.
01:01:29 ►
But as Alberto always said, you know, the only thing you can’t fix is death.
01:01:36 ►
So even if you got a little messed up, you can get it fixed.
01:01:39 ►
But it’s pretty intense.
01:01:41 ►
So thank you very much.
01:01:42 ►
Thank you.
01:01:54 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
01:01:57 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:02:01 ►
I had to smile about midway through Hamilton’s talk when after a truly wonderful rap about consciousness, he said,
01:02:05 ►
and I quote, that took me a really, really long time to figure out. It took over a decade,
01:02:12 ►
end quote. And what made me smile is that just before he said that, I was listening to him and
01:02:18 ►
thinking how incredible it was that as young as he is, he’s already figured so much out. Because, you see, these ideas are ones
01:02:27 ►
that I’ve been working on for most of my adult life. Of course, those who know me really well
01:02:33 ►
still don’t think that I’ve become much of an adult. So let’s just say that for the 73 years
01:02:39 ►
that I’ve been kicking around here, it has only been the past couple of years during which I was able to begin to clearly formulate the ideas that we heard Hamilton say took him almost a decade to learn.
01:02:51 ►
To me, that was really fast, Hamilton.
01:02:55 ►
But in my opinion, this speaks well not only for Hamilton, who has a mind that we all should stay in touch with during the coming years,
01:03:02 ►
it also speaks volumes about Lady Ayahuasca.
01:03:06 ►
While it took me much longer to begin to achieve some clarity about the true nature of consciousness
01:03:11 ►
and our own state of being that is somehow immersed in it, I believe that my road was
01:03:17 ►
actually much easier than has been Hamilton’s. It takes an exceptional spirit to spend 12 years in
01:03:23 ►
the jungle while participating in Ayahuasca ceremonies almost every third day during that time.
01:03:29 ►
Having had only a few dozen ayahuasca experiences myself, the extent of Hamilton’s commitment to his path has completely boggled my mind.
01:03:39 ►
Now, this is the third time that I’ve listened to this talk, and I plan on listening to it again tomorrow while on my morning walk. And it’s my hope that unless you’re able to drop everything and move to the
01:03:49 ►
jungle for a long time, that you also re-listen to this talk more than once. There is much deep
01:03:55 ►
wisdom here. If you’re in your teens right now, be sure to somehow remind yourself to listen again
01:04:01 ►
when you turn 30. If you do, my guess is that you’re going to realize and
01:04:06 ►
actually amaze yourself at how much of what Hamilton has discussed here has become almost
01:04:12 ►
second nature to you. Now, while there is more that I could say about what I’ve learned about
01:04:17 ►
consciousness myself, beginning with my research when I was writing The Spirit of the Internet,
01:04:22 ►
what I have to say, well, it isn’t nearly as well put
01:04:25 ►
as what we just heard from Hamilton.
01:04:27 ►
So instead of listening to more from me,
01:04:30 ►
my suggestion is that you go back and re-listen again to this talk,
01:04:34 ►
because there are many layers here to what he is saying.
01:04:37 ►
And if you spend some time thinking about what he says
01:04:39 ►
about life and consciousness,
01:04:41 ►
well, you just may find some of the answers that you’ve been looking for.
01:04:46 ►
Before I close, however, I do have one last thing to say about looking for answers.
01:04:51 ►
A question that I’ve never thought of before came up on our forums the other day when
01:04:56 ►
Centilla asked, I wonder who it was that introduced Terence Mushroom McKenna to mushrooms?
01:05:03 ►
Well, have you ever wondered about that?
01:05:05 ►
To be honest, I hadn’t.
01:05:08 ►
And so I wrote to his brother Dennis to find out, and here’s his reply.
01:05:13 ►
Hi Lorenzo, good to hear from you.
01:05:16 ►
I think the answer to your question may be lost, but here’s what I know.
01:05:20 ►
None of us had any personal experience with mushrooms before we gathered in Bogota.
01:05:25 ►
On the way to La Charrera, we went through Florencia and then to Porto Luguzamo,
01:05:32 ►
where we got the barge downriver to El Encanto.
01:05:35 ►
In Florencia, we went wandering in the fields and found only one mushroom.
01:05:40 ►
The person who suggested Terence eat it had to have either been Kume, Eve in True Hallucinations, as she had been living in Colombia and was familiar with the effects,
01:05:51 ►
or it may have been Chia, her boyfriend whom Terrence had just cuckolded by hooking up with Kume, but who accompanied us anyway until a big fight on the trail to La Charrera sent him packing. They were both with us in Florencia, and it had to be one of them,
01:06:08 ►
probably Chia who suggested it.
01:06:10 ►
They both knew the effects. We did not.
01:06:13 ►
Then in Porto Luguziamo, while we were waiting for a boat,
01:06:17 ►
we looked again in the fields on the edge of town.
01:06:20 ►
There weren’t very many mushrooms there either,
01:06:22 ►
but we found enough that we were all able to eat a few and have a light, giggly trip.
01:06:26 ►
That was our first exposure to the secret.
01:06:29 ►
I don’t think Terence ever stumbled on mushrooms during his rambles in Indonesia.
01:06:34 ►
He was mostly collecting butterflies in the jungles, so he wouldn’t have encountered Cubensis or any other.
01:06:40 ►
I don’t think his radar was tuned for them there.
01:06:43 ►
I don’t think his radar was tuned for them there.
01:06:50 ►
In fact, it was only well into the 70s that it became clear that Cubensis was a pan-tropical species.
01:06:56 ►
Certainly he never spoke of such a find to me, and I’m sure he would have mentioned it if it had happened.
01:06:57 ►
All the best, Dennis.
01:07:03 ►
And that is our little psychedelic history lesson for today.
01:07:07 ►
So for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:07:09 ►
Be careful out there, my friends.