⚗️ alembic

Search

SearchSearch

542 - Shamans of the Global Village

Jun 05, 2017, 75 min read

Program Notes

Become a Patron!

Guest speakers: Rak Razam and Niles Heckman

http://www.shamansoftheglobalvillage.com/Date this lecture was recorded: August 2016

Today’s podcast features the 2016 Palenque Norte Lecture by documentary film makers Rak Razam and Niles Heckman. In addition to discussing their work with indigenous people, they discuss the making of their documentary, “Shamans of the Global Village”.

Shaman’s of the Global Village

More about
Phaze Theory
I was just wondering if anyone else out there on these forums is making psychedelic music with live instruments in or around London. I run Phaze Theory (phazetheory.com) which does a sort of Art Rock that is directly inspired by some incredibly high dose LSD sessions; literally 100 hits in some cases while listening to our heroes – Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Miles Davis Electric, Jimi Hendrix and Funkadelic. We sing over the poetry of the great psychedelic poets and artists – William Blake, Aldous Huxley and W.b Yeats.

We take the light to the darkness.

I was hoping that someone might wish to open for us on 22nd of July in Servant Jazz Quarters (London). We are looking for someone who is also putting there psychedelic visions to the test in the crucible of live music. The gig is paid and you can see the details here.

http://www.phazetheory.com/phaze-theory-at-servant-jazz-quarters.html

You can hear some of the music here

Very Psychedelic ambient music – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oE0XPduPQ5Y
Art rock on an incredible Yeats Poem – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMzjshHxyCE
A Huxley poem – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7qYH40wGcA

Previous Episode

011 - Psychedelic Therapy for Veterans

Next Episode

012 - Psychedelic Stories from San Diego

Similar Episodes

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’m very pleased to

00:00:25 ►

begin today’s podcast by thanking some of our fellow salonners who, unlike me, who has been

00:00:31 ►

goofing off these past two weeks, well, they instead have made donations to help offset some

00:00:37 ►

of the expenses here in the salon. And these wonderful souls are James S., Timothy M.,

00:00:50 ►

wonderful souls are James S., Timothy M., Ryan Q., and Kloss H., all of whom made direct donations to the salon, as did one anonymous salonner who made a Bitcoin donation on the 15th of May.

00:00:56 ►

And I should let you know that all of the Bitcoin donations that have come in over the past several

00:01:01 ►

years are still in my account. Long ago, I decided to just hold them as a backup for any potential emergency that might come up.

00:01:11 ►

So, some of those early donations have now been multiplied many times over.

00:01:16 ►

And I thank all of our donors from the bottom of my heart.

00:01:20 ►

Also, I want to thank Lex Pelger for his recent plug about my Patreon account.

00:01:25 ►

In case you missed my announcement a few months ago, thanks to the generosity of my patrons,

00:01:30 ►

my next book is going to be released directly into the public domain,

00:01:34 ►

which means that you and everybody else is going to be able to get a copy for free.

00:01:39 ►

And since Lex made his announcement a week ago, I am very pleased to welcome the following

00:01:45 ►

salonners as patrons, and they are Kai M., John C., Brady A., Nina N., Sassy M., Chase B., and

00:01:56 ►

Anil P. And I guess I should mention that the main reason this podcast is a bit late is that I got a

00:02:04 ►

little too wrapped up in working

00:02:05 ►

on my new book. It now looks like I’m going to be able to publish it by the end of this summer,

00:02:10 ►

which means that if you want to have your name listed in the book as one of the patrons who have

00:02:15 ►

made it possible for me to place it directly into the public domain, well then you still have a

00:02:20 ►

little time left to be included. However, I also know that there are a lot of our fellow slaunters

00:02:26 ►

who aren’t currently in a position to donate a couple of dollars each month for this project,

00:02:31 ►

and having been in that position myself, I completely understand.

00:02:35 ►

In fact, that’s one of the reasons that I’ve decided that from here on out,

00:02:39 ►

I’m going to put all of my new writing into the public domain as it’s published.

00:02:43 ►

That way, even though

00:02:45 ►

you’re broke, you’re still going to be able to read my ramblings. And if you ask any writer whether

00:02:51 ►

they would rather have a dollar or so royalty on a book or have more people read it, I think that

00:02:57 ►

you’ll discover that without readers, we probably wouldn’t be spending so much time working on these projects. We’re all in this together, you know.

00:03:06 ►

Now, finally getting to today’s podcast.

00:03:10 ►

Since Burning Man and Planque Norte are now almost upon us,

00:03:14 ►

I’m going to play one more of last year’s Planque Norte lectures

00:03:17 ►

that fellow salonner Frank Nuccio recorded for us.

00:03:21 ►

And I should add that I received an email from Frank just the other day, and he

00:03:26 ►

was offering to give me a ticket to Burning Man this year. And while I truly appreciate your offer,

00:03:32 ►

Frank, I’ll, well, I’ll have to pass again this year. Right now, I’m thinking that probably the

00:03:38 ►

next time I make it to Burning Man is going to be in 2022, where I can celebrate my 80th birthday

00:03:43 ►

there. But until then, I’m just going to have

00:03:46 ►

to attend virtually through the work of people like you, Frank, and Bradley Smith, who Pez now

00:03:52 ►

tells me is the person that has taken over the lead role for the Planque Norte lecture series.

00:03:58 ►

I wish you all the best, guys, and I’m looking forward to sharing the recordings that you make

00:04:03 ►

of this year’s lectures.

00:04:09 ►

So, now today we’re going to hear from, well, I guess I should call them filmmakers,

00:04:14 ►

but to me they seem more like adventurers who have a film crew with them.

00:04:17 ►

I’m talking about Rak Razam and Niles Heckman,

00:04:22 ►

the two men behind the documentary series Shamans of the Global Village.

00:04:26 ►

You might recall that back in my podcast number 516, I spoke about their marvelous film, which I just watched, and, well, it really blew me away.

00:04:33 ►

Here’s a little bit of what I said back then. I’ve read hundreds of books about psychedelics,

00:04:39 ►

and I’ve seen dozens of films dealing with that topic, but without any doubt in my mind, Shamans of the

00:04:45 ►

Global Village is by far the best treatment of the psychedelic world that I’ve ever seen.

00:04:50 ►

This film series, in my opinion, is going to be the new standard for what a high-quality

00:04:55 ►

production about psychedelics should reach for. The writing, editing, and other production values

00:05:01 ►

are top-notch. But enough from me. Here now are Rak Razam and Niles Heckman

00:05:07 ►

at the 2016 Plank and Norte lectures at Burning Man,

00:05:11 ►

and they’re going to be telling us a little more

00:05:14 ►

about their work with indigenous people.

00:05:19 ►

So that was episode one of Shamans of the Global Village.

00:05:23 ►

Thank you. I hope you enjoyed that.

00:05:25 ►

And, you know, it is a great responsibility

00:05:27 ►

to be documenting this global shamanic resurgence.

00:05:30 ►

You know, my 10 years or so of working with ayahuasca

00:05:33 ►

and other entheogens and being a media maker,

00:05:36 ►

encapsulating the essence of what’s going on,

00:05:39 ►

it is difficult because there is something larger than all of us.

00:05:43 ►

There seems to be a cycle to this

00:05:45 ►

and you know the planet secretes these entheogenic substances which invoke the divine within as they

00:05:51 ►

say or reconnect us to a larger holistic sense of the planet of gaia and through gaia of the

00:05:59 ►

universe and it puts us in our place and they can be very healing modalities. There’s a lot of work now,

00:06:06 ►

both with the medicalization of psychedelics

00:06:08 ►

and with the global shamanic movement to…

00:06:11 ►

It seems like the first wave is concentrating on healing people

00:06:14 ►

because Western culture and modern culture is out of balance.

00:06:19 ►

It’s really sick and our relationship with the earth is sick

00:06:22 ►

and what we’ve done to the earth

00:06:24 ►

with the level of consciousness and what we’ve done to the earth with the level

00:06:25 ►

of consciousness that we’ve had um i do believe though that there’s larger world ages and cycles

00:06:30 ►

of consciousness itself as as many indigenous cultures believe uh like the kali yuga or the

00:06:36 ►

mayan culture with different world ages all these different tribes who have had relationships both

00:06:41 ►

with the earth and with uh with the cosmos, understand that we are in a cycle of time

00:06:48 ►

and in a relationship with the seasons of both consciousness

00:06:51 ►

and the medicines of the planet herself.

00:06:54 ►

And so, you know, in the last few decades,

00:06:57 ►

we’ve seen the indigenous people who have been caretakers

00:06:59 ►

of the medicines of their lands engage with Westerners.

00:07:05 ►

It’s been going on for a long time,

00:07:07 ►

but there’s been a groundswell in the last few decades

00:07:09 ►

with interest in things like ayahuasca and now iboga.

00:07:12 ►

Psilocybin mushrooms are coming back to the fore with interest.

00:07:16 ►

Salvia divinorum, San Pedro cactus, hayoma in Iran,

00:07:22 ►

acacias in Australia.

00:07:24 ►

There are so many substances which alter our consciousness,

00:07:28 ►

but they don’t just alter our consciousness. They bring us back into relationship with the plant,

00:07:33 ►

with the spirit in the plants, and with the earth, and with the larger cycles.

00:07:37 ►

And so I do believe that there is a global shamanic resurgence happening, and the

00:07:42 ►

driving force behind that is um not just gaia

00:07:45 ►

herself but a larger connection as the five meo dmt reveals with source consciousness itself

00:07:51 ►

with the the emanating uh eternal loving infinite presence of of the source which

00:07:59 ►

you know it’s really only western culture in the last few hundred years which has not felt that

00:08:04 ►

which has not understood that,

00:08:06 ►

which has fallen out of relationship with that.

00:08:08 ►

And that’s the thing behind the scenes of everything.

00:08:10 ►

And that’s the thing which animates everything,

00:08:13 ►

like the wireframe.

00:08:15 ►

So I’m going to throw to Niles.

00:08:17 ►

He can talk a little bit maybe about making the show

00:08:18 ►

and the challenges and responsibility of,

00:08:22 ►

I’m not just making a documentary about whatever,

00:08:25 ►

but about shamanic issues and about spirituality

00:08:27 ►

and about the sacredness of these substances.

00:08:30 ►

Yeah, yeah.

00:08:31 ►

Well, thanks for coming out, everybody.

00:08:33 ►

Is this mic loud enough?

00:08:34 ►

Is this working?

00:08:35 ►

Want to turn it up a little bit?

00:08:36 ►

Does that work?

00:08:37 ►

I guess we can use this

00:08:39 ►

and then we’ll give this to the audience.

00:08:42 ►

Yeah.

00:08:43 ►

So, I mean, for those that don’t know i mean rack razam what wrote and produced the

00:08:48 ►

show and then hosts it obviously and i’m niles heckman i directed and shot the show and this

00:08:53 ►

is something that was made you know independently just conceptualized by rack and then created by

00:08:58 ►

the two of us together and it’s something that has been made you know 100 independently the idea

00:09:03 ►

for the series is to obviously have each episode

00:09:06 ►

focus on a specific medicine person and a specific medicine.

00:09:09 ►

So as Rak highlighted, the pilot focuses on Octavio

00:09:12 ►

and his work with the Sonoran Desert Toad.

00:09:14 ►

But the idea is to make this an entire series,

00:09:17 ►

a documentary series,

00:09:19 ►

and have it be something that is a thing that we can continue to create

00:09:23 ►

as time goes on with schedule and budget allowing.

00:09:28 ►

But it was made for very little money,

00:09:31 ►

about the same amount of money that a large production has

00:09:34 ►

for their craft budget for a single day.

00:09:37 ►

So we’re pretty proud of the result that we got out of it,

00:09:40 ►

but it’s something that the two of us as kind of two white guys up here

00:09:44 ►

talking about shamanism,

00:09:45 ►

I mean, we fully realize that, as Octavio says in the episode,

00:09:51 ►

we used to be a global shamanic culture,

00:09:53 ►

and we’ve lost that at some point.

00:09:55 ►

And obviously, indigenous people who

00:09:56 ►

have kept the lineage of shamanism much more purely

00:10:01 ►

than the West has or the quote unquote

00:10:03 ►

industrialized first world has,

00:10:05 ►

understand the relationship and the balance

00:10:08 ►

of medicinal plants and the shamanistic practice

00:10:11 ►

and what it is to be a medicine person in a small tribe

00:10:15 ►

more than we have because we’ve lost that at some point.

00:10:19 ►

So as the series goes on,

00:10:20 ►

it’s something that we fully realize and expect

00:10:23 ►

as each episode continues

00:10:25 ►

like Octavio has. He has the

00:10:28 ►

approval of the indigenous

00:10:29 ►

tribe that he’s worked with. So as we continue

00:10:31 ►

on, the idea is to continue making more episodes

00:10:33 ►

with people who may be westerners

00:10:35 ►

that have felt the call

00:10:38 ►

to some sort of medicine practice

00:10:39 ►

or becoming maybe a shaman themselves

00:10:41 ►

but have done that through the lineage of the indigenous

00:10:43 ►

people. That’s kind of a crucial component to the show.

00:10:48 ►

So yeah, this was something that we got going independently together,

00:10:52 ►

and we’re talking about this now.

00:10:53 ►

This is 2016.

00:10:54 ►

We shot it in Mexico in 2015, you and I together.

00:10:59 ►

And I think it ended up being quite a life-changing journey

00:11:02 ►

for both of us and the entire crew that came with us.

00:11:05 ►

But it’s something that through development of me as a filmmaker

00:11:09 ►

and Rack as a filmmaker, you know, Rack has a background as a journalist.

00:11:12 ►

I have a background more in Hollywood.

00:11:14 ►

And I’m trying to always align my cosmology with doing more conscious projects.

00:11:18 ►

This was, like you say, the perfect kind of balance of your background

00:11:21 ►

and my background to make something that’s kind of the culmination

00:11:24 ►

of both of our life’s work thus far.

00:11:26 ►

Even though here at

00:11:27 ►

Palenque Norte, we saw it under less than

00:11:29 ►

ideal conditions, but it can always be watched

00:11:31 ►

online, down the line.

00:11:34 ►

That’s the thing about this show

00:11:35 ►

that I think is profound for

00:11:37 ►

us as filmmakers, is

00:11:40 ►

that it’s such a life experience and a growth

00:11:42 ►

experience for us because we

00:11:43 ►

learn so much and we change so much in the process of making it. So, yeah, I mean, do we want to kind of

00:11:50 ►

open it up to floor questions or how, you know, we’ll go from there. If anybody has

00:11:55 ►

any kind of initial questions about the process or what we did, I mean, I could go into more

00:11:59 ►

specifics with things, but if anybody has an immediate question, otherwise, Rack and

00:12:03 ►

I will just continue to kind of bounce back and forth off each other.

00:12:08 ►

Let’s see if that works.

00:12:10 ►

Yeah?

00:12:10 ►

Yeah.

00:12:11 ►

Can we maybe turn the other mic up a little bit?

00:12:14 ►

If you see working with this particular group

00:12:19 ►

and this shaman and if you contact with others

00:12:23 ►

and if they face any danger of exposure by the government

00:12:27 ►

or by military groups or by, in Mexico, there’s the cartel, do they face?

00:12:35 ►

I know that in Russia, most of the shamans of the north, the first shamans there,

00:12:42 ►

were prosecuted through the Tsar’s time and through the

00:12:47 ►

years of communism yeah rack can speak to that pretty well i mean obviously um he has kind of a

00:12:54 ►

plan for the season of who we would focus on per episode but um some of those folks just because

00:13:00 ►

of exposure and things have that he’s inquired with you know a certain percentage of them have

00:13:04 ►

kind of said

00:13:05 ►

that they are not necessarily willing to be part of a show like this at this point.

00:13:08 ►

But do you want to speak to that a bit, Matt?

00:13:11 ►

So if we take the big picture, right,

00:13:14 ►

there’s, again, everything’s consciousness,

00:13:17 ►

but there’s these cycles of consciousness.

00:13:19 ►

So if you look at the last 500 years or so,

00:13:22 ►

Western culture has dominated the other half of the world, the old world.

00:13:26 ►

And when it went into the old world, its religious imprint and its filtering mechanism was horrified

00:13:33 ►

by plant worship, by cultures that engaged with substances which connected them directly

00:13:40 ►

through plant gnosis to the divine, because there was no middleman, there were no priests.

00:13:45 ►

Or there might have been. Sometimes shamans can be.

00:13:47 ►

But shamans are more…

00:13:48 ►

Even though the technical definition in the West of a shaman,

00:13:51 ►

which was coined from Mercy Eliad in his book Shamanism,

00:13:56 ►

is sort of a bit between medicine person, doctor, priest

00:14:00 ►

and traveller between the worlds.

00:14:02 ►

But in the priestcraft, it’s essentially all indigenous cultures

00:14:06 ►

and earth-based cultures of the past had this direct gnosis,

00:14:10 ►

this route of connecting to the divine.

00:14:12 ►

And somewhere along the line, some of their sacred substances

00:14:15 ►

were lost either due to climate change or political ramifications or whatever.

00:14:20 ►

And the priestcraft took control and filled the gap

00:14:22 ►

where the plants used to fill.

00:14:24 ►

And the priestcraft took control and filled the gap where the plants used to fill.

00:14:31 ►

So priests in Western sort of culmination of cultural iterations really were the middle people between you and God.

00:14:35 ►

And so Western culture, when it went into the old world

00:14:38 ►

and found San Pedro cactuses or the mushroom cults

00:14:42 ►

or the Mesoamerican cults which had shamanistic practices

00:14:45 ►

killed them all you know and it did the same for the medicine people in europe for the witches

00:14:51 ►

the herbalists the magicians anyone who deviated from the cultural norm of their filtering mechanism

00:15:00 ►

of what the ego had latched onto and created religion, which is essentially a calcification

00:15:06 ►

of what was a personal spiritual experience.

00:15:10 ►

And many indigenous cultures all around the world

00:15:13 ►

still retain that direct gnosis and that direct spiritualism,

00:15:17 ►

and they wouldn’t really define their practices as religion.

00:15:20 ►

It was just whatever their spiritual pursuit was.

00:15:22 ►

So the persecution of shamans around the world is millennia old,

00:15:27 ►

or at least the last 500, 600 years of Western imperialism or so,

00:15:31 ►

and that’s trickled down to all different countries

00:15:33 ►

and all different repressions, and even in some places,

00:15:36 ►

you know, suppressions of religions themselves that aren’t shamanistic.

00:15:39 ►

And so nature abhors a vacuum.

00:15:43 ►

Like, you cannot create or destroy energy.

00:15:46 ►

It’s always there.

00:15:47 ►

It’s this emanating source, you know, the primal om,

00:15:51 ►

which began everything, this vibrational force,

00:15:55 ►

the ripples of which and the interference patterns

00:15:58 ►

and the dissonance patterns build up space-time

00:16:01 ►

and everything’s created from.

00:16:03 ►

So when the Western culture essentially tried to repress spirituality,

00:16:07 ►

indigenous spirituality, it’s created a culture of discontent.

00:16:12 ►

And there’s that film, Konosquatsi, like world out of balance.

00:16:16 ►

And so shamanism as the portal or the gateway as caretakers of the divine

00:16:20 ►

never really goes away, but it creates this ache,

00:16:24 ►

this real hunger in people’s experience

00:16:28 ►

for this capacity we have within ourselves for direct communion with god or with source or force

00:16:33 ►

or whatever label you want to give it because so many uh centuries of oppression of our spirituality

00:16:41 ►

have even linguistically given us a negative charge around the word God.

00:16:45 ►

So, you know, that has a trigger now. But this persecution of religions and of spirituality

00:16:50 ►

and of shamans is still going on in some countries, even in South America,

00:16:54 ►

even within intertribal things or with the oil companies who are going into the Amazon and

00:16:58 ►

trying to suppress the communities who have solidarity. Because if essentially, if you trip

00:17:03 ►

together, if you journey you trip together if you journey

00:17:05 ►

together and if you feel what it really means to be alive to be given this gift of incarnating

00:17:11 ►

in the flesh on this planet as part of the planet not separate from the planet but as an extension

00:17:18 ►

like fingers on your hand of the one unbroken thread the sacredness of life you’re not going

00:17:24 ►

to let an oil company come in

00:17:25 ►

and pollute your river or your community.

00:17:28 ►

You’re going to fight for it.

00:17:29 ►

And so spiritual experiences like plant-mediated shamanic connection

00:17:34 ►

to divine sources make us stronger as communities.

00:17:38 ►

And so the persecution is still ongoing.

00:17:40 ►

And in the Western blossoming,

00:17:42 ►

in this resurgence of interest by westerners who have

00:17:45 ►

gone through this culmination of you know the the apex of what terence mckenna used to call

00:17:50 ►

dominated culture essentially was post-world war ii white picket fence america which won the war

00:17:56 ►

or both the wars and instigated this global paradigm of what became consumerism not just

00:18:03 ►

even capitalism but consumerism, which is completely

00:18:06 ►

unsustainable. And we’re seeing the fruits of that level of consciousness now in this planetary

00:18:11 ►

ecological emergency that we’re going through, which is directly caused by a lack of connection

00:18:17 ►

to the planet itself. So at the same time that happens, this equal and opposite reaction happens,

00:18:23 ►

it’s like spiritual thermodynamics, right?

00:18:25 ►

Spirit starts to flourish back up again.

00:18:28 ►

And so these sort of

00:18:30 ►

early adopters go into

00:18:32 ►

different tribes, like William Burroughs went

00:18:34 ►

down to the Amazon in the 50s and

00:18:35 ►

Ginsburg followed him a few years later,

00:18:38 ►

wrote the Yahé letters and put information about

00:18:40 ►

ayahuasca, or telepathine

00:18:42 ►

as it was called at the time. But no one else

00:18:43 ►

was down there, because that was white picket fence Americaica time but what came through was the lsd revolution and i

00:18:50 ►

know that’s made in a lab but eventually everything’s a container for spirit and lsd

00:18:55 ►

opens the mind in the 60s a generation later ecstasy opens the heart and a generation later

00:18:59 ►

by the noughts we have this really blossoming renaissance of enough people going down to the Amazon to

00:19:06 ►

experience ayahuasca that the plant medicine revival was really underway. And it seemed like

00:19:13 ►

there was a cascade in those stepping stones for us to come back to the garden to get ready. We

00:19:17 ►

weren’t ready for it en masse in the 50s. But the persecution has continued. And as some of those

00:19:23 ►

early adopters who have experienced ayahuasca

00:19:26 ►

or the other sacred plants like iboga and things like that

00:19:28 ►

have decided to answer the call,

00:19:31 ►

the very mythic archetypal call to the shamanic path,

00:19:34 ►

and to be those medicine people for their communities around the world,

00:19:38 ►

they’ve taken these seeds and these plants with them,

00:19:42 ►

and they’ve started to work in their local communities

00:19:45 ►

because it’s a network, and we’re all nodes for the network.

00:19:48 ►

And those people are generally still underground in the West,

00:19:52 ►

but look around, you know, Elle magazine, Time magazine,

00:19:56 ►

you name a Western media outlet, everyone has covered ayahuasca.

00:20:01 ►

They’re falling over themselves to cover this blossoming interest

00:20:05 ►

in this amazonian drug you know but it’s not there’s something deeper going on and even western

00:20:11 ►

media is feeling it so that’s what we hope with this show we really dearly love that you guys are

00:20:16 ►

here who i am going to make a presumption are already into these what shouldn’t even be considered

00:20:21 ►

alternative practices this deep connection to something original again.

00:20:27 ►

But everyone is feeling this awakening,

00:20:29 ►

and it’s not just a buzzword, it’s a verb.

00:20:32 ►

It’s an active process ongoing in the planet at the moment,

00:20:35 ►

and all the pathways are valid.

00:20:37 ►

All the pathways lead back to source.

00:20:39 ►

You can do tantra, dance, trance, drumming.

00:20:42 ►

They’re all great.

00:20:43 ►

The original shamanic sacraments are secreted by, as Terence said,

00:20:48 ►

the planet, which has a plan for us involving the plants,

00:20:52 ►

and it’s this unbroken thread.

00:20:55 ►

And they want us to come back home to the garden.

00:20:59 ►

And this time, there’s not going to be the drug bust.

00:21:03 ►

History’s first drug bust was in the garden with Adam and Eve

00:21:05 ►

but we’re coming full circle now

00:21:08 ►

because the garden’s inviting us back

00:21:09 ►

and when we come back into that

00:21:11 ►

then there’s just us

00:21:14 ►

there are no others so we don’t need

00:21:16 ►

the hierarchy of cops and robbers and

00:21:17 ►

who’s to blame but it’s like

00:21:19 ►

you know we’re coming home

00:21:21 ►

yeah and that’s

00:21:23 ►

a great answer Rack and to speak to that again i

00:21:26 ►

mean yeah shamanism is so about your direct experience and like in the western world i mean

00:21:31 ►

the western world’s terrified of people having direct experiences so shamanic practices really

00:21:36 ►

destroy that kind of paradigm of what you know you highlighted of kind of white picket fence, suburban materialist, consumerist hell America. So the dynamic of having empire spread, like you said,

00:21:50 ►

and that’s repressed shamanism.

00:21:53 ►

Shamanism, we once were a global shamanic culture,

00:21:55 ►

so we will one day return to being a global shamanic culture

00:21:58 ►

through much of what he highlighted.

00:22:01 ►

And yeah, anything that is direct experience that is basically

00:22:07 ►

inner experience is that’s the beauty of shamanism is that it’s about your direct

00:22:12 ►

experience and like rack highlighted it’s not about a hierarchy of something else that’s a

00:22:16 ►

middleman between you and the divine so you have a question You have a two-part question.

00:22:32 ►

One is, I’m just wondering, is there any action plan based on this to maybe drive that forward or to sort of take this and launch it into some kind of moving that forward here?

00:22:38 ►

That’s one question.

00:22:40 ►

And the other one, I guess, is more a comment, which is…

00:22:42 ►

Let’s do one at a time.

00:22:43 ►

Okay.

00:22:44 ►

And in terms of here do you mean just

00:22:47 ►

what do you mean by that more specifically

00:22:49 ►

planet earth

00:22:52 ►

the realm of earth do you want to answer that

00:22:56 ►

I just want to know do you mean

00:22:58 ►

do we physically with our ego structures

00:23:00 ►

have a plan for the show or for shamanism

00:23:02 ►

in general or is there a larger

00:23:04 ►

galactic plan for the evolution of human consciousness happening through these plant

00:23:09 ►

mediated experiences oh i do sort of channel usually um there is a plan i mean i don’t know

00:23:17 ►

it’s like you know i feel like we’re culturally we can’t see the trees for the forest or the

00:23:23 ►

forest for the trees um we all have our little pods and our little communities

00:23:27 ►

and more and more because of things like the web

00:23:30 ►

where we’re coming together and we’re recognising the others

00:23:33 ►

and we’re recognising there are no others, you know?

00:23:36 ►

Making media about shamanism is part of this unbroken wave

00:23:43 ►

of connecting and helping inform others

00:23:46 ►

because we’re not saying this is for everyone.

00:23:49 ►

We’re not saying…

00:23:50 ►

These are really powerful experiences

00:23:52 ►

and they’re basically initiations

00:23:55 ►

and the West in general has lost the idea of initiation.

00:24:00 ►

In tribal cultures, there’s initiations around birth

00:24:03 ►

and I know in some sort of secret

00:24:08 ►

knowledge in australian aboriginal communities you know women who birth basically do it with

00:24:12 ►

the dmt acacias there were big acacia bushes and the babies are born from source consciousness

00:24:18 ►

through the mother into this smoke like a smudging ceremony and they’re coming into this layer of a plant mediated you know um

00:24:28 ►

into the world they’re held by that and then other initiations are very uh dynamically anchored in

00:24:37 ►

indigenous cultures around puberty both for men and for women and they reflect a need of, you know, the body is the temple and the mind and the soul.

00:24:48 ►

But there’s triggers and there’s needs that if they don’t get expressed, we remain infants.

00:24:57 ►

We remain unexpressed.

00:25:01 ►

We don’t come to our full fruition as human beings. And in the, essentially the

00:25:06 ►

battery farm of 21st century consciousness that we have as happy or unhappy little consumers,

00:25:13 ►

we haven’t been given these initiations. And so we remain at a certain level of consciousness

00:25:19 ►

until we have had them. And so I really believe that with the shamanic sacraments especially,

00:25:24 ►

these are very deep initiations. And many people are coming into this in search of healing.

00:25:30 ►

And in indigenous cultures, they sort of believe that there’s the physical body,

00:25:35 ►

there’s an emotional body, there’s an energetic body, or the luminous body, the light body.

00:25:40 ►

And those different subtle facilities within yourself are where you store things.

00:25:45 ►

It’s like as electromagnetic beings

00:25:47 ►

and we’re learning technology is what they call an exosomatic evolution.

00:25:51 ►

It’s something which is evolving faster than the genetics of the body,

00:25:54 ►

the somaticness of our body

00:25:56 ►

and it’s almost like an ego manifestation in our technology

00:26:00 ►

but the real technologies are within

00:26:02 ►

and so we learn that we can record data or we record experiences,

00:26:06 ►

whether that’s bliss or trauma,

00:26:09 ►

basically in our electromagnetic and in our emotional bodies.

00:26:12 ►

And so the curanderos or the shamans of the Amazon, for instance,

00:26:16 ►

a lot of the work they’re doing with ayahuasca,

00:26:18 ►

they believe that ayahuasca is essentially, you know,

00:26:21 ►

it’s like something which opens you up,

00:26:23 ►

but it’s a plant spirit

00:26:25 ►

which they use on a vibrational sense so they use the the the power of ayahuasca to communicate and

00:26:31 ►

to look into your energetic body and see where the blocks are and anything that needs working

00:26:36 ►

and shifting and removing and then they sing and often when they sing their echaros their magical

00:26:41 ►

songs their vibrational codes and they will call in the spirits of other plants which have an essence which may be good for whatever’s ailing you or

00:26:50 ►

whatever blockage is in you. And it’s not just random. It’s like everything’s, you know, this

00:26:55 ►

endless sea of permutations of vibration. And so they’re targeting these vibratory codes to work

00:27:00 ►

on your energetic body to remove the blockages. And that’s just the healing level. So that’s a big initiation for many people.

00:27:07 ►

But there are deeper and deeper spiritual levels of initiation,

00:27:12 ►

which essentially, you know, we talk about this idea

00:27:14 ►

of global shamanic cultures around the world.

00:27:17 ►

And Octavio mentioned a lot of the Mesoamerican cultures,

00:27:20 ►

the Olmecs, the Aztecs, the Maya,

00:27:23 ►

all of these different ones which have anthropological evidence of the toad and the medicine in them.

00:27:29 ►

There’s, you know, many different cultures in Peru.

00:27:31 ►

There was an empire called Chavin.

00:27:33 ►

They predominantly work with the San Pedro cactus,

00:27:36 ►

but they’ve got evidence of, like, DMT snuff pipes,

00:27:40 ►

of psilocybin mushrooms, of many, many different substances.

00:27:46 ►

And, you know, you look at all the many sacred sites around the world, from the pyramids

00:27:50 ►

all around the world, and dealing with energetic structures, and deep sound chambers that many

00:27:55 ►

cultures build in total darkness, for you to go through these type of initiations, because

00:28:01 ►

we’re not just physical beings, and we’re designed to blossom.

00:28:06 ►

It’s like where the concentrated essence of flowering plants is the flower

00:28:13 ►

and when it flowers, it has all the goodness of the plant,

00:28:17 ►

like the whole life force of that organism has gone into this gift

00:28:21 ►

that it gives back into the ecology that releases um you know the smells of the flower

00:28:26 ►

and the essence and the bees come and it’s interconnected in the web of life it’s meant to

00:28:31 ►

be the same with us we’re not separated from nature and when we have these initiations then

00:28:38 ►

on an energetic or soul level that blossoming then feeds into the energetic ecology. So this sense of initiation,

00:28:46 ►

what I feel that’s happening with the shamanic medicines around the world is there’s deeper and

00:28:50 ►

deeper levels, like the mystery schools have had throughout time, like indigenous cultures have

00:28:55 ►

held for their tribal people. And so making media about this, yes, there’s a plan. There’s a plan that, you know, I feel, and I think Niles feels, and many of

00:29:07 ►

the peers I have in the global psychedelic and shamanic community, whether they’re working at

00:29:13 ►

the coalface, helping heal people, or be those medicine people for the medicines to heal people,

00:29:19 ►

and ultimately, we’re our own medicine as well. What it really reveals is,

00:29:21 ►

Ultimately, we’re our own medicine as well.

00:29:26 ►

What it really reveals is things aren’t done to you, right? Things are done for you and with you.

00:29:30 ►

And on a soul level, you’re here to learn and you’re here to blossom like that flower.

00:29:36 ►

And everything is a gift.

00:29:38 ►

And it can be really hard and it sounds a bit dolphin and woo-woo new age to say it,

00:29:42 ►

but everything is a gift.

00:29:47 ►

And you just have to have the eyes to see it and they’re initiations.

00:29:49 ►

And so having a shamanic experience is one thing

00:29:53 ►

and then going through deeper and deeper gradations of experience

00:29:56 ►

and relationships that you can form with the power,

00:29:59 ►

the plants, the essences or the spirits in the plants

00:30:02 ►

or the earth sacraments

00:30:03 ►

and then the deeper

00:30:05 ►

relationships you can form with like the ancestors who are there and i it’s only been recently in my

00:30:11 ►

my shamanic path myself i’m working with 5meo dmt that i really deeply feel the presence of

00:30:18 ►

the ancestors as tangible spirits that are there in the invisible energetic ecology and supporting us and waiting for us.

00:30:26 ►

And yes, yes, yes.

00:30:27 ►

You know, it’s like join us is the thing I just love saying

00:30:31 ►

because there is no, it’s just us.

00:30:34 ►

There’s just us.

00:30:34 ►

There’s just, we’re not the us we think we are as individuals.

00:30:38 ►

So I feel the planet has a plan

00:30:41 ►

and Source has a plan through the planet

00:30:43 ►

involving the plants and the sacraments

00:30:45 ►

and we have a plan holding space for making media about this to continue that unbroken energetic thread

00:30:53 ►

and help people awaken.

00:30:55 ►

So just like I don’t think the medicine’s doing it all, you have to do it yourself,

00:31:00 ►

I don’t think a show like Shamans of the Global Village can do it all.

00:31:03 ►

I think that we’re just holding space, we’re doing the best we can to document what’s going on

00:31:09 ►

around the planet and to try to find the right words, the sacred words, to create a container

00:31:15 ►

through the media we create to transmit the energy of these experiences. And so, yes,

00:31:22 ►

there is a plan and you’re all invited.

00:31:27 ►

And the second part of your question.

00:31:40 ►

I’m processing what you said. I guess this is maybe just more like as you’re making this, like I really think that nothing happens without good reason.

00:31:45 ►

So, like, I think this whole Western thing, I don’t think it’s a negative.

00:31:50 ►

It’s painful.

00:31:52 ►

It’s a struggle.

00:31:53 ►

But I think there’s something we’re learning there that can then come back into the earth medicine.

00:32:01 ►

So that’s my take.

00:32:02 ►

Like, there’s, I mean, I think that our first instinct is yuck, yuck, yuck, yuck, yuck. But I really feel like there’s a lot of juice that we’re coming

00:32:09 ►

into by going on that road. And then when we come and reintegrate with the old, it’s not going to

00:32:15 ►

be like that, right? We’re bringing in all this richness and learning and education that we come,

00:32:20 ►

that we have here. So I guess the reason I asked about what you guys,

00:32:25 ►

if there’s an action plan,

00:32:27 ►

because I would like to see that, I guess.

00:32:29 ►

I would like to see something that sort of explores

00:32:32 ►

what riches do we get from this?

00:32:35 ►

What riches do we get from that?

00:32:36 ►

And what’s the new thing that we’re going to create

00:32:38 ►

when we integrate both of those perspectives?

00:32:41 ►

Instead of this like, oh, that’s bad, that’s bad,

00:32:43 ►

and that’s good, you know,

00:32:44 ►

but like both of them are valuable. And that’s bad, and that’s good, you know, but, like,

00:32:45 ►

both of them are valuable, and how do we,

00:32:47 ►

and what’s the new thing that’s going to come out of that?

00:32:51 ►

Yeah, and we fully realize that there is a sensitivity

00:32:53 ►

with indigenous tribes about, you know,

00:32:56 ►

Westerners coming in and co-opting

00:32:58 ►

what sometimes they feel has been their lineage.

00:33:01 ►

So in terms of that, I mean, there’s,

00:33:03 ►

speaking to that in the show is obviously,

00:33:06 ►

as I’m tied up here, we don’t have anything more. I mean, making media about something that is,

00:33:14 ►

we’re trying to make media that, like Rack says, helps Westerners kind of see that this is

00:33:20 ►

something that is an integral part of being a human being, what it is to be a human being.

00:33:24 ►

And media has a

00:33:26 ►

capability of getting out to a larger,

00:33:28 ►

broader group of people oftentimes

00:33:29 ►

than just podcasts and things.

00:33:31 ►

So we’d love this show to be not

00:33:34 ►

only something that is supported by the community,

00:33:36 ►

it’s just something that we’re helping to

00:33:37 ►

create to educate

00:33:40 ►

Westerners more on this practice. And obviously

00:33:42 ►

RAC has over a decade of

00:33:44 ►

experience working within the community of the entheogenic and

00:33:47 ►

psychedelic community but it’s something that just helps other people that are

00:33:50 ►

interested in these processes like RAC so eloquently said you can never show

00:33:54 ►

the internal experience because it’s all about your direct internal experience

00:33:58 ►

with these things we just show like the meat body flipping around and you know

00:34:02 ►

having that external goings-on But it’s all about the internal

00:34:05 ►

experience. So if somebody’s interested in having

00:34:07 ►

a shamanic experience, Shamans of the Global

00:34:10 ►

Village could be some step along the way

00:34:12 ►

that actually shows what a ceremony

00:34:14 ►

looks like in an integral, kind of

00:34:16 ►

cinematically done way that

00:34:18 ►

highlights

00:34:18 ►

what somebody else has gone through

00:34:22 ►

visually. Because a lot of times there’s

00:34:24 ►

oftentimes many talks about shamanism,

00:34:26 ►

but you don’t see as much in certain documentaries you do,

00:34:29 ►

but this show would be, we hope to make something that’s a staple

00:34:33 ►

for showing ceremonies of each plant medicine

00:34:35 ►

so people can have those reference points to then maybe potentially pursue it themselves

00:34:39 ►

as something if they feel the call to experience one of these things.

00:34:48 ►

So do we have any other questions here yeah um a couple of thoughts with just experiencing the film um the one the idea that you’re using

00:34:59 ►

the term shaman the way that you are that’s kind of like rooted in in this russian culture

00:35:06 ►

shaman the way that you are this kind of like rooted in in this russian culture using it in this native kind of like setting and one of the things in the film that was weird to me was like

00:35:10 ►

how you guys featured the idea that this western medically trained doctor is endorsed by this tribe

00:35:18 ►

that had never used that material that this guy brought it to them and taught them how to use it, and then kind of that validating his practice,

00:35:27 ►

and then seeing his practice as kind of like your viewers using it as somewhat of a how-to,

00:35:36 ►

I didn’t see the safety in how he was holding space for people.

00:35:43 ►

It looked really dangerous to me. And the

00:35:47 ►

idea that with this particular material, people that have that experience tend to somewhat

00:35:56 ►

worship the person that administers it to them. I could feel the real ego come through in that doctor um or so-called doctor

00:36:10 ►

and then um so yeah to kind of piggyback off of those natives that have no idea what that

00:36:17 ►

material is about him being honest with the idea that he really has no idea what that stuff’s about

00:36:22 ►

he’s reaching into this kind of like maybe cultural story that he’s heard experimenting with this stuff with these kind of

00:36:31 ►

living guinea pigs which i fully support on some level but to kind of like endorse it in the media

00:36:35 ►

in this way it’s it’s skating on thin ice in my opinion especially knowing what a vulnerable

00:36:42 ►

position those people are in that are having that experience.

00:36:46 ►

Yes, they’re going into it voluntarily,

00:36:48 ►

but it’s having seen those experiences

00:36:52 ►

and spoken with some of the people coming out of those experiences.

00:36:54 ►

It’s to put that out into the world.

00:36:58 ►

People, yeah, are experiencing it,

00:37:00 ►

but I just think it’s something to contemplate

00:37:03 ►

as you launch this into the kind of global reality.

00:37:08 ►

I’ll let Rak speak to that a bit.

00:37:10 ►

But yeah, I mean, this is very, you know,

00:37:12 ►

especially the medicine that’s the focus of the first episode

00:37:15 ►

is very serious stuff, you know, 5-methoxy-NN-dimethyltryptamine.

00:37:20 ►

Rak sometimes describes it as, you know,

00:37:22 ►

a star on top of the Christmas tree of entheogens

00:37:24 ►

in terms of its power, and Octavia describes it as a star on top of the Christmas tree of entheogens in terms of its power.

00:37:26 ►

And Octavio describes it as the center of the X or the top of the pyramid in terms of its power and its ability to send you places.

00:37:34 ►

So this is not recreational stuff.

00:37:37 ►

It’s very serious stuff.

00:37:47 ►

You know, Octavio is not perfect, but he does do a lot of, with UNESCO that we highlight in the episode,

00:37:51 ►

which is ancient indigenous medicine tours that he goes around the world with giving the medicine.

00:37:54 ►

He records a lot of that on YouTube.

00:37:59 ►

So he has a YouTube channel where he shows a lot of it, and he’s done thousands and thousands of patients.

00:38:08 ►

And the ratio of people that have come out of that experience feeling, like, absolutely transformed in a better way and having an amazing positive experience.

00:38:14 ►

Obviously, the experience is unbelievably serious stuff, and it can be very purgative.

00:38:18 ►

And everybody’s experience is different, especially with 5-MeO.

00:38:26 ►

So you saw in the ceremony there in the episode, every person’s experience is a bit different because it’s like a mirror for your attainment level, so it brings out what’s in you. So one of the gentlemen in the show

00:38:28 ►

had a very purgative experience

00:38:30 ►

with stuff basically coming out of every

00:38:32 ►

orifice, and it was very much

00:38:33 ►

like ayahuasca does, a cleaning

00:38:36 ►

out experience, and that was, when you

00:38:38 ►

see it on camera with no reference points, it looks

00:38:40 ►

very scary, and we had a comment about that

00:38:42 ►

with somebody that

00:38:43 ►

looked at the show and didn’t have the reference points of what this medicine is saying that.

00:38:51 ►

But that being said, everybody that we shot this episode with

00:38:55 ►

that was part of this process came out of it absolutely transformed for the better.

00:38:58 ►

And all the footage that Octavio records, he has the ratio of people.

00:39:04 ►

I don’t know if Arachno is kind of more

00:39:05 ►

ballpark percentages, but

00:39:07 ►

it’s like for every three people

00:39:09 ►

that have a negative or bad experience with him,

00:39:12 ►

he has thousands of people that have

00:39:13 ►

profoundly been changed for the better.

00:39:15 ►

And I know what you mean. When you have an

00:39:17 ►

absolutely life-changing experience with somebody that

00:39:19 ►

gives you a medicine like this, you tend

00:39:21 ►

to really always have a special

00:39:23 ►

place in your heart for that person. So, egos aside, which always, there isn’t a single person in this tent that

00:39:31 ►

doesn’t struggle with ego, since that’s part of our learning process in this realm. Ego

00:39:35 ►

aside, it is something that there’s a lot to be learned by even somebody that’s, you know, Octavio’s practice as a young Mexican physician

00:39:48 ►

that’s now discovered the lineage of this medicine

00:39:50 ►

and is always trying to work on bettering himself.

00:39:54 ►

But the other thing I was going to add to that is that the local tribe,

00:40:00 ►

the other part of your question is that the local tribe

00:40:02 ►

had basically forgotten the lineage of the toad.

00:40:05 ►

So through a series of kind of synchronistic events,

00:40:07 ►

I mean, there’s probably no coincidences in life.

00:40:11 ►

Everything kind of happens for a reason.

00:40:13 ►

Octavio had rediscovered this medicine

00:40:15 ►

and then brought it to the tribal people.

00:40:17 ►

So in the episode, regardless of how he vocalized that,

00:40:21 ►

our understanding of kind of that process

00:40:23 ►

was that he brought it back to the tribe,

00:40:25 ►

and then the tribe had,

00:40:27 ►

he allowed the tribe to rediscover the lineage

00:40:29 ►

that their ancestors had had

00:40:31 ►

when they had previously worked with Bufo Alvarez.

00:40:33 ►

And then, because of their exposure to it,

00:40:36 ►

part of their process was getting the chance

00:40:38 ►

that they had gotten from their lineage,

00:40:40 ►

from their ancestors,

00:40:41 ►

and now Octavio is using those chance in his process.

00:40:43 ►

So it’s kind of been a back and forth of that dynamic.

00:40:47 ►

So do you want to speak to that a bit more, Rack?

00:40:50 ►

Yeah.

00:40:52 ►

Many of the entheogenic sacraments have an existing lineage.

00:40:58 ►

If you look at the ayahuasca communities all through South America,

00:41:02 ►

and if you look at that as an example, actually,

00:41:04 ►

they’re all very varied and very different.

00:41:06 ►

So the Shipibo tribe originally,

00:41:09 ►

the curandero, the shaman,

00:41:11 ►

would drink on behalf of the patient.

00:41:13 ►

And it’s really only been since Westerners

00:41:15 ►

have been coming in search of it

00:41:16 ►

that now they do ceremonial style catering

00:41:20 ►

to the Westerners who want to take the substance themselves.

00:41:22 ►

Other indigenous tribes would take the medicine together as a tribe

00:41:26 ►

and have a decentralized sort of approach.

00:41:28 ►

The interesting thing about the Bufo Iverius toad

00:41:31 ►

is that it’s sort of buried in history.

00:41:34 ►

It doesn’t have an existing unbroken lineage.

00:41:38 ►

So in the Sonoran Desert, which it is native to,

00:41:41 ►

which goes from, you know, top end mexico over into america uh there are still

00:41:47 ►

people who remember it like i know there’s some native american tribes and some of the native

00:41:51 ►

american churches which even have toads on their preservations and in their environment they’re

00:41:57 ►

legally able to work with uh peyote and sometimes san pedro cactus they know of the Bufo alvarez toad, but they don’t necessarily

00:42:06 ►

work with it. Like it’s not completely forgotten, but it doesn’t have an existing lineage that says

00:42:12 ►

this is our medicine, we are the tribe which have been the caretakers for it, and this is how you do

00:42:17 ►

it, right? But the interesting thing is that, and this happens, you know, many different curanderos

00:42:23 ►

I’ve talked to with many different medicines,

00:42:25 ►

they say essentially, like they say,

00:42:27 ►

what’s the origin of ayahuasca?

00:42:29 ►

And they say, well, one day, you know,

00:42:31 ►

many, many generations ago,

00:42:33 ►

someone, you know, a tribe’s person was out in the jungle

00:42:36 ►

and this plant spoke to him.

00:42:38 ►

It was the spirit of ayahuasca

00:42:39 ►

and it basically said,

00:42:40 ►

put me with that plant over there

00:42:42 ►

and boil me up and drink me.

00:42:44 ►

That’s, you know, the urban, the jungle legend.

00:42:48 ►

But essentially, it’s like the spirits in the plants, and that’s a jump in cosmologies

00:42:54 ►

from the West to Indigenous understanding, that there are discarnate intelligences which

00:43:00 ►

exist in these materials.

00:43:03 ►

They speak to the people that have the relationship with them

00:43:07 ►

by taking it into their systems,

00:43:09 ►

and they will instruct how to use them or what they’re good for

00:43:12 ►

or show you what the relationship is.

00:43:17 ►

And there are 13 tribes in the Snorin Desert.

00:43:20 ►

The Seri are just one of them.

00:43:21 ►

And here’s the thing.

00:43:23 ►

It’s like a microcosmic indicator within

00:43:25 ►

the macrocosmic uh configuration is that you know the war on drugs is really affecting that region

00:43:32 ►

because of the mexican border the mexican cartels have totally devastated most of those you know

00:43:39 ►

remote communities as well as um you know the imperial legacy even in Mexico, of taking the remaining indigenous peoples,

00:43:47 ►

taking them off their original land, putting them on reserves.

00:43:49 ►

There’s so many layers of disconnection

00:43:51 ►

and of stuff that’s gone on with these tribes

00:43:53 ►

that no wonder they don’t remember their roots of these medicines.

00:43:58 ►

There are some of the other tribes I know

00:44:00 ►

that also work with the Bufo Averias toad,

00:44:03 ►

but none of them really have

00:44:06 ►

a public face of this knowledge. It could be esoteric knowledge and it could be public

00:44:10 ►

knowledge, but none of them are really claiming that they have had this unbroken thread of

00:44:15 ►

working with the toad. But essentially, Octavio went down, was working with the seri for about

00:44:20 ►

three, four years as just a GP, as a physician for the community. And the whole community had basically crack addictions,

00:44:28 ►

like including the elders, men, women and children,

00:44:31 ►

because the cartels were swamping that area.

00:44:33 ►

So there’s this conflux of pressures on that particular tribe.

00:44:39 ►

And as we were talking about no coincidences,

00:44:41 ►

Octavio was turned on by another Western doctor that he trained with

00:44:44 ►

and he

00:44:45 ►

had access to this medicine and he felt that in his experience this medicine of the buffalo various

00:44:50 ►

toad and what it did to the body and to the soul and the reconnection could really help with

00:44:56 ►

addictions and there’s a lot of research happening now with 5meo and the buffalo various toad medicine

00:45:01 ►

looking at uh immunomodulation and removing of blockages,

00:45:05 ►

it’s basically like God’s factory reset.

00:45:08 ►

It can be this endocrine flush from the tryptamines in the brain and how it works in the body,

00:45:12 ►

and it can cure addiction.

00:45:14 ►

But it can, it’s not just that.

00:45:16 ►

It’s not, you can’t just medicalize what this substance is because it has a deeply spiritual

00:45:21 ►

significant component to it.

00:45:27 ►

deeply spiritual significant component to it um so the relationship with within the tribe is you know it’s it’s intimate and it’s difficult to convey the nuances of politics because yes he

00:45:34 ►

was there he was their doctor for three four years he was working with them with normal medicines and

00:45:38 ►

then with the toad and what he first did was that he went to ask permission of the elders of the

00:45:43 ►

tribe of the community to give them the medicine and they agreed and they experienced that direct connection to source and

00:45:50 ►

they saw the value of it and through that the elders have given permission and protocols to

00:45:56 ►

initiate other providers in the community to decentralize and so it’s not just about the ego of Octavio and let’s be frank here Octavio is a

00:46:05 ►

very fiery yang egotistical figure he has he has a lot of ego and you know what he he is driven

00:46:15 ►

to share this medicine and to provide it I almost feel like my shorthand is that Octavio is like

00:46:21 ►

Moses from the old testament you, he has his archetypal

00:46:26 ►

quality to him that is very ego. And he has an incredibly good heart. And I vetted him very well

00:46:33 ►

before I would do this show with him. And he’s not perfect. He makes mistakes. He learns from

00:46:40 ►

the mistakes. And he’s doing the best he can. And he’s done like 7,000, 8,000 people in seven, eight years.

00:46:46 ►

So it’s a lot of people.

00:46:47 ►

And there’s a fire and a drive behind him

00:46:50 ►

almost to like carry the flame of this knowledge,

00:46:53 ►

which was lost.

00:46:54 ►

And even though there were pockets of it,

00:46:56 ►

maybe under the surface in tribal scenarios

00:46:59 ►

or maybe in the West, you know,

00:47:01 ►

it’s like it wasn’t really known.

00:47:05 ►

And I feel that he’s done an amazing job with the drive he’s had.

00:47:09 ►

And in that relationship he’s had with the Seri tribe,

00:47:14 ►

he’s learnt the songs.

00:47:16 ►

He stayed with them.

00:47:16 ►

He lived with them.

00:47:17 ►

It’s very primitive conditions.

00:47:18 ►

They barely have running water.

00:47:20 ►

They’ve only recently got electricity.

00:47:22 ►

But he’s lived and breathed and been with them.

00:47:24 ►

And within the tribe,

00:47:26 ►

like with many, many tribes, and I

00:47:28 ►

know this from Australian Aboriginals and all the

00:47:30 ►

ramifications of everything that’s happened to

00:47:32 ►

them, you know, the disconnect and

00:47:34 ►

the

00:47:34 ►

murder of their

00:47:37 ►

culture over many generations, essentially,

00:47:40 ►

is that they’re broken up

00:47:42 ►

and vested power interests

00:47:44 ►

then divide and conquer.

00:47:46 ►

And then certain power blocks will be for this project

00:47:49 ►

or this thing that outside forces advocate.

00:47:52 ►

And there’s politics.

00:47:54 ►

There’s tribal politics in every level.

00:47:56 ►

But the medicine has disseminated through that tribe,

00:47:59 ►

separate from Octavio.

00:48:00 ►

But in his relationship with them,

00:48:02 ►

he has been given permission to learn the songs,

00:48:05 ►

the sacred, sacred songs,

00:48:06 ►

which we don’t know are connected to the tribe.

00:48:08 ►

But, you know, like many Indigenous cultures,

00:48:11 ►

the songs are sacred and they do connect to spirit

00:48:13 ►

and they bring through a deep ancestral connection.

00:48:17 ►

So as much as he’s, in some sense, initiated the tribe,

00:48:21 ►

the tribe have initiated Octavio

00:48:22 ►

and they’ve given him permission to use the songs

00:48:24 ►

and to use that in his ceremony with the Toad Medicine,

00:48:28 ►

which even if the tribe doesn’t claim ongoing lineage with,

00:48:32 ►

it’s part of the land, and it’s part of the legacy of the land.

00:48:35 ►

And so there’s a lot of different people trying to help facilitate,

00:48:41 ►

both from within the Seri and the 13 tribes of the sonoran desert and from

00:48:46 ►

outside in the west trying to create bridges of respect and consensus to support the preservation

00:48:54 ►

of the toad because one of the things which happens with the supply and demand in consumer

00:48:59 ►

culture is yeah the whole west is coming on to the idea of of this global shamanic resurgence

00:49:03 ►

but there’s not enough medicine for everyone, right?

00:49:06 ►

And not that the medicine is for everyone yet,

00:49:09 ►

but like Lindsay Lohan did ayahuasca

00:49:11 ►

about two, three years ago.

00:49:13 ►

She had a miscarriage

00:49:14 ►

and she heard about the power of ayahuasca

00:49:16 ►

and healing and what it could do.

00:49:18 ►

She had a very positive cathartic experience

00:49:20 ►

and then she tweeted it

00:49:21 ►

to like six million of her followers.

00:49:24 ►

And if like 10 percent

00:49:26 ►

of those decide to go down to the amazon there goes the supply of ayahuasca for another seven

00:49:31 ►

years you know so there are really delicate political and management issues around sacred

00:49:36 ►

shamanic medicines and we deeply understand this and we’re not trying to glorify shamanic

00:49:41 ►

medicines we’re trying to shine some light on the role of the shaman as a caretaker

00:49:47 ►

for the medicines with a connection to indigenous cultures with a connection to the planet and that

00:49:53 ►

unbroken thread and yes there’s politics and yes there’s egos and yes this is a movement and yes

00:49:59 ►

it’s difficult but it’s birthing itself into the world. And the interesting thing with 5-MeO, which I really believe,

00:50:06 ►

it was explained to me many years ago,

00:50:07 ►

it’s like the tree of life as a schematic for energy,

00:50:12 ►

you know, in understanding how energy works.

00:50:15 ►

Or you could say like a Christmas tree

00:50:16 ►

with the different baubles on different branches.

00:50:19 ►

All the entheogens have a place in nature

00:50:21 ►

and in the circuit diagram of how the divine imprints on the planet and so

00:50:26 ►

on that circuit diagram you might have you know psilocybin san pedro acacias whatever but 5meo

00:50:32 ►

dmt and all its all its containers is essentially the star at the top of the tree of life it’s the

00:50:38 ►

light it’s and the thing is with 5meo it’s phalaris grass, it’s in some varolas in different plants and trees, it’s in the toad medicine, apparently it’s in some fish.

00:50:49 ►

But most importantly, it occurs endogenously in the human brain.

00:50:54 ►

And this is what I mean.

00:50:55 ►

All of these medicines, I believe, are keys and triggers and reminders for what we have within us ourselves.

00:51:02 ►

So there’s not enough shamanic entheogenic

00:51:05 ►

sacraments around the world ongoingly to be sustainable for everyone. But this is the wake

00:51:09 ►

up call. This is the thing that says, look within, you know, there’s this whole world in there.

00:51:14 ►

The Sequoia tribe in Ecuador work with 5-MeO in their version of ayahuasca, they call it Yahe.

00:51:21 ►

And in their brew, they take two weeks to sing to the medicine,

00:51:25 ►

to prepare the medicine, to do it on an open flame,

00:51:28 ►

to sing to it, to energise with it, to feel it,

00:51:32 ►

to resonate and come into cohesion with it.

00:51:35 ►

They drink in hammocks off the ground.

00:51:37 ►

And they say that when they drink it,

00:51:39 ►

they connect to the star people,

00:51:41 ►

to the people who live in the light.

00:51:44 ►

And it’s interesting because that’s what the 5MEO experience is,

00:51:48 ►

of the light and of the deep, deep, deep, deep source.

00:51:51 ►

But there’s, as many other cultures have given us maps,

00:51:55 ►

there’s like Bardo states or there’s an energetic ecology

00:51:59 ►

from the baseline material world into maybe sort of like the NNDMT,

00:52:03 ►

you know, entities and fractaling geodesic there’s

00:52:08 ►

spaces there’s an inner cartography uh of the astral and of life forms that exist on the energetic

00:52:15 ►

realm but the deeper and deeper you go the vibration just becomes pure light and so when

00:52:22 ►

the sequoias say they work with the starry beings who live

00:52:25 ►

in the light, I’m really drawn to believe, in my experiences with 5MEO, you have the deep,

00:52:31 ►

deep source, and there’s like an event horizon around it where the ancestors live and potentially

00:52:36 ►

the descendants, and almost like this holographic matrix of all space-time in that bandwidth.

00:52:42 ►

And I feel that when the Sequoias say there’s these these people that live

00:52:46 ►

in the light who gave them the original recipe and understanding of how to work with their yahweh

00:52:51 ►

i feel that uh this potential is also within us and that these substances are reminding us

00:52:57 ►

that we have the on switch like god’s left the on switch back there for us to access

00:53:02 ►

and in this season of consciousness, we’re coming full circle

00:53:05 ►

and all the entheogens are preparing us and cleansing us

00:53:09 ►

and deepening us in our initiations to reveal this light and to go within.

00:53:14 ►

So the ultimate initiation and the ultimate anchoring

00:53:17 ►

of what the Australian Aboriginals call dream time consciousness

00:53:20 ►

is to be able to function in some type of tryptamine, holographic,

00:53:25 ►

all space-time as one and still be here on this planet.

00:53:29 ►

And it seems like from the Sequoia, and I’m making a metaphor

00:53:33 ►

and I’m jumping and sort of having artistic license here,

00:53:37 ►

but what if over large tracts of time between the ice ages

00:53:41 ►

and the pressures of living down here on planet Earth,

00:53:45 ►

what if there’s like this crest of the wave

00:53:47 ►

and we’re going through the sixth great species extinction as we speak

00:53:51 ►

and the biomass and the physicality of the forms are falling away?

00:53:56 ►

Like every day, species are dying, but energy is not created or destroyed.

00:54:00 ►

It goes back into the energetic matrix of Gaia herself

00:54:04 ►

and she’s building up to a charge for something new, at the same time as the plant sacraments are switching

00:54:09 ►

us all on, getting ready for this thing. And it seems to me, perhaps, this is part of the natural

00:54:15 ►

process and of awakening of the grand age, world ages and cycles, and that at the crest of the wave,

00:54:22 ►

a species gets an opportunity to reclaim the knowledge of their luminous body

00:54:28 ►

and to step into the light.

00:54:31 ►

And so down here in this initiatory phase as we’re going into this,

00:54:36 ►

sometimes it takes ego.

00:54:37 ►

It takes ego to let go of ego

00:54:39 ►

because 5-MeO is completely ego-dissolving.

00:54:43 ►

For 10 years I’ve thought I’ve surrendered in ayahuasca.

00:54:46 ►

I’ve let go.

00:54:46 ►

I’ve surrendered.

00:54:47 ►

I’ve surrendered.

00:54:48 ►

I’ve surrendered.

00:54:49 ►

Oh, my God.

00:54:51 ►

Rumi, the poet, the Sufi poet, says,

00:54:53 ►

the drop rejoins the ocean.

00:54:55 ►

And it does.

00:54:56 ►

And it does.

00:54:57 ►

And it does.

00:54:58 ►

And it does.

00:54:59 ►

And it does.

00:54:59 ►

So anyway, I feel that perhaps there’s this crest of the wave,

00:55:02 ►

there’s this global initiation happening,

00:55:05 ►

and for the last 10,000 years or more,

00:55:07 ►

we’ve been ego-driven creatures.

00:55:09 ►

We’ve needed the ego.

00:55:11 ►

We basically have species PTSD

00:55:13 ►

because we fell from unity consciousness.

00:55:17 ►

It’s the fall.

00:55:18 ►

It’s in all different myths around the world,

00:55:20 ►

not just the flood and the deluge, but the fall.

00:55:23 ►

And to cope with that, we’ve created,

00:55:25 ►

well, the ego has risen to the fore as one of our compartments of intellect, imagination,

00:55:30 ►

intuition, and all the different capabilities. And we’ve been holding so tight to this pain of

00:55:36 ►

separation. And now we’re being invited to come back to the light and to full circle. So yes,

00:55:41 ►

there’s ego. And yes, I’m not going to make apologies,

00:55:46 ►

but I think a lot of people involved in the shamanic movement

00:55:47 ►

are doing the best they can.

00:55:49 ►

And we’re all peers for each other

00:55:51 ►

and reflections for each other.

00:55:52 ►

And we’re all helping each other

00:55:54 ►

find our way home,

00:55:56 ►

as I think Ellen Watts said.

00:55:59 ►

Yeah, and as you or I aren’t perfect

00:56:03 ►

or Octavio’s isn’t perfect,

00:56:05 ►

we all are learning this process and this is a learning experience for all of us.

00:56:08 ►

But one thing I do give credit to Octavio in saying in the episode

00:56:13 ►

is that this is a self-healing process.

00:56:15 ►

So unlike a lot of the Western medicines that he’d use or what we call medicines,

00:56:20 ►

the toad, for example, and what Rak highlighted so is a is a process that you can only heal you

00:56:28 ►

like bruce lee said there is no help but self-help so there’s two reasons why somebody would want to

00:56:34 ►

partake in something like this and the first one is for healing and the other is for the expansion

00:56:38 ►

of consciousness so that’s something that for a young gentleman that’s on his path of learning

00:56:43 ►

discovery and growth like we all are,

00:56:45 ►

I think he highlights it so well in the episode and is infinitely wise.

00:56:51 ►

So we have about five minutes left.

00:56:54 ►

One more question?

00:56:55 ►

Yeah.

00:56:55 ►

Yeah, Annie.

00:56:59 ►

So my question is, where are the women who are doing healing in this tribe

00:57:06 ►

and who are the women shamans that you are profiling in your series?

00:57:12 ►

Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant question.

00:57:14 ►

Hands it to me.

00:57:16 ►

The women are out there.

00:57:17 ►

The women are out there.

00:57:18 ►

And God bless, because, you know, this would be out of balance

00:57:22 ►

if there wasn’t a representation of women

00:57:25 ►

doing the shamanic work.

00:57:27 ►

Let me say something to that.

00:57:29 ►

Super quick.

00:57:29 ►

One of the women that we’re very interested

00:57:32 ►

in potentially talking to

00:57:33 ►

is in the Women’s Visionary Congress.

00:57:36 ►

Yeah.

00:57:37 ►

I mean, you look at…

00:57:38 ►

I think of the Virgin Mary of the psychedelic culture

00:57:42 ►

as Maria Sabina,

00:57:44 ►

who was the gatekeeper for the patriarchy coming in, in a sense.

00:57:48 ►

And there’s been a lot of light and dark there

00:57:51 ►

with Gordon Wassoon coming in and using his influence.

00:57:54 ►

But the female curanderos of Mexico are working potentially…

00:57:59 ►

We’re just launching the episode,

00:58:00 ►

but we’re aiming for an equal balance of men and women to document

00:58:04 ►

and to see the differences you know in practitioners and of that yin energy which

00:58:10 ►

can be really fuerte as well really strong in its own way and also really you know those qualities

00:58:16 ►

of of care and of compassion and of the feminine energy is so important to it. So we’re looking at a mushroom shamaness, definitely,

00:58:26 ►

and an ayahuasquera, a woman who works with ayahuasca,

00:58:30 ►

and potentially with salvia divinorum.

00:58:33 ►

And we’re open to finding the right people to document

00:58:36 ►

because we recognise that there’s a great duty of care for us as filmmakers

00:58:41 ►

to show people that are doing this the right way,

00:58:44 ►

but definitely looking at the

00:58:45 ►

role of female practitioners

00:58:47 ►

in the shamanic resurgence

00:58:49 ►

so thanks for coming everybody

00:58:51 ►

thanks for making it out today

00:58:53 ►

and we just wanted to kind of say thank you

00:58:56 ►

to Palenque Norte for allowing us

00:58:58 ►

to do a brief showing of the episode here

00:58:59 ►

today this is only the second time it’s ever been shown

00:59:02 ►

so

00:59:02 ►

yeah first time in day time as well so it’s ever been shown. Yeah, first time in daytime as

00:59:06 ►

well. So it’s always going to be available

00:59:07 ►

at shamansoftheglobalvillage.com. That’s where

00:59:10 ►

you can always find it and hopefully future episodes

00:59:12 ►

in the series. So a

00:59:14 ►

series like this obviously is very much

00:59:15 ►

something that’s been made independently.

00:59:18 ►

There’s no way that this type of

00:59:19 ►

content at this point in time,

00:59:21 ►

oftentimes highlighted by your question,

00:59:23 ►

would be made by kind of old school channels of hierarchy from the top down. So this is a very much a

00:59:30 ►

bottom up process and how we’re putting this together. So, you know, we just appreciate any

00:59:36 ►

community support along the way, even if that’s just sharing the message and sharing what we’re

00:59:39 ►

doing. So thanks so much again. They say it takes a tribe to raise a child and it definitely takes

00:59:47 ►

a tribe to support a documentary series. It almost feels like the 12 tasks of Hercules because we,

00:59:52 ►

you know, there’s, we see at least a dozen major entheogens around the planet which are

00:59:57 ►

being used and coming to prominence again and looking at the caretakers of those substances.

01:00:03 ►

So this is a real labor of love both

01:00:05 ►

for niles and i and the rest of the team and uh it is launching on october the 1st at shamans

01:00:10 ►

of the global village.com and uh we’ll be all over social media and doing our sort of podcasts

01:00:16 ►

and outreach uh and we really really need your support to do that to help share and uh let other

01:00:22 ►

people know who are interested in in these

01:00:25 ►

substances and in this this level of initiation and engagement so thank you so much from all of

01:00:31 ►

us and check us out at shamans of the global village.com aloha

01:00:36 ►

you’re listening to the psychedelic salon where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.

01:00:47 ►

I think that I can speak for most of us when I say how much I appreciate the work that Rack and Niles have done and are doing to preserve more of the knowledge about how our planet’s medicinal plants continue to be used by indigenous people, people that most of us are never going to be able to visit with in person.

01:01:06 ►

And along with the work of a long line of ethnobiologists that stretches back even beyond

01:01:13 ►

the legendary Richard Evans Schultes and on through current researchers like Jonathan Ott,

01:01:19 ►

well, the documentary films of Rack and Niles I find to be equally important because, well, they reach out to us

01:01:26 ►

less scholarly people who, nonetheless,

01:01:28 ►

can play a role in preserving

01:01:30 ►

this important human knowledge

01:01:32 ►

in ways of our own.

01:01:34 ►

And so if you go to www.shamansoftheglobalvillage.com

01:01:44 ►

you can learn more about this

01:01:46 ►

very important work. Now, before I go, I want to mention some new music that has come to my

01:01:52 ►

attention. At least it’s new music to me. Almost every week I receive inquiries from fellow salonners

01:01:59 ►

asking if I would play some of their music here in the salon. But as you know, I don’t do that very often,

01:02:06 ►

and I won’t be doing it today, by the way. And there’s several reasons for this, the main one

01:02:11 ►

being the fact that after a lot of discussion with a wide range of our fellow salonners,

01:02:16 ►

I decided to produce these podcasts with very low audio quality settings so that the file sizes of

01:02:22 ►

the podcast can be kept as small as possible.

01:02:25 ►

And that, of course, means that playing your music here really doesn’t do it justice.

01:02:31 ►

But the band that I’m going to mention now, well, they didn’t even contact me directly.

01:02:36 ►

Instead, I found a posting on the salon’s forums about an upcoming gig of theirs in London.

01:02:42 ►

This posting was made by Orphic Resonance, and I’ll put a link

01:02:46 ►

in it to today’s program notes, which you’ll find at psychedelicsalon.com. Now, while I seldom play

01:02:52 ►

music that’s sent to me, well, I always listen to it. And so, when I saw the posting on the forums,

01:02:58 ►

I clicked the link and listened to this art rock band that’s called Phase Theory. That’s P-H-A-Z-E Theory. I mean,

01:03:07 ►

how could I resist after Orphic said that their music was inspired by listening to Led Zeppelin,

01:03:13 ►

Pink Floyd, Miles Davis Electric, Jimi Hendrix, and Funkadelic. And since I bought music from all

01:03:20 ►

of those influences, I had to wonder what kind of sound phase theory had created,

01:03:25 ►

and I wasn’t disappointed. Over the course of my life, there have been a number of different

01:03:31 ►

musical influences that, well, that stand out from the rest. And keep in mind here that I was

01:03:37 ►

buying Elvis Presley 45s in high school at a time when his new songs were just beginning to hit the top 40, and I’ve listened to a lot of music since then.

01:03:47 ►

In 1967, just at the start of the Summer of Love,

01:03:50 ►

and one week before our ship deployed for the war in Vietnam,

01:03:54 ►

we had a party, and it was that night that we all heard the new Beatles album,

01:04:00 ►

Sergeant Pepper’s Marching Band, for the first time.

01:04:03 ►

Then somewhere around 1983, my oldest son gave me a copy of Brothers in Arms by Dire Straits.

01:04:10 ►

Well, those two albums for me kind of bracket my experience as a Vietnam vet.

01:04:15 ►

Then in the early 1990s, my youngest son was attending a university in Boston,

01:04:20 ►

and he became a fan of a local band that was hot on the college circuit at the time.

01:04:25 ►

When he handed me a copy of their latest album, he had this silly little smile on his face, and he

01:04:30 ►

said, I think you’re going to like this. Well, the album was titled Cure for Pain, and was by a band

01:04:37 ►

that consisted of drums, a bass guitar, and a saxophone. The band name was Morphine, and if

01:04:44 ►

you’ve ever heard them, well, their unusual

01:04:46 ►

sound is going to stay with you forever. So a couple of days ago, I clicked on a link to listen

01:04:53 ►

to Phase Theory, and I learned that the band consists of drums, a lead guitar, a fantastic

01:05:00 ►

female singer, and an electric tuba. Now, I really don’t need to say much more, because you should be able to guess the rest.

01:05:09 ►

Let me say it this way.

01:05:10 ►

Although I never thought that I would find something that I liked better than morphine,

01:05:15 ►

phase theory takes that vibe to an entirely new level.

01:05:20 ►

That sounds cool when I say it like that.

01:05:22 ►

Makes phase theory sound like a drug, and it’s a drug for the ear, I guess.

01:05:27 ►

At least to me.

01:05:28 ►

Anyhow, on July 20th, they’re going to be holding their album launch party at Servant Jazz Quarters in London.

01:05:35 ►

And if I lived in London, well, that’s where I’d be on the 20th of next month.

01:05:40 ►

I’ll put some links to a couple of their YouTube videos in today’s program notes,

01:05:44 ►

but be sure to use headphones if you can.

01:05:47 ►

Oh, and I almost forgot to mention the fact that the lyrics to some of these songs

01:05:51 ►

are actually poems of Yeats and Huxley.

01:05:55 ►

In fact, I’m going to go back for another listen right now.

01:05:58 ►

So, for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from cyberdelic space.

01:06:02 ►

Be well, my friends.

Graph View

Backlinks