Rebirth of the Mystery Schools: Ayahuasca in the West

Thank you for listening to the Occult Sentinel podcast. This is the 45th episode of the show and I'm your host Joe Moore. Today in the show we have Rak Razam a new guest to the show. Rak is a freelance journalist, author, filmmaker, and podcaster from Australia doing a lot of work covering the entheodellic community or psychedelic medicine communities of the world. I just finished watching Rak's newly released film, Aya Awakenings. It is a stunning film that pulls from Rak's book titled Aya: a Shamanic Odyssey, and newly released as Aya Awakenings, a Shamanic Odyssey. In this show, we cover subjects all over the map, including how the Western magical practitioner may approach this area and practice, how shamans see Ayahuasca functioning on the health and healing of individuals, and some of the metaphysics or cosmologies surrounding ayahuasca shamanism, we also get into a little bit of Rak's personal story.

OS: Rak, thanks for joining me. This is really cool because you just came out with a film and you're about to tour North America in January. Is it gonna be January when you're here?

Rak: Yeah, January 8 and in eight days time we premiere in New York City at the Film Anthology archives on I think it's 52nd Street, but yeah on January 16^th in New York City.

OS: That's very cool. Is that in partnership with the Evolver or Reality Sandwich?

Rak: Yeah, both the Evolver and Reality Sandwich have been very supportive of us. When you kno, you're coming over from Australia it's been really important to establish ongoing relationships with those organizations and indeed in different cities across America we're doing 10 cities across America and it's really it's really beautiful to meet the community because there's so many valuable people in the community who themselves might have experience with the medicine or with altered states or with the shamanic culture.

And I feel like it's it's a bit of a responsibility. Here in Australia we have this thing where, as white people, I guess, as Westerners, when you're on indigenous people's land, you have to ask permission. You have to ask permission to the indigenous elders, the caretakers of the land. I liken that when we go around America to the different cities to asking permission, not only if I can hopefully find the other indigenous caretakers if they're still there, but also the community caretakers and the people that represent the psychedelic and entheogenic and consciousness culture in different cities around America. So we'd love to meet and greet them and partner with them as we bring the film, "Aya Awakenings" to America.

OS: Cool. So the name of your film is "Aya Awakenings" and it's modelled after a book you wrote. Could you speak about the book for just a minute? Like what's the title and the general concept?

Rak: I'll just backtrack a bit. So, I first went down to Peru in 2006 as a freelance writer and at the time I was rebranding myself as a Gonzo journalist and exploring edge culture, exploring different facets of spirituality and technology and counterculture. And so I really sunk my teeth into the story about the mythic archetype of the shaman.

I went down to the Second Amazonian Shaman Conference that Alan Shoemaker hosted in Iquitos every year and was really lucky to get a broad snapshot of the different shamans or curanderos who were speaking at the conference and also hosting ayahuasca ceremonies at night. And to also meet hundreds of different seekers from all across the world who are engaging with this shamanic revival and just to get a snapshot of the culture because it's such a burgeoning and blossoming culture.

In 2006 it was just starting to peak and now in 2014 it's really burst open the floodgates and it's very public and you know there is a lot of teething issues as the culture comes more into the mainstream. So I was reporting about about shamanic culture and it quickly became apparent that it was it was going to be a bit a bit more in-depth; that I'd fallen down the rabbit hole a lot deeper than most traditional journalists do and just doing a short story.

So it evolved into the book, "Aya: A Shamanic Odyssey," which has just been re-released from North Atlantic books now with the same title, "Aya: Awakening, A Shamanic Odyssey." It recounts my three months or so in Peru in 2006 drinking with about 24 different indigenous and Western curanderos or shamans, and really getting a snapshot, not just of my journeys, but of this generation of people engaging with the medicine, why Westerners are going down to Peru, why Ayahuasca's on the rise, what it's like to be in ceremony.

And so I anchor that in the book and when we came to make the film a few years later, Aya: Awakenings the film takes the narration from the book and the dialogue from the book and directly, like it's a narrative documentary, but it's so unlike any other documentary, it's another gonzo shamanic artifact. Really what we've done through the narration and the visual recreation of the interior landscapes and the oral soundscapes and the multi-sensory mashup of synesthesia that we create in the film really invokes in the viewer a shamanic awakening. It takes people on a journey that is really the closest thing you can get to the medicine itself. So I'm really pleased to be able to share that.

OS: Very cool. So yeah, I got the unique opportunity to watch about 57 minutes of the film today before this interview and then sit in and about an hour and a half of panel discussions on a webinar with you, Mitch Schultz from the DMT: Molecule and Dennis McKenna and Richard Meach, who made probably my favorite possibly now second favorite ayahuasca documentary Vine of Souls is that the right name?

Rak: Yeah, Vine of the Soul and then the subtitle was encounters with Ayahuasca. We're working shaping this idea of entheodelic as a label for, I guess, a textual equivalent of the visionary art movement of how we are anchoring these journeys and these dimensions and these possibilities in our fiction as well as non-fiction and creating these shamanic artifacts to then seed into the mainstream culture and help with awareness of this shamanic revival, you know, get further into mainstream awareness.

OS: Yeah, I think there's a lot of value there. I read Benton's review on Reality Sandwich of your film before I even thought I was gonna be watching it, before we spoke so he kind of got me excited with that review. And yeah, he got me really excited with the language and he made some really interesting points. He's saying, you know, Gonzo kind of started with Hunter Thompson. I think Tim Leary might have had a little bit of a streak of it in him, but not really. But, but these guys got super inflated and it doesn't seem as though, you know, you're not really on the same level of inflation as these guys were. I think because you've been doing serious medicine work, you know, for different healers for that one book.

Rak: Well, yeah, also, you know, its been seven years since I first went down to Peru on that original spiritual journey where I was all consumed. We were talking about, I guess you could call it the "Messiah Complex" or this ego inflation that many people, not just on Ayahuasca, but they say that psychedelics and entheogens can help erase or, you know, reabsorb the ego, their ego dissolving. And that can be true.

But what can also happen is that it can inflate the ego. And there's been many examples in Ayahuasca, the western integration of Ayahuasca, the embrace of ayahuasca experience where the medicine, it seems to me part of what happens on a physical level, Ayahuasca is a purgative. They've done the only real scientific test in the early 1990s with the Hoasca Project with Charles Grob and Dennis McKenna and other academics and scientists and doctors looking at what happens on a neurological level.

So we know that it has positive effects on a physical level, but on the emotional or the mental level it seems that what happens is that the wall which is usually present in the ego state between the conscious mind and the subconscious mind becomes very, very permeable. It almost is dissolved. And so a lot of what this shadow, the repression, all the things which are in our subconscious flood the conscious mind. And so what usually happens is that many people become aware of things very suddenly.

And what Western magical traditions have told us is that where your consciousness goes or your intent goes, that's it, it flows. So if you're trying to manifest or do magical work and you're in the Ayahuasca space – if you're thinking of your loved ones you'll revisit all your relationships and what the hurts may have been, or what you've said, or what you've done and how you feel. And just like with the the the physical reality where you defrag, you emotionally defrag as well.

And so a lot of the healing which can happen from Ayahuasca, I believe, is the psychological healing where the shadow is brought up to the light. And so that can often be very cathartic, but somehow in that, there can also be a disparity or the opposite where ideas can get caught in a loop. It can be in a recursive loop and there can be messages or transmissions, which people– we still don't really know if it is some animistic transmission from Ayahuasca herself or from the planetary interface, which I've been also responsible for mythologizing to a large degree, some of these vegetal sort of transmissions.

But it seems to be that Ayahuasca works through this interface of the receiving of our consciousness, and so there's a very famous example, there's many examples, but one of the famous examples, I think it was written up in Vanity Fair magazine, there was a guy who went to Peru about five years ago and he got these transmissions in ceremony saying you've got to build like this huge four-story pyramid on the banks on the river, on the Amazon river and he had the money to do it and he was following through on his mad mission and he built like this bamboo structure, four stories high on the Amazon river above Iquitos. But of course it just didn't get to completion and the remnants of it are there as his testament to the hubris of some of these ideas.

I've talked to many different people over the years, you know, Ayahuasca says, "Build a lodge, build like, you know, the most gigantic lodge." And it may not be Ayahuasca that's saying this, it could be their own ego, it could be, you know, this interface between all the different players here.

But it's kind of full circle to this, it seems to be there can be, you know talking about Timothy Leary and the other people, there can be this messianic sort of idea that people can prosylite and the medicine is a very powerful tool But it's only one tool amongst many and I've been very careful over the years because I've been on a seven-year mission.

I acknowledge that I've been on a mission. But as a writer it's been to get the book out there and then to make the film and how to get the film out there and it's been very much a humbling experience for me because I've done it all while maintaining a day job, while maintaining my relationships and my family and the three kids. And, you know, I haven't got time to get all egotistical about it because I need to get the message out.

But the message as a writer and a media maker, it's embodied in the artifacts I create. I do believe there's a deeper planetary message coming through. And it's basically, you know, Dennis McKenna said recently, it's like, you know, "you monkeys think you're in control, but you're not, and it's time to wake up."

And so Ayahuasca can be a great cleanser of the soul and the doors of perception, to help us remember what we're embedded in, to help us feel. I mean, 'cause it's a medicine and it's cleansing, all it's really doing on some or level is letting us be ourselves, be fully integrated and helping us re-link up and heal ourselves so we can remember, we can connect with our loved ones, we can connect with our community, we can connect with the planet in a very visceral way and we can, in many, many ayahuasca ceremonies, I've tactically almost kinaesthetically felt this connection with the web of life.

And what they help do is connect us to the planet. And the planet is speaking to us all the time. And it's regulating all the different species in the web of life synergistically to play a role for the greater good of the whole. And it's only because we've been out of balance, you know, like the movie Konnisquatsi, this world is out of balance. It's why there's such an urgency now to reconnect and why I believe that this Global Shamanic Resurgence is happening and that the planetary Exo-phermones are being secreted by the planet herself to connect to the higher primates like us humans, who are in need of remembrance of the web of life and what we're really embedded in.

OS: Mmm. Yeah, definitely. So I have to agree that yeah inflation is a huge problem, but yeah, if you are careful that you can check it fairly regularly I think when I when I do breath work workshops, we often tell people don't burst into a radio station to tell them the ultimate truth like an hour after you're done breathing. Because Inflation happens when you're doing this kind of work. I think even people doing Western magical type work are gonna have these kind of problems. One thing we talked about, go ahead.

Rak: It's very true because here's the thing for the average person who hasn't had a spiritual experience and it doesn't have to be through the lens of a psychedelic or an entheogen. You know, as you say, breath work is an amazing tool for getting in touch with their own energetics and their own bodies and souls, if you will. And, you know, the states of being that these things can engender are, well, I was going to say they're wonderful, but they're awful in the original sense of the word. They're full of awe, AWE, awe. They're full of awe.

I mean, they're awesome in the sense that they can be overwhelming in the tactile energetic immediacy of the reality of these states of being and they exist within us and outside they connect us to larger energetic states. It's because Westerners have been denuded and we've been really compartmentalized away from the spiritual connection that this is such a revelation.

But so many many people when they have their first initiation through whichever modality do want to scream to the rooftops and be like: oh my, it's like having sex for the first time. It's fucking beautiful but you don't have to go out and tell the world that, you know there's these orgasmic states of being but there does need to be a larger cultural awareness and a proper integral frequency to transmit these experiences on.  

It's so important that these artifacts, these shamanic cultural artifacts, are really starting to peak in Western culture. There are many ayahuasca documentaries and things on DMT and other plant medicines emerging. We're not trying to push these on anyone. We're just saying, "Hey, these are pathways that exist and they're on the rise and it seems to be that there's an intelligence, perhaps from the plant herself, in creating these substances and in these opportunities to engage with them."

And because we seem to be in a planetary crisis and a paradigm crisis that we need fresh ideas, we need new perspectives to tackle the immediate problems of this generation globally, we need new ways of coming together. And when I say new ways, it's almost like Terence McKenna used to say: we need an Archaic Revival, we need sustainability, we need tribality.

We need togetherness. We need to be on the same page with this. We can't have hierarchies of, you know, military, industrial, corporate domination controlling us and leading us down the garden path to oblivion. It's really time to start living our truth. And for me, that does involve the spiritual path.

OS: You were talking on the webinar as well about creating artifacts like the documentaries that you were just mentioning, and books, and, you know, also, I think paintings, you know, there's the visual artists like Alex Grey and things like that, and then the western magical side, we have people like Austin Osmond Speer, and there's loads and loads of painters in the, you know, magical worlds, and I think that's key, trying to just express, through various mediums, what's happening in these kind of occult worlds, you know, stuff that's just not seen. How do you take that stuff from these visionary states and put them out there? And there's so much value in sharing that kind of stuff.

Rak: Totally. Well, here's the interesting thing, you know, it's like the whole idea of occult means to be hidden, you know. And the spiritual dimensions that the entheogenic experience opens up have been well documented and known by tribal people across the world.

They've held the flame and they're the gatekeepers and the caretakers of the land of their communities, but they've retained their connection to the land and the land which secretes these substances. So, you know, all across the planet, indigenous people still retain the knowledge from many different entheogens.

But in Western culture, we've had this occult tradition of magic and of hermeticism and of, you know, stimulants and of psychedelics and entheogens and mind-offering substances, but they've been channeled through mystery schools. But they've been channeled through mystery schools successfully for over 2 ,000 years.

You look at the mysteries of  Eleusis and the Greeks and the "Soma" and things like that. And they've had to parallel to not upset the apple cart and to not challenge, you know, the dominator culture and the empires of the day and the power structures. But even people within those empire power structures, the kings, the queens, the authority figures, were participating in these ceremonies. It's only really been the last few hundred years that we know of that they've fallen by the wayside or they've been disconnects with the mystery schools.

It's a bit of a worry because you've got things like the NSA and total information awareness and PRISM and we know everything is monitored but I mean this is it. I mean it's no longer the time to remain hidden because everything is known they know everything there we are not doing anything wrong this is our birthright to connect with our spirituality through the plants with integrity you know for the right for the right spiritual practices. This is not a recreational drug paradigm per se. Also embedded within that I must respect the fact that ecstasy or estasis in the Greek originally meant this divine connection and within recreation there's also a pathway which is very valid.

But it's a learning curve and usually recreational usage is because we don't have the traditions of initiation in our societies that indigenous people do. But I really see this whole idea of a culture and the magical traditions are really peaking again through psychedelic and entheogenic culture, but the time for the mystery schools is over and its time for what I call the "Global Shamanic Resurgence" which is well underway.

OS: Cool, so I hope this doesn't sound remedial and I hope my listeners don't mind it, but could you roughly recap what Ayahuasca is useful for or why some people might want to use it?

Rak: Well, and I'll say at the outset, Ayahuasca is not for everyone. We seem to go through these generational shifts where, at least with alternative communities and cultures, different substances come into popularity.

And it's almost as if there's certain different gateways or chakras or energetic potentials, which had to be opened up on a species level before the next one could be opened up. It's very interesting when you look at the cultural vectors involved in, you know, I guess what mainstream would call drug culture, but what we call medicine culture.

So Ayahuasca has been around for millennia, the indigenous people say all throughout South America. It's a concoction, a brew made up from a vine called Bannisteriopsis Caapi, which contains Harmine and Harmaline, and the admixture plants in the brew are usually Chakruna or Chaliponga, which contain Dimethyltryptamine (DMT), which is the visionary component.

Together, the Bannisteriopsis Caapi is an MAO inhibitor. It stops the monoamine oxidize breakdown in our bodies of the DMT, because DMT is the visionary component and as listeners might know from books and the film like DMT the Spirit Molecule, Rick Strassman did the last psychedelic test in the early 1990s and the only one the record as a legal test with DMT. And it seems to be that DMT, he called it the Spirit Molecule but as a visionary component, tryptamines are all through nature, which is a very significant thing because it means nature does not make mistakes. Nature knows what she is doing.

And if you were to thread, here's what I think about tryptamines in general throughout nature. If you were to have an understanding of the holographic nature of reality, the fact that everything is interconnected and everything reflects and is reflecting in an interdependent web of existence, if that's on a quantum level–what reality is–if you were to have to anchor that on a biological level, you'd need an interface. You need to actually thread something all throughout nature, which would be a portal for the holographic quantum level and the biological.

So lo and behold, nature threads these tryptamines, and there's many different types of DMT. There's NN-DMT, 5-MeO-DMT, pineline DMT, many other combinations which occur in the human brain.

It is the most current research believe that it's produced in the pineal gland as well as the bone marrow I think in other parts of the body, it's in the blood. But mystics all through time have centered on the pineal gland, which is as small as the grain of rice in the shape of a pine cone, as the third eye, as the portal spiritual sort of awakening.

And so the curanderos of Peru and throughout the Amazon–there's a lineage and a heritage of ayahuasca use. The curanderos themselves and in different tribes say that they were told by the spirits in the plants by an ayahuasca to combine these very two very random plant materials.

This woody liana vine that curls up and grows on other trees and plants and goes all the way up the foliage in the jungle and breaks through the canopy to reach the light and you've got to combine the vine which takes up to seven years to grow with these other administered plants and the vine is the one which stops your body breaking down DMT because DMT occurs naturally in our bodies. Some indigenous peoples like the Kogi tribe in South America do darkness rituals and if you're nine days in total darkness the DMT builds up in your serotonin pathways and you spontaneously have very, very deep visionary experiences.

And so what they're doing is there's a healing component to why Ayahuasca was a purgative that we described earlier, which is very useful and very needed in their jungle communities that have not had Western medicines.

The jungle is their pharmacy and their hospital, you know, and they provide healing for people with the medicine, but then on the other level the tryptamines and the DMT in the brew has a different type of healing. The curanderos I sat with were saying that many people are coming down to South America now in search of physical healing. But there's a much larger percentage of people they were encountering, Westerners, who didn't have anything visibly wrong with them. But they had this disconnect or dis-ease or this feeling they were lacking something and they weren't connected to spirit basically.

The indigenous curanderos can see that they were hungry for a connection to nature and to spirit and to Great Spirit and that is potentially what Ayahuasca can provide and potentially also why there's this smokable DMT boom in the West which far eclipses–if you look at the statistics on social media and the net, just in terms of demographics of certain pages and on YouTube, on clicks and things, DMT seems to outweigh Ayahuasca about 10 to 1 in the demographics, and it is a lot more easily transmittable.

There's pros and cons, and there's a lot of different dynamics and cultural dynamics around the sacredness and the usage of the two substances. And we talk about this in the film, Aya: Awakenings as a quite a fundamental theme, but anything that is used with integrity and respect and the right intent–and we're talking about the magical intent at the start here– is a sacrament. These are sacraments. It's just how you use them, they're tools.

So Ayahuasca is a healing modality, and to a large degree, what Westerners are wanting from that healing–if they don't have a specific element–is a reconnection to the web of life, to spirit, and to themselves.

OS: Okay, cool. Yeah, I occasionally run into people in the Western magical tradition, that are really hesitant because they don't necessarily... they hear how severe the ordeals are, and they don't really want to go there. I kind of describe the level of terrors that can be experienced, and that's enough, and they don't want to know what the beauty is like at the end of it.

A lot of the time in this other tradition that my podcast really focuses around, you're kind of going after the philosopher's stone, and there's a fairly clearly delineated path towards that, but Ayahuasca, I believe, could be complementary to it. I think it is complementary to it. How do you see the Western tradition, how it could maybe complement or be complemented by the ayahuasca work?

Rak: Well, it's very fundamental actually. It's a really good question that most people don't ask because they're not that aware of magical practice or the Western occult tradition.

I do have a few friends that are chaos magicians and magical practitioners. I do a series of podcasts quite regularly as well In a Perfect World and a few years back I encountered in North America a practitioner that works in circles, but he was administering five 5-MeO-DMT, which was completely legal at that time. It only got banned I think in 2011. It was a bit of a loophole in the law, but he was doing magical ritual circles and then administering the incredibly powerful sacrament on top of that.

Essentially the occult tradition throughout the West has been in altered states, sometimes with stimulus and sacraments and things like that. But people almost don't see the forest from the trees. If you start off from a starting position of being a meditator or being in contact with your mind and your energetics and your body and knowing yourself quite well, it's like filling up your car with petrol before you go on a big journey. If you've tuned up the car, had a check-over, and know how to drive and everything's ready to go, you can take off when you put petrol in.

And some people are coming into ayahuasca and expecting too much from the sacrament herself. It's really important people do a dieta and physically cleanse out their bodies and also mentally purge and mentally clear out all their issues and the better, more finessed vehicle you bring to the work of the plant sacraments, the more she or they can work with you.

And the curanderos I talked to said well, this might be more of a Western sort of translation, but understanding the chakra system you've got to get through the first base chakras the first three chakras until you get to the heart chakra and the heart chakra is ability not just to love, but the ability to navigate. It's almost as if we're navigating with our soul, not just with our mind when we're in this these altered states.

It's not just your logical, reasoning intellectual capacity that is going on the journey. Ayahuasca is opening up your full emotional, intuitive imagination in the archaic sense of carving out possibilities with your intent. It's a magical act. The imagination is your best tool, your best sword to use to carve out potential in the draw. And so the medicine opens up all these potentials.

So the more you have cleansed and prepared and are familiar with the possibilities within yourself, then the deeper you can go. And so, the heart chakra is the navigator which helps navigate in the hyperspatial realms. And a lot of the curanderos, the shamans of the Amazon, they're always battling each other on the astral and they're assuming their avatars. They've got the black Jaguar, and they've got these allies which may or may not be autonomous entities, but they then engage them against other curanderos or shamans.

It's like, I quote this in the book, it didn't make it into the film, but there's an academic called Roy Ascot, and he coined these terms, there's validated reality, there's virtual reality, and there's vegetal reality. And vegetal reality deserves just as much anthropological and academic discourse as the other two, because it's a valid frequency of being that these tribal peoples have always been engaged with.

And it's very similar to virtual reality. It's very similar to the fact that you can manipulate your avatar in these realms and it's your ability to visualize and your ability to work with visualization which can carve out possibilities. I guess to use another Hollywood shorthand it's a bit like the Green Lantern superhero: it's the willpower which is the magical act which carves out the potential to shape reality.

Terence McKenna had this this infamous riff back in the 1990s, you know, of a tribe, I think it was the Shuar Indians in South America, who would do group ceremonies on Ayahuasca and they would see this purple viscous sort of fluid, this super fluid, you know, coming out of their membranes and mouths and as they were speaking and the vibration of sound was turning into light, it was turning into colour and they discovered that they could sculpt from the emanations of their mouth from the sounds they were making sound became light and light could be carved into shape. It was like there was this visual language. McKenna was making the allusion to that what we think language is.

But it's not what we think imagination is in the classical psychotherapy sort of mechanistic reduction of it. Imagination is a tool of your will to engage with the ability of the universe, the fact that the canvas of the astral is open for, it's like Second Life, it's open for manipulation in the sense of fleshing it out and it engages with us and finds our interface and finds out the right symbols that we'd like to use and we may see visions of certain archetypes that are in our cultural data banks, but it's reading us and we're reading it and there's an interactive consensual relationship with higher dimensional space that these substances open up.

OS: How do you see the differences between different, I guess there would be a ton of different lineages in the forest because it's been around for so long in the Amazon, but how do you see the differences between the groups in the Amazon basin and doing ayahuasca work and maybe the groups and the mountains outside of that region, I guess to like the Kogi, for instance. Like, is their metaphysics somewhat similar in their practice similar in the ayahuasca use?

Rak: Well, I won't misstep by commenting on other cultures Cosmovisions. But generally, I would say from my understanding of different indigenous tribes. There is a commonality, I think there's a commonality of the shared astral spaces they go to.

Quite often they have different linguistics and different language for their different origin stories but there is quite often a similarity in what they're describing is happening and the fact that most of the from what I know most indigenous tribes to use a term would say their animus that they believe that there is spirit animating everything and nature is alive with these spirits and thespirits talk to them.

And the whole purpose of Ayahuasca and the dieta, it's not just a Western thing that's like you're popping a pill, you know, you pop the red pill and escape the Matrix, it's a process of initiation, it's a process of rigorous control and of sacrifice to give up a lot of the Western ways. The dieta involves no sugar, salt, pork, red meat, sex, alcohol, any of the things which can dull our vibrational fields, our energetic fields. And what they're meant to be doing is to be stripping back to the pure vibration that we have. If you're living in the jungle and not taking on artificial stimulants or EMF or any of the frequencies that are out there, it's a very pure signal and they can hear the sensitivities of nature.

So, you know, a friend of mine, Steve Bayer, wrote the book, "Singing to the Plants," which was about Mestizo Amazonian shamanism and this whole idea of singing to the plants and the sacred songs and the Icaros, the shaman sing, that's where the healing occurs through vibration and through sound. But everything is sound. And we know, you know, on a quantum level, everything is vibration. Everything has its own unique vibrational code and this is what the curanderos sing up in their songs.

They transmit the code of different plants and of different entities for healing practices. But the thing I'm getting to is that the different indigenous tribes have the sensitivity to be able to hear nature, to be able to hear the songs of the plants and the spirits. And so even though some of the different mythologies or origin stories might be different. The commonality is that they believe nature is alive.

So as well as a human collective unconscious, I believe there could be an inter-species collective unconscious level of vibration that we interact with, where other creatures are also dreaming, and then that deeper level where entities may be native to that realm of ideas or to that canvas where things are there.

So all the different indigenous cultures believe in the Great Spirit. There's Mitakuye Oyasin. There's Pachamama. There's all these different names they give, the fact that the planet is an alive and vibrant, sometimes loving and sometimes destroying entity, because there's a larger ecosystem and a larger pattern at work, you know, there's a larger organism that we're just embedded in. But all cultures have a perspective and origin story and a cosmology And they're all about it.

OS: Cool, and you were talking a lot about the planet being alive and sending messages and nature being alive and sending messages. Do you, to get a little more obscure, is there ever anything from like star systems or galaxies or anything like that? Or just very far off astral levels of reality or anything like that?

Rak: well here's the thing and you know I talk with lots of people about different facets of Shamanic culture and there's got to be some discernment of the dolphin woo woo new age type of love and light, which I embrace to a degree as well–it's a different language and it's a different discourse and they're coming from usually a correct emotional space, it's just not intellectually rigorous.

But there's a discernment, we talked at the start, about the ego inflation and this idea that Ayahuasca is healing and then there's the voice that can often be heard, you know, and this happens on the mushrooms as well, that voice that can often be heard on high dose mushroom usage, and this whole idea of the other. And what is it that we are contacting to when we engage with these practices?

Are we just connecting with different subroutines within our own consciousness that we're projecting out and reflecting back at us? And are we so distant from our own spirit that we're being exteriorized as the other? And there's an element of that. Here's where Jung had this idea about the unconscious and these levels to the unconscious. Like when we’re dreaming, we often dream about people that we've been thinking of, or concerns of the day residues, you call them. So he said there's basically chambers where the first layer is the day residues. And then you'll think of your brother or the person you're in love with or your teacher at school. And you will go through scenarios in your dream of acting out what is in your day residues.

And then the deeper chamber. It's the level of the collective unconscious where we might be overlapping with the other person who's dreaming and thinking about us and we're overlapping because we are connected on the tryptamine frequency of dimethyl tryptamine in our brains because they say that is the key, the neurochemical lock and key to potentially the dreaming state we go into each night.

And so we are overlapping on a neurological frequency and there's a potential for the collective unconscious, but then I believe there's a deeper level even beyond that, which is the canvas, which those first two levels are on. It's on that canvas that you find the creatures which are native to that realm, which potentially have autonomy. One of the four archetypal symbols that people see in DMT space is geometric energy entities and praying mantis-like insect entities. The funny thing is that insects have DMT in their brains as well.

So there's so many levels of discernment and how do we, there needs to be a rigorous, basically there needs to be a rigorous cosmic anthropology. We need to take the scientific practices of different anthropological ways of interacting with cultures and the science that we've developed around different states like that. We need to apply it to psychedelics and entheogens and magical work and to the hyperspatial realms that open up.

Like we're not even on the cusp, we have entered the paradigm of cosmic awareness of this interspecies symbiosis that we're all engaged in, you know, different levels of dimensionality and that there's this cosmic ecology that we are embedded in. It doesn't stop at the physical level.

And this is basically what quantum physics is telling us, what a lot of the astrophysicists are telling us about the past, the Earth's orbit and into the solar system and all the cosmic things on a physical level, all the energy coming in, all the potential plasma life forms that are out there, feasting on the changes happening at the moment. And also on a shamanic level on the astral realms and the hyper dimensions. 

What I found with Ayahuasca, and I've spoken to so many people in ceremonies and sharing circles the next day or immediately afterwards, these intelligences embodied within the plants, these divas or these spirit entities, in the last generation or two, when we've had a lot of biomimicry in our sciences, looking at nature and creating network-based approaches to computing and to connecting, you know, information technology, we're developing our own language to describe and encapsulate network-based, work-based systems. And nature is the original network.

But this ability to languageize them often riffs off a lot of computer terminology and stuff in a very neat way. But it seems to me that the entities, and they themselves, like Ayahuasca, in the indigenous Cosmovision or their paradigm, they say that she's sort of at the top of the spiritual food chain. There's Mapacho tobacco who's the mother of Ayahuasca or all the other plant spirits are basically like sub-programs or sub-routines of the Gaian server herself. There's something beyond these entities themselves: they're working on behalf of a larger entity which is basically enmeshing down into this space-time continuum baseline world through the astral realms.

It's like the juice or the flowering of the astral entity that comes through in the physical manifestation of the plants, but the entities do speak through us. And then where we become the spokespeople for them.

OS: It's almost a almost a bit Dr. Seuss-like. It's almost like the voice of the Lorax. Seuss had it as well.

Rak: The Lorax speaks for the trees.

And the language is hyperdimensional. It's grounding hyperdimensional language in the physical reality of the species themselves. So it's very interesting subject matter that I really hope gets explored more by a generation of cosmic anthropologists.

OS: I can't agree more, I hope so, and I think there's this whole generation of people that are being born right into the internet-connected world, and I think with Ayahuasca becoming more popular and DMT becoming more popular and available, things are really going to happen in really interesting ways over the next handful of years. Could you talk about the future, like the promise of localizing and making our own pragmatic practices with plants?  A lot of people spend a ton of money to go to the Amazon to do ritual, but what if we didn't have to? And what about the people that can't afford it? I know there's a lot of books on the subject, but what's your take on creating a localized circle or localized personal practice?

Rak: Well, it's my belief–and this is through seven years of involvement in medicine culture all around the world, and speaking and interviewing with many Western practitioners and Western seekers who start off on the shamanic path with different entheogens.

It seems to be that, you know, our Western understanding of shamanism had this idea that the shaman was a healer, a priest, an artist, a traveler between the worlds, but he or she worked on behalf of the community. To draw a rough analogy, if a tribe had a hundred people and one shaman on a one-to-one sort of basis, the shaman was often on the edge of the culture, he was in the world but not of it. He had to retain that sensitivity to nature, hear nature, interact with the spirits, and be able to be a good medicine person for a community that could not be fully in the world or lose that sensitivity.

But on that 1 to 100 ratio, it seems that if we have fallen out of balance with the right relationship with the planet, with being in balance with nature and the web of life and doing what we're meant to be doing as a species, as a human race, and working with the other species in a synergistic way for the betterment of mother nature herself. It seems to me that this Global Shamanic Resurgence, which I've been witnessing for seven years now, is really building very organically and very fast now. And there's a reason for it. It's because there's been an energetic and spiritual disconnect.

And we know from just the basic laws of nature and thermodynamics that there's an equal and opposite reaction to things, and that if you have a dominator culture which tries to eradicate a connection to the planet, to the Earth, to Earth-based worship and practice and to spirituality itself and just exacerbate and glorify materialism and consumerism, you're going to create a spiritual imbalance. And then that imbalance creates a world out of balance. And so this healing that is going on with planetary entheogens and many other modalities is to fast-track this healing because I believe we don't need the plants per se, in a long-term evolutionary sense.

The plants have retained the connection to the web of life. They transmute at a fundamental level light into basic carbohydrates and sugars and building blocks of base matter and then that's eaten in the food chain by the next level species and then the next level species and basically they're grounding heaven on Earth the plants. And so they have always retained the connection that we have forgotten and we need to very quickly now remember what we're embedded in to have right relationship to fix the problem.

Western civilization is coming to this crux, to this tipping point and I think we can all feel it we can see it, we can see it's socially, financially, ecologically, you know, things are breaking down because it's unsustainable. And so the plants are beseeching us to remember. And you don't have to do it through the plants, but it's becoming very efficient way because it helps heal, it helps cleanse, and then it helps you have the best vehicle you can have to go off on your own path and to embody your own wisdom and to walk the shamans path yourself.

I am witnessing a generation of neo-shamans, of medicine practitioners all across the planet. And suppose we had something like seven billion people on the planet, and we had that old one to 100 ratio, and my math could be out here. In that case, I'm not good at math, but it's something like 70 million shamans or medicine people, men and women are needed to anchor their local communities and to be dispersed not just in the jungles where indigenous peoples are, but to bring the remembrance out to the West and to receive it and to let it grow.

It is growing like wildfire now and it's not a threat to anything but it's growing up. It's coming from within it's coming on a soul level. So it's not a threat to religion. It's not necessarily a threat to politics; it is going to transform the paradigm totally, but it's all about spirit. And so I acknowledge and I celebrate and I thank my fellow journey people who are on this path together because I feel that it is both the archaic revival and it's the future revival.

It's this remembrance of things past and how to interact on planetary Gaian level like permaculture. It's this ability to maximize the yields of what the planet is offering to remember who we are to go forth as galactic citizens.