Planetary Exo-pheromones: Nature’s Psychedelics

Shamans within the Peruvian Amazon are trained from a young age to be mediators for others to help see more of the reality around them, be it through ceremonies with ayahuasca or otherwise. What is the value of the shaman and what is the value of an experience like ayahuasca? And how is it weaving its way into our culture today as part of the global collective awakening? This is Skull Babylon, and you're about to listen to episode 72 of Paradigm Shift Radio with our guest, Rak Razam, a fellow gonzo journalist who is documented in both book and film. His experiences with ayahuasca and DMT, with the intention to bring light and educate others about how the shamans in these experiences are helping us see more of ourselves.

Rak: If I'm being politically correct and talking to my mom, I call myself an experiential journalist, but "gonzo" is the original term.

PSR: Yeah, yeah, neo-gonzo journalist. I think we both fit underneath that category. And those not familiar with the gonzo side of things, Gonzo simply means, its basically a reporter who's reporting on something that they themselves are part of the experience of. So, yeah, really interesting way doing that. And that's exactly what Rak has done here with his experience with ayahuasca, which within the film you beautifully narrate. So maybe you can tell us a little bit more about what this what this project is, what this experience is that you're trying to share.

Rak: Well, let me just give some context to that. We we started off talking about the gonzo journalist stuff because that's where it all began for me around January, 2006. I reinvented myself as a gonzo journalist. I was actually freelancing for Australian Penthouse, which might sound a bit strange, but, you know – there's not many mainstream print magazines where you can explore fringe consciousness or counterculture / spiritual sort of themes. And I had free rein as a freelancer to write about the subjects I wanted to. I actually went to Albert (the chemist who invented LSD) Hofmann's hundredth birthday symposium in Basel, Switzerland, in January 2006. And continuing the momentum in June, I set off for South America to drink with the shamans of the Amazon.

I come from not just the psychedelic scene, but also the electronic music scene and the legacy that has from the counterculture into the 1960s. And so, some people might not see the connection, but there really is a web that really connects the medicines like ayahuasca and the tourism that is springing up around that in South America and elsewhere around the world. And the connecting point is us. It's Western culture and how we have been distanced for hundreds even thousands of years from a very sensual relationship with the planet. There are reasons of empire and vested interests in 'Dominator Culture' that has tried to eradicate our own personal connection with the plants and through the plants, the planet.

Now, the planet can speak to us in many ways: it can do so quite viscerally through upheavals and through changes in it's environment. But one of the premier ways it seems to do this is through this secretion of what, one of the 1960s acid chemists, Bear Owsley likened to exo -pheromones. McKenna also polished the idea, but Owlsey came around with this idea that the planet is interfacing with all the species. It does this all the time. We're one species amongst many and the planet secretes these substances, which we now politically correctly call psychedelics.

And different bio-regions secrete different types of plants not just to fit the environment, but to also interface with the peoples of that environment. The commonality of these substances is that to a large degree, they can be ego dissolvers that connect us to a non-linear headspace that seems to absorb us back into something larger – the drop rejoins the ocean.

And this is a really important concept because it's like we are embedded in an ocean of information. You know, nature is the original infinite. And this is what we are drawn back into: the web of life. And it's not just a way of thinking. It's not just a mental construct this type of vegetal infinite. It's actually an energetic/ kinesthetic relationship in that we can feel once more…

In areas of the Amazon the shamans would say the way which you navigate in ayahuasca space is through your heart. When you align your chakras and you cleanse your body and your energy systems – the heart is the bridge between the higher and the lower faculties, and it allows you to travel in hyperspace.

You navigate through the heart so coming back into the web of life is all about being integrated as a full human, as what our potential has always been and to to interface with these plants the planet has given us to communicate with her. And so this is all a bit of a long -winded way to say that I went down to Peru in 2006, and what I discovered there was the mystery was alive and well.

Madre Ayahuasca

I found that there are indigenous peoples who basically serve the Western resurgence of interest in shamanism and of ayahuasca and the power plants. And there's a great healing that's going on. There's a lot of vested interests and there's a lot of complications in the fact that it's a mercantile exchange and this is a consumerist age. So there's a lot of culture clashes happening between the old world and the new. There are tens of thousands of Westerners besieging Amazonian towns like Iquitos, creating this wave of supply and demand. So the profession of the curandero takes decades to master to be to be a good shaman.

PSR: I think we can step back here to some of the basics and define like: what is ayahuasca like? This is for people who haven't even heard that word before. The context, of that needs to be set out on the table as well. And I would love to hear what your definition of a shaman is like. What is the shaman to you? And then we can weave into hearing about the experiences that that you had through the ceremonies drinking this ayahuasca. And I know that the shamans explain themselves that it is a medicine.

Rak: Ayahuasca is something that heals us psychologically as well as physically. It's something that is meant to help us align with more of ourselves. And a lot of that is kind of removing, like the gunk or the junk that is inside of this machine that is our body. Like we are the ghosts in the machine.

PSR: And when you think about that in a literal sense, it's almost like we ae struggling to control it in some degree – we're just kind of like fumbling psychologically. How conscious are we, versus how much of a robot are we?

Rak: Humans themselves are the bridge between this physical world and the spiritual world. The bridge is through the living things.

PSR: And that's something you say in your film as well. So let's go back a little bit. For people who might not be familiar, what is ayahuasca? And, what is the role of a shaman?

Rak: Well, it's a very good question. In 2006 when I set off to explore this – I was doing my freelance magazine article – and I'd done a lot of research on ayahuasca and the shamans of the Amazon. Number one, the word 'shaman' is a Western concept. It's a label that we've given, a blanket term to describe medicine people around the planet. Now, every different indigenous culture has their own version of medicine because the planet gives them these substances. It gives us food because it's medicine. It gives us this cornucopia of plants that have different effects. And people who have lived on the earth have, over times in their native areas, recognized and been in a symbiotic relationship with these plants.

And so, the medicine people of different indigenous cultures don't call themselves shamans. It's the Western term. It comes from the Siberian root word saman that has been, adopted by anthropologists. The other thing to remember is that the word shaman in the West – over the century or so that it's been coined – has a lot of linguistic power and a lot of energy around it. This is, to a large degree, because in the Western culture we have been bereft of our own archetype of the shaman.

For us, healers have been reduced down to doctors and to the medical profession that doesn't really encompass a spiritual aspect to it. In indigenous understanding, at least in the Peruvian indigenous understanding of not just ayahuasca, but doctors and medicine, they believe – the curanderos of the Amazon believe – that there is a physical body, an emotional body, there's the mental body and the energetic body – there's all these layers, like an onion being peeled, and each one affects the other.

They believe that the root cause of illness, which if you look at the English for disease, is not being at ease. Right? It's not being aligned, not being in full alignment with your full energetic being. The curanderos believe that is at the root cause of illness. We all experience things as we go through life, and we store all our memories and all our experiences as vibration on our energetic template. And when there's hurts or pains or some negativity around that vibration, it's stored, stored in your energetic body. Eventually that will migrate to the physical body and it will come through as a sickness or illness or something like that.

So in the the Amazonian traditions, they call themselves what we call shamans. In reality, what that means on the ground in the 21st century, in the towns, in the cities like Iquitos, which is the largest city in the world only accessible by air or by sea, there's no road in. It's a it's a city of about 400,000 people on the, upper Amazon in Upper Peru. And it's one of the hotbeds of ayahuasca shamanism. The curanderos of the Amazon are there. They train for a very, very long time. So for them, the shaman is like this Western conceit: they see a healer.

You know, at one time all the villages had their own medicine, because they had no other access. There's no such thing in their paradigm as Western drugs or Western medicine. Right. The jungle: the jungle provides all; the forests, the selva, you know, in Spanish. It provides everything. And so, they've they've used many, many different medicines.

And chief and premier amongst them is this very interesting concoction called ayahuasca. Ayahuasca is actually, a made up of a few components. There's a vine called ayahuasca, which in the West its scientific name is called banisteriopsis caapi. And it's, it's a woody liana vine that grows pretty rapidly.

We know that, chemically, neuro -chemically, it contains harmine and harmaline, which are not actually psychoactive except at very, very high doses on their own. But when you add DMT – they become an inhibitor. DMT is another very curious chemical which science has been researching a lot in the last few decades. DMTs is produced in the human body, in most mammals, in all through a swathe of, plants and toad species, all through nature. I think it's recently been reclassified as close to a neurotransmitter. That's how central it is to the nervous systems of all these creatures throughout nature. So DMT has been called the 'Spirit Molecule'.

It allows us to visually see and anchor different visionary states. Doctor Rick Strassman did tests in the 1990s, which was in his book DMT: the Spirit Molecule and in Mitch Schultz's adaption of the documentary. Anyway, the DMT in the Amazon is contained in different admixture plants like chakruna or chaliponga.

Now, there's many different aspects to this as well, because in the indigenous set and setting, for instance, around Pulcullpa, where the Shipibo tribe, one of the main tribes who practice ayahuasca, originate, the curanderos would drink ayahuasca on behalf of the patients. And, you know, there was none of this chasing the visions.

So what's happened when Westerners have been coming down to to South America is that as well as going in search of their own physical healing, ayahuasca can be a great medicine. It's called, you know, quite often "the medicine". I believe it has this spirit in it as well, like the mother. This is the other little wrinkle, which we often don't understand in Western culture is that when they say medicine, they don't just mean like a chemical, like we might mean in the West, or a medicine that is flat type of thing that can be dispensed quite easily.

What they mean by medicinal is: there's a spirit in the medicine. They mean that there's an alive and vibrant, vibrational entity, which they call the mother ayahuasca. So as well as administering this physical concoction called ayahuasca, which Western science has examined and they've done tests on: in the 1990s, Dennis McKenna and Eduardo Luna and a few others, did these, tests on the Santo Daime church participants. And they studied the biochemical effects of ayahuasca.

They found that it flushed the brain clean to a large degree and helped sort of re -link up receptor sites. And it seemed to be not just a positive on that level, but it has very beneficial effects on the body and the brain. But in the indigenous set and setting the curanderos understand that all of this cannot happen without right relationship, without this interaction with the spirit of ayahuasca.

And they say that what they do is they use ayahuasca almost as an intermediary to then connect with all the other spirits in nature. And so the curanderos in their eyes heal not just through the medicine of ayahuasca, but through sound and through singing. They have these things they call "icaros", which are basically their magical songs. And it's all about the vibration. Again, what they're working on is the energetic vibrational body of the patient. And so ayahuasca will be this intermediary and they'll say, look, I've got this patient. He has like, you know, cancer or AIDS or something.

And ayahuasca will then basically search out in this vegetal internet of nature – I think it's a bit like Google, right. It goes and it searches for the right plant that might be able to help cure the curandero's patient. And it will then connect the two and then the curandero will basically download the code or the song, and he might add his own lyrics to it, but what he's actually singing is a vibrational wavefront. And in that sense he's joining that vibrational wavefront to the patient to enact their own healing.

So this whole idea of the shaman is in a very real sense, being diluted by the Western commodification and by our expectations. What I found in 2006 was this surge of Western interest in shamanism. To a large degree some people are going in search of healing – and a lot of other people are going into these states and connection without needing healing. Curanderos have commented that the Westerner is largely coming looking for visions, not physical healing. They're seeking a connection to the web of life. They're seeking a connection to this larger dimensional reality that ayahuasca can open the portals to. So that's a bit of a shorthand for what ayahuasca is of the medicine and what the curandero is.

PSR: Definitely. And that's what I mean. We'll get into the experience of what ayahuasca was for you and obviously it's something that is different for every person. And in the film you actually show a couple of ceremonies that you did with the medicine and with the curanderos, who are actually raised from childhood, and that is something that they're intimately attached to.

The Call to Awakening

Rak: Yeah, absolutely. This is a very good point because this is quite central to this term "awakening" that the you know, the book was originally called Aya: A Shamanic Odyssey, and now it's been retitled Aya Awakenings: A Shamanic Odyssey. So this is just the tip of the iceberg with all the Westerners going down to the jungles of South America, there's a larger awakening happening, as I think many of us are feeling across the planet. Many different cultures are saying we're at the end of one world age and the beginning of another, and all around us we're seeing the disintegration of the old modes of being, of the old isms that are no longer serving us.

You know, we're seeing this collapse of financial systems and the transformation of society at the same time. Underneath all that, there's this consciousness that is the prime originator. It's what everything springs from. So all of these things are just manifestation on the outside of this great awakening of consciousness happening on the inside, that's building over the course of history.

And now we're coming into this different world age, which means that we're receiving a new signal and consciousness is changing. So this whole idea of awakening in the indigenous sense – and not just in Peru, but in shamanic cultures around the globe… There's a classic book called Shamanism by Mircae Eliade, published in the 1950s. It's a pretty dry anthropological text, but it's the seminal book on indigenous shamanism. And it identifies these key components to the call to awakening, to to the shamanic path and the idea of being a shaman.

It's often hereditary. It's often handed down through the family lineage. And I think that a lot of people in the West have this argument as well about, is it epigenetic or is it is it passed down genetically or is it not? Is that set and setting outside of ourselves and lifestyle choices and other things? In a very similar sense, I think with shamanism, it's not that it's genetic. I think it's vibrational, because what shamanism is really about is vibration. It's really about using the power and the ability to feel connected, to interface with vibration to affect change, whether that's the healing of others, or other purposes. So the, the vibrational field of a parent is often passed down through the family lineage.

It might be you have many kids. Families in South America have big, big families, they have lots of children. It's part and parcel of life down there, but there will usually be one that they'll find that has the right vibrational signature to have the calling. And then it's a question of will they accept the calling? Because it's a very hard road to travel, you know. In traditional Amazonian shamanism, you might receive that calling anywhere from the first few years of your life to the early teens. And that sets you apart. And then you go on a different path and you have to give up a lot of things.

In the indigenous understanding the medicine person would be on the edge of the village. So they would be of the world, but not in it, not asleep in it. They wouldn't get their energy and their vibration brought down to the everyday Babylonian, you know, let's go shopping and work out 9 to 5 vibration, they're able to keep their energy attuned to the astral and attuned to, you know, the subtle frequencies. And you can't do that when you're in the 9 to 5 type of reality. It's a lot more difficult. So the call to shamanism meant from a very early age, people were selected and they had to go on a very special path of abstinence.

 The thing about Amazonian shamanism is, you need to prepare the body. You need to give up a lot of things like sugar, salt, red meat, sex, alcohol. All the things we take into our body. And our body is, as we know, an electromagnetic vehicle to receive signal. You know, we're 90% water and we're electromagnetic conductors, and we're we're always taking in a signal from from the environment around us.

If you give up all the sugars and the salts and the oils and the things which clog our system on a physical level and impede that subtlety of vibration to come through, if you give up all those things, you actually align the body, the soul, or the vibrational and energetic body to be able to interact and engage with the subtle dimensions. And so the shaman or the curandero has to often live in isolation, has to learn these Icaros, which means being able to receive the vibrational Icaros and the messages coming in This is often taught by an elder shaman, from an early age. That's one path. Another path is often that you have a near death experience and you survive and in some tribes they are hit by lightning or they might be bitten by a snake or something will happen, or they have an illness. It' called an initiatory sickness. There's there's an initiation. And this is something which happens a lot, actually. And I think it happens in the West as well.

And it's a question of whether you go with that to deepen that connection to that vibrational state of being or not. And I think that in Western culture in general, this path was often not just misunderstood, but it was eradicated. We have put most of our shamans from the West in mental institutions, or we have self -medicated them or we have killed them, you know, for the last few generations, if not hundreds of years. And so the people with this sensitivity to energy have often been, not just supported, but they have been really incarcerated because of this.

Five-bar Galactic Signal

So what I feel is happening now is it's through the remembrance and the relearning and reconnection with the indigenous lineage of South America and medicines like ayahuasca that the Western awakening is catalyzed. It's not just that we're relearning about ayahuasca or relearning about shamanism – we're learning about our own innate abilities, our human abilities to cleanse our bodies and vibrational bodies to receive the proper food. You know, I call it a "Five -bar Galactic Signal" of information that's coming in. And then to be able to interact with the galactic ecosystem that is all around us.

And so I see a lot of people awakening to their own abilities. And I think it's a bit like that. Everyone has Buddha nature within them, we all do, but not everyone is cultivating that. And so potentially what I feel is that there doesn't need to be a hierarchy of shaman and patients. I think that potentially it may be at one stage in our development where we have all had this before the "fall" [of consciousness]. And potentially sometime in the future, we will all have this connection again.

But in the intermediary paradigm and period that I'm witnessing, the Shamanic Resurgence across the world, different waves of seekers are going down to the jungles of Peru to relearn their own abilities and relearn their own soul and then apply that as basically neo -shamans. And the challenge we face as a generation is how to do this with integrity, with right relationship, and to actually take the time as much as we can not to pigeonhole this and not to shorthand this, but to go into the depths of all these little terminologies and all of the intricacies, because with each intricacy it gets deeper and deeper and deeper.

So the curanderos of the Amazon might have trained since they were ten years old, and by the time they're in their 30s, they might start practicing as a healer. By the time they're in their 50s or 60s they have attained a deeper level of shamanic ability, and they call themselves Banco shamans.

And, you know, it means they're masters of the land and sky – but they understand. They understand that it takes decades to really master the art. And what we're seeing now is this explosion in interest in shamanic culture.

And I guess the term neo-shamans is being used in the West, as many people in some sense dabble with this dimension and in many senses, a lot of good people are engaging on the path and they have accepted the call. But it's going to take a generation before we get to the level of depth where we can really call ourselves full shamans.

PSR: Yeah. And that's what I was thinking about earlier – the idea of like, imagine a society where everyone is a shaman, where everyone is a teacher and a doctor for themselves. And if everyone could actually heal their own ailments and of course, other peoples when need be, just how much of the society is like that? Its just a radical, radical idea. But I mean it has to begin from somewhere.

So coming back to you – what was the experience of your first ayahuasca ceremony in general? The reason why I think a topic like ayahuasca is so valuable is because it allows us to take other things that we might already be familiar with and integrate them into the topic of ayahuasca in a sense of like, how is it related?

Rak: This whole shamanic thing is this process of remembering that we are more than our physical body, this reality is not as cut and dry as it appears to be. And I think that what is really exciting about this whole resurgence of shamanic stuff is the idea that when you think of a shaman, to me, just to simplify it, I think it's a person with an intent who wants to understand more about their connection to their reality. It's the same space that I'm referring to that you experience within ayahuasca that you're also accessing in our dreams.

So I think what is really interesting is the fact that obviously you're not just supposed to go to something like ayahuasca regularly, routinely, but that does happen. People do that. But oftentimes if you just do it once, it rocks, right? You need to figure out how can we bring that experience back where the filters are removed, where the veil is removed, where you see yourself or what you are in very literal ways in the ayahuasca, I think one of the best ways to use a metaphor for it is kind of like a defrag. It's like a defrag on your computer and kind of removing the junk data, so to speak. And in the process, you see a lot of yourself. And it's just a very internal journey that is very reminiscent of a dream.

PSR: So yeah, what what is the value of that experience such as ayahuasca for us as people?

Rak: Okay. Well, it's it's sort of like how deep down does the rabbit hole go? So many people are going in search of healing; a lot of people have physical ailments. It's said that ayahuasca is a great plant medicine, and it can help with different things. It works not just physically but on your energy body. I mentioned earlier in the Shibibo tribe how the curandero would drink ayahuasca and not the patient. And now with this that, you know, and, and people are really wanting to drink ayahuasca themselves and to take that on board.

PSR: You've mentioned a bit about DMT in the brain and how its ingested into the body.

Rak: I think that some people would say that ayahuasca is essentially a delivery mechanism for DMT and it is, but that's really not all of it. It depends on where you're putting your intent and why you're going on the journey in the first place. Because the people going in search of healing, don't really care about the DMT.

Ayahuasca varies for everyone. In a sense, you get out what you put in because you do need to have a very good diet and cleanse your body. If you're taking ayahuasca on a physical level it's going to get blocked in the liver if youre not healthy and its working on a physical level to heal things, but its also going up the higher chakras, moving up the chakras to the fourth, the heart chakra.

The first two or three times I took ayahuasca it was more of a physical cleansing and getting used to the medicine. And you definitely feel the energetic awakening as ayahuasca loads in your body and snakes through. There's this awakening of energy, this presence in your body, it's very weird.

Sometimes you get the Shipibo circuitry pattern visions – and they can be sort of like a gateway in or a doorway. It's like if you pull a thread it reveals this whole tapestry. I've had very archetypal experiences with jaguars and snakes and a lot of stuff around, around those sort of motifs, which can be quite common. But the danger is that people can chase those experiences and it's not about that.

I find my consciousness and my being really starts to cascade through different memories and healing things that have happened, and by revisiting some traumas and things like that on ayahuasca, it can unravel the trauma. You know, you can look at it in a different way. It's been called "a year's worth of psychotherapy in a single night". And then there's the visionary state, which can obviously be incredibly profound and unpredictable where that takes you, but to remember as well. But that can also be eye candy in a sense, unless we're, going in with the right intent, and the visions on their own can be a distraction.

You know, this is one very important thing to remember: that the curanderos stress as well – there can be entities. They can be other things in there that, you know, you need to watch out for as well. And it's not all virtual reality/ love and light. It's an alive and vibrant ecosystem. There are creatures out there or in there that either do not have our best interests at heart, or that we need to be careful about. We're basically bungee jumping into hyper hyperspace. We're going into other people's homes, we're going into their realms. And so, being forewarned and forearmed really helps.

Hat we really need to think about is what do we do with these experiences when we come back? Otherwise its sort of recreation when we go to these realms. What are we going to do with it? Why is this knowledge important to us as a species or to us as individuals? How is that going to affect us? When you're really, viscerally experiencing interdimensionality for yourself – it's like Copernicus discovering the orbit of the Earth around the sun. Its revolutionary and it should really change the direction of where we're going. We can tune into the information superhighway of the galaxy around us.

Ayahuasca reveals the primal foundation of reality, the world. And what we perceive to be physical world is actually the dream. And it is a direct analogy to what quantum physics say about the Implicate in the Explicate: that basically this whole world is a projection from some Implicate reality, some higher or extra dimensional reality. It's like a holographic film or movie being played, a projection from this whole, Implicate reality.

What's underway is some sort of intergenerational remembrance and of learning plant shamanism. But it's a stepping stone to our own innate ability and to be energetically awakened.