The Invisible Landscape: Exploring 5-MeO-DMT

Martin: Greetings and welcome to the latest edition of the Entheogenic Evolution Podcast. As always, I'm your host, Martin. Let's go ahead and get into our talk with Rak Razam. Mostly we're talking about 5-MeO-DMT because hey, that's what there really is to talk about. And Terra Incognita. And you're going to find out about how you can support the Terra Incognita project and help bring some rigorous scientific investigation into the experience of 5-MeO-DMT, the God molecule.

We, had a great conversation yesterday, and he's initiated a new project called Terra Incognita, and he's going to tell us all about it on the podcast.

So tell us a little bit about the Terra Incognita. And maybe, give us a little bit of background. You know, for any listeners out there who are like, well, hey, who is this Rak guy? And so we kind of started off without really introducing you. So maybe tell us a little bit about your background and the project and how you've kind of moved on now into the Terra Incognita and really starting to focus very closely on 5-MeO-DMT in particular.

Rak: Yeah, it's funny. It's always interesting looking back on your personal journey and seeing the threads and the clusters and, you know, the shape of it. So, to backtrack a little bit about me, this this year, 2016, is ten years that I've been calling myself an experiential journalist in the sense of commenting and writing about psychedelic culture and shamanic and entheogenic culture.

I first went down to the Amazon in 2006, and I was freelancing. You know, I basically working for Australian Penthouse at the time, which was a great opportunity this to do gonzo journalism in the style I wanted to do. My first article was on, Albert Hoffman's, 100th birthday party. He was alive and well and in Basel, Switzerland.

And I was over there on the ground at that one doing that. And then the second, freelance article was on the shamans of the Amazon. So that 3000 word article morphed into the book Aya: Awakenings, which, you know, that came out the first print in 2009. And then, on the book tour of, promoting that in the West Coast in the States, the director who became the director of the film and his partner at the time, was the sound engineer.

We hit upon this way of, doing, spoken word, samples from the from the book with VJs and photos and this mash up sort of technique. And that started the genesis for the documentary film adaption of Aya: Awakenings. And so essentially from 2006 to 2014, it was a complete journey with no break. And I was just carrying it wasn't a burden and it was a joy.

And it was my love song. Back to the world to be commenting on ayahuasca culture in the largest shamanic resurgence. But in some sense, as I say, you know, as, as deep. I guess it's the peak experience you have. There needs to be a time of integration. So I did have incredibly deep experiences on my virgin trip down to the Amazon, and it did take, you know, six years, or my seven year cycle to, to process them into, to anchor them into media that I wanted to release to the world and contribute back to the discussion and the evolution of, the reclamation of the semantics of the paradigm into the West.

Martin: If I could interrupt you just for a moment to, heap some praise your way, I just wanted to thank you for having us show, the film Aya: Awakenings at the conference last year, back in 2015 at Exploring Psychedelics. And that was really the first time I had seen the film and clips of it here and there, but that was the first time I saw the whole film and just really want to say what a wonderful narrator you were.

And I really loved kind of the entire meshing of the narration in the film and then the visuals that it makes for a very trippy experience. And I really love the conclusion as well. And it was just a very, very enjoyable film. So I really recommend anybody who's listening who hasn't seen your film either awakenings, to go out and check it out. It's, really is a wonderful film. And like I said, you really make a very nice narrator. I love the thread of your ideas and concepts as it's woven throughout the film.

The First 5-MeO-DMT Immersion

Rak: Yeah. Thank you. So it is a, you know, what we call it, it's like a shamanic artifact. It's not just an average documentary. It really anchors the experience by taking people on that narrative journey and then showing it and trying to invoke in them the actual experience through the visuals and the sound, and utilizing all the senses and the Icaros and things like that.

And so it's really funny because, you know, I was thinking about this the other day. It's like a lot of the film, the heart of the film actually is a 5-MeO-DMT embodiment sequence. And this is the seriousness of how life or the universe or whatever energies sculpt us. I really say that there's a pattern at work, right?

So I'm there, you know, doing my 3000 word article for Penthouse magazine, getting my mind blown by ayahuasca, you know, drinking. I've gone through about three shamans on that journey so far. You know, I'm documenting and I'm really committed to it. And then all of a sudden, in the jungle, I hear that there's this Ron Wheelock, the gringo shaman of Iquitos, who also works with 5-MeO-DMT.

I'm like, wow, I'll be interested in that. And so I go along to a session. It turns out to be chapter seven of the book. And that's the guts of the heart of the film. And everything changed. You know, you smoke that little pipe and I had basically a nine-minute sequence and its pretty much in its entirety.

It's in the film, the nine minutes with special effects overlaid, and we go in and out to show the interior journey. Because here's the other thing. I have filmed many, many times my experiences on 5-MeO intake, and it is always such a disappointment because it's just the flesh body rolling around and, you know, there's all these things happening.

And I look back and I go, but I was feeling and I was connected to and I had this like distributed trip to mainline consciousness of all space time. And it was so tangible and and you just don't see it. You just don't get it, you know. But in AYA: Awakenings we did really recreate the void and the white light tunnel and the trip main sort of energies.

And it invokes, you know, that response in people. So that's probably the most successful, anchoring of that state in film that I've seen. But here's the interesting thing. I really realized that while I was on this ayahuasca journey and, you know, back in 2006, I was sort of willing to drop everything. I was like, oh, my God, because that's it, right?

You know what I really recognized? And some of the readings I did at the conference with you in Ashland were from the book, and it was this translinguistic sort of onomatopoeic, mash up of love songs to the experience, because the core of what it is is everything, and it's the Source and it's radiating perfect, super fluid, super union, crystalline perfection.

And it's too big for everything else. I mean, it's bigger than everything. And yet all we have are these words to describe it, you know? And so, I sort of hit upon this way using language as scaffolding to make a mold, and you can't contain it, but you can get the shape of it. You can get an intuition of it, you can get a feel of it.

And what I realized looking back on my journey now is that I didn't do 5-MeO-DMT since that experience because it was really, really deep. And I had basically consciousness, like lucid dreaming the whole time going in a full release journey, but losing my consciousness as I went and merging with the over mind with the Source and recognizing it as its vibrational field was into interacting with mine, it was sort of shaking loose all my memories and all my stored vibrations, and they were going back into the circuit of the white light tunnel, like a, you know, celestial Super Hadron Collider of hyperspace.

It was like there was this celestial technology was like a laser reading a disk. And now is this the information storage unit? And as I was going into it, it wasn't this I was going into it, it was revealing. It was me. And it's basically when the drop peels back and remembers that it's the ocean and it's just so freaking profound, right.

And so because I was also committed in my space time journey to documenting the entire book and then that finished around 2014, mid 2014, with getting it out there and it was fully released and I'd done the tour and then I fell into this slump, I really did.

I fell into a complete slump of like, wow, my life has been completely full for so many years now, seven, almost eight years. And I've known what I'm doing. I'm holding space for this thing. I'm getting it out into the world. And then it was gone. The baby was out in the world, and I was like, what do I do next?

And I started to do these ayahuasca retreats I'm through, which I'm still doing, which was really great because it got me back onto the front lines of tangibility of the experience. But in a sense as well, you know, I was nurturing and holding space and waiting for that next thing. I called out for it.

And I'm like, and funnily enough, it arrived and it was 5-MeO-DMT again. And I knew that I would go back to this material, but I had held such reverence for it. I didn't want to go back to it. Basically. I didn't want to dabble in it. I didn't want to do it recreationally. I wanted to create a structure for it, to really know it and to work with it and to be in partnership with it and to anchor it and to bring it down on earth and seed it and let it be part of what is happening down here again, because it is it's spreading.

It's coming. It's really almost the end, you know, of choice. Lately it seems to be really percolating through shamanic culture. And there's, pitfalls of that and dangers and beautiful, opportunities as well.

Mirrored Bi-lateral Symmetry

Martin: Yeah. It's interesting to see how quickly it is spreading around the world. We've talked a little bit about this. Think on your show or maybe it was when, we were talking for your conference. And I was Skyping in with you about how, you know, 7 or 8 years ago when, for example, when I had Rak on the show and he was talking about 5-MeO and I had just had my first couple of experiences that we were really talking about how really nobody knew what this was.

And the whole concept that there's a difference between N,N and 5-MeO-DMT was just completely foreign to most people, and the experience itself being so profound and so different from anything else, it was just kind of like talking over people's heads a lot. And there wasn't really a big surge of interest. But now at this point, 7 or 8 years later, it's like it's gone around the world. And part of it is due to people like Octavio and Doctor Gerry and, you know, kind of these roving medicine people who are taking the medicine around the world.

But beyond that, there just seems to be a burgeoning of interest. And communities are popping up all over the place where people are really starting to understand that this really is the crown jewel. And it's not to speak ill of any other medicines. I've had people accuse me of being like a 5-MeO you know, fundamentalist, but I'm definitely not.

I just happen to think that it really is the top of the line, that it's just it's the ultimate molecule. It's the ultimate experience. And it's just wonderful to see this knowledge spreading and to have it enthuse people like yourself, where you have such a facility with words and articulation of the ineffable and you just it's a very playful and very wonderful job that you do with it. I mean, I'm just loving this conversation, sitting here talking to you and listening to way that you weave your words and, paint these pictures of this experience that is just beyond everything else.

Rak: You know, it's funny, there's a saying, I guess, or a way of thinking that they say that the plants, although the entheogens and maybe in this case, the toad, they choose the caretakers, they choose the providers or the facilitators or the shamans that do the work with them. And, you know, you can work with many different modalities and many different entheogens, and they are all good.

And, you know, to a degree what they're doing within the energetic body as well as the physical effects and, you know, and raising the vibration and tuning you into certain things, all paths eventually can lead to central Source, you know, and I've had people that say LSA or LSD or, different other entheogens or psychedelics that have gone to the white light and on a high enough doses of anything: that's I'm saying there's a geography and a cartography, I believe, which is what Terra Incognita was all about, exploring of these astral landscapes.

And, you know, I believe that, all the entheogens can lead there, but sometimes they also choose us, and we have allies or we have sort of relationships with them. And so for many, many years, aya was going to be my ally. And she was always a harsh mistress, you know, I must say, gave everything for her and, you know, it's still an ongoing relationship.

Source Consciousness as a geography

And it is incredible. And that is what I believe is the frequency of that originating source energy, which is not just in the astral cartography geography of the source as a space, but as it incarnates down into the meta world that it has created as an extension of itself, the frequency of it is lurking and lingering within all things, and in potentially animating all things.

And, you know, it's also an incredibly dynamic relationship. It's not like with other entheogens and you can have a plant spirit there is also not just this sort of oceanic merging and dissolution of consciousness, which happens on the full release dose or the threshold doses, when basically what's discovered is the ocean can come into the drop, you know, and when that happens, that's when I get the full bandwidth, the full spectrum, I call it like the outer event horizon of the Source.

And in that sort of space, it's like all space time a one, and it's all connected and the ancestors are there, and the future descendants are there and everything is there and it's full. It's so dense and full of information. And, you know, different people like yourself as well, have different aspects and thinkings on that cartography and the way the radiation of Source comes down into the material world.

I've had such beautiful experiences, and this is why I really want to give back and why I formed this, this organization, the Terra Incognita Project. And we have a website: www.terra-incognita-project.org. And, you know, we're really into this exploration of hyper hyperspace and in doing it legally.

You know, we're working in Mexico doing scientific research and development. We're leading retreats, and we're sponsoring a lot of different pilot projects and reaching out to different members of the entheogenic community. And also the science and the shamanic community. We believe that this is sweet spot between this overlap between neuroscience and shamanism, where we can sort of anchor the two hemispheres in a way, and not just get good data and prove that there's something going on.

In a tangible sense, it was this experience. But we can hopefully eventually, as we anchor this modality with neuro feedback, we're exploring the possibilities of endogenous amplification or integration of the 5-MeO experience. And these are long term goals, you know, in concert with leading scientists. But if you look at the burgeoning field of neuroscience at the moment, wow.

Martin: So let's back up a little bit and go back to the inspiration for the Terra Incognita and how that kind of came together and your thoughts of, well, I'm going to put together a team. And then who do you need on the team and what is the team going to accomplish? So, we've you know, your enthusiasm has pushed us into all of these, things that you're looking to do with Terra Incognita. So let's just tell a little bit about its formation and who's a member there.

EEG brainwave mapping of the Innerspaces

Rak: Well, yeah. It's been this really beautiful, organic unfolding of the journey. So, when I was touring the film across the world in the States in 2014, I met up again with Doctor Juan Acosta, who was the actual neuroscientist who was present at my first experience in Iquitos with Ron Wheelock in 2006, which is documented in the film.

So it wasn't just that I was, you know, smoking 5-MeO-DMT. Hey, here's the thing, which I think really affected me. It was part of a of a legitimate medical scientific experiment. Legally, you know, in finding me, it was legal at that time. And it was using a 19 channel skullcap electrode cap to monitor the brainwave activity and to try to get data on what is happening.

As I went into that experience and doctor Juan Acosta was doing that with multiple people at the time and getting data, which he has recently published on, what the EEG sort of output is from that experience. And so it was a real interesting merging of these two strands. And I thought, well, not only can we go into this experience, we can actually bring something of value back, which is sort of the old Terence quote, you know, to bring an idea back or to bring something back that is of value and can make a difference in the world.

And so that always sort of stayed with me. And I met up with Doctor Juan at the MAPS conferences in 2010 and in 2013. And as part of the release of the film, he talked on some of the panel discussions in 2014, and we sort of sat down at dinner. One day I did a podcast with him called, you can see on my page, my podcast page, in a perfect world, saying "Dinner with Doctor Juan."

And we talked about the state of neuroscience instead of shamanism, and the way that there's similarities and the way that we could really do this. And like, as opposed to, you know, seven years before that when the technology wasn't quite up to speed, it was a patience game and it was waiting. At this stage, we realized that technology is out there.

We're getting amazing results on brain activity. And even with things like the electro cranial magnetic stimulation helmet being able to then, invoke different brain activity and people not just record it, but actually sort of, promote or catalyze it. Basically I just said, fuck it, you know, let's do this thing. I really want to do this thing.

And I thought, well, how do we do this? You know, how do we do it for them? And, you know, so this journey began with number one, who are the others? And I'm like, I didn't want to just do it on my own. What I really felt was this intuition to do it with the team and to explore these dynamics because another, another part of the journey was basically that many years ago, almost a decade ago now, I had this experience with an intra-muscular injectable DMT and ketamine at the same time.

And it was a it was a group experiment with ten people. And basically what happened was this car crash through hyperspace, where I could totally see and feel the people off to the side. One person was singing and she was like the engine of the ship, and another person was trying to shut her up, and he was like the brakes of the ship.

And I was trying to hold the wheel together and someone else was vibrating like a fish and almost falling off the edge into this moat. And the another person was holding and I realized we were this group gestalt, this group entity. And I swear to God, this thing happened where I started to go "whats" and the next person said "happening" and another person said "to us". And it was like ten bodies in one mind.

Forming a Group Gestalt or "Ship" 

And I'm like, it really stayed with me. So somewhere along the line, I think it was basically a Burning Man with the Tea Faerie who is another, you know, incredible, beautiful, anchored member of the team. We had this visioning project where, we realized that navigating 5-MeO is one of her real unique skill bases as well.

Its this linguistic thing or the ability to recognize, basically, that this whole world is a story? You know, this whole world is a narrative in process, you know, and it's being conjugated its inter penetrating and it's dynamic and it wants us to seize control of our stories. And it's magic. You can make magic in the sense of your will, can interact.

Because especially the 5-MeO space, this idea that if we are just extensions of this centralized Source and this individuality in the play of Maya is an illusion in the sense it's not that we're not individual, but it's like we're fingers on the hands and the hand is connected to this larger macro body, and it's all one giant macro-organism.

And so, when you when you say to your hand when you go, I want to pick up my coffee cup and it reaches out for it. It's not magic. It's just exerting your will in the world.

You know, Burning Man is this petri dish of the imagination where you can basically do anything. And the Tea Faerie, she's basically the manifester. She can manifest like uncannily. You've got to get her on the show to reveal her secret stories because they are the most incredible documented, you know, manifestation stories where she does stuff.

And so we were talking about this idea of Terra Incognita, and she told me that she had read this book, the science fiction book, you know, years ago by Norman Spinrad and it's called The Void Captain's Tale. And essentially it's a metaphor or an allegory for the 5-MeO experience. And it has this future spacefaring race of, all sort of rich aristocrats.

And basically it's Maya and the play of illusion and, you know, the distractions of the world all bounded up in the world of a spaceship. And the captain of the spaceship is at the wheel. And the pilot is always this certain, energetic, almost like anorexic, witchy energy woman who is tied up to the ship in this, you know, mechanical sort of neuro tech device and basically, essentially at the point of orgasm, she jumps the ship through hyperspace, which is actually the void at the other side.

And that's how the spacefaring race goes. They found this technology from the alien race and retrofitted it for their jump technology. So it had this metaphoric strand of the myth for us of technology and the jump into the void and the ship metaphor, which resonated with my ship experience, you know, previously. And that's where the idea of forming this crew came from.

And you look at, you know, the different, medicalization of psychedelics that that happened, which is wonderful. And I fully support it. And I've been talking with some of the people involved with that in regards to 5-MeO; it's utilized legally at places like the Crossroads clinic down in Tijuana in Mexico, where they do ibogaine treatments, and they also do 5-MeO. They've discovered that, you know, the ibogaine really clears out the addictions and empties the people of what was, you know, afflicting them. But then it leaves some sort of emptiness. And so they're using 5-MeO to then give them that experience of the unconditional love and the Source and the reconnection that is the icing on the cake.

And I support that. There's also such an incredible, broad bandwidth of applications and the true nature of what 5-MeO is and what it reveals that the medicalization is only one part of it. So, you know, a lot of the funding going to these things would look at five years. How can we do research and development on that level of like get a broad spectrum of volunteers to go through and get this analysis?

And that's a good amount. But what we really want to do is look at what can we do, not just as individuals, but explore the sort of, configuration and explore what happens. Because, you know, with the other entheogens and psychedelics, it's been proven that they turn off the default mode network. And basically, your mind at large is what's connecting to the universe and experiencing the trip.

Neuroshamanism

You know, the current research with 5-MeO and neuroscience is suggesting it's not quite the same. It may suppress the regions of the brain versus switch them off. But it's doing a different thing. When the ego is reduced or dissolves completely in the 5-MeO full experience, you have an opportunity to, engage like never before, really.

I mean, if you can use techniques, which are ancient techniques which many cultures have used of the meditation and yoga poses and different things to explore and experiment with group dyads and sort of all different configurations and then switch off. Essentially the what is analogous to the default mode network, or the thing which is anchoring you and your ego, and then take a threshold or, you know, some threshold dose of 5-MeO and allow that Source energy to come into the what appear to be individual units and explore what happens with that.

So, you know, Tea faerie was so instrumental in anchoring this myth in this dreaming of the ship, this idea of the ship, what we call the five ship. And, you know, it can play out from there to different scales of that. That's really part of our core. And we really want to do this legitimately, scientifically.

You know, we really want to get the data on the edge. Because for me, whenever I go in, what's been happening, you know, in the last few years of the beta testing and the development of this, is that most of the technology with the EEG helmets wasn't able to accommodate movement. You get the sliders that effect the fluttering of the eyes, the clenching the jaw, any movement of the body.

And it would create like seismic wave artifacts on the readouts which corrupted the data. The latest technology promises to, remove those artifacts and have full, full movement to a degree, because, you know, when I'm on 5-MeO-DMT and if it's the full complete merging release dose merging with the Source... Okay, I might be really still have left the body.

I'm not there. But if it's anything threshold if there's any of me left. It moves me. And there's so many different facets to explore and document of this, this culture and also that this culture has happened before.

Because one of the things which happens on 5-MeO and potentially even in DMT, it's happened to me as well, is this sort of tryptamine arousal where it moves the body. And we've talked about this a lot. I mean, you could call it mirrored bilateral symmetry. And it seems to me to be, you know, very intimately connected to the origins of, of yoga and things like that, where, it might not have been that they've invented these positions and these techniques for the body to, to exercise themselves just and to move energy on their own.

But when though those traditions were originally entwined with entheogenic sacraments that were tapping into more bandwidth of Source, and the Source energy itself was moving them and showing them these configurations of the body like gods Lego, you know, I've had these experiences where essentially I've moved and the mirrored bilateral symmetry happens, and my conscious ego mind is not doing it.

And it feels to me it's almost as if I say it's like, you know, this God's factory reset. It almost feels as if the test prints on the printer, when it does the inkjet test and it recalibrates, it's like the energy itself from Source in the manifestation of its vessel of the body, which is also a manifestation of it.

It's bringing it back to a recalibration that's intuitively what it feels like to me. And so all of these aspects, there's so many different aspects to, things that we really want to, explore and document legitimately with the Terra Incognita Projects.

Martin: Yeah. And if I could just add to that for a moment, just for any listeners out there that are kind of wondering about, you know, what is he talking about being moved? Because it is kind of a rare experience now. It's something that tends to show up much more commonly with 5-MeO than really anything else, but it can occur.

I've seen it occur on multiple different medicines, but it really is this very, very uncanny experience where you are aware of your body and you're aware of the choices that you think you're making, and yet your body is moving and you are aware that, well, I'm not doing this from the ego perspective is like, well, I'm not moving this body, so who's doing this?

And you do get into all different kinds of positions and it starts to affect your breathing as well, where you're holding your breath for very long periods of time, or there you're breathing out very, very slowly. And then sometimes the ego comes in and says, oh shit, you're not breathing enough. You've got to breathe more. And so you just have to relax into this experience and you literally are moved.

And it's a very, very unusual experience. And that people can become, in a sense, they can become trained and attuned to it, to where they allow it to happen more and more. And then these barriers between what we think of as the self and the thing moving us at that barrier becomes thinner and thinner and thinner, and then it returns back to a state of, oh, it's me.

It's not the me I thought I was, but it but it's me. But that whole process is really, really uncanny. I spent a lot of time writing about that in my memoir, Being Infinite, because it is. It is the most bizarre thing I'd ever been through.

Rak: I know, and you know what? I've talked to a lot of –there's a lot of overlap at the moment with, you know, I was committed in circles and yoga through communities. There's even, you know, retreats happening with, yoga. They're doing ayahuasca and yoga, and it's beautiful blend of modalities. And I had a Kriya yoga book, a Kundalini Yoga, which is one of the most ancient traditions of yoga.

I had a real download from this book on this ancient book on Kriya Yoga and basically all the descriptions in it, it was a chunky book, like a thousand pages, and there's chapter after chapter of here's where you will encounter the visions, and here's where you will encounter the Source and the samadhi, and here's where you will encounter the movement of the body by the energy.

It's almost like the archaic revival in this, modality sense. And, you know, it's part of the human nature. And it's ultimately as well as this awareness of how do we integrate this awareness that the individual isn't everything, you know, that there is more. We are intimately connected. And one of the cool things that many commentators have pointed out is, you know, this, I guess, flaw in consciousness, which has resulted in the the world out of balance we have now, is that we are not in right relationship with the planet.

We see it is separate from itself. We see it as something to be pillaged and plundered and taken from. And it's like we're eating away at around body because we don't –we've broken the sacred contract with nature, which means we've forgotten that we are part of it. And so for me, you know, I use this term awakening quite a lot in my retreats and in this process. And I think it's a real, tangible, verb. You know, I think it's a real thing that's really happening. And 5-MeO seems to be a real dynamic part of it happening now in the cascade, in the order of what's been happening in so many culture in the West and the indigenous cultures handing it over, is that it's this awareness that we are not what we think we are, not just what we think we are.

And that's not to lessen the value and the import of the individual human body or even the collective species. But to say that we're part of a larger whole, and I think that's why I'm interested in this thought, in this idea of cohesion, you know, and even into species cohesion. And, you know, I sort of almost feel that the Source is like a, the Source is a program, but it's like it's seeding itself as a BitTorrent, you know, and all of consciousness is like this.

I call it a Pan Galactic BitTorrent, and it's seeding everywhere. And it's time for enough of it is loaded in the world ages. And where we are now in the cycle that we're getting more, it's formulating it. We're starting to see the program loading and coming back into, into our awareness.

Martin: Yeah. And to circle back around for a second, in discussing the tangible, that's one of the things that I really, I'm very interested in with these bilateral symmetrical movements, these spontaneous fluid symmetries that occur. And then also coupling that with, say, the brain scans is that this is something objective in the sense that we can observe it and we can compare across different people's experiences.

And then like you're saying, in looking at this book of Kriya Yoga that we can see that actually this has been documented before, so that this is not it's beyond the realm of a product of culture. It's beyond just a localized mythology or systemization of thought that it's something that ultimately is universal. That is an objective feature of this is what occurs when people go deep into a unitary state that their bodies exhibit these kinds of movements.

And here we can correlate this with brainwave patterns. So it's really giving us an objective, observable and scientific medium through which we can talk about this and analyze it into and then also get into the phenomenology as well.

So what's going on when someone is having these brain states and having these kinds of spontaneous movements? And that's what's excites me about the Terra Incognita Project that is bringing together both the internal state and the more esoteric, brainwave states and also observable phenomenon.

And then perhaps the inter subjectivity of multiple people flying the same ship at the same time. And, and really, I know exactly what you're talking about with that. Where there is this well, where did the boundary between me and this other person go? Because we really are functioning as one unit here. And then if you're adding more people into that, and it is to recognize that we're not who we think we are, and as you say, it's not to devalue that.

It's not to devalue the ego in our sense of self-identity as an individual, but is to recognize that we're actually much more than that and that the outer limit ultimately is everything.

Exploring Innerspace

Rak: Yeah, I agree, and that it's so true. It's like we we're not just hippie idealists here, you know, doing whatever. I waited eight years, nine years between my 5-MeO jumps to create the structure. And there's a line in the film where I say, I feel like, the first monkey that's been shot into outer space. Yeah. You know, and now I feel like I'm helping build the NASA of the inner space because it's time to go back in.

And I don't want to go back in alone because I know it's about the collective, and it's building this structure, this foundation, which can really tangibly, do the work because we have this vision and we know that the technology is out there.

So we did the soft launch of Terra Incognita last April, actually, in, San Francisco, in partnership with the consciousness hacking community. With big thanks to Mikey Siegel, who's, the founder of that and one of the lead drivers of that. And it's such a beautiful community. You know what? It really reminds me?

I love San Francisco, and there's a lot of, consternation in commenting at the moment that the tech companies are driving all the… not just the hippies, but the average people out of San Francisco, the rents are so high. And that may all be true. But I also see in the energy around Palo Alto and Silicon Valley, there's so much interest and burgeoning startups around neuroscience and neurotechnology and meditation and all of these things and states of consciousness.

It's basically another 60s wave, and it's a 60s wave mediated through technology. And because of that, it's anchoring into the culture more in a capitalist sense and maybe even a consumer sense. But it really has this promise, a very tangible promise of helping people get in control of their brains states. And the next step from that is really the full spectrum of consciousness, which is, you know, the psychedelic and the entheogenic and the tryptamine states, which are endogenous and they're built in and go back to, as we said, these ancient sort of Hindu and Sanskrit sort of streams and their modalities, both of meditation and of yoga.

Speaking of that, you know, the meditation community is really interested in 5-MeO. I know people involved with Terra Incognita who've held retreats in Mexico, specifically for meditators who are working with this medicine. And of course, you know, it's such a gift to have a strong container that is experienced in states of mind and of self-knowledge and of knowing yourself beyond the ego, you know, to then go into this state, which is every one of them says, you know, it's like a thousand times stronger than any meditation state they've gone into.

But because they've had the training in their containers, they can see it's just a natural extension. And then because of that, it also helps with the integration. So essentially what Terra Incognita is really realizing is it's not just about the peak experience of 5-MeO integration, as with all the entheogens is crucially important. And you know, 5-MeO people have "reactivations".

And it's like people have, you know, reactivations. They had subliminal sort of activations. And, you know, we're exploring ways we can help them learn how to integrate it. And I really feel beyond the peak experience itself, this, modality basically of yoga, meditation, neurofeedback, and the medicine is the real optimal blend to learn how to integrate it and how to accept what it reveals of who you really are.

Martin: Yeah. I often tell people with 5-MeO that it's really something that you should only approach with the utmost seriousness, because it is so powerful and that for most of us, we haven't had that full introduction to the ultimate nature of being we. It's like that connection hasn't quite been made. Like with you're saying with meditators that, you know, you can take someone who's spent their entire lives meditating.

It might be very skilled at it, but then you give them an experience of five. Oh, and all of a sudden they're like, whoa, wow. Okay, now I'm really starting to get it. So once, once that energetic connection has been made through the vehicle of the molecule, that you can't just go and close that again.

And that's where sometimes people get terrified by their reactivation, is that they feel that they've lost control, that somehow now in this plunging into the deep end, they feel that they're never going to get back to the shallows again because this stuff does reactivate our bodies do produce 5-MeO, and it's very, very powerful when the body just does this on its own, you know, and it's really common for people between like two and three in the morning for these events to occur. So, someone's asleep and all of a sudden they wake up and they're in bed and it's like, oh my God, did I just take some medicine? Because I'm in the middle of everything again.

And learning skills of how to stay present, how to stay relaxed, how to stay focused, how to stay calm within your breath. Right? All of these things that you learn through yoga and meditation practices. All of this is applicable to not only the immediate 5-MeO experience, but then the repercussions that come from that. Like, I had a woman write me, really recently about how she had had a five year experience and she said, well, I kind of want it to stop now.

And, she said she that she used it as a metaphor of, that she feels like Icarus and that she's maybe she's flown too close to the sun. And so now she's paying the consequences for that. And I said, well, if we want to use, mythological metaphor, that perhaps Pandora's box is better that now that you've opened this up, you can't just go and close it again, because once we've entered into Source and then we reemerge into our individuality out of that, that we become aware of how we have created, often unhealthy narratives for ourselves, of ways that we constructed our sense of self and our story and the way that we play our character and or engage ourselves with other characters that we're creating through that process.

And so it can be very challenging for people. I mean, it's wonderful to go into the 100% supercharged love state because that's really all that there is. But then that the reality of the individual level, that we have choices and we have consequences for our choices and we have responsibilities.

And once we've kicked all those doors open all the way to the center of everything, we can't just go and shut them again. And we can't say, oh, I don't want to look at that, or I don't want to feel that. So it's about continuing to trust and continue to open. And then in using all the tools that we have available to help ground that into our ordinary everyday consciousness and being, because that's really what it's all about.

I mean, who cares how many times you go out? It's about what you're doing right here, right now. That's what really counts, but really matters and how we're interacting with others in the Earth and all of that.

Formatting our Vessels for Connection

Rak: I totally agree. And that's the idea that, you know, you look at all through history, all these mystics spend all their time trying to go up to Source. And then when you get there, you realize Source spends all its time coming down, incarnating and creating down here. Right. And it's about heaven on earth. It's about when your consciousness can see and tangibly feel that this is you all around.

This is an extension of what you really are. You don't want to destroy it. You want to find the right way. It can be heaven on earth. And, you know, that's utopian, but essentially we're enchanting back into the Gaian matrix is part of what it is and part of what I think the shift that is needed is and why perhaps not just 5-MeO, but the things that are happening at this time.

I've got this little riff, I intuit when I'm in these states, I feel like I just get downloads all the time and they form into words. I feel like it almost comes from, you know, a heart speak more than a head speak like my head's not thinking what to think. It just pours through me in the right words, you know? I feel that we've seen this rise in the 80s, you opened the heart and in the Noughts the plant medicine revival spearheaded by ayahuasca help reconnect the spirit.

And there seemed to be a cascade and a progression historically because, you know, white picket fence America, the post-World War two was totally distanced from and conquered nature. The spirit had to reconnect somehow through the lab and do what it did and shift the tide of history and reconnect. So the psychic lubricants really stretched our consciousness. And, you know, ground zero, San Francisco, Palo Alto, Silicon Valley computers, internet, yada yada. But you can see that there's interesting synergies there.

And our consciousness itself is shifting through different, I guess, what Terence called exo pheromones, this idea that the entheogens are secreted by nature to modulate the species with chemical messengers. So once we realize nature has cycles, we can see that we've had this recorded history and we've had this at least in the West, this, distancing from nature and from the plant entheogens.

And now we've been ready for the plants and the garden and to go back to the garden. And, you know, ayahuasca is booming across the world at the moment. And it's in all the media. And I feel that aya was doing great work. The magic mushrooms, psilocybin is getting a lot of attention. There's the medicalization angle, but essentially the sickness and the illness in the modern world is disenchantment from nature and from Source and from right relationship and from living in egoic consciousness. It's spiralled out of control. And we've reached the apex of that phase of the paradigm and of that world age. And now we're coming back. And so as part of that, the entheogens have been reconnecting re weaving and healing.

So people who have gone through the healing of different entheogens and their energetic bodies and their physical bodies and their souls are essentially, you know, happy again or healed again already to be warriors and face the reality of reality.

So with 5-MeO its like the icing on the cake. There's a progression. And I feel that's a pattern within nature and a cascade of why this is happening now and then. Five seems to be really, really coming back into at least the shamanic underground and even the medicalization of psychedelics a bit.

And, you know, people who have had DMT, it feels like that's what it's like, this non-linear, distributed experience. You're going through all this realm of information and potentially entities or whatever they are. But there's something there. But if you if you go through that with the higher vibration of the 5-MeO, you're able to almost navigate as a Dreamtime warrior versus being drowning in it.

You can swim in it. You can you can carve your path through it. And that links up to another indigenous mythology, which is the Secoya, which they work out of Ecuador and with Jonathan Sparrow Weisberg Miller. He's running retreats with them in Costa Rica at his lodge. They have this thing they work with Yage which is a form of ayahuasca. But instead of the chakruna with N,N- DMT in the mix they use wambisa which has the 5-MeO-DMT. And so they say when they drink this and they spend like two weeks to prepare it with the utmost integrity of their vibrational essence and revering it and keeping it very, very pure.

They drink the ayahuasca in hammocks off the ground, so they're not even on the ground in the terrestrial energies. And they say they communicate with the star beings who basically live in the light; that their heavenly beings. And so there's something about, you know, the 5-MeO in their brew. And there's something about it almost reminds me of that cascade in the brain going from the pinealine to the 5-MeO to the N,N, DMT, and being able to function.

We're working with some neuroscientists, and they've been having some very interesting breakthroughs with PTSD and neurofeedback, the EEG correlates of the 5-MeO experience.

And, you know, we've even got cultural aspects. So we're going to be launching an overview of a lot of the similarities of the cartography of the 5-MeO experience and the Sanskrit, meditation states, because we really want to bring the awareness of that language and of those states of being to modern psychonauts who are experiencing this because we think it's a value.

We're launching a program we call it neuro shamanism. You know, the blend between yoga, meditation and neurofeedback and the bufo alvarius toad medicine. We're sourcing our toad medicine ethically, you know, down there in Sonora under the auspices of this Seri tribe, where we've got some incredible experts who have a lot of deep experience with this and how to blend these modalities together between the yoga and how to maximize, you know, the body, and then to prepare the mind with the meditation and how then to take, you know, lower threshold doses of the five meo and to work with neurofeedback to both integrated and to entrain you so that that awareness.

It's like if you're meditating, you're like, all right, you know, when you're in busyness and you're in the world and you're working, that's sort of a beta state of mind. You might go down into alpha and then into gamma, which is like cohesion when we're asleep. It's the delta and theta in these other states. But, you know, neurofeedback in meditators can learn those different frequencies of consciousness.

And we're hoping that, you know, through this and anchoring the neuro feedback into the five, you know, a toad. And we can also help anchor where that five amnio frequency is not to have the full-blown experience, you're not in control of it, but to almost, in a meditation sense, bring it into your life as a as a pilot light versus a flame.

And so that's launching in August. We have two spots left only it's a very intimate retreat of six, six people and four facilitators in August, in near Cancun in Mexico. It is expensive what we've decided to do with the retreats because of the dynamics and because what we're really courting, we really love our largest shamanic community.

And we're also trying to build some bridges with the neuroscience community and the neuro tech community, especially to help, look at what we're doing and improve the technologies and get the headsets that we need for the five-year project, which is really expensive. You know, the some of the cutting-edge technology can be 20 grand to helmet.

We're really looking to curate the right people who are interested in these fields of meditation, neuroscience, neurotechnology and the medicine, because we want to essentially bring them into Terra Incognita. We want to help them grow with us as an organization.