Becoming Distributed: Plant Entheogens and Consciousness

KMO: Hello? [gong] Course laid in, captain. Our current heading will take us through an intense initial rush mixed with equal parts, eager anticipation and giddy terror. After that, we'll bask in the radiance, spiral through cycles of intense introspection and then break through to a realm of acceptance and peace that will colour our daily experience from now till the eschatonic. Morphic fields are stable, karmic loads remain with unacceptable parameters. Shall we begin? All right, well, you are listening to the Psychonautica podcast. I'm one of two co-hosts, KMO, and I'm sitting down with Rak Razam, the podcaster, author, and now the art tour of a new film. It's called Aya: Awakenings.

Rak: The movie definitely talks about ayahuasca and the tourism scene as Westerners are going down to Peru and coming back in this upsurge of what I call the Global Shamanic Resurgence. There's a very large segment segment of the film which looks at 5-MeO-DMT in a smokable form. Still, it's also really looking at beyond the catalysts of these substances what these substances are opening up in our energetic fields and in our consciousness. You know these are perhaps in some sense training wheels for what we have the ability within us to tap into.

KMO: So talk a little bit about 5MeO-DMT and your experiences with it?

Rak: Wow, that's a very interesting question, KMO. You know, some people say that the experience is actually trans-linguistic. It's something which can't be captured in words. And I dispute that, you know, as a writer and as a journeyman myself and a spiritual seeker, it seems well impetuous, and I guess my skill base is to put things into words. Obviously, words themselves are just, in some sense, two-dimensional sort of vibrational constructs.

But I do believe there's something in the power of words and this old archaic idea of language and magic that you can transmit an energy with words and that you can sculpt with words, almost in a William Burroughs type of cut-up style. And these realms, that things like 5-MeO take you to, it's the traditional mystic white-light-tunnel experience, although that's a very flat analogy.

In the book, "AYA: Awakenings," which the film is based on, I liken it more to a "super-hadron collider of hyperspace", where the ego is dissolving, consciousness is dissolving, the drop is rejoining the ocean, but at the same time, what's happening was my vibrational wave front was going into the super hadron collider of hyperspace. The "Godhead" is another Sufi term for it. It was reading my vibrational wave front, shaking loose my memories, which were stored as vibration within me, and that was cascading out to the sides.

And it was revealing at my core; the language I had for it was basically "it's it," which is a very poor term–but there are no words to suffice to describe these core mystical states of being, because you do transcend and not just the ego, but the body: it's like bungee jumping into the Godhead was another phrase I had for it, but you go all the way, you feel yourself melting into it as it reveals itself coming into you… And at the same time, you're losing remembrance of being individual, of the drop rejoining the ocean. And they get right to the end of that and lose it and then start coming back again.

I went in as a journalist. I was in the Amazon and I was exploring ayahuasca culture. But what I also found was some Western gringos and many, many Westerners partaking of these plant sacraments. And I do believe, you know, from the outset we must get the language right. We're talking about language and words again, that these are all sacraments. 5-MeO is a sacrament, N-N-DMT is a sacrament, ayahuasca is a sacrament, all the entheogens are sacraments. If you're using them sacramentally, it's all about intent, like a magical sort of consciousness. Your will is how you navigate in these spaces.

And if your will is for recreation–I think recreation as a label is also denuding a bit. It's also reductionist because the recreational label has been used primarily in Western culture since the war on drugs to de-emphasize the fact that these are spiritual pursuits and these are pursuits of consciousness exploring.

What I believe is there is the invisible landscape or the terra incognita – and that it's a valid realm of exploration – and if it wasn't a paradigm threat to the powers that be, it could be embraced more readily by science. Obviously if it was legal we'd have more opportunity to do that.

So, the current wave of explorers like myself are doing it in an underground way. 5-MeO-DMT was completely legal at the time when I encountered it in 2006 and I was just very lucky at the time there was a Western scientist who had been doing MRI brain scan research and quantitative electrophilography (EEG) scans and he was visiting a Western shaman named Ron Wheelock, who no longer does 5-MEO-DMT, I must say.

The Experiment at La Rosacita

KMO: I've had ceremonies with Ron Wheelock.

Rak: Yeah well I found Ron a very beautiful guy. For me, in an ayahuasca ceremony, in the set and setting and in the jungle, whether it's indigenous or a Western practitioner, it's the sanctity of the space that's created. For me, when I can open up in that space and on the medicine, regardless of the visionary component, it's the empathic nature that opens up within me where I feel. When you're in ceremony with people, every little nuance – whether it's a groan or a cough– there's an energy behind the sound, like we're talking about words at the start – and I feel that energy.

So when I was sitting with Ron I had three ceremonies including the 5-MeO-DMT one, and I just found him to be a very straight down the line very integral practitioner. You know, his son was there young Queto, who was only three and a half at the time and it was a very much a father and son together, I could feel the love, you know, I could feel the energy and so that allowed me to open up.

So when this Dr. Juan Acosta–the EEG scientist –was doing the experiments and in the movie we call this sequence "The Experiment at La Rosacita" which is what Ron's Lodge was called at that time. And it translates to the Rosy Cross, funnily enough.

I'd been doing half a dozen or more ayahuasca ceremonies and cleansing and sifting the soul in a cleansing, not just my physical body, but giving up Western culture and being in the jungle and at lodges. And I was more vibrationally clean. So then when the opportunity came to do this 5-MeO experiment, I was very willing to do so; I feel that because I'd been in this journalistic headspace, that part of my brain was activated, and so as I'm going into this very deep – you know, many commentators say that 5-MeO is sort of like the light on the top of the Christmas tree, that all the other entheogens are the baubles on the branches and that the 5-MeO-DMT is a deeper quality of DMT tryptamines, that it goes deep into (I use this Sufi term) the Godhead.

I went in with a journalistic mind frame to languagize the experience, to have that momentum of that part of my brain operating in a mystical sense, to data mine and to bring stuff back. And that was quite unique and I do believe now, having had many different sort of entheogenic experiences that they're usually non-linear.

I wonder if all the species which contain tryptamines–which isn't all, but many… if nature herself threads it all throughout her constructs, then it seems seems to me that on a neurochemical level, that creates a nexus point where we can overlap when we're in that psychic space. So perhaps we're experiencing what it feels like to be threaded all throughout nature as a consciousness, which is almost like a root system in a distributed consciousness way. So I hope that answered your question.

KMO: Well the question was just basically a catalyst to get you talking and it seems to have worked. Yeah, yeah, done well. Something that comes up a lot I think, for people who who are probably maybe scientifically minded or sceptical in their approach to, you know, other non-human minds that people report having contact with on on DMT or on ayahuasca… They might get on a plane and fly down to Peru and get into Iquitos and suddenly all of their scepticism dissolves after their first experience when, quite plainly, a female voice is speaking to them, and them in particular, and not in a sort of hazy, phantasmagorical, dreamscape sort of way, but in a very coherent conversation. And it just doesn't seem plausible anymore that this is all in my head. And you mentioned that DMT is essentially a neurotransmitter.

Also the organization of mycelial networks underground are very similar to synaptic patterns in human brains and it seems quite plausible to me that there is cognition going on, that there is intelligence, a distributed intelligence, as you say, in nature, and that under certain circumstances we can participate in it and communicate with it, but we are habituated not to.

Distributed Intelligence

Rak: Yeah, I think this is the thing. It's obviously that we've got the consciousness we have for a reason. There's an evolutionary drive and a historical precedence that this has happened.

And down here on the terrestrial level, we've needed this level of consciousness to survive and adapt and make make our way in the world. But nature's built in this capacity into us and she knows what she's doing. I don't think anyone would actually argue that there isn't some type of intelligence in nature because obviously the whole system is evolving and has evolved and there's a push behind it. It's what type of intelligence.

And it seems to be that all our 20th century technologies, not all of them, but a great number of our 20th century technologies are applying this idea of biomimicry to look at how nature evolves herself and to apply them in an exosomatic way outside our bodies, whether that's things like the internet itself and this whole idea of networks.

Computers alone are an amazing device, but it's the network of computers connected together in a distributed sense where we're really seeing these pioneering fields – and you know this sort of crowdsourcing and parallel processing and and those type of those type of ideas seem to be very analogous to the way nature herself is working.

Let's look at domino effect in nature and even though humans have obviously dominated the landscape we originally had a place. We had a place in the web of life and we're playing a role. And this great quest for meaning in human affairs, I don't know, it seems as if this shamanic impulse to reconnect to the planet is something – as we're talking about distributed consciousness, it's something which may not be apparent in an individual ego, perhaps in obliterating the ego or emerging with a larger distributed consciousness of nature, we can remember what our place is, and we can find that that role and then find the meaning from that.

That's that's that's one of the things I'm really interested in – not just ayahuasca itself or DMT itself or these mechanisms which nature creates within us, but how we can tap into these portals, what it reveals and then what value we can glean to bring back into our culture. This is actually the structure of the book AYA Awakenings, I used Joseph Campbell's heroic journey structure of the departure initiation and return and for me you know I first went down to Peru in 2006 and so it's been a seven and a half-year journey carrying the experiences in textual form and anchoring that into a book and promoting the book and then into the movie and communicating this to audiences.

And so it's been quite an interesting journey in many many ways. But even just in a media sense, the book is a very dense hyperkinetic anchoring of these hyper-dimensional and cultural experiences, so there's a certain demographic which that plugs into and it can really evoke the experiences written up in the book but film is so immediate and there's something very dynamic about the visual cortex and about seeing it.

Electric Sheep

One of the animators that we licensed for the film was some electric sheep of Scott Draves and I just met up with him earlier today in New York and we're talking about, you know, this ability we have now with algorithms to basically–it seems like our technology is catching up to the same sort of mathematical algorithms that nature herself uses when we are seeing what we might call hallucinations or visions.

There's many different levels of visions in Amazonian shamanism and some of them are very, very dynamic and very real and people and jungle-orientated and jaguars and snakes and cities. But at least on that DMT level, where there's a few different iterations and levels of geometries and different shapes, it seems that there's definitely a mathematical code behind it and we're getting very close to be able to replicate that.

And so we used a lot of Scott's electric sheep geometries in the film to help portray that type of visionary state, as well as a lot of very organic special effects which the director and editor Tim Parish used to a very great effect because actually the visionary component of the film, Aya: Awakenings, seeks to basically anchor these experiences in a visionary sense, like a direct visual sense and then take the viewer on that journey.

So we're setting up the outside narrative of drinking with the curanderos, introducing what ayahuasca is, introducing why Westerners are going down there, what the culture clash is and then we go in on the journeys itself and we take people on those journeys with the emotional narrative taken from the book, with the visionary component, with these beautiful dense audio soundscapes, which the sound designer Lulu Madill has made samples of indigenous icaros and jungle sounds. And together, there's a there's a critical mass of synaesthesia, which I believe gets us as close as you can get to the real thing with that being the real thing.

And then you've almost got to ask: we've done preview screenings around Australia, we've had people who have experienced the medicine of ayahuasca, who basically have a vibrational flashback. It really is a very beautiful organic film that layers and draws you in and if you've had the medicine or DMT or something like that, you are very much going to be, that's going to be invoked again and if you haven't then you're going to feel as close as you can to that experience.

KMO: Before we started recording you mentioned a topic which is important to me, and that is the topic of integration, of having an experience, be it a psychedelic experience with an entheogen, or some other sort of experience that's well outside of one's usual range, and feeling some really profound insight in the moment. But it seems that the world is full of people who have had those experiences at one point or another, and compartmentalize them and set them aside or somehow come to terms with remaining a very egocentric, sometimes avaricious, competitive self-important jerk with a psychedelic history. Is this what have you found in terms of ways of keeping the vitality of that experience alive, other than writing books and making films about the experience?

Rak: Yeah, definitely. Well as with any spiritual path it's something that you have to put energy into, you have to work on it. I'm not saying you have to take it daily, a psychedelic. The infamous psychedelic chemist of the 1960s Bear Owsley has this analogy where was saying that acid is basically an amplifier. So it is ego-dissolving in a sense but at very high doses if you give it to a cop, you're going to get an acid amplified cop. If you give it to a murderer, you get a Charles Manson or something, and if you give it to an average hippie, you'll get that amplified. It seems to be an amplifier of consciousness on some level.

I think perhaps the difference with entheogens like ayahuasca, as well as the lineage and the heritage of being connected to the plant world, the vegetal kingdom directly, although I have to point out that LSD was modified from plant material by Albert Hofmann originally. And there's the morphic fields or resonance or the relationships that humans have had with the plant kingdom as well as inducing, say, a visionary experience or an altered state.

Psychedelics as Planetary Species Modulators

Traditionally, these substances have been used by indigenous people who are themselves the caretakers and the guardians of the land, and the land. Owsley and McKenna riff off this, he said that he believed that entheogens are basically "exo-pheromones" secreted by the planet herself to be taken by the species like humans, and so the caretakers of the land, the indigenous people have guarded the knowledge of these substances.

Things like psilocybin mushrooms became more widely known to the West in the 1950s when Maria Sabina introduced Gordon Wasson. She was a mushroom curandera or practitioner, but one of the other famous substances or sacraments in Mesoamerica was the Salvia divinorum. That wasn't revealed to Westerners until the 1980s or really the 1990s.

So some substances were kept even more sacred. And that's the thing. I know that in Australian Indigenous culture, Aboriginal culture, these substances–and we have in Australia some of the highest samplings of acacias with DMT in them, many different sort of psychedelic plants per se, but they were used very specifically and culturally as initiation tools, not something you would take all the time.

And so these caretakers of the land and of the entheogens like ayahuasca, I think the reason why it's a healing modality. It's very popular because of the healing capacity of it. But part of that healing happens not just on a physical level, it happens on a psychological level. And basically what ayahuasca's doing is it's kickstarting people's own ability to heal themselves.

It's not just the plant or the experience that starts to become sort of semi-deified and worshiped, you know, in a sense. What I feel is happening is that ayahuasca helps the unconscious become permeable into the conscious mind and the shadow material and the suppressions and the ills and the hurts come up for viewing and reconsidering and reordering and for healing and letting go of – and that's with the cooperation and catalysing influence of the plant and and potentially as the indigenous people believe in their cosmology, the spirit in the plant as well as an active participant.

But with all that healing going on, that's just one aspect of these plants. And then the right usage and right relationship with the plant and the planet is something which then I think we're really learning from tribal people. So yeah, I remember the start of your question there. But it was about integrating the experience and keeping it vital in every day life. Yeah, so in that sense these aren't things we need to do all the time but the capacities they reveal within ourselves as well as the healing they can potentiate in ourselves is something which then changes our matrix and can change who we are.

These substances specifically I think can help with healing and so it's not the substance which then is integrated into our everyday lives, it's what that substances help facilitate in ourselves which then reintegrates. Like we integrate back differently and then by facing our shadow by looking into our healing by reordering our relationships with our loved ones and how we want to walk in the world and who we want to be, then that healed person can go forward into the world with a fresh start and that's the bit which I think is the great benefit of these substances.

KMO: You mentioned Terence McKenna and his exo-pheromones talking point. He had another talking point which has been taken up by Bruce Damer which is that – and you mentioned this earlier– that nature knew what she was doing when she unleashed our particular style of consciousness on the biosphere. It seems to a lot of people that it's been really destructive and possibly was a mistake, that human consciousness is an evolutionary dead end and that the sooner we die off and leave the biosphere to recover the better. Bruce Damer has taken on the opposite view that if nature without human consciousness existed in the long run, then we're here.

It is our job to build a scaffold by which the Gaian mind can climb out into the stars and then propagate and as Terence said, nature has put every daffodil and Honey Bee and Blue Whale on notice saying: look, you're all expendable. This project of human consciousness, this, you know, this wave front of a creating novelty in the universe, is the point of this experiment.

And all of that is expendable. If humanity can break through and have its apotheosis and provide nature with like, turns we kind of said that humanity was nature's way of building itself a nervous system, by which she meant that we were taking sand, essentially silicon, and creating fiber optic networks and information processors and infrared data packet routers and satellites, and basically giving the earth a new style of moving information around very quickly.

You know, the natural sort of chemical distributed intelligence that one might access with ayahuasca certainly has its strengths but it doesn't move information around the whole globe as quickly as electrons can move.

Rak: I would agree to a very large extent with that, but I think there's still a human conceit in there that I think we must remember: yes, perhaps the human experiment is at the forefront of of nature's concrescence and of this consciousness that's increasing and taking dominion over the planet. And perhaps that's the crest of the wave and it's intended to be. But we are also just one species amongst many. 

Humans are the Crest of the Wave

And so, we're talking about this intelligence and nature and this distributed consciousness. And yes, I think that humans are a very valuable tool that she is using for a specific reason. And it seems very much so that there's this drift of evolution, where we again, the biomimicry – we're replicating the natural systems, these networks sort of paradigms, and we're recreating in a very sort of rough-hewn way what nature does in a very organic, seamless way.

And we know that nature does have dead-end species or it experiments, but it's almost like, maybe like sifting in the dirt in the water and there's a sand picture and turn it upside down and there's different levels I think the intelligence and nature is working through the biomass of the species and has no hesitation to switch the species off, but to allow a plague of locust to overrun its ecosystem. It'll expand, it'll grow to the millions, and then it'll eat everything and kill some other species in the process, but then it too will die. And then that falls off, but the energy underneath the form continues in that crest of the wave, and some of it is shunted throughout the matrix of nature herself. And so this build up and this charge seems very interesting.

And to give context to that, I used to term earlier this "galactic ecosystem", and even just on a very physical sense of astrophysics we're learning so much more about the Earth and the solar system and the galactic ecosystem within the universal ecosystem, the cosmic rays, all the different sort of stellar bodies and how the energies permeating in and how that's affecting life on Earth.

And so Earth herself as a matrix and a cradle of life – there is life everywhere, like the suns are technically alive; there might be dead planets or whatever, but there is not just the potential for life, I think there is definitely life all throughout the galaxy in the universe on some level. It could be on a semantic level here, but the potential for it's there. But this human experiment and what we are doing, I think the value of entheogens is in remembering by plugging us back into nature.

And for me, there is no value. I think we have become a plague, just like the locusts. If we spread across the planet, just with a technological mindset, without having a heart-based, vegetal understanding, without having an understanding of what's of value, we can take a pristine ecosystem, we can raise the forest, and we can breed cows to be slaughtered for McDonald's burgers, you know, but it's the consciousness behind it. Why would we do that? You know, it's a consciousness which has fallen out of right relationship that does that.

So we can build the internet and it is one of the most fantastic tools we have to connect us. But then what do we do with it? It's getting colonized with capitalism, basically at the moment, the NSA listening into everything. And it's the consciousness. So what I feel nature is doing with modalities like, not just ayahuasca – ayahuasca seems to be the pre-eminent one at the moment, and it's coming through this healing portal.

But what's really happening on a larger level is that we're reconnecting with the planet, with this deep green ideology and meme, and the consciousness of individuals, the collective shifting of consciousness is happening as well. And as the shamanic revival spreads on some type of matrix level, if we can change enough humans, it's changing the consciousness and the paradigm of our species.

And then we can use the technologies we have invented and we can glean and have insights into new technologies through our relationship with the planet to use these tools with the right intelligence in the right way and it's not just a mental intelligence, it's a heart-based intelligence, it has to be.

Rec-Chems: Modern Alchemy

KMO: What do you think of the proliferation of psychedelic chemicals that are purely synthesized?

Rak: Well, it's alphabet soup, isn't it? And it has its pros and cons. In broad strokes, it's like being introduced to your own genetic code: there's nothing wrong with bio-technology or the rec-chems per se. But again, it comes down to this consciousness. And I mentioned earlier this idea that we have relationships in the Amazonian Cosmo vision, in their world paradigm, they believe it's basically animist: they believe that everything is imbued with spirit. And it gets sort of complex. There's a whole schematic to it that they might say: that tree has, you know, 10 souls in it, or 10 divas in it, but that tree doesn't have any. And I was trying to get to the bottom of this. Do you know if the genus of that tree has just one soul that splits into many? Or do they, you know, if that tree dies, can they hop to the next tree? I don't know its intricate depths.

And this is why, at least in Amazonian shamanism, you know, it is a science of curanderismo, and they take decades to be an expert practitioner in it. And it's the relationships they have with the plants and the vegetal kingdom and the depths of that relationship that they go a long way with.

So there's that idea of their spirit in it. And I think it was John Lilly, you know, he's experienced with ketamine and he was saying that ketamine feels like this sterile, empty room, you know, an amorphic sort of level. And that there's nothing wrong with it, but it's empty. It's an empty template. And it's by having relationships with it as an individuality grows.

Here's another little riff on it actually: Maria Sabina, who you mentioned earlier said in the 70s, wished she hadn't introduced Gordon Wasson to the magic mushrooms. She said that the little Ninos or the spirits in the mushrooms that she would connect with were never the same after Westerners took the mushrooms.

So if we add our vibrational wave fronts to the morphic field of say magic mushrooms, which has a long relationship with humans – you know McKenna's whole riff of mushrooms on the savannah and being a catalyst for human evolution...

Obviously, we have a relationship with the mushroom, but imagine adding this vibrational energy of essentially white Western 20th century culture. That's a different vibration. So I do feel that it gets down to a level of morphic resonance and vibrational fields here.

And these rec-chems perhaps need a generation of psychonauts to imbue their morphic resonance with them and develop relationships, because what I believe is happening in the anthropogenic and psychedelic and whatever label we give these sort of experiences, is that we are having relationships and we are probably having this vibrational imprinting going on, on a morphic resonant level.

And so there's nothing wrong with rec-chems, but they're pretty much virgin territory and so obviously there can be dangers because there's not a lot of knowledge handed down from psychedelic elders or they're so new.

 Shulgin's invented quite a vast majority of these and tested them. And so I guess it still remains to be seen what value there is. And I guess to come full circle, I would bring it back to what's our intent. I think they definitely need to be explored. And I wonder if there's an overlap with the indigenous cosmovision here that if we do develop deeper relationship with them, can we find a diva or a spirit or an intelligence inside these substances? So it's not just a neurochemical relationship we're having, but a spiritual relationship.

KMO: Well, if you do find yourself with the opportunity to try some new alphabet soup chemical, what questions do you ask yourself in order to determine whether or not you're going to say yes to that?

Rak: Well there's this resurgence of alchemists and of alchemy, and we look at people like Shulgin and I know quite a few alchemists my generation or younger, DIY alchemists as well, who are exploring this new frontier. And it is a frontier, and I think basically all frontiers do deserve to be explored, but we must remember that sometimes there can be guardians on the threshold. There can be entities in these dimensions.

And what's opening up is this cosmic ecology. This inter-dimensional hyperspatial landscape. This terra incognita, which does exist, so it deserves to be explored, but we do need checks and balances. We need duty of care. What I see happening in the ayahuasca movement, which is fantastic, is this real need for duty of care and for safety mechanisms, which NGOs are forming, like the Ethnobotanical Stewardship Council and MAPS, doing some pioneering work.

There's some self-organization happening within the community to ensure that there is a standard of care, and some fail safes are transmitted through all practitioners and people going for these experiences.

On the same level, I think the psychonautical community exploring recreational chemicals probably needs to develop some type of game plan of understanding on the same level and a way to share knowledge as well, because if it is a valid frontier that we're mapping…

I know there's a great website called DMT-Nexus and they do a lot of community and group work exploring the tryptamine frequencies. They've done a hyperspatial synchronized link up with many people at once trying to consensually find themselves in hyperspace and navigate and have signed posts they can agree upon. They've done a lot of work with a hyperspatial lexicon trying to agree on language: like what McKenna said or the "chrysanthemum" level, etc.

So again, I feel like there's no real artificial distinctions if it's made in a lab or made in nature –except there might be more energetic differences, but overarchingly as a community of seekers and however we define ourselves, I really look forward to and I think we're in the age where this exploration is happening, it is valid and it is the new frontier and it deserves to be explored, but we need to do it professionally. It's not just a recreational pursuit.

I did actually experience; I'm trying to think: it was either DOI or DOI, I think it was DOI about a year and a half ago. My goodness, it's a psychedelic methamphetamine as well, and the friend who provided me some of the materials said, "Dip your finger in." I'm like: "How much is too much?" And he said, "Oh, just dip your finger in." It was too much. It was too much. And I felt like I didn't need that experience. Like, I almost died. It was a very uncomfortable experience for a good three, four hours. Intense, beautiful, but too much.

I guess I'm more comfortable working with plant entheogens and with the body of knowledge that's developed around those. And there's an enormous body of knowledge. The curanderos, the shamans of Peru, I mean, there's cultural reasons, perhaps why different tribes develop different bodies of knowledge between them, but the Icaros, for instance: the vibrational magic songs, you quite often hear those shared through different tribes and with Westerners, and there's already roadmaps.

Colonizing Hyperspace

It's almost like they've colonized hyperspace to some degree, and they can give you the access codes. And so I find that as well as having that hyperspatial map from indigenous cultures, which is very handy, there's also an aspect of respect and an aspect of lineage where you can train and learn with the curanderos.

If we forget for one second the social culture clash dynamics and all the issues which are the teething issues that arrive in Amazonian shamanism as the Western commodification is happening as we speak, and all the money issues and things like that. Just the knowledge that is there is a deep reservoir to be mined. I think that as we do so with respect, I mean there's issues about cultural appropriation and things like that.

Still, I feel there's a larger issue about species exploration and if we can train with the curandero or absorb their knowledge with integrity and respect and the right relationship with them, with their tribe, with their body of knowledge given from the earth, then we can integrate that into the Western skill base and into our understanding.

And that affords us perhaps one of the better pathways to travel down with all due respect to recreational chemicals as well.

I mean all roads need to be explored.