Dropping the Ego Armor: Healing Species Trauma

Shonagh: This is the Mushroom on Awake.net and I'm your host, Shonagh Home. DMT, ayahuasca, shamanism, etc.: I want to know who was Rak Razam before you found your way to entheogens and shamanism?

Rak: That's a thorny one. That's a difficult question to ask. Who was I? Who was anyone before they found their way into shamanism? I mean, shamanism is not necessarily a destination. It's a path and you're always finding yourself and you're always reinventing yourself. I think it just makes you more conscious. You have to be conscious of consciousness and conscious of yourself and I guess that's who I've always been to some degree.

I don't know we could go all the way back to my birth. You know there's been so many different things. I had a psychic in Peru tell me a couple of months ago that I was a woman for 80,000 lifetimes and this is my first lifetime as a man. I came in, I was two months premature, I had all this weird birth trauma, forceps on my head pulling me out of the womb; I think that shunted all my energy up to my crown chakra and since then I've just you know, been doing what I do, trying to figure out what's going on here with consciousness on planet earth and what to do with it. Because once you figure out what IT is then you've got to figure out what to do with it. So I don't really know what the answer to that is, Shonagh.

Shonagh: All right. Well, you did start in journalism and then this is how you...

Rak: Oh, yes, this is kind of the 10 year anniversary of when I basically relaunched myself as an ‘experiential journalist’: it’s like submersive journalism, something that unlike traditional journalism, where you know – you've got to have this objective point of view where you're not allowed to really get into the situation itself or report on what's happening. You have to show the pros and cons and both sides. And that's all good and well.

And I think that there is definitely something for that. But the type of things I was reporting on when I launched my career 10 years ago was basically, I started off in Basel,Switzerland, at Albert Hofmann's 100th birthday party symposium. It was a celebration of the great chemist who discovered LSD back in 1943 and he was turning 100 years old and I girded my loins. I got my journalist credentials because I was freelancing at the time. I pitched it around to a lot of different local Australian periodicals. I went over to Switzerland and basically birthed Rak Razam as an experiential journalist. And so that's been 10 whole years now. You know writing about consciousness and the LSD movement or you know the counterculture movement or what evolved into my interest with Shamanism.

These are very esoteric things and outside the norm, beyond the pale and so it's not easy to really comment on them objectively from the outside. I found that I was already beyond the pale myself. I was a participant in these cultures and you know, what I wanted to do was share some of that interior journey work and some of those experiences with readers and with the general public. So experiential journalism was the way to go and yeah it's been ten years now.

Shonagh: Well you're damn good at it. I must say, I mean, you really are. What you have created is fantastic.

Rak: Thank you. Well, it's a it's a big question really because you know, everything has an equal and opposite effect and basically what Terence McKenna used to call ‘Dominator culture’, which is basically the inheritors of Western culture, informs all our shamanic explorations. And someone reminded me the other day that even the term Western culture comes from what was West of the Roman Empire. It always goes back to history.

And what we've seen over the last few thousands of years is, there's been these leaps and bounds and progression of technology, but at the same time, since the Industrial Revolution and things like that, there's been this focusing just on the material. It's been the material world that has enabled us to improve living standards and certain things, including technology. But it's been at the expense of everything else. It's been at the expense of the other facets of our beings and we're not just intellectual beings and we don't need to just intellectualize the world and try to then control the world.

Species PTSD?

I came across this theory actually, a lot of my theories are basically intuitions and looking at the big picture, but I had this download, this intuition the other day,I was thinking what if, right,

So we're shielding ourselves from nature and what nature really is, which is, you know, this alive and intelligent macro creature, this organism. And nature extends into the web of life and beyond the planetary envelope, I believe, and the stars are alive and there's this whole galactic ecology, there's this incredible community of beings that are in the universe and we have this perception that we are the only ones and it's so myopic and it's so closed off and it's so closed-minded because I think we are sick and the sicknesses comes from the fact that we've been in shock.

I got this intuition when I was in Costa Rica recently and I was on Wachuma, the great medicine San Pedro, the cactus, and I was watching these little crabs and they were like scuttling along the beach and you know the beach was just going down to the water into the ocean and I had this voice in my head and it was going you know, come to me, it was like join me, and it was getting pretty religious. It was like this sort of God thing happening. And I always get that down at the ocean because, you know, whenever the waves wash in, I always have this feeling. It's like relentlessly wave after wave after wave. And it's an incredibly Zen experience, just watching the ocean, you know, come to the shore and where the sea meets the earth and that overlap and that nexus point triggers this vocabulary around the inner cartography or the geography of inner space which mirrors nature.

And so when I look at the ocean I really think of the inner Bardo states and some of the places that the the tryptaimes can take us to, which are within us. You know, there's the deep deep ocean, there's the beach, then there's the the initial waves and then there's like the shallows and there's a deep sea then there's the deep deep ocean and then you dive down very very deep.

You are the Ocean not the Drop

And so the geography of the ocean continues and it reminds me of I guess the ocean of consciousness itself you know and as a living, alive, intelligent organism. And so I was looking at that and thinking wow how have we forgotten this? Why have we forgotten this? Why has our entire culture sort of denied its existence to the point we've denied it for so long, we don't even believe it's real anymore. We say, you know, we went through the 20th century, the God is dead type of thing of philosophy. It was like this whole divine organism. And so I was just thinking that, we're like the crabs and we have got this body armor and we have this psychic armor and we have this cultural armor.

And I think that, you know, whatever “The Fall” was in pre-history–and a lot of the archaeologists now are sort of debating, you have sort of progressive amateur archaeologists like Graham Hancock, who are doing a lot of testing and finding sites all across the world,which go back beyond 12 ,000 years and looking at the Sphinx and the pyramids. And, you know–the history books try to cram everything into nine, 10,000 years and it doesn't quite fit. There seems to have been previous cultures, that's what even the archaeological evidence is pointing to now. And there seems to have been a Golden Age; there seems to have been a civilization which had vast knowledge and vast ability to build things like the pyramids and other type of structures.

And there seems to have been a purpose for that. And that seems to be pointing towards some energetic connection to the grid lines of Earth and to how the Earth then connects to the energetics of the solar system and what stars they’re pointing at. They may have been an intergalactic civilization, it gets all really cosmic, right? But this is the thing. Somewhere in our pre-history, we had such a massive shock that we've gone into species PTSD. This is what I believe. And ever since then, in history, we've been rebuilding and rebuilding and rebuilding. But because of the shock and because of the of the trauma, we have atrophied a lot of the spiritual connection.

And so the Dominator culture, which was, you know, it's like the victim-perpetrator type of scenario. It's gone out there and tried to conquer the natural world, which it was distanced from, which it was in shock from, which it was running from. And that natural world is divine, you know. It's what God made it, and it's what nature really is, but that remembrance of what it really is – that's what we lost.

Return of the Sacred

And so I feel that these things are coming full circle, these things are coming back. So what is this resurgence and interest in shamanism again and in spirituality and in consciousness and in getting back to the earth? It's the equal and opposite effect of having submerged that and suppressed that for over 2 ,000 years. Because we know the energy can't be created or destroyed and so that suppression in itself has created a momentum for this to come back, you know, with a groundswell. It's just unstoppable.

I borrow that phrase from Terence, and I think it's the ego. It's basically the ego, essentially. It's a culture which has promoted ego,and through ego, the intellect, and things like that, as the be all and end all, to the detriment of the spirit. Because the ego's part of the vehicle that we've been given, but it's not the only bit. It's there and to navigate and it's a very valuable tool, but when it takes over, we become narcissistic and we become sort of out of balance, you know, it's like koyaanisqatsi, the world out of balance.

And here's the interesting thing, what you were talking about, the idea of seasons of consciousness, I agree with that totally. I had this other theory that I've sort of promoted in a lot of my lectures over the years,and I wrote this up for an essay that I did for Graham Hancock's recent collection, The Divine Spark and it was based on a lecture years ago called From Cosmic Consciousness to Convergence, Mapping the Species Activation.

And it's this idea that previous cultures and earth-based cultures have all pointed to the fact that there are world ages, there seems to be different seasons on a larger scale of time. So depending how you measure it, you look at the cultures like the Maya who had many different Calendrical systems to measure things on the planet and also like off the planet as well in a galactic calendrical They had the idea of the 26 ,000 year grand orbit and within that,you know there was quadrants or different seasons as well. And you know, we've been blaming ourselves for history or his-story as Terence used to say: everything that we think of of the ego and us being in control – and so when things go wrong, it's it's our fault.

So I have this little shorthand: it's like sometimes you have five-bar galactic godhead signal and other times it goes down to one bar. So like the last like, you know, six and a half thousand years or so has been like one bar signal. We've been on a really reduced signal of what the bandwidth has been available for us to receive. And so, of course, I guess with that shock and with that PTSD, what we were left with, we did what we could to survive and to protect ourselves and to, you know, shield ourselves from the outside world. And with that, we've tried to conquer the planet because we saw the planet as an enemy and something to protect from and to use as a resource.

That's the other thing: to cannibalize the planet and to use it as a resource is to not know what the planet really is and what we really are, to not know our right relationship with nature, which you know a lot–not all–of the indigenous peoples of the planet understand,the people who are on the land and understand that consciousness extends beyond them and that you know the plants have consciousness and the earth has consciousness. And we're all just different fields of consciousness within a greater field of consciousness. And you know, it's like these are the relationships that we need to relearn.

Shonagh: Ayahuasca is sort of, I guess at the moment on the planet, the pre-eminent entheogen, which is getting a lot of attention, but there's so many different entheogens that are native to different bio regions around the planet and have very healing effects as well.

Ayahuasca: Planetary Avatar

Rak: I think the thing with Ayahuasca, I mean, she's been used by jungle peoples for millennia. There seems to have been different strands of Ayahuasca. I mean, Gayle Highpine is a commentator and admin on the ayahuasca.com forums. She wrote an interesting article that I just saw in the feeds recently, looking at anthropological evidence and the usage of Ayahuasca. We know that the vine itself, Banisteriopsis Caapi, is what the ayahuasca brew is named after. In the brew itself, a lot of the curanderos or shamans of the Amazon add different admixture plants, including things that have dimethyltryptamine or DMT in them, either chakruna or chaliponga or things like that.

But she was pointing to the fact that, you know, that may actually have been a very recent in the last century or so that admixture concoction and it's definitely speeded up in the last few decades since Westerners have become interested in Ayahuasca. The thing is Ayahuasca is a purgative and so I think the thing people are looking for healing and that’s the reason it's managed to navigate the social sort of labyrinth.

I asked this question, why does the culture get the politicians it deserves? Why does the culture get the medicines it deserves? So, in the 1960s,we had a whole generation who was switched on by LSD. Now, we had basically an acid revolution, and that type of configuration came to fruition because it was necessary at that time. We had post-World War II, we had white picket fence America that had won the war, you know, the whole mechanization process, the whole, you know, roll out of suburbia. Dominator culture was at the apex of its victory.

And at that exact time, this antidote seemed to spring out of nowhere and to surface on the streets of America and switch on the children of the Dominator culture, to grow their hair long like Indians and to go back to nature and to relearn,as they did with the tribes like the Grateful Dead, this idea of the tribe and of the group mind and of different modes of consciousness.

Anyway, so for whatever reasons, we had the Acid Revolution in the 60s, but we don't, even though it's still around now, we don't have a need for acid on that level. It's still a very beautiful, I believe, substance if it's pure,and it can be very cathartic, and it can be very healing and connect people, but it's not what the culture now needs en masse. So in the 1960s, acid opened the mind. In the 1980s, we had an ecstasy generation, which helped open the heart. We had all the dance music and all the club culture, which has now gone all across the planet. Those are both man-made substances, but we didn't have the connection to all the delivery mechanisms or the availability of the plant entheogens that were still around.

Now the Lodge system with Ayahuasca really only started up around the early 1990s,at least around Iquitos in Peru. These things were there, but they just weren't as accessible.

And so I feel that it's almost like panning for gold. You know, you have to sift through the dirt and sift through the big chunks and if you have the right sieve you can sort of get those finer details. It's almost like generation after generation. If you were looking on a vibrational sort of front or a soul front and looking for what the lessons were or what the tweaking was, the world went through this acid revolution in the 1960s and it diverted the course of history.

There's so many different things that have happened, not directly attributed perhaps to acid itself, but to the generation which was exploring with acid and to the energies which are coming in in their cosmic season at that time.

And Ayahuasca has the built-in fail safes. It's the purgative, as I mentioned before. It's not recreational in any way, shape, or form. And it also has the lineage. It has the lineage which a lot of the 1960s generation looked for to the East, to India, and things like that, to train people in the West in altered states to use these substances in an appropriate way to re-establish the right relationship.

And so Ayahuasca has really come to the fore and it is, you know, the master healer. It's an amazing healing plant and substance. And so people are having very profound effects because at the core of it, Ayahuasca can help show people their own darkness and it can help show them their own wounds and get them to know themselves. And you know, many of these substances, as we've talked before, they can help lower the ego. They can help diminish the ego or relieve ourselves from the burden of the ego for a time.

They've done a lot of work, different organizations, looking at MRI and EEG scans and looking at The ability of Ayahuasca and other entheogens like the psilocybin mushrooms to switch off the default mode network of the brain, which are the clustered regions which help reinforce and give us a sense of identity or ego.

Dropping the Ego Mind

And when that is switched off, the mind at large is able to process a lot more unconscious material, the buried material, the psychic material, and to sort of connect as opposed to being this single particle of ego. I think we revert back to being an ego-less wave, you know, like a wave function type scenario. And so Ayahuasca is incredibly healing and powerful. The culture is going through, the Western uptake of that is going through a lot of growth challenges as we see occasionally in the media.

But, you know, as a healing modality, Ayahuasca has a lot of profound abilities embedded within it, and I think it's been the perfect entheogen over the last 10,15, even 20 years, as it's been growing, to represent entheogens and to represent this reconnection to shamanism because Ayahuasca didn't just bring itself to the West, it has also reintroduced the idea of the circle, i .e. the container that the ceremony is conducted in, and the idea of lineage, and I think those are almost as valuable as the Ayahuasca itself.

So what we've been seeing, and as you yourself know, it's not just that Ayahuasca can be done in a ceremony set and setting or a circle. There's people who are now doing serving as practitioners around the world doing mushroom circles. I know 5-MeO-DMT practitioners hold circles and ceremony in that sacred space. And I think that idea of the sacred space and the ceremony and the container that the healing work is done in as part of a community who get to witness you and be present and support you as well is equally valuable.

Shonagh: Ayahuasca’s in the news for good or worse, for a good number of years now and it has been glamorized and Hollywood sort of adopted it and the in-crowd has adopted it and there's a double edge to this, what we're seeing is these substances have the potential to help remove or diminish the ego to look at ourselves and to realize that we are our own medicine and we can heal ourselves by getting in touch with our spirit, by working on the things that we have suppressed or repressed in our traumas and letting go of the root causes of our illness.

Rak: And many of these substances also reconnect us back to the planet. And so it's not just the individual ego, it's I guess the planetary ego or the planetary identity or the planetary consciousness that is such a panacea. When you can reconnect to that and viscerally feel yourself plugging back into something bigger than yourself, it really is like coming home.

The ego it's almost like a race to the finish because at the same time the ego rebounds and a lot of people find that these substances can reinforce the ego, you can get a lot of different sort of flow through effects with these substances that may reinforce certain ideas or certain things that come up in the medicine trance or the visionary component.

People may fixate on things, they may just hold on, or they're anchoring themselves to a particular point of the journey, which is why you need a good facilitator and someone who is well trained and can hold that space and can hopefully energetically see where you're going in your journey and help clear any blockages for you. But you also need good follow-up. You need to be able to integrate your experience afterwards and to be part of a community. These substances weren't done recreationally by the indigenous; but they were done on maybe a semi-regular basis to refresh and to renew and to reconnect back to the planet.

A lot of studies have been done with groups like Santo Daime; for instance when the Hoasca project back in the early 1990s looked at the effects of Ayahuasca, they took into account that they had a supportive community that they were part of and they could talk about their experiences with as well. So what I feel like we're getting to is we're seeing this community, this medicine community, crystallize in front of us in the media. You know, if you're on Facebook, you can type in any known entheogen and find like a dozen or more Facebook groups with tens of thousands of people that are all talking about their experiences very publicly.

The Resurgence of Global Shamanism

Like it's very, very dynamic and it's very public. And there's also a lot of people looking. A lot of those Facebook groups are experiencing rapid surges in growth, you know, I know that one of the main Ayahuasca Facebook groups went from 10,000 members about six months to a year ago to almost 50 ,000 members. As more and more people switch on, the cultural vectors mean that these things can become sort of like fads, or they can become very popular, entheogens are becoming very popular, and they're becoming very trendy. But here's the thing: these aren't recreational substances.

So what we're seeing [with ayahuasca] is this cultural appropriation in some sense and that's the symptom right, But it's not the root thing that's happening. The root thing that's happening is bigger than us all and it's this season as we were talking about before, this cosmic season or planetary season of consciousness itself .

And by that I don't just mean our consciousness or even the planet's consciousness – I mean there's a larger cycle of consciousness that the planet is going through and that we are going through and that we're all connected to. And so I think that we need to take very dynamic steps to help reinforce this sense of community. And so for all those newbies all those new people coming in and seeing the trendiness of entheogens, we need to reach out to them.

Shonagh: Okay. All right. Let's do that.

Rak: If everyone in the medicine communities was to basically like adopt a new person, like a big buddy program type thing, but to teach them that this isn't just a recreational thing, this is a lineage that connects all the way back to the planet herself and that we all have a right to this experience. You know, not everyone may want to do this, but we all have a right to it.

So the problem we're facing, I think, in global shamanic culture at the moment is how do we nurture our right relationship when we're being swamped by so many new people coming in, which is frankly, you know, it's a sign of the success of medicine getting out to the people that is needed to everyone on the earth. But we're managing the growth of shamanic culture.

And this is part of what I've been interested in for a while, that it has sprung out of my film and my book, "AYA: Awakenings," and I've been using the term “global shamanic resurgence” for quite a few years now, a lot of my talks.

And as part of that, I've come up with this idea of doing this documentary series, Shamans of the Global Village. So exploring this idea now that, you know, my little rift is that if in olden days an indigenous tribe had 100 people in it, and they had one medicine person, on that one to 100 ratio in the global village now, we have 7 billion people. So that means we need something on that ratio of like 70 million medicine people all around the world.

I mean no one is really a proper shaman in the original sense of the word. And we know as well that even the word shaman has been appropriated by the West from the Siberian, saman– their medicine person –has been used by anthropologists for over a century now. But we've made this word our own. It's a very Western word, the word shaman. I mean, it didn't really exist in the other cultures. But we had different words.vEvery culture had a medicine person, those healers, those medicine people, those wise people.

In Australian Aboriginal culture, they had the clever man, you know. There's been the druids. Every culture's had medicine people. But here's the thing, Western culture hasn't. Because Western-Dominator culture, what we've been doing to the planet, eradicated their shamans. They killed off their medicine people. They killed off millions of women who were witches or herbalists or people back in the middle ages and the dark ages. We basically subdued, or the Catholic Church did, you know, every indigenous culture that had a plant worshipping component to it. It tried to either eradicate that through slaughter or through subjugation of ideology by grafting the Christian religion on top of it – and we basically severed our connection to medicine people.

And so at the same time, remember the equal and opposite reaction thing that nothing can be created or destroyed, the need for that, because the shaman plays a very vital role. It's not just even healer in one sense. It's healer, it's priest, it's walker between the worlds, it's mediator of energies. And those are the energies which cause either sickness or health and prosperity and abundance because you're in right relationship with the planet.

And so those energies didn't go away when we severed the connection through killing off all the medicine people. They built to this sickness within Western culture, which is now screaming out and crying for salvation and for healing. And so for that to be properly healed, there's going to need to be facilitators en mass on a very large scale.

 At the same time, there's another tact, which is like, you know, the true teachers of the plants themselves and the substances themselves. But I do find in some very intriguing way that the plants are also choosing the caretakers and the medicine people to then facilitate them to their communities as well and it's going to be a full generation or two before I think any of us have the right to call ourselves full shamans and it's a very bandied about term because it implies an enormous duty of care to individuals that you work with and to the planet and to an ongoing shamanic path which takes everything you've got really.

Shonagh: Yeah,it's interesting.

DMT as an Endogenous Tryptamine

Rak: I mean, for me, it always comes back to DMT. I mean, in DMT, science hasn't called it a neurotransmitter, but they've basically reclassified it. And it's as close as you can get to a neurotransmitter, which basically means that nature has threaded it all throughout its creatures. It's in our human brains. It's in many, many plant species. It's in this bufo alvarius toad. It's in all the mammals. But it's something very close to tryptophan and goes down the serotonin pathways, it's very intimate in the consciousness experience to all creatures which are conscious to some level.

Shonagh: But many people ask me as well, things like, "Well, we're talking about this wave of global shamanism and of re-interest and of the scaling networks of the amount of people that are interested in taking some type of substance for healing and for reconnection and to discover their initiation. But, as you said before, it's like different cultures around the world use many of these substances, Indigenous cultures, as initiation rights and of bringing us into a consciousness which understood what we're embedded in.

Rak: I mean, there's not enough Ayahuasca on this planet for everyone. There could be perhaps enough psilocybin mushrooms for everyone because they are quite replenishable and they do grow very, very speedily and they can be grown from spores and transported and the psilocybin mushroom, which I know you're very familiar with, is actually a source of DMT as well because the psilocybin converts to psilocin when eaten in the body and that's just like it's a sort of like a one molecule different from the normal NN-DMT. It's basically a source of DMT as well, but the really interesting thing for me is that you know DMT is is endogenous to to the human condition to the human brain.

We believe that it's produced in the body in the lungs and the serospinal fluids. There's been a wonderful new book that's just come out by a friend of mine, Graham St John, called Mystery School of Hyperspace,and it's a cultural history of DMT, basically, from like the 1930s onwards when it was first synthesized and then looking mainly at Western usage, but there's some incredibly profound historical connections mapped in that book. But the thing with DMT is because it's endogenous to the brain, It's the one thing which we all have within us.

It's almost like nature's on switch. I mean the backdoor root access to the software has been built into us by Mother Nature. And so, even if we can't get to these other entheogens which Mother Nature secretes around the planet, which do fit our our brain chemistry very handily and can bring us back into relationship with her, she's already built this relationship in and it's part of our human nature.

So the thing with DMT that most people comment on is, you know, Rick Strassman, Dr. Rick Strassman did the tests 20 years ago now. He started off in 1990 and finished in 1995 and so it's been 20 years since the culmination of his legal NN-dimethyl tryptamine tests in New Mexico and he did a lot of research on it then and popularized DMT both in medical circles and it has been on the rise again in countercultural circles.

Terence McKenna, of course, was probably the great DMT promulgator and talking about it and things like Ayahuasca. I mean, aya contains DMT and we were talking before about Gayle Highpine's work and the chakruna and the DMT containing plants in the ayahuasca brew. The DMT may have been a very recent addition when mestizo tribes started to use the brew and then as the westerners came in search of visions because from the 1960s generation on, that distortion of hallucinations which they knew about from acid is sort of what they were seeking. They were seeking the visions because to the Westerners back then it seemed to the intellect or the ego at least, it was only true if you could see it, or if there was some tangibility to it.

So, DMT's in Ayahuasca, it's analogous chemical counterpart is in the psilocybin mushrooms. It's all throughout nature and it's just a very, very beautiful and curious substance if anyone has had a DMT experience. You know, it's the great mystery.

I'll give you a bit of a shorthand. A friend of mine has this analogy. Basically, there's different tribes which do these darkness rituals. And I know that Mantak Chia, the Tantric teacher, he still does these darkness rituals in Thailand at one of his retreats. And if you're in darkness for anywhere between 9 to 14 days, they say that the brain– basically, you get rid of all the melatonin that's usually in your serotonin pathways and you start to build up your endogenous tryptamines.

And there's many different types of tryptamines, so basically the melatonin goes, the pinealine is produced by the brain, the 5-MEO-DMT is then secreted by the brain, and then the NN- dimethyltryptamine is secreted by the brain. So there's basically a tryptamine flush and what happens is that this flush resets the body. Now if anyone's seen my film "Aya: Awakenings" there's a very infamous 5-MeO-DMT sequence in that and that was initiated by a QEEG– quantitative electro- encephalography researcher named Dr. Juan Acosta, who I've been working with again recently. And he has just published over 10 years worth of his research into the EEG brain maps of people on NN-DMT and 5-MeO-DMT.

You can find those results up here: https://cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/download/495/861/2262

You can see over 10 years of his EEG research into the tryptamines and there's also up there a really interesting other scientific study looking at the tryptamines and their work as immune modulators. What they've been finding is that these substances like many of the other entheogens are medicines as well as the sort of psychedelic effect, which everyone mainly comments on, these things can have a healthy and positive effect on the body by basically resetting you back to default factory conditions, you could say. They boost the immune system again. They've been looking at the ability of tryptamines to help retard tumors and to basically bring people back to optimal health again.

So the brain, when you're in this darkness ritual, it basically secretes natural DMT to a state that you're in if you were to take an external booster of DMT. And in that visionary state, you also are flushing the body clean back to its default settings. And so there's a very intimate and pronounced relationship that we have with dimethyltryptamine, or the tryptamines in general.

So for me, it all comes back to the tryptamines because it's almost like, you know, some of the base LEGO blocks which the Divine has given us to build up from, and I think that it's not only the mystery, but it's part of the journey of discovery, of getting to know our own consciousness through the domains and getting to know where that journey goes.

Shonagh: Well, I mean NN-dimethyltryptamine, NN-DMT is the one that most people think of when they just say DMT. 5-MeO-DMT is a very different substance. Well, it's chemically it's not that all that different but the effects can be pronouncedly different.

Rak: Basically, 5 is stronger than NN-DMT, and if you have a strong enough NN-DMT experience, you can get to the same realms as the 5-MeO. For me, and this is very different for everyone, I've been finding, okay, my shorthand for this is, we talked about these seasons of consciousness, and why does a culture get the entheogens or the medicines it deserves or it needs?

There's a lock and key type of configuration here, I think, with us specifically as humans on this planet at this time and what we need. We came from a culture we described that had eradicated all its medicine people, had severed its connection to the planet, had reinforced the ego, and has this species PTSD that just locked itself away, and we've gone through these successive generations of different mind-altering cultures in the West to get to this point of the entheogens.

Go Into the Light

Now, Ayahuasca has been doing this work for 20 years or more in the West, cleansing, largely cleansing and healing and reconnecting. And once you're clean, I feel it's almost as if that then you're ready for the next stage. And for me that the shorthand has been explained to me years ago is that all the different entheogens that nature secretes are like the baubles on different limbs of a Christmas tree, or you could say maybe the world tree, and that the light or the star at the top is 5-MeO-DMT, because one of the key experiences on a high-dose 5-MeO journey is the white light.

It's the classical mystic white light; it can be a tunnel or it can just be this complete envelopment, this immersion in an oceanic void; basically the void which everything springs from and I don't know it gets very mystic actually. A lot of the different cultures I've been really getting into a lot of Sanskrit and a lot of Buddhist terminology and sort of vocabulary and a lot of the maps that they have created are really identical to some of these experiences on the entheogens like 5-MeO DMT.

So for me, there's like, you know, the baseline material world, then we go into the astral, all these hyperdimensions we might say, and there's Bardo states. There's these different vibrational frequencies. On NN-DMT, it's like being shot out of a cannon, and you never really know where you're going to end up. There does appear to be an interior psychic cartography or a landscape which many users report seeing similar signposts or similar sort of terrain.

There's a very good community called DMT Nexus. They've got a website, https://www.dmt-nexus.me, and they've been doing a hyperspatial lexicon or a group exercise for many years now in trying to map some of these,these, these dimensional states that NN-DMT seems to take one to. But you can't really say where you're going to end up; sometimes on NN-DMT I feel like I'm going into the plant world and it feels like there's these overlapping vibrational fields. There's amazing geodesic type of signatures or energetic sort of things. There's often reports of entities. I mean, a lot of multi-dimensional entity contact, like a lot. All of that. But there's an ecology. Basically, there's an interdimensional ecology with multi-level cartography of a terrain of this space. And beyond that,you start to get to the classical, the deeper waters of the white light of the void. And that's where the 5-MeO can take one too. Sometimes on higher doses of 5-MeO people have like a white out where they don't have a memory. They immerse themselves into the whiteness.

There was this complete and utter becoming home in this remembrance of unity consciousness, of being the wave again, of being, you know, rejoining the Source basically. And so the Source itself, and here's the weird thing, when you start to get into this, how do you describe this?

Well, as I was saying, there's been these different mystic traditions and religious traditions like the Buddhists and Sanskrit sort of terminology they've left, where they do have descriptions of these states of like Samadhi or Nirvana or but they have such intricate descriptions as well, that I've been really getting into. So there's the clear white light of the void and then there's the false light you know, and then they've got all these different declensions of describing different zones as well. But for me what I was feeling and what you got to remember is that in unity consciousness it is all one and we only have these really poor vibrational words to describe things, and words can never describe the mystery, they can only be signposts towards it to try to help you know, grope towards what it really is, which is bigger than everything, because it is everything.

And so in my immersive Unity Field Source, you know, it is the only entity, it is it, and there's nothing but it. And then around the event horizon of it, around the outer edge of the Source and of the unity consciousness field, there also are other entities and they are a very high vibration and purity and they're not negative and they're not to be... there's no fear in that space because it's still the unified love field. But I have felt the discrete presence of autonomous individual entities which I believe are you know some type of spirits or some type of higher selves or some type of entities.

I know that the Secoya tribe, who I'm greatly interested in working with someday soon, they work with 5-MeO-DMT in their their version of Ayahuasca, which they call Yaje, and they put a plant in called Wambisa usually or Chaliponga, which has 5-MeO-DMT, not just the normal NN-DMT, and they work with what they call the ‘heavenly beings’ or the ‘star people’, what they mean is the very pure beings of the highest light.

And they go to these light filled realms on their version of the brew and they basically say these entities in what I call the event horizon around the Source consciousness are those who have gone before. They're not necessarily native to the realm of the light, but what I believe is happening is that in the cosmic seasons there comes a time of fruition, there comes a time when we are being asked as spiritual beings to step up and to receive the light and to remember who and what we really are.

And so these successive waves of man-made chemicals reconnecting consciousness and plant-based chemicals healing and making us empty and ready, I know that a lot of the psychedelic healing centers in Mexico that work with with Ibogaine to heal addicts and things like that, they give the addicts the Ibogaine and then a few days later a lot of these retreats are giving them the 5-MeO-DMT because what they realize is the Ibogaine might work on people's root causes of addiction and getting rid of the problem, but then you've left them with this empty vessel. I mean, they've gotten rid of the negative, but they're just neutral. And then you've got to fill them with something positive to reseal, like a crucible, like remelting a sword. You've got to smelt it down and re-form it stronger than before.

And so the 5-MeO does this, right? And so it's almost as if that I feel we're being called to step up and to go through this experience to then remember and to be re-smelted,you know, to be reforged and new, to be to be able to hold that light and to be hold that consciousness because the season is coming full circle.

And so once we're healed, we can see, we can remember, we can be, and we can go forth and uphold that right relationship with the Earth, cause we can feel that connection, cause we've been restored to the proper default settings of what a human is meant to be. It's like a human being on the Earth is part of the Earth, you know, like the environment doesn't sort of stop it at the level of our skin, it just connects. We're all connected in one big macro organism and it's crazy what we're doing to the planet because we're killing ourselves.

We've come to this point, this complete point of annihilation and apocalypse and it's also an opportunity. We've come to this point and it's a point of transformation. There is no turning back and things are going to speed up and I don't know,it's like the only way really is forward. You've got to keep moving forward.

I guess for me it does all come back to love and it really comes back to what these things can do, not just to heal your physical wounds, but a lot of the root traumas. You look at work of doctors like Gabor Mate, who's looked at the root causes of addictions, and he's been doing a lot of work with Ayahuasca as well. But he was saying that everyone who usually has an addiction, in his studies, there's been a root cause to that addiction, and there's been something you know, on a childhood level, which has been trauma. And it's like this lack of love, which is really at the root, I think, of the species PTSD that we're all suffering.

We've fallen out of this unified field of being, of this remembrance of unconditional love. And that loss, that deep sense of loss is why we've armored ourselves and why we've built up this trauma.

And it's time now for the shell and the armoring to give way and to let ourselves be vulnerable again, which is, you know, it's a real act of trust. And so I guess with my kids when I'm in that love space, that helps renew that sense of love and it extends and the lessons I learned through shamanism and the entheogens.

All right much love.

Aloha