State of Mind 2024: The Truth about Psychedelics

Tom Garcia, DC:

Welcome to another session of Expanded States of Consciousness World Summit. My name is Dr. Tom Garcia and I'll be your host for this session. I have the pleasure of being here with Rak Razam. Rak, thank you so much for joining us.

Rak Razam:

Always a pleasure to speak to the community. 

Tom Garcia, DC:

Thank you. So, Rak Razam is an author, ethnographer and filmmaker known for his work on the exploration of Shamanism, consciousness and the spiritual dimensions of the psychedelic experience. He has written extensively on these topics and has produced several documentary films. Rak is a leading voice in the modern psychedelic movement advocating for the responsible and intentional use of psychedelics for personal and collective healing and transformation.

Rak's work is characterized by a deep respect for indigenous wisdom and traditions and he has spent significant time learning from and collaborating with indigenous cultures, particularly in the Amazon region. His writings and films often explore the intersection of traditional shamanic practices in contemporary Western culture, seeking to bridge the gap between these two worlds.

Rak has been involved in organizing and participating in various events and conferences focused on psychedelics and plant medicines. His books include "In a Perfect World", "The Ayahuasca Sessions" and "AYA: Awakenings", which he adapted into a documentary film of the same name. Great work.

Rak Razam:

That's a long biography you read out but it was even longer to live it, Tom, let me tell you.

Tom Garcia, DC:

Yeah, I'll bet. There was nothing I wanted to leave out, to be honest with you, and so, you know, the first question I have for you is what are you currently engaged in? Like, what's your work? What are you focused on now? You could share that with us.

Rak Razam:

Well, that's an interesting one to start with, Tom. So yeah, as you can tell from the introduction, I've been involved in the psychedelic and Shamanic communities, consciousness communities, pretty much for almost 20 years now, since about 2005, 2006, I started out as an experiential journalist working for Australian Penthouse here in Australia actually, looking at counterculture, spirituality, technology, I wrote about Albert Hoffman and his 100^th birthday LSD symposium in Switzerland, then my second assignment was to go down to the Amazon and to look at the archetype of the Shaman and the rise in Ayahuasca usage and what that really meant to the 21st century.

So, in some ways, currently in 2024, I'm sort of in a new cycle and I feel like I've consolidated a lot. My website, https://rakrazam.com/ has a lot of my free content as well as some of the paid documentaries and books, and it's interesting because in some ways, I've always felt that I've been out there on the edge and alone but the community has caught up and the world has caught up, so just in the last five years or so, there's been such a surge of interest and legitimization of the psychedelic experience, you know, mainly sort of pioneered through MAPS, the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies, which has been really lobbying the government for the reclamation of the substances in the medical sort of paradigm for decades now.

Through that and a lot of other cultural sort of vectors coming full circle, we seem to be mature enough as a culture, a global culture, to utilize psychedelics, I feel, and a lot of my writings touch upon this in different ways, that every culture gets the psychedelic or the medicine that it deserves. You know, they say, "We get the politicians we deserve". Don't worry about that, but the times demand things of us, and in these times, we've had in the last few generations, we've had the sort of LSD, acid sort of movement and revolution in the 60s, which really dovetailed a lot of social movements, social justice and all those different things that happened in the 60s. But then that sort of transformation of society then keeps going.

And so in the 80s, we had this ecstasy revolution, it really opened the heart. Acid opened the mind, ecstasy opened the heart, and by about the noughts, we got up to this idea, Ayahuasca came back to preeminence and was really out there and coming into the public consciousness and we've had plant medicines return to the Western sort of table.

And so, what I've seen, you know, in this pattern is that over time, there's been different substances which we use which affect our consciousness but it ripples through the culture pool and it makes a lot of changes and then we change as individuals. So my documentation and my work has been documenting both the psychedelic sort of revolution and renaissance and now, the "Shamanic resurgence" as I call it with Ayahuasca, preeminently.

For the last seven years or so, I've been documenting and working with and even working with the medicine of the Bufo Alvarius toad, which contains 5 - MeO - DMT, and in this interim, though, there's been a lot of advances, both in medical science and an understanding of what's happening in the brain and consciousness when we take psychedelics. And really, I feel a sort of marriage between the psychedelic path and I guess the spiritual path, or more really understanding how these substances and external catalysts also affect and empower our internal evolution and our capacity as human beings.

So, I'm left at this stage, you know, the world's going through an enormous amount of changes and it seems to be really pattern matching what a lot of indigenous cultures have said, that there's world ages and there's ages of consciousness and there's rise and falls of civilizations and peaks and troughs of energetics in the closed system of planet Earth, or Gaia, and so I'll tell you, I've been like, "Well, where do I go personally?", "What do I want to comment on?", "What's the value?" because I feel like in some ways, I've maybe either exhausted or said what I've needed to say in terms of psychedelics in general, their history and usage, and things like Ayahuasca and even the Bufo Toad medicine, they're really well - documented.

And at this time, we are at, not just a crossroads, but really a turning point where we have to evolve or it's not looking really good for our continued survival on planet Earth. So, in many ways, I am finding a positive message of how we can utilize still these substances and these capacities within ourselves but there seems to be a fruition, a combination or something very unique in these exact times we're living in now, which both informs the psychedelic experience and I think our consciousness is key to navigating these times. So, I'm still getting there, Tom, and figuring out how to position all that in a message which can be understood.

Tom Garcia, DC:

Yeah, thank you for that. One of the things that strikes me about you is the movement from the personal to the global, you know, it's all connected, and yeah, what's the message? And the question that's come to me while you're speaking is, where do you think psychedelics as an intelligence is taking us?

Rak Razam:

Well, that's a really good one to unpack because does LSD made in a lab have its own intelligence? Not necessarily, right? But the plant medicines, the earth medicines, which we should extend to call "Earth medicines" because they're no longer just the plants–the magic mushrooms or psilocybin are really surging everywhere in global consciousness, there's a lot of usage of those, they're very easy to access and grow and sustainable really, in their own way, we've found effect through their mystical sort of connections, they can help heal as well–but there's Earth medicines, like the Bufo Alvarius toad, like the mushrooms we just talked about, but they are said to have an intelligence.

One of the differences between a drug and a medicine is intention. And so, when I first went down to the Amazon in 2006, I learned a lot from the indigenous people of the region and I was doing a lot of interviews for what became two books, the "AYA: Awakenings" and "The Ayahuasca Sessions", which are both available on Amazon, and I interviewed and talked with the Indigenous Curanderos or the Shamans, as we call them, of the Amazon basin.

And they said, you know, Westerners were coming down to Peru in search of Ayahuasca because they were sick, and some people would be going for specific health reasons which they knew about but they said, the vast majority of Westerners were sick and they didn't know it because they were disconnected from the flow of life, from the meaning of life, from Gaia, from the planet Herself, the alive and intelligent organism, the Mother that we live in.

And so, this disconnection has been, in some ways, a purposeful sort of strategy of empire and of the socio - political systems which govern and control us, which have been very pronounced and even Orwellian of the last few years. But what we see, what we can boil that all down to, is one little word, the "ego".

So, here's the thing: psychedelic medicines are considered ego dissolvers, right? They did a test back in the 60s and they discovered that LSD for instance, is metabolized in the body within about the first 20 minutes, but we don't really feel the substance for a little bit longer. Essentially, psychedelic medicines with modern neuroscience have been shown to drop what they call the "Default Mode Network", this regional cluster at the back of the brain which sort of aggregates all the incoming sensory data and makes up this channel of reality.

You take a psychoactive substance, whatever that is, made in the lab or from nature, and it sort of de - emphasizes or loosens that structure, so your sense of "I", your consciousness can go on a journey into those infinite spectrum of reality that's in there and out there. But when we do that, we're lowering the ego itself, so other medicines like the Bufo Alvarius toad, which I have mentioned a bit already, and they've done neuroscience on that, that specifically shows with the EEG readings, that it's lowering the parietal and the frontal lobes of the brain and the electrical activity where the sense of "I" or the ego is generated.

So, when the ego is lowered, it can reveal pretty much like these spaces of being, of consciousness itself, which exist underneath the ego mind, and this is what all the Vedic paths of India, in their meditation maps culminating in these Samadhi states or this single point of unity focus states go.

But psychedelics in general, show us that there is a full spectrum of consciousness that is available for us. In anthropological terms, they call it "polyphasic", that a lot of indigenous cultures take a lot of substances because they live in nature, in the Mother and they don't have politics and the constraints on consciousness, the war on drugs that Richard Nixon created in 1971.

So, you know, "polyphasic" means you can shift between not just waking and sleep or alcohol to go down or this to go, coffee to go up. There's a vast spectrum, very nuanced and subtle, of your ability to experience what consciousness really is. And this is the great sadness that for like 70 years or more, we have been unable to legally access our human birthright as Divine beings having a human experience, to access our full potential. We've been controlled and corralled into this little work frequency of consciousness.

So, to come back to your question, it's like, what has been said over many years is: the plant medicines and the earth medicines have a deep morphic resonance. Rupert Sheldrake, the British, I'm not sure if he's a biologist, I should call him "scientist", has a theory of morphic fields and resonances, they're almost like energetic templates from which the physical being is created, and so, this idea that the medicines of the earth have some of her energy, and you know, a lot of these are tryptamine - based, which are very close, tied to the serotonin system, which is these intimate building blocks of the foundations of consciousness itself.

So, the tryptamines, which include N,N - DMT, 5 - MeO - DMT, phenethylamines, melanin or melatonin, the skin pigment is also a tryptamine, they're really fundamental, they're all through nature in the plant kingdom, the animal kingdom, in mammals, and they're in us humans as well.

So, for a few generations now, Westerners have been going down to the jungles, let's say, South America, mainly Peru, Ecuador, other countries like that. William Burroughs and who was it? William Burroughs went down to the Amazon in the 50s and was one of the first Westerners to try Ayahuasca or Yagé, with Allen Ginsberg, that's who it was, writing the Yagé Letters, but it was such a bold move to go down into these remote jungles in the 1950s. And even then, the knowledge he brought back, no one wanted it, it didn't fit.

But the man - made chemicals which really started to come to the fore in the 20th century; mescaline was one of the first, it was isolated into a drug, you could say, or a medicine or something that could be used from plant materials, from the cactus originally; LSD, which was you know, Albert Hofmann, the famous chemist who worked for Sandoz laboratories, was looking for something that could help with women in childbirth, interuterine sort of assist with the ergot derivatives.

But you know, even in Switzerland where he's from, they had hundreds of years of alchemical knowledge of these substances, with ergot derivatives and St Anthony's Fire and things like that which were rampaging through the Middle Ages, which was psychoactive.

There's a deep history of psychoactive connection and relationship, even though Europe and in the West, it's been buried because the West pretty much killed its medicine people in all those pogroms and all those times in Middle Ages where the witches, warlocks, herbalists were all killed and the empires would conquer the old world and any mentions of plant medicines considered the work of the devil.

But plant medicines have a relationship and an intelligence, and this is what they say, if you take Ayahuasca, you're not just drinking Ayahuasca, you're connecting with the Spirit in Ayahuasca, what they call "Madre" or "The Mother", and it has an active intelligence.

In the indigenous understanding, they believe all plants have an intelligence, right, that there's an animist belief that there's a spark of life and an intelligence in them. There's been a lot of work in recent years. Dr. Monica Gagliano is one of the ones she wrote "Thus Spoke the Plant", it's a New York Times bestseller about plant intelligence.

They've done tests all the way back to the 1960s with voltage devices, trying to measure the electromagnetic sort of responses from plants but in the indigenous understanding, definitely an intelligence in the plants and definitely an intelligence in the plant medicines like Ayahuasca and psilocybin, San Pedro, the Morning Glory, Ololiuqui, the many different intelligences.

And so, currently we have this dichotomy and a bit of an argument in modern psychedelic culture and a lot of it revolves around things like 5 - MeO - DMT, which there is a synthetic version of and there is an organic version of, both from plants like Phalaris grass and from Bufo Alvarius toads, but there's a general psychonautical division within this idea of organic psychoactive and man - made or synthetic psychoactives, and part of the issue is the scaling because in the last decade, tens of millions of people have read positive stories about psychedelics.

In 2018, Michael Pollan, the New York Times food critic and influential author released his book, How to Change your Mind, which has become the Bible for middle class, you know, white - bred American moms and pops and all over the world to go, "Ah, maybe I should give psychedelics a shot", but the thing is, they need to scale and we're in this time as a culture where psychedelics are now pretty much legitimized, the medical establishment is on board, the American government is on board, the insurance companies are on board, the Pentagon is on board. They're giving psychedelic medicines like Iboga or Ibogaine to help cure addictions and 5 - MeO and Ayahuasca to help with army vets that have got PTSD.

They're saying that there's a recent study that psychedelics are more efficacious than antidepressants to heal depression and keep you in a better state of mind. The echo chamber of the global media is 110% behind psychedelics which is great in many ways, but there's also an agenda there, and there's an evolving what we call a "corporadelic" sort of agenda, where it's all about patents, it's about the money grab, it's about the control of these substances into the medical establishment.

Where if you have $3,000 to $6,000 for an MDMA or a psilocybin session with two therapists, then you can afford it, and so they're being commodified. But the intelligence in them is potentially still there in the plant materials but it needs a relationship and we need this context to have a relationship with the plants, that you don't have to go to a therapist or a doctor. In indigenous cultures, they do it as a tribe. They have a healing, they have a togetherness, they have a belonging where they can understand the way these substances can be used in a way the West is still figuring out.

Tom Garcia, DC:

What you're saying is truth. It resonates deeply and I really appreciate what you're saying. I want to ask you to speak to the medicalization versus the Shamanic pathways that's part of your study.

Rak Razam:

Yeah. So, to be really frank, and the thing is, a lot of people in the community, and I saw this with Ayahuasca its like, you know, lodge owners and places where people would go and there's a lot of Westerners involved, would not want to talk about the dirty laundry in public, because we owe to our community to keep it all good, we don't want to have bad, we don't want to talk about stuff, we deal with it in house, and that makes sense as well.

But there's a similar drift that is happening in the global psychedelic community where it's really about the money now, and so unfortunately, it's like, there's not really–there used to be what we call a "counterculture". So, in the 1960s, when things like LSD were really booming, and, you know, history is written by the victors and people don't really know the real story of anything because they control the narratives of everything, but it's very well documented and none of what I say, you can find links and I'm happy to provide links, look on my website, there's a lot of links for all of this type of stuff.

The American government and the CIA, through MK - Ultra, one of their programs to experiment, was totally enamored by LSD ever since the late 1940s, and they basically promulgated and distributed LSD through, when it was still legal, before 1966, to a lot of therapists working in the late 50s, early 60s. All of the intelligentsia of North America was using LSD in the 1950s when it was legal, they we're using it to think outside the box, for creativity, you know, all of these different applications, but over time, these substances got banned because they got out of the box.

There were sociopolitical reasons why they banned them, you know, Richard Nixon war on drugs, controlling consciousness, etc. it's controlling people, essentially. We've lost 70 years of legitimate research which could have been done without the legal ramifications. We've had to restart.

So, in that gap, we had this first wave of, let's say, the acid wave, which really made a huge significant impact on the world, and it's like millions of people coming together in the summer of love. It's not just about "Who's cured from trauma?", "Who's got the money?", "Where the patents are". It's about, "Who are we as a community and as a global community?", "What are our values?", "What do we believe in?"

And so we're inside a sandbox. It's like goldfish in a bowl. We're inside an economy which is devouring the planet and it's pretty much strangled and killed the planet and it's going down pretty quickly at the moment, but that rapacious, devouring economy must be fed, and in that, it's devouring the Earth and devouring the indigenous communities and all of this is happening. But that starting point is what we're born into and it's not often questioned.

So, as I mentioned before, there's this organization called MAPS, the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies led by Rick Doblin and many, many other esteemed doctors and scientists, and for almost 40 years now, they have fought pretty much single handedly, to legitimize and to reclaim it, to work with the FDA and to work with institutions and to do medical research studies on the efficacy of psychedelics. We would not be here having this conversation today without them. Great kudos to them and thanks to them, and they are a not for profit and they do need your support.

They have pretty much brought things like psilocybin mushrooms and MDMA to the point where they're now being rescheduled and they will be legal for use in the imminent, maybe this year, maybe next year, scheduling for use for treatment of PTSD and chronic sort of trauma issues in the community, and we need that.

But what's happened is, in the last 20 years or so, there's been a snowballing effect where a lot of other organizations and individuals have realized that, "Oh, these things are coming in, they're going to be legal", right, and MAPS has pretty much single handedly been a community hub where a lot of the more fringe, Shamanic underground, the artists, the collectives, the writers, the cultural aspects of our community who utilize these substances, I wouldn't even say recreationally, but in an exploratory way, have been doing for generations now, have been going around MAPS and being part of that community.

So at the moment, there is a company, there's quite a few psychedelic companies and 80% of them have no patentable things and no income, they're all going to bust, there's a boom and a bust, but it's really become almost like the internet in 1999 when there was this gold rush or Bitcoin when there's this gold rush and there's this frenzy.

So a lot of people that weren't coming to psychedelics, perhaps for the right reasons or the right energetic or come in because they really want to experience it, or conversely, they had had a psychedelic experience and they get it and they respect it, but then the ego bounces back and it's like, "Well, let's make a buck off this", and obviously, in this culture, we need to make money, I'm not necessarily against that, but psychedelics and "entheogens", which was the other main word for them which was coined in the 1980s by Gordon Wasson who and few others, Carl Ruck and a few other sort of intelligentsias and people in the community.

Gordon Wasson was actually, you could call him "the granddaddy of psychedelia" because he was an investment banker who worked for Morgan Chase in the 40s and 50s, he was incredibly well connected with the sociopolitical everyone and he published a story in Life Magazine in 1957, from his journey in 1955 down to Oaxaca, the area of Mexico where he first had the magic mushrooms in ceremony with the famous Curandera, Maria Sabina, who I liken to the Virgin Mary of psychedelics, this archetype of the Mother.

She was instructed to give Gordon Wasson the mushrooms, which was unprecedented for a Westerner, by the chief of the village, basically ordered to because he was the man, he was like this, you know, a very elite person. He brought in this idea of magic mushrooms into middle class America in the 50s and then he coined this term "entheogen" in the 80s, to differentiate the stigma of psychedelics, but it's come to more. It means from the Greek, "to manifest the Divine within", so plant or earth medicines, whether from a lab or from nature, but what they do is they're not just recreational and about the mind, they're bringing the Divine, this sense of, however you want to say that big G word, into your experience.

And so, this medical establishment, you know, it's like we all wanted the legitimacy for psychedelics and entheogens, for the plant medicines, for the freedom to do these things and to see where it will take us as a community and a culture, in ways that I think will bring us back to sustainability and equity, and from the heart, not just the head.

But we've been, in a sense, running against the stream or against the current of capitalism. So, capitalism and the box we're in and the medical establishment, you know, I mean, the American medical system is dysfunctional to be kind; that's a kind way to describe it. I lived in America for three years with no health insurance. I know what it's about, right?

What we're saying is, psychedelics now had to get through this narrow little bandwidth window to be legitimized and do all the testing which MAPS has done over decades and proven through double blind studies that these substances, in general, can drop the Default Mode Network, they can assist in deep held traumas that we have, but this all comes back to the ego. The ego mind holds on, it's like a cork on a bottle.

As we go through life, and this is my more Shamanic perspective on it; we go through life, we experience joys and negative experiences, traumas and stresses, but the negative stuff seems to stick in our energetic bodies. If I say the word "energetic bodies" to medical scientist, they're going to go, "Oh, what are you talking about?", you know?

But I can't help it. It seems pretty obvious to me that we have an energetic body. Look at Chinese medicine, look at all the different gradations of our being, these finer sort of layers to our being and our energetics. It's still a miracle, the human organism and medical science hasn't dissected us really, enough to know how we really work. They still do not know what consciousness really is or how it works, whether originates in the brain or it's received by the brain being a broadcast signal from elsewhere. But this medical establishment now, is dealing with the hot potato of psychedelics. They've done the double - blind studies, they've shown that it can assist in relieving of trauma, but it does so because it reduces the ego.

There was a very key study done by Johns Hopkins quite a few years ago, and it looked at psilocybin and the mystical effects of psilocybin. Now, they did psilocybin tests back in the 60s, these infamous Good Friday experiments which they did with divinity students who were working with the psilocybin mushrooms and they repeated it again, like 30 or 40 years later.

What they discovered in these studies is, these people who were already religiously informed, training to go into the service of the religion, would have a mystical experience which was essentially a meeting with God, and they would be like, you know, whatever their language for it was, they felt that they had this dissolution of the ego which culminated in a unity state of something bigger.

Tom Garcia, DC:

I appreciate what you're saying. I want to give you a personal anecdote; I've been working with psychedelics, primarily psilocybin for 15 years, over 15 years, and for the first 10 years, I worked alone in a ceremonial setting in the woods, at the fire, I had a ceremony, a voice came to me and that's what I worked with, and five years ago or so, I came out of the woods and then started bringing other people to the fire, bringing people into a ceremonial space with the plant medicine, and what's so interesting about what you're saying, and this goes back to the intelligence of the medicine, for lack of a better phraseology is, I didn't do any reading, any study, I didn't know what was happening in the world of psychedelics with MAPS and other organizations for the last, you know, 20 years at least, and when I started doing the reading.

And when I started doing my own writing about the experience, and then reading and hearing what you're sharing today, the similarity, it's almost identical in what's been reported over the years, from various studies from this 40s, 50s, 60s and coming forward, to my own personal experience over the first 10 years, which leads me to believe, from a direct experience that it is intelligent, the intelligence is of the Earth and it's transmitted to all of us who open ourselves, especially with the assistance of the plant medicine, to open our mind, dissolve the ego, soften those constructs so that something approaching truth can actually get through to us.

Rak Razam:

I'm going to finish off this question about the medicalization, but that's so true, Tom, and the thing is, again, direct experience is science, can you repeat it, can you prove it again. We can't prove the voice and the feeling, but the intuitions and the knowledge it gives us in the transmission, and if multiple people all around the world over time are having these experiences, science needs to be looking at this, if they want to have some rational deconstruction of it, sure.

That's not really what it's about but if you need that, great, go do that. But this is part of the problem, is that these experiences have a commonality, they have an intelligence, as you say, with the medicines, with the Spirit in the medicines, with the connection to the Earth. The overarching message is essentially, often in the psychedelic experience, when the ego is dissolved, what it can reveal is these unity states, this feeling of connection to the web of life all around, and it's in the feeling, in the re - sensitization, that our hearts open, and we realize it's not all about the intellect, it's not all about the ego.

My intuition is: 12,800 years ago, we had a catastrophic event on Earth called the "Younger Dryas extinction event", and we almost all died. Many species died, and it was probably a meteor strike, you know, it hit the Arctic, they think, but it was around the same time in the aftermath to that, that civilization started. Before that, and as the Australian Aborigines say here in Australia, we have this idea of cyclic time: it's not just civilizations that rise and fall, but there's quadrants to time and they repeat, and they believe that consciousness also has these rise and falls.

And so somewhere in our pre - history, we potentially had a different state of consciousness that wasn't as ego - rigid, wasn't separated, wasn't locked down into these little boxes, and that we were connected and we felt the message which we feel on psychedelics, which is essentially that all is one, we are all connected and the web of life feels and is felt, everything that we do has an effect.

I read something really recently saying that even just agriculture, like 10,000, 12,000 years ago, started to create a very minimal .00001 more carbon dioxide, more warming, that everything we're doing fractally over time builds and has this effect. We're in an organism and she's intelligent, she's birthed us, but we're in this little ego compartmentalization which is separated and in a sense, traumatized.

I believe that we have what I call "Global PTSD" or "Species PTSD", right, but it's become the baseline of civilization, and over thousands of years, we don't call it "trauma" or "Species PTSD"; we call it "the ego", we call it "the mind" and we call it "We're just here doing our best", but we're alone and we're separated and we no longer remember why we're here and what it's all about. We're in this rat race which is just out of control and now the planet's out of control.

So, trying to say, bring all this down to this message of "oneness" and "unity" and "the effect that we have" is a very common, oceanic ego dissolving effect of psychedelics, and yet, this seems to be a perennial message, that it's all connected, it all matters, you know, everything we do. But to try to bring this language into the scientific paradigm, and for them to do a double - blind study; they don't care about that.

What they're actually wanting is for psychedelics to be are replacements, currently for antidepressants, which are getting phased out because they don't really work in the long term. They were never designed to be working in the long term. They're short - term band aids which can help people when needed but there can become a sort of addictive, psychic sort of crutch that is not assisting the trauma that is still stored underneath the bandaid, and so a lot of people know this.

So unfortunately, psychedelics occupy the same 5 - HT2A receptor sites that antidepressants do, so if you're on an antidepressant, the psychedelics aren't going to work. People choose to titrate off under medical supervision from their antidepressants. Psychedelic medicines often, in my experience, can work on the deeper trauma to be released, which is why they were taking the antidepressant to begin with, so there's a clash of paradigms, essentially, in the fundamental bedrock of what the medical paradigm, which is now totally caught up in the insurance model and part of the financial capitalist drive.

In the last hundred years or 120 years or so years, the American medical industry has totally transformed into a sickness industry which continues to bleed people dry. It's not about getting well. It's about maintaining more drugs to pump more money out, essentially.

In the 60s, there was this great revolution which created the counterculture, which saw these substances as activators of our awareness of our true Divine nature, of our potential, of the miracle of the human experience, right? And then to live life, it made changes in the culture which threatened the establishment and the powers that be, and became a political issue, which is why they're banned them.

And so, now 70 years later, these substances don't seem to have, they still have intrinsically the revolutionary potential but they've been defanged and they're being compartmentalized and they're been commodified in a way for the corporadelic agenda to control how we use these substances, which is designed to be in a safe set and setting with a male female facilitator, with mushrooms, for instance, in a 6 to 8 - hour journey, with preparatory work and integration afterwards, between $3,000 and $6,000 are in your insurance model, which means 99% of people who want them won't be able to access them, and then the ones who do, what are they going to do with their great psychedelic revolution?

I hope they have personal healing. I hope they have illumination. I think what's happening is these substances are coming into the capitalist framework and it's changing the capitalist framework because many of those people might not go back to the office, they might not become a better CEO, they might quit their CEO - ness entirely, right? But it's a different dynamic where previously, the counterculture and the drug issue was a political threat to the establishment.

Tom Garcia, DC:

What can we do to circumvent the medicalization and access the plant medicine for that deeper transformational experience, if you will?

Rak Razam:

So, there's two things; I think everyone that's currently in the psychedelic community has a responsibility and a duty of care to – we're talking before about the dirty laundry, to be honest about the pros and cons. Psychedelics and psychoactive substances are not for everyone.

There are contraindications if people have underlying bipolar or manic depressions, manickness, you know, schizophrenia. In indigenous cultures, though, those labels were probably described "sensitives" in their communities, which would have either a lineage in the Shamanic tradition or they would be called to work with, not just the substances but the spirits and the ancestors and to mediate on behalf of their communities. In the West, we label people and we medicate them to be "normal", okay? So, there's that as well. We can look at that in a larger context for the conversation, but in general, psychedelics are not for everyone, and you know, we have to be careful around that.

When I first went down to the Amazon in 2006, the Shamans, the Curanderos said something to me. They said, "This idea of the medicines is that there is an intelligence, there's a Spirit in it, and we engage with the Spirit in the medicine as much as the biological component of the medicine". So, when we take Ayahuasca, it's a purgative, it cleans us out, it usually helps us purge.

You know, technically, you can boil it down to Harmine and Harmaline which you can make separately. They've tried to do things like Pharmahuasca, which is like a lab - made Ayahuasca with the same chemicals but it doesn't necessarily have the Spirit in it, right? But these things can be compartmentalized, they can be put into the marketplace, but without the intention and without the revelation of the Sacred, they don't really have a sustainable place, I don't think.

Tom Garcia, DC:

Yeah. So, this begs another question for me as I think about the word "Shaman" or "Shamanistic" and, you know, in my experience of working with plant medicine has been in a ceremonial space, in a ceremonial way. So, psychedelics aren't for everyone, yes, and, you know, it needs to be said but there are so many for whom psychedelics would be of great benefit, who might be considered more in the healthy community.

Rak Razam:

So, in that, just to circle back and answer this; I mentioned a Johns Hopkins study, I think was around 2007, but it was looking at the psilocybin and the mystical experience, and they said the healing, this idea of healing came from the fullness of letting go, so people can resist, they can hold on, they can do whatever, and there's different degrees of ego presence.

Things like 5 - MeO, it's specifically fully letting go of the ego. Most of the other psychoactives, your ego is present in an altered state, and you can engage with the process and go, "What's going on?", "What is that?", maybe get transmissions from inner space, outer space. In 5 - MeO, traditionally it's the full ego, Samadhi, the drop rejoining the ocean.

But in general, though, it's that full letting go that actually opens us up energetically and then we release all these trapped traumas which are stored energetically in our emotional body, in our luminous light body, and then the body wants to be healthy, it does its reset, and then all those things where there was inflammation and other stuff aggregating around the energies all clears up, and people can have wellness and wellbeing, but also they have this transformation, they have this completion, they have this feeling of like they get it, but it only really happens when the ego lets go; that's what the studies show.

So, what is the corporate marketplace trying to do? They're trying to make little molecular differences in their patentable structures, so they can copyright them and anyone will have to pay them for their use, but then also, you don't have to actually let go of your ego. They're saying, "Oh, can we have a psychedelic which isn't psychedelic?", and maybe you can. They're discovering real intricacies in the receptor sites and things, but again, it's taking the Sacred and making it profane.

Separately, what I call the "Global Shamanic Resurgence"; so, you know, I've been documenting Ayahuasca using this idea of the archetype of the Shaman since 2006, and what I discovered in that book, when I went down there was that there was his movement of Westerners going down to the jungles of Peru in search of their healing and connection and the meaning of life, and that this role of the Shaman was something that is revered in the West because we don't have it.

We have our doctors who give us our pills, right, and we have our priests, and we have our confidants, and we have different specialities, but in the old days, and you know, I have an online television show I've been doing with my media partner, Niles Heckman, for many years, very slowly, we've only done two episodes. It's called "Shamans of the Global Village.com", and it looks at this exact role of the archetype of the Shaman.

And what I saw happening was people were going back to the old world for healing and for reconnection and some of those people felt the call to work with these medicines, and I believe that's no coincidence and it's not necessarily the ego. Sometimes there's an ego glamorization where people want to be Shamans or want to be in service and it's about them, but you know, in indigenous cultures, Shamanism is either a hereditary route that you had the genetics and the mental makeup and the energetic to be passed down the responsibility of being in service to your community, or you had an initiatory sickness or were hit by lightning or you had something happen which took you out of your ordinary world and you survived a near death experience and maybe you encountered spirits, and they said, "Look, we'll send you back but you're going to work for us now".

And again, it's this idea that what are the key ideas about plant medicines and Earth medicines is it opens us up to not just an Earth intelligence, but a whole dimension and an energetic ecology where there are so many intelligence and beings and you know, in their understanding the trees and the plants, they all have nested ecology of souls, they're all talking, they're all sharing energy and information, and they're all wanting to work with us humans who have fallen out of the web, and have been eating the web alive and killing the planet, so it's pretty urgent for them to reconnect us.

So, in this model, there has been paralleling the MAPS medical model for at least the last few generations, things like Ayahuasca, the psilocybin mushrooms, Iboga, now the Bufo Alvarius toad, many different earth medicines from all across the planet, from different ecologies and different issues with sustainability and reciprocation there, that have been coming out, and many people, Westerners are now taking up the bastion of being the either provider, facilitator, practitioner or Shamanic sort of representative and gatekeeper and holder of these medicines and the power that they reveal.

And this has been culminating for a long time, but again, even this is still within the capitalist structure, so it becomes a business of spirituality and a business of Shamanism which is inevitable, and you can't get away from it in capitalism but you can still do it ethically and with heart.

And so, part of my book "AYA: Awakenings" is really looking at the archetype of the Shaman and looking at the Ayahuasca usage, but really looking at us. As I said, we killed our Shamans 500 years ago, we killed the witches who were really essentially herbalists who connected with the medicines of the plant, you know, the planet, and when we went back to the old world, the Empires, the Spaniards, they killed all the indigenous South Americans which utilized the San Pedro cactus and the magic mushrooms and they said it was the work of the devil.

But we killed the archetype, which in indigenous cultures was the mediator between the planet and us. I mean, not a good idea. Look at what we've done to the planet. And we've had this species trauma which has trapped us in the ego, and everything we've created in the world comes from here, not necessarily from here in the heart, and so we're a world out of balance because we're not working with the fullness of our capacity or with the information which connects us to the true reality, which is more than just the baseline physical world. There's an energetic ecology which continues up in the inner dimensions.

Michio Kaku, one of the world's leading physicists, calls it "Hyperspace" for the 12 dimensions, which science says exist in there. There's a growing commonality and unification since the 70s, you know, "The Tao of Physics" and all those books looking at the top end understandings from our quantum physicists and physicists and astrophysicists and all their systems of science realizing the interconnectedness and realizing the way that energy is fed through and realizing the way that it's all holographically a lot bigger and beautifuller than just on the physical level we've been led to believe.

And so essentially, what science has been grappling towards is a psychedelic paradigm, they just wouldn't use that word. And so, in all this, there's the medical model and there's this Shamanic model, and so what came out of the jungles of Peru 70 years ago or more, with William Burroughs and others from the 50s onwards, wasn't just Ayahuasca and wasn't just the medicines.

Here's really important thing; it was a container, it was the idea of ceremony; it was the idea of elders and others having lineage and having support and handing down a paradigm or a Zeitgeist, a worldview that includes the Sacred, which we had lost and extinguished because we killed the medicine people and the knowledge and awareness of the plant medicines which mediate our consciousness to reveal the Sacred within us.

Tom Garcia, DC:

That's exactly what occurred for me. All the things you said; the container, ceremony, the sacred, elders, lineage.

Rak Razam:

The songs, the transmissions, the intelligence. You know, some of the most profound experiences I've had on things like Ayahuasca are connections to, I mean, visionary states. I mean, am I imagining this? Am I making this up in my head? Okay, let's say maybe, but I've had experiences where I've encountered ancient Mesoamerican Shamans, indigenous people, and they've shared energy and transmissions with me, and knowledge, things that have shaped my life.

Here's the thing, they say, "Information carries mass"; if it's a vision, if you're making it up or if it has some authenticity outside of yourself that you can check and validate, there's a transmission of information from the Sacred world to the profane world, and it's mediated through these altered states experiences.

And through all of history, we have had this relationship with the ancestors who were still there in the collective field, with these plant intelligences, with these supportive energies and beings which are part of Gaia, and it's like such a human conceit to think that we're the only ones. I mean, animals are intelligent, they have souls, they know stuff, more and more science.

Tom Garcia, DC:

Let me ask you something; this is really great, what you're saying, and you've beautifully framed the dilemma from a historical perspective, right to the moment. What do you see as, I don't know if "solution" is the right word? What do you see as the evolutionary? You know what I'm trying to get to?

Rak Razam:

Is there a solution to this?

Tom Garcia, DC:

How do we heal this in a good way, from your perspective? I mean, I have my own sense of it from a very personal perspective. And then from your, you have such a grasp?

Rak Razam:

Yeah. One thing I wanted to point out, that there's a growing network of NGOs, non - government organizations and community - based collectives all across North America and spreading into the world. Is it "Decriminalizing Plant Medicines" or "Decriminalizing Nature", I think it might be, and basically, they've sprung up and they have successfully legislated and lobbied to places like Oakland and Berkeley, and on a council level, on a regional level, to decriminalize these substances, so the police will not prosecute, you will not be charged for personal use.

So, ceremonies and community - based ceremonies are really resurging all around the world with these substances because there is a growing awareness that there's an alternative to the medical model, and part of that alternative in the Shamanic paradigm and community - based holding space for each other, doing medicines, is this church model.

Which in America, I think is the 501(c)8, but the idea that entheogenic churches are legal and create a container which theoretically protects you from legal repercussions, if it's done right, to come together in a way and essentially to pray.

The one study from about 1990 that Dennis McKenna and Charles Grob and some other scientists had done on Ayahuasca usage, was looking at one of the Ayahuasca churches in South America, there's a few, União do Vegetal and others, which are over a hundred years old, and they have this sense of community and togetherness and everything we really want from communities, right?

And essentially, almost like the good sort of bits of the Judeo - Christianic religions and their community church worship services, the good bits are people coming together. There's a lot we could say, and maybe shouldn't say about the Judeo - Christianic religions, especially at this point in time, but at their heart, the message is good, is true, is just that it's not really lived in practice, right, and it's been weaponized, but this idea of "Love your neighbour like yourself", you know, "Do the right thing", you know.

It's like, these churches contain like Ayahuasca, and then they have a syncretic jungle religion where they have a bit of the Christian stuff as well, but imagine you go to a church and you take an active psychedelic sacrament and you have a mind - blowing experience, and you don't have cancer, you don't have PTSD, you were just like not quite sure where you're going with life, and it all seems to be going to hell in a handbasket, and you go, "I hear about this stuff, there's meant to be more", "I want to know for myself, is there more?"

But you do it with a community and then you form relationships with your community, and the healing that happens in your mind, of calming down that starving ego mind that is so worked up by the pressures of life and the hustling, the gigs to make ends meet in Western civilization; you get to share, you get to reciprocate, you get to give back.

And maybe they are dropping out of the rat race a bit if they can, and have the results of, maybe they're congregating together in communities. These substances, I believe, are at the fundamental basis of human civilization. All the original religions of the world had a sacrament, psychoactive sacrament, that you can look into yourself.

You know, John Allegro, who wrote the book, "The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross", was looking at mushroom usage in the Gnostic world around Jesus's time and the idea that it could have been mushroom usage, and this came from the Dead Sea Scrolls original translations. The Indian meditation sort of communities, they had the Rig Veda in which they have a line that says they drank a psychoactive substance called the "Soma", which we don't know what it was today, but we suspect, again, it was a mushroom, and it made them unto Gods and it showed them the reality of what we're really in.

So many, if not all of the world's religions had a psychoactive substance, and now psychedelic churches and entheogenic churches and community groups and gatherings are flourishing as an adjunct and as an alternative to the medical model. So, where is this all going?

Even within the medical model, it feels like this intelligence in the planet, and here's the thing, it's like I believe Gaia has her own intelligence but it's a different scale, it's a planetary intelligence. And then you get like the sun, and then you get all the intergalactic sort of planets and suns, and you've seen those pictures of the galaxies, they look like synaptic pathways in the brain, there's this "as above, so below" mirroring effect in nature, where the same forms are formed from the pressures of the templates of, I was going to say "real essence"; the same structures are formed because the building blocks of physics happens "as above, so below" on macro or micro scales.

But these substances now have the ability to help us remember and we don't have to be sick to do it but we do need a safe, sound and sacred container, and to do it with the community creates a framework to move forward which really is invigorating, and I think we're still coming to grips with almost like asking permission from the powers that be. I mean, it's all going down out there in 2024. It's like, here's the thing; if you're doing it responsibly, ethically and sacredly, you don't have to ask permission, maybe from yourself, maybe from God, maybe from you know, whatever, but it's like, explore.

Terence McKenna, the great's psychedelic philosopher, has a seminal talk and meme he created called "You are an explorer" and "You are of the one great sea that lies within", and we need people to explore the true nature of reality at this time because we need alternative roadmaps and models for what civilization could be.

Tom Garcia, DC:

So, this is, Rak, this has been fantastic. We're going to have to wrap it up now. We could go for another hour, easily, and I so appreciate the wealth of knowledge that you're sharing with us and your historical perspective and where we're going with this. So, how can people get a hold of you? How can they reach you to find out more about you and your work?

Rak Razam:

You can reach me at https://rakrazam.com/, and most of my work is up there.

What I'd like to say, just to close, though, is all of that historical sort of background hasn't finished, right? "We're now living in the times that we've been waiting for", as they say in the phrase, right, is that all the indigenous cultures of the world, all of them are basically saying, "This is the end of one world age and the beginning of another".

Not 10 years from now, not 5 years from now, we're in it now. And all the global warming Arctic scientists are saying we've crossed all the tipping points, I mean, it's looking really intense out there, and that at this time, it's as the Hopi prophecies say, "There's a river flowing now very fast. Know who are your allies and friends, and let go", go with the flow, everything is meant to break down.

So essentially, what's happening I see in the world, is we're undergoing a psychedelic experience on a global scale, and we are the psychedelic, right, because it's breaking down the ego which has controlled for thousands of years, what civilization is, and we separated from nature to form culture, right?

It's like a cargo cult. It's a cult called "civilization" and we've had it for so many thousands of years, we don't look at it that way, but it is, and there are alternatives to the way that we live on this world. What we're in now is this great moment of opportunity where nature is fighting back, you could say, or the ramifications of what we've done over time in nature have reached a tipping point in a crescendo, which are coming back to affect us, and nothing can remain the same.

So, at this time, there's a movement to re - sacralize our relationship with nature, and psychedelics and entheogens and the plant medicines are at the forefront of that. As I said, there's organizations working to help people on the community level to come into community usage of plant medicines, but ultimately, what I see is we've forgotten what we're in, what life really is.

We live in boxes, we live on screens, and more and more, the powers that be are promoting that going inwards and away from the true energetics and reciprocation and feeling of nature. When you go outside into nature and feel the wind and the sun and feel the earth, you're getting fed, your biome is getting fed. There's invisible exchanges of energy and all these things happening, where we're not separate.

And so nature is going through what they're calling the "6^th Grade Species Extinction", and it's happening right now, and you know, it's such a loaded topic and I don't want to come down either way on it for anyone, you can look on my website, but what seems to be happening is we're in this runaway extreme weather effect, which is really going to shift civilization right now, and we need to come back to this awareness of who and what we really are, you know?

And so, these medicines can have an effect of what they call "ecodelic", of many people that have these type of psychedelic experiences in nature experience a re - sensitization and feeling of connection to nature, which has been scientifically proven with reportage and interviews with them, to last for years afterwards, to shift your perspective of being separated, to understand what we're in in nature, to want to help Mother Earth because we're part of her, and you feel it on these substances.

So, I have a an essay on my website called "Praying for the Earth", and really, this is, I feel, where the next step is because it's imminent and we need to do something very quickly. The Earth is going through these great changes that were part of, and all over the world, people are partaking of plant medicine ceremonies, every week in Peru, they drink often on a Tuesday or Friday or Saturday night, and it's consistently, and they understand in Peru, when they all go in together and drink Ayahuasca, it opens the field energetically and it's stronger; that's one of the reasons that Curanderos do it.

I found this with 5 - MeO as well, I'm currently working with other facilitators globally doing an online virtual private thing, which we're hopefully going to be more public as the year goes on, but I call it like a "Samadhi Mesh Network". The more people that are in altered states on the same frequencies at the same time, the more nodes in that network strengthen, the more that energy can come out into the world.

We need our own healing, we need our own revelation but remember the Mother. If we go in there asking and trying to connect, not to fix things, which is the ego trying to fix things that we've created again, but to go with the flow and to figure out a way forward, and to do that collectively, that would be incredibly empowering and a solidarity for the community to have that identity, as well as to tangibly bring things back and to start making shifts which give us a voice or give the planet a voice through us.

So, I really encourage people to, as we said, psychedelics aren't for everyone, but if you are interested in this, jump in because the time is short. The basis is a safe sound and sacred container for the work and its intention, not just for your own healing, but to connect to this bigger organism which is the planet and the larger sort of universal role embedded in, to be a participant in these times.

And I think that's the real empowering thing about psychedelics, they reveal your Divine sovereignty, that you matter, that you are loved, and you are loved, and that that recognition within yourself doesn't stop once you've had a peak experience.

You can radiate that into the collective and bit by bit, the collective will change. This change is upon us. In Peru, in the Andes, they call it "Pachacuti", or the time of the great upheaval, and the great change; so many cycles are all coming in this exact moment.

And whether you like it or not, you may be having a psychedelic experience soon, because consciousness is a magnetic - electrical phenomena tied to the magnetic fields of the Earth, which have dropped near 30%, and almost 8% in the last few years. We're going through a cosmic ecological shift, this is verified science called the "galactic current sheet" which emanates from the center of our galaxy in a black hole, and probably all galaxies have this black hole at the center.

It's like a spiral arm of energy which comes out and it is galaxies - wide thick and the bands of energy are going through all the solar systems and they're going through our solar system at the moment, and everything is warming and the energy is being felt and the magnetic fields are dropping and this is cyclic. Indigenous people understand cyclic time and they've left us mythology maps of the great upheavals and transformations of the Earth, and we're knee deep in it now, it's really coming to the fore.

What I'm getting at is consciousness itself: we are psychedelic, it's just that we've been trapped in the ego, but not forever, it's only been this last cycle, and that is changing too. So, I believe, all this work we're doing is preparation, like training wheels for revealing.

Imagine if our consciousness would wake up one day, something happens, mass coronal solar flare ejection which is initiated by a micro Nova from the aggregation of space dust coming in from the galactic current sheet, all documented, happens on a regular 6,000 to 12,000 year basis. But then this energetic surge comes from the sun, most of life gets blown off, but there's this energy surge which is also information with instructions to evolve, right, "Evolve or die", as Eckhart Tolle has said.

There's this idea that our consciousness can change because it's connected to nature, so when we take psychedelics, we renew that sacred connection to nature, we're practicing for the real deal, and I believe the real deal is imminent, and I know how this all sounds, check out my website, it's very well - documented and intricate with links and backup information, but we are sacred beings, and this is the times that we're here for.

Tom Garcia, DC:

Thank you so much for your offering today, for your time.

Rak Razam:

Thank you, Tom. Great to be here. I hope the event goes well.

Tom Garcia, DC:

Thank you, brother.