Steering Civilization: Crisis, Consciousness and Evolution

All right, all right, all right, everybody. This is Battered Souls. I am Dylan Charles. Thank you for tuning in and being here with me on this excellent broadcast. These are definitely some interesting times. I know I'm going through the stuff here myself right now. And you kind of wonder, are we in some sort of planetary ceremony facing our egos, our traumas, our shadow?

Sure seems to me that way. Thank you. And my guest today is Rak Razam. He is a journalist, filmmaker, author, and one of the most outspoken advocates for psychedelic and entheogenic consciousness in the world today.

In 2014, I read his book, "AYA Awakenings", and although we didn't get to it in this podcast today, I just wanted to give it a shout-out because of all the books I've read on the topic of ayahuasca and shamanism, "AYA Awakenings" is just a fun, thumping, good read. It's like an adventure story. You actually get the feel of what it was like ten or so years ago to go down and check out some of these experiences before the tourism industry took over, such a good book I can't recommend it enough, and he made a documentary film related to that as well.

Rak is presently in Melbourne, Australia, and I've been watching the news (June, 2020) noting how the lockdowns there become more and more authoritarian and draconian, and watching his Facebook posts about it, and thought it'd be a good idea to get his perspective on what's happening on the other side of the world during this pandemic.

So tune in and check out what he has to say. He has a lot on his mind. I thought we were going to get more into psychedelics and stuff, but he really has a lot of important and insightful things to say about what's happening in the world right now, the complexities of the situation that we're facing, and where this all could be going. So you don't want to miss this one. Thanks for tuning in and enjoy this conversation with Rak Razam. Peace.

DC:  Yeah, you're in Melbourne. How are things going in Melbourne?

RR: Nothing is happening. We're all good, obedient citizens to the state.

DC: I love hearing people speak in those terms. I guess I wanted to talk to you. I wanted to get your perspective on a number of things. Like your experience with shamanism, I definitely wanted to get into it. But I kind of wanted to get the matrix stuff out of the way. So you're in Melbourne and my perception is that Melbourne has one of the strictest lockdowns on the planet right now. Is that right?

RR: I think that's true. Melbourne is on the stage one full lockdowns, which essentially has a curfew or martial law between 8 PM and 5 AM. There's talk of mandatory vaccines if and when they come through. It's pretty full-on, yeah.

DC: Yeah, it seems like you were posting about it on Facebook a few weeks ago in your comments where you're like, "Yeah, this is the end of the world. This is like this suburban dystopia; you posted photos of these empty streets. It seems like that's pretty extreme. I mean, here in the US, people are kind of all over the place, but do you get the sense that anybody's waking up to, just waking up to the reality that we're maybe, this maybe isn't our best interest to lock things down like this?

RR: Well, look, you know, as we briefly mentioned at the start, this is a really complicated issue. And I don't really see anyone, hardly anyone talking about the complexities of this issue that we're facing with the global pandemic and the ripple effect of what comes from that.

So there is a virus, and it is deadly, and it is affecting a very small percentage of the population who do get it, and it is something of great concern. And the response from governments around the world seems to be disproportionate and seems to be eroding our civil liberties and, essentially, the democratic state or the sense of freedoms that for thousands of years we have fought for and when we have entrenched.

Desperate times do require desperate measures and it's just so complicated. I hesitate at every word, guys. I say, because someone will be triggered by everything that is said.

And the thing is, we're living this. Interestingly, we can spiral out into a more shamanic perspective in a moment. But the interesting thing is that we all face this as a planetary society, right? As a culture. And there have been previous Spanish flu epidemics and things like that around the world. And some events happen around the world that affect the world at the same time. But this one is ongoing. There's rolling viral outbreaks and clusters. And it's not just the virus.

Regime/Paradigm Change

I mean, here we are in the 21st century where we can have this conversation around the world, we can have the internet, we can have everything monitored, everything is surveilled, everything is tracked.

We have the technology to implement–to enable the voice of the people, right, of the masses– we can basically get away with the middle management of government with the bureaucracy with the creep with the vested interests. We could have people, you know, self-organizing! I mean, this is the definition of anarchy: it's not burning cars in the streets when police shoot black people.

Anarchy is self-government right and we have the potential for that. Still, we also have the potential for dystopia. And that is the bigger issue that few people comment on.

I don't know if they can't see the forest from the trees, but the issue is this sense of control. And it's hideously complicated because, as we see online, there is a giant division between everyone.

No matter what you post about, you post a kitten picture and the dog people will rage against it you know, and that's not to belittle the importance of the issues that are being, well–it's not even fair to say they're being discussed; they're just being argued back and forth. So what I see happening in the collective in the global mind is this more… understanding of the energetics and a shamanic understanding of what it represents, of all these individuals going through this trauma, this trigger of this planetary experience. We're all experiencing the same thing.

There's many different strains of the virus and many different intensities. But what we're seeing is as a collective body, the organism of society is responding in certain ways. And in general, you could say that some people aren't having a voice in that change of the way society is responding. And on some levels, it feels like the authority, the top-down authority is trying its best, right? I mean, it's doing what it's always had to do. It has to make decisions. But the thing is, if you look into it, there's so many gray areas of vested interests of the same capitalist structure trying to tackle this virus, which it's just insane.

And so this meltdown is happening culturally, which really feels like a ceremony. It feels like a shamanic ceremony which involves essentially a sense of ego dislocation or ego death.

And, you know, we're seeing a whole, not just movement, but a whole discourse and a whole criticism of the spiritual communities worldwide being called conspiratorial, right?

DC: Right. And the thing is, at the heart of every conspiracy, there are some facts where there's smoke, there's fire.

RR: And it does get really complicated–usually on the socials like Facebook to dissect issues and to talk about them reasonably and to not have flame wars.

Technologies as Gaian Hormones: Species Puberty

That's basically what the power structures of society do. New technologies come in, new possibilities come in. People who are in the society who basically own the infrastructure of the society go back many generations. You could call them elites, whatever.

But the point is, there is reason to believe that there is an agenda, right? And I'm not going to use the word conspiracy, but there is an agenda. It's called business. I mean, this is what people do. They collaborate to bring in and to push their things forward. And so at the moment, we're seeing unprecedented technologies come through.

And if you look at some countries in the world that are far ahead with these technologies, essentially it's Asia and, to a large degree, China, in the sense of what they're doing with the technologies of 5G, what they're doing with uber mass surveillance of their citizens, and what they're doing with AI. And the AI is learning from the surveillance of the citizens is prognosticating exactly what is in the human makeup of each individual.

I mean, they're monitored not just in the streets with cameras but also in the homes, phones, and computers. computers. And AI learning is, in a way, shaping.

There's an entrainment from the existing technologies that want to come into culture more. And there's not the impediments of the democracy that China doesn't have. And so there's a whole there's a whole suite of things happening.

But again, it's happening, it's sort of without consent, without discussion. It's been proven so many times that basically humans are hardwired to take up new technologies to do new things. And it's only in the process of that, half a generation later, we start to see the effects and what can go wrong.

So it's in China, they're actually using EEG brainwave technology, neuro technology, to monitor students' brainwaves. And this is totally documented. This is not the conspiracy. You can look it up and I can give you links to this documented, you know, sites like BBC and other ones just documenting what's happening in China. This is like basically five, ten years ahead of where we are in the West, because certain constraints hold us back with the brainwaves of students.

Our cultural matrix, right? It seems that they are far apart right now. Yeah, brainwashing monitoring is in China. If they daydream or deviate from the lesson, it pings the teacher. It also pings their parents, and then they get a text message. And so there's this entrainment happening from technology and from AI, which is embedded within the power structure of the government that there to make a model citizenship.

This power is basically what the other Western nations envy, and that they see the potentials as well. We've got all the grassroots building blocks of the same dystopian nightmare that China has. We've got the mass surveillance. We've got the 5G. We've got surveillance everywhere, but we have this capitalism thing. And so, I don't know, you just look at the sequencing of events.

The virus happened. We don't know where it came from exactly. There is conjecture, you know, Chinese biolab or from nature. It almost doesn't really matter, right? I don't want to argue about the virus's origins, but that's just the trigger. The trigger that it's caused, the response, is that this global economic shutdown is disproportionate and was largely based on an economic shutdown.

A report that came out of Imperial College in London in March 2020, which looked at the worst -case scenario, which hasn't eventuated. There is obviously a great need to minimize the impact of the virus.

To a very large degree, I agree with the need to minimize the impact of the virus. And what we're seeing is it's not necessarily going away anytime quick, and those in initial responses to shut everyone off, to isolate, to quarantine, it's like a controlled demolition of the economy. And if anyone needs to –

DC: Can I ask a couple things? Because you just said a whole bunch of stuff that's really fascinating to me as a person who's done the work I've been doing over the last 10 years, which is bridging this same stuff. I mean, it's really interesting to me to hear somebody with such a shamanic view get right into what you call - the conspiracies.

But earlier today, right before I called you, I had a knock on the door, and this young salesperson came up to the door. He was a super nice guy, but he was selling like Vivants or something. It's a new system where they go, like you can buy this video camera to put on your front door.

So basically, he was selling the consumer version of the technology you're discussing. And he was like, oh yeah, all of your neighbors up and down the street just bought this. So there's going to be 24-hour surveillance.

On your street right now. I was like, oh, that's interesting. That is how we adopt things. We adopt things through convenience. But you were talking first about the complexities of stuff, but I just wanted to get your perspective on this.

Something that I see here, not just the dynamics and how the government structure and how the corporate structure is playing with this and how they're working to spread this divide even further, move us in the direction of an economy that's managed by a few corporations where there's no mom and pop shops. There are no small businesses.

And though to be like, you know, in addition to those systemic changes that we see, I see a lot of like psychological changes happening in people. And I've written quite a bit about this lately, but the like people seem to be, you're probably familiar with this Rak, like the Stanford Prison experiment and the, what is the other one, the Milgram experiment. Two really popular social experiments were conducted in the 60s and 70s and the gist of it is they basically had a bunch of kids act like prison guards or prisoners and within no time at all both groups adopted the role.

They both started playing but didn't even realize the changes in their behavior. The prison guards immediately adopted authoritarian behavior and started policing everyone and coming up with their own rules and ways to enforce those rules.

The person in the subjugated group immediately started behaving as such, and just relinquishing their power and caving more and more into themselves. And so I see that there's this change in people's psychology.

Do you see that over there in Australia as well?

RR: Yeah, we see it everywhere because we're all human, right? And we all respond in the same way. And you can go all the way back to Machiavelli in like the 1500s or something,that there's the people who have been in positions of power and authority over the centuries and millennia understand the hierarchy. They understand how to subjugate.

Cultural Thermodynamics: Someone Thinks They’re in Control

They understand how to control the masses. And to a very large degree, capitalism has been doing that in a more invisible way that is more about service of desire. And if you look at, what was that BBC documentary that came out : The Century of the Self. The whole way propaganda was created, you know, in the 20th century, and they brought it in as an ism. And -isms are like meme complexes that control and interact with you and your desires.

And so it was easier in many ways to gratify human beings than to, you know, put a boot on their head and hold them down. They found ways to to make people placid. But the problem is, and this is the big thing, that we live ‘embeddedly’. Culture is embedded in nature, and nature is changing. And no matter what our ism is and what we do as a planetary or fragmented planetary society, we're all at the whims of something larger than ourselves.

DC: Yeah.

RR: So, the unsustainability of capitalism has been milked to its point of fruition, where it cannot continue any longer. And they're not dumb. The people who are looking at this stuff in the institutions and the systems of control understand this.

And there's been talks in economic circles for a long time about a shift in late-stage capitalism or disaster capitalism to what's going to come next. And so we're always embedded within these systems of control and of change.

And this isn't conspiracy. This is just business. This is just why civilizations have always been run. Someone is running a civilization. And it's a fucking hard job.

Imagine if you were having to run a civilization and make these decisions. So I don't think it's so Machiavellian and you can just draw a line and say they're evil and we're good or it's the alliance and the empire. It's like, it's complicated. We're all human beings.

DC: But this is the opposite time, we could talk like this as a planetary culture. There you are in America here I am in the US. We can all connect; we have the potential through technology for utopia tantalizingly close, and it's looking like it's going to be a dystopia because we're being distracted and as you say. We're being suppressed and the human spirit what we're seeing now is huge rises in suicides, But that's the tip of the iceberg from all the quarantine is that everyone is feeling uneasy.

RR: Everyone is feeling like we can't plan for the future. I mean, the viruses we're gonna get over that eventually, by hook or by crook, but the economy is gone. What we haven't really realized yet, if you follow any economic circles is most governments of the world are drip feeding their economies and they're propping it up. So basically, we have socialism everywhere, which is great. But there's a controlled demolition of the economy, which had to happen because it was unsustainable and because capitalism was on its last legs.

And we now have the technologies to bring in a new paradigm. And the thing is, I just turned 50 this year, right? When I was growing up in the 1970s,we had all the this science fiction. And if you look at science fiction dystopias, you know, a lot of them were set around 2020. Oddly enough, maybe it's about 50 years, right? But the thing is, I always wonder, how could things get so bad? You’d look at all those dystopias of like economic collapse and, you know, everything's gray and bombed out and wars, and you're like, well, how could we let it happen? We're living through it now.

And when we see the responses from communities, whether that's Black Lives Matter or others, when they get out there and they protest. They have a right to do that and there is a need to do that and a natural response is happening. To a large degree it seems like it's being detourned or it's being absorbed by the larger cultural mechanisms and politicized and weaponized because in this day and age everything is being weaponized to certain agendas and including the division within culture. And this is the sad thing. This doesn't lead anywhere good.

The divisions and the emotional repercussions on everyone is really what is, for me, one of the most worrying things on planet Earth at the moment. We're disconnected and we're disempowered and we're being entrained, you know, by the times and by what they're doing. And it doesn't really lead anywhere good, according to the science fiction dystopias of the '70s. This is where it heads.

DC: One of my first, most powerful medicine journeys I ever had was a moment, Rak, right before things got really good and positive where I was in the situation that we're in right now. It's like, this can't go anywhere good. This is only getting worse. This is hell on Earth. Things are hitting me and coming at me from everywhere. angle. So I'm fascinated by this idea that the microcosm's struggles and projections are finally coming to fruition and playing out in the global scene.

And you do such a great job of articulating it. I wonder if people are going through these psychological changes and people seem to be turning on their neighbours and people seem to be turning into mask tyrants or whatever it is, whatever rule they feel like they need to become an enforcer for, or does this spiritual awakening, the spiritual work help people become immune to like being absorbed by the Borg,I guess, you know?

RR:  Well, you know, the thing with the Borg, they say resistance is futile. And the thing is-- - Bullshit.

Well, but here's the thing, here's the thing: we have so many thousands of years of cultural indoctrination in the global culture, right, that we don't see it. We're the goldfish in the bowl that doesn't see we're in the water.

Remember with the Zapatistas and the anti-globalization movement a generation ago, there was a beautiful phrase, "Another world is possible," and then it became, "Another world is happening." That got taken down, that got detourned as well.

Another World is Here But the Old World Has To Go

The thing is, this is really good. This is a good question. What is culture? Right? In my, you know, journey work and my psychedelic and shamanic work over many years now, I've come to the intuitive understanding that culture is a stress response from humans that are distant from nature, that we've lost our path.

We've lost our relationship with the originating matrix of being, the mother, the one that nurtures and sustains. And it basically all goes back to the Lower Dryas near-extinction event 12 ,800 or so years ago where something happened.

It may have been a meteor strike It may have been something but there was a very rapid shift from a hunter-gathering society in in cooperation with the earth into a retraction that created agriculture and which basically set in motion the whole distancing from the planet, and the individuation of the ego itself.

Now, the ego is needed.  And this is the crux of the psychedelic and shamanic experience, is that basically, science has proven that these substances–they’ve done EEG and MRI scans, you know, legally with psychedelics. And they understand that when you take these substances, it's not necessarily doing the thing to you, it's actually affecting the brain's neurochemistry. It's temporarily lowering or switching off or making the Default Mode Network more pliable, which is like this regional channel of reality, this cluster of different overlapping capacities in our neural structure.

When that happens, we are freed up from this channel of reality, this incoming sensory channel that we're on, and we get to travel in a lot larger spectrum of reality that is always there that indigenous cultures of work with medicines understand. That you know, all the different world mythologies point to their being different realities and different understandings of the world – it's bigger than this…

DC: We’ve basically been hobbled, we basically been kept in this thing and it feels to me that. It's basically like a species PTSD that what you've seen also.

RR: Through history is this separation. We encounter other tribes. We kill them. We try to protect ourselves. We try to protect ourselves from nature. We chop down. We devour nature to build and to do whatever we're doing.

And more and more, we create these clusters and tribes and towns and cities. And it gets to 21st century. And it's like an algae bloom across the planet that is like this cancer. It's like a virus. And it's like we have forgotten who and what we really are.

And another metaphor I like to use is that we’re one strand in the planetary biome; that mother nature has millions of creatures, 97 % of which are in danger of becoming extinct because of global warming, which is part of human’s contribution to this disaster. But it's like we have dominated, we've become this apex predator on the planet, which has killed off so much else, and killed ourselves, and we're numb, we're emotionally numb, we're spiritually numb as a species.

And so that's the starting point when you discuss culture and what's happening on the planet at the moment.

So there's actually a great opportunity in the future in the disintegration of the 20th-century cultural paradigm. And there's a great opportunity to look at ourselves individually and collectively, which is very parallel to what happens in a ceremony when we take a psychoactive medicine, a sacred substance, and inquire within.

We go within and we go through the dark night of the soul, it's been termed, right? Which is basically facing yourself. Facing your fears, facing your wounds, looking at what's happened, sorting it out, maybe purging or releasing and letting go.

Turn On, Tune In, Let Go

The key thing in so many medicine circles with the medicines is this phrase "letting go." And what does that mean?

It basically means letting go of control, letting go of that egoic groove locked in in our Default Mode Network of holding on, trying to control things, and being in control. Because we believe we are in control because we've forgotten what we're in. We've forgotten the larger organism of Gaia and Mother Nature and the whole galactic universal organism which we're a very small and necessary part of, right?

And so that control, I mean, Terence McKenna phrased it beautifully, you know, decades ago, he called it "dominator culture." We've tried to create dominion over the planet. We've tried to take and rape and pillage and plunder, and we've done it. And it's done itself in now. We may have entered the sixth great species extinction, which climatologists say we're in. We may have, you know, killed ourselves at this point. But essentially, if you look upon it as in a larger paradigm, we're in in a natural phenomena.

We don't understand this mystery of life. Yet, sometimes, we feel that reconnection when we connect with sacred substances. That reconnection diminishes the ego, and it enables us not to think; it enables us to feel that we're embedded in something larger, that something larger is actually in control. It renews the right relationship with the parent and the child, and humanity is the little brother, it's the child, and the planet is the mother, right?

So we're actually in this time at the moment, and it's being forced from circumstances of a planetary ego death, right? I mean, it is. I mean, everyone wants this V -shape recovery of the economy, everyone wants to go back to normal. It ain't going back to normal, honey, right? It can't go back to normal because it was dying.

The old normal was dying and not just killing individuals and collectives. It was killing the planet. So it had to change. So, whether by chance or design, this is an enormous opportunity for the global collective to instigate change.

But again, we need to have some input into what those changes will be and how they impact us, because otherwise we're just slaves to someone else telling us what the new system's gonna be. And so there's this opportunity to go within and it's like the five stages of grief: where you have denial and we've seen this with climate change and we're seeing this, I think, with cultural change, with what's happening on the planet, right?

We've been in denial for a very long time, so long that we don't see it anymore. And now the walls are coming down, right? And you have bushfires in California, you have floods in China, you have plague of locusts in Eurasia, you have the Arctic Circle melting, almost all the sea ice melted for the first time. They thought it wouldn't happen for another 50 years. It actually happened as it was speeding up exponentially.

An exponential curve happening with global warming, where more methane is being released, more carbon dioxide is absorbed into the sea, that's making the sea warmer, then you're getting the mega cyclones and tornadoes. It's a closed system. It's actually one system. So everything that gets more intense in one part of the Earth is then domino affecting every other part of the Earth.

So we can't return to normal, which is the great crisis. And in crisis comes opportunity. But we need to understand, ultimately, this is not happening to us, it's happening for us, because we're embedded in a process of planetary change that is actually, I mean, global warming has happened many, many other times in the geological lifespan of the planet.

It's part of the planetary shift and changes with incoming galactic energies, cosmic rays, the control of the weather. Humans have contributed to it with our carbon dioxide emissions, and there are many incoming deeper energies embedded in larger world age cycles. This happens on regular, larger tracks of time and the world ages.

And we're just at the first cup, as I like to say. We're at this stage of letting go of denial because we can't deny it; it's on our faces constantly. And we're going through this.

Releasing Planetary Trauma

Then suppressed rage. We're going through bargaining. We're trying to bargain. We're trying to go, "Well, we'll give up this and we'll make do. We'll just limp along with this." But a grieving is coming because we haven't seen the worst of it yet.

It's not just the pandemic. It's not just the economic collapse. It's planetary civilizational collapse. That is basically what's coming. When we've seen this in micro examples in just nation states, when you look at Argentina, Russia, or Cuba, you know, it's sort of like they've managed to limp through and transition. They've managed to have a soft collapse when it happens to an interwoven global culture, all at the same time, with supply chains and a globalized network.

It's not going to be pretty. So it seems to me if you just look at the big picture, the pandemic is one trigger, and the response to it seems to me to be part of a larger response to the larger emergency, which no one really wants to talk about, which is the climate change emergency and the collapse of modern civilization. Basically, every nation -state is calling their decision. home.

It's like this biblical thing, return to your nation-state, localize. International travel is hobbled. It's gone down. The food chains are endangered. There's amassed famines and plagues coming because of the global warming, the floods and all the things that are happening, and the environmental changes which are causing a degradation of our global supply chains. chains, which was very much a lot of hubris of us to try to spread across the planet and control it as dominated culture.

It's a manifestation of our ego that tried to control Gaia, the entire planet wrapped in concrete and all these human manifestations that wasn't sustainable.

We had one brief shot at it and it couldn't keep It would have been planted at the Borg So that was the first cup What happens when we drink the second cup?

DC: Well, you know it goes deeper down the rabbit hole doesn't it? Because as you said, I mean most people that have had you know, ayahuasca or shamanic medicine journeys. We all hold grief.

RR: And this is the thing, you know, when I've worked with people in shamanic ceremonies, I mean, most people have trauma in their background, but a lot of people don't understand that they have trauma.

So if you've been sexually abused as a as a youth or if you've been in an accident or there's been physical pain you know it right the thing is the majority of people don't understand what trauma really is and the thing is our modern culture is a planetary battery farm to just break down the human spirit. We're not living in optimal conditions.

We're not living in a happy world that is equitable and you have clean water and food and housing and purpose, right? We're living in a capitalist Orwellian battery farm.  And so basically, you know, Gabor Mate, who's one of the great voices in the psychedelic community, who's been 20 years working with trauma in addiction in Canada and for about a decade now working with ayahuasca. He says that the root of everyone that he's ever worked with who has addiction issues is a trauma.

And then the addicts are essentially trying to self-medicate, they're trying to heal the pain or push the pain away or they're trying to to almost even sometimes kill themselves because they can't deal with the internal pain within.

We look at human culture and civilization and as I believe we're all traumatized, we're all living in our heads because we can't inhabit our bodies. We're not connected, disconnected. We have classical signs of planetary trauma and the trauma is so rewarding that from a very young age we get our kids back into the heads and learning all this stuff and it's like we're not embodied anymore and so it's like what comes next is we have to face our trauma.

We have to face the fact that the world as we know it is dying in front of our eyes, not just the biological world but our cultural world and it's not going back to normal and we need to respond, and we need to find it within it. But to do that, what comes next is the purge, really.

That's traditionally what happens in medicine ceremonies, is that once you've identified and felt the trauma within you, you release it, you purge.

So you could say things like that the Black Lives Matter, and now there's also, I guess, a counterpoint happening within, I guess, an anti-pandemic sort of movement of people getting really fed up with the ongoing quarantine and the responses of wanting to mobilize some type of sovereignty movement or just responding back to their governments. There's an equal and opposite pushback within the culture for some change, but it's basically, on a human level, it's this response of this letting it out.

Of they're going through the rage. It's the five stages of grief, denial, we're going through a rage stage we're going to go through a bargaining we're going to go through grief somewhere along in that process there has to be a purge of identifying all the trauma that we've held individually and collectively in the culture and releasing that. If you clean out then you can make room for what's coming for our a healthy response.

DC: I'm super curious did you go through some personal stuff like this on this level when you started your work with shamanic plant medicines? I mean, what was this experience like for you personally?

RR: Well, you know, I've put my time in the buckets in the maloca [Peruvian temple hut]. Definitely, you know, I guess I'm lucky that I don't have any obvious traumas in my childhood or growing up, but again you know, my relationship, let's say with ayahuasca was always challenging because I was so stuck in my head.

Because, you know, I would be on the floors in Peru for many years, going, "I surrender, I surrender." But the "I" was going, "I surrender." You know, I was still trying to control things. It was only when I like, you know, falling off to sleep or I would let go of trying so hard that the ayahuasca would be snaking and sort of be able to like get under my defenses unless it was a really strong brew.

So you know, I mean this is this is the path of knowing yourself. You know ayahuasca to a large degree can be a physical purgative and cleaning out a lot of things in you as well. It can be an emotional purgative and it can be that spiritual reconnection and sometimes when we chase the visions or we chase that spiritual reconnection we're spiritual bypassing because we're getting ahead of ourselves.

DC: I see that happening. I see that happening with people talking about this need to be one, think positive, and go through this stuff. And a lot of people, I feel they're shedding the darkness out, you know, just ignoring the hey, the experts said this, don't think anything else, you know, don't think otherwise. This is what the experts say.

So I kind of really would, would like to see people more embrace this darkness. It's really encouraging for me to see people like you talk about, you know, this conspiracy stuff because I haven't been called a conspiracy theorist as often in the, like in the last two weeks, I've been called a conspiracy theorist like dozens of times. It's like you said,if I even say anything, if I make a nice comment to a friend on Facebook, somebody's going to jump in and be pissed off at me about it.

And so I see people clamping down their control, you know, and I'm stuck in the USA with the election coming up, Biden versus Trump. And I doubt you've been in the USA for for an election season. But man, it's tough to even go out and every conversation that you have with somebody you feel you can I mean, I can feel just how much people are clinging to their beliefs in the system, but how much people are like, you know, know, doubling down and clutching their pearls more and more and more and trying to take that, take a side and stick with that team.

Psychedelic Revolution or Renaissance: You Can’t Have Both

RR: It's what no one really points out from a medicine point of view, from a psychedelic and shamanic point of view. This is a concentration of the ego yet again, it doesn't really matter Biden or Trump.

They're all pawns of the same establishment which own the infrastructure of the culture and are bringing in the new world agenda regardless of who gets in. It's this good cop, bad cop. But then when everyone buys in, it's calcifying and concentrating the egoic divide between us and them. It's the classic divide and conquer. I mean, who is out there saying decentralized, defund government, not just defund the police, defund government?

Or even better, wasn't there some proposal just really recently to use blockchain to, you know, to vote with through the postal system? There was something around. Basically, we have the technologies to decentralize. But what is happening is that the cultural egoic structure is taking the decentralizing technologies and trying to keep them away because they're worried that it's going to eat away at their centralized power structure, or they're trying to co-opt them.

I mean, this is what is also happening in the capitalist structure with psychedelics. They're totally getting consumed. They're getting absorbed into the medical insurance paradigm, which will not save the planet. It will help people and heal traumas of people who can afford it with their insurance and medical plans.

But, you know, the great revolutionary promise of the Sixties of a revolution of consciousness is not going to happen with medical psychedelics. It's not the agenda of medical psychedelics, it's not intending to do that.

That's also not the agenda of the shamanic movement worldwide, to have a revolution of consciousness. And yet, I say we need a revolution of consciousness. It doesn't have to look like it's been before. And I feel like we're going through a slow-motion revolution of consciousness, but we don't see it, and we're still at the first stages. We're still at the first cup. We're still at identifying the trauma.

And if we could just see how big our fucking egos are, myself included, right, we're all trapped, we're all trapped in ego states. And so it's like, it's like me on the ayahuasca, on the malocca floor. Ayahuasca wanted to connect with me, but my ego wouldn't let her in. I didn't know how to drop my defences. I didn't know how to drop my defences. I didn't know how to let go of the mind.

I didn't know how to open up.

DC: So you know now?

RR: I do know now. I do know now. And again, it's like a groove. It's like a muscle that you've got to keep work and it gets easier. And the longer I step away from exercising that muscle, the more I fall back into ego consciousness.

DC: What are the practical things that you did to exercise and train that?

Well, I don't do them enough at the moment. I've got to say in my quarantine lockdown, I mean, all this time on my hands, I should be meditating. I should be doing fresh work. All I do is doom scroll and look at everything that's waiting, they're having the plan and they're waiting for more collapse.

So I'm probably not, I'm not the best exemplar of the things to do, but you know, there are lots of practices out there and, you know, number one what I would say is, I mean, it's again it's very difficult in quarantine, but it can be very isolatory, you know, yeah, maybe we can do meditation we can do breath work, these are things that you have to face on your own and ultimately in a ceremony even if it's a group ceremony you're going through what's happening on the inside of your head on your own but you often feel connected to the group.

And I've been I've been a part of a few zoom ceremonies over the last few months, which has worked. It's been an example of feeling that connection to tribe, beloveds, and oneness. And I feel that perhaps more of that is needed.

I often get my own little groove in my isolation, but it's because I'm not connected. So what I would really love to see, and I mean, you know, it's like,I mean, if we don't do it ourselves, who will do it? But more healthy responses to quarantine and isolation and the times of creative, artistic, and fun things.

So we're not doing a Zoom -like chat and you know, a hierarchical top-down lecture or talk. Well, we're doing some type of, you know, I don't,I don't know, it was like some type of things that could be fun that could engender a lightness of spirit, you know, I don't know what they are.

DC: Honestly, man, I've been having absolutely physically and physiologically having to throw myself into painting and making electronic music these days because like the intensity of everything here and everything that I'm going through, like you said, doom scrolling all day, which is basically my business in a large way. So, yeah, for me, it's martial arts, DJing, electronic music. and art. It helped me more than it's ever helped me in my life right now.

RR: You know, I mean, and people say, "Well, what can we do? And what can we do, people that are in the medicine communities?" And as we mentioned before, there's a huge division even within our communities of people saying conspiratorial or conspiratoriality. And it's like [laughs] name calling doesn't help. I mean, it's sort of more spiritual bypass. I feel sad. I feel like really almost like crying a lot of times when I see the heartache and the blaming.

I mean, we're all in this together. And if people are in fear, they're in fear. I'm not condoning anything but it's like the responses online are just so mean and they're not human there's no etiquette and there's no respect or there's very little respect and it's very difficult to have conversations about what's happening when people are split into opposite camps.

You know underneath all those responses whether you agree with how people respond to or not in their reaction to the virus or whatever they're human beings and they're scared. They're feeling it: have some fucking humanity for each other you know.

DC: Yeah I noticed today just kind of like the last few days dealing with people on Facebook and and just the kind of kind of things that people say to you there. I don't think I ever hear people say this kind of stuff to other people face to face. I almost never hear that. So there's definitely something lost in that mode of communication, which is kind of unsettling.

RR: That's part of the problem of our technology. At the moment, we can connect to thousands of people worldwide, but we don't necessarily get the verbal cues, tones, or nuances. We don't get facial recognition, even if we're doing it through a screen, we don't get it on mass for a collective.

So even though we know that we get entrained by our technology, it changes our neural structures, we get our little dopamine hit, and we're addicted to our technology. I am, we all are, we're all doom-scrolling, we're all on our screens, we're all hungry for connection.

Some study came out a few years ago that said people do not really want to just, you know, look at what people are posting. What they're doing is they're hungry to connect to other people. And this is what we used to do physically as a tribe when we would be in nature, in the environment, out in the fresh air, in God's paradise of nature, of the Earth, and we would see each other.

You'd look people in the eyes, and if you look someone in the eye and said, "You're a piece of shit because you vote for Biden," Biden or Trump, you know, well then you would have to say it to their face and you would have to feel it, you would feel the emotion. When you see certain comments on Facebook, you get hurt, you get the same trigger of hurt, you respond in the same way, but it's faceless and it's inhumane and it's not human and it's not contributing to solutions.

Don’t Panic the Herd

That paradigm is going down. And I believe the powers that have got all the data on the climate change and got all the data on where things are going must know it as well.

You can't basically panic the herd. You've got to transit to a new system. What are they doing? This is not conspiracy. You can research this yourself, but around the world, all the governments using the new technologies; the plan is to bring in 5G and 6G. I saw a post the other day of 6G, which will enable telepresencing. What we're seeing at the moment is capitalism is going down.

There are not enough jobs for everyone. Universal basic income is coming in. 5G, 6G, 7G is coming in. What it enables is mass internet of things, everything connected, everything talking to everything else, everything surveilling, everything you do constantly, living in smart cities, which can be titrated off anything or everything.

We're seeing more and more decentralization, and we don't actually do things ourselves anymore. You don't have to cook. You can have stuff delivered by Uber. Your food is delivered by Uber. You can telepresence. You can meet people on Zoom. More and more and more, it's this crescendo of separation of the egoic structure, which now has the technology to do everything within a localized, smart city, safe-contained dystopian battery farm, right? That they can close off from nature. It's the apex of 13,000 years of history where we're sealing off in the cities to protect ourselves from global warming, from other nation-states, and from the future.

And that's where it's headed. This uber sort of lean, elegant, dystopian society, all the Sci-Fi's pointing to it. Look at Brave New World lately, which Grant Morrison was one of the showrunners for. Look at, I watched Cloud Atlas again recently for the near future scenarios.

You know, they've got the CRISPR, they've got the genetic technology, they can clone, you know, in China recently, they did that little experiment with modifying one of the babies, you know, they've got all these technologies, but they can't morally use them in Western countries. What's happening is they're biding, they're chomping at the bit to actually do this stuff, which can bring in this total science fiction future, which is no longer science fiction, it's facts. It's this cultural impediment. We're seeing the controlled demolition of the paradigm.

What it's bringing in is like these– it's not looking good for the future. It's really looking potentially dystopian. But again, it's like, it's a culmination of ego. You've got to understand that it's humanity working from the wound of separation of nature and each other, of source consciousness of feeling connected, that is at this final stage of its separation. And there could be a bifurcation of the species where many people aren't gonna get the chip.

Elon in Your Head

I mean, that's the other thing, Elon Musk and the brain-machine interface. This is no longer science fiction, guys, look it up. I mean, look at Starlink with the 5G, 12,000 satellites orbiting the Earth and with bathing it in 5G technology.

You know, the Earth with its very delicate ecosystem, the upper echelons of the atmosphere, the ionosphere, the magnetosphere, they're actually part of the Gaian organism where it not just blocks ultraviolet rays and stuff, it's actually, there's some, some people say that's where the consciousness of the Earth resides in the upper atmosphere in the vibratory sort of layers.

 And it's like yet again, what humanity is doing is infiltrating and infesting these fine subtle layers of Gaia. We're just, it's this war between us and Gaia, this division of the ego, the separated ego, which has had 13 ,000 years now to build all these technologies, go next level, and maybe even inf est other planets. Wow, wouldn't that be great? Let's like drain this planet and then let's like a plague of locusts march our way through the solar system and drain the rest of the planets from our egoic centralized perspectives. 

Somehow, I don't know, all I know is we're not in control.

And the more we try to control, it creates an equal and opposite reaction from what is in control: Source Consciousness and Gaia and the planetary intelligence.

DC: But I mean, you've been through it. Like you said, you spent years on the malocca floor. I've done the same thing. And I mean, it literally took years of drinking the water this stuff, thrashing around, puking, getting healings, meditating. And then I'd come back six months, six months or a year later, and I'd hit it again.

I'd realized it was all this other new shit that was coming up that I didn't even realize that I needed to look at. This has been going on for quite some time. I mean, the thrashing, the screaming, just working it out until finally I got to a place of peace where all of it just left my system. So I can't help but think that you're exactly right, things aren't looking good right now, but we've got a lot of thrashing and a lot of puking and a lot of stuff that we have to look at.

RR: Yeah, it's a process, it's a process. So I don't mean to be a doomsayer, but it doesn't look good when you project ahead with the current trajectories. The best case scenario is it's going to be a very tightly controlled society of the future, which is like all the sci -fi decisions. in the smart cities shut off from nature and hideously monitored and controlled and entrained.

And obviously, what we're seeing now, people saying, "I'm not going to get the chip. I'm not going to get the vaccine," things like that, you know, there's a rebellion from that. And so not everyone's going to do that. But the problem is, unlike the 1960s when the hippies tried to go back to the land and to have a shot at, you know, being off grid, everything is so interconnected now.

 It's like here in Australia, I remember the first wave of the virus when it hit. Some people went bush, but there were helicopters that tracked them, monitored them, and punished them for being hundreds of kilometres out in the bush away from everyone.

I mean, it's like basically an independent community living off grid with sustainable technology, not getting chips, not getting vaccinated, would potentially be seen as a threat by the powers that be for being a living breathing example of an alternative, which I don't think, you know, they want. I mean, I don't want to be a doomsayer. I believe there's got to be a way forward. And that all of everything I've said is actually projecting from where we're at now, but where we're going, things are going to change. Hopefully, this purge and this collective work we're doing will be where it comes down to all those social media things.

If we could have discussions, if we could actually look at what the playing field really is, if we could understand the paradigm that we're in and the process we're in as a spiritual transformation and not take it so personally and not attack each other for feeling what we're feeling because we're in a process of trauma release, right?

And then we could actually maybe be kinder and we could actually retain the bonds of humanity to come together. I mean, there's going to be times where, I mean, look at look at poor Santa Cruz and Northern California with the virus. It doesn't matter if you believe it, the virus is from a Chinese biolab or it's natural or if you're a Trumpian or a Democrat.

That fire destroys everyone's homes, whether left or right. And hopefully the response from the community, the common unity is to come together regardless of your egoic ideological separations in the face of devastation, in the face of these triggers, which hopefully will bring us together and not divide us more, right? But we need to go through this process. So it's a work in progress.

DC: Yeah, I see like the stuff that you're saying, first of all, this is all stuff that I've been thinking about working, and writing on for a couple of decades, really.

So you're not doomed saying to me, you're not telling me anything I haven't already written about or thought deeply about. But lately my perspective has been changing with so many people calling me a conspiracy theorist, like just I mean somebody said that my views on socialism were conspiracy theories because my wife grew up in Communist Poland.

So I had you know, I have that experience to color my perspective. And so I guess I really kind of see like what you're saying is it's super important because you're acting like a bridge between these two worlds. And I kind of feel like maybe there's a lot of people like us that are like bridging this gap here, trying to get people to realize that hey man, there's shit. We need to look at this, which isn't going to end well, but then you're also saying that we need to go over here and tend to the spiritual side of things, which I think is super valuable.

So I also see some people just living in one side or the other, the spiritual guys doing all the bypassing and they won't ever look or take, they won't ever acknowledge that their own personal liberty, their own families, their own food security, their own medical freedom, their right to informed consent, that all these things are under very direct attack right now. And then you have the other people that are so absorbed. You know, super, super absorbed into the rabbit holes of all the conspiracies. So I just want to commend you, like the stuff that you're saying is not doom saying to me, it's a very important work of bridging the gap right now.

The Human Hero’s Journey

RR: Yeah, it's acknowledging what is, but I mean, from the larger perspective, I mean, even with the spiritual community, when you do your self work, I mean, with a classic psychedelic journey, it's the Joseph Campbell sort of template of, you know, the known world,having the initiation, but then the crux of it, the really important part is the return, returning to your family, your tribe, your community with the new wisdom that you've gained to put it into practice.

So we have a global shamanic community in the West and with indigenous peoples who are really feeling it. I mean the pandemic has closed down all the international travel. So basically the Shamanic, you know, circuit. I mean, the lodges, the ayahuasca communities, the medicine communities are not getting the tourism. And they're really feeling it. And inversely, the Westerners are perhaps not getting the medicine experiences.

And so there's a great divide there and a great sadness there. So what do we do? If you can still work with medicines in a safe and sacred way, I say do that, because ultimately a lot of the great spiritual wisdom says the world outside is just a manifestation of the world inside.

You can't save the world. The world is saving itself through us. The world is transforming. The world's not dying. We're not talking about the end of the world – we're talking about the end of our little civilization which is only 12 ,000 years old and every civilization which has been before has come and gone and again it's this letting go, can we let go, can we face our trauma because there will be a rebirth.

There will be something new coming, you know, but it's that return. It's like if we do our work and we return in this time, it feels like people that have done the work, it is about sovereignty. It's about going back to the land. It's about living sustainably. It's about forming community. And it's about transiting the collapse of the globalized society. Because that's what's going down. It's the globalized society. And we can take the technologies and we can take the wisdoms of what was the best of the planetary society that's collapsing, and we can have a soft reboot, you know, but it's time to start transiting. It is time to go back to the land and continue doing the work without bypassing.

DC: But you know what that means? It means forming community. And at the moment, I don't know if anyone can form a community. I mean, you know, the doomer in me says, yeah, communities aren't being formed, plus there's too much manipulation from the system that you've been talking about. So I like. Dystopian vision is when the whole system collapses before people actually start to really engage in, understand, and do the things you're talking about right now.

RR: That's always been the way. I lived for almost 20 years in a hippie community in northern New South Wales, and we had many meetings in the first blush of my idealism of community and meeting.

And ultimately, you know, personalities - ego is what all got in the way, right? And it's the same on the microcosm as the macrocosm. It is our egos which are stopping us from connecting to each other and seeing there were all one in the face of this adversity or planetary collapse. And it's our egos on the macro level of what the government is. It's a collection of individuals who are the elites with all their billions of dollars. They're us.

There are. other expressions of the divine Source. I mean, it's only when things get really bad and start to collapse that we will either nationalize all the billionaire's money. I mean, you know what? If we had Bernie, here's a utopian vision. Bernie Sanders gets in. Biden somehow loses his marbles in the months leading up to the election. Trump goes out. Bernie comes in, ushers in a socialist wave of nationalization. Nationalize everything because the ship's going down. I mean, nationalize Facebook, right? I mean, when they say you've breached the community standards, who the fuck judges? Who's the community? I mean, we should. I mean, nationalize the billionaires, Amazon, Google, and Apple.

If we're in a planetary civilization - collapse- now is the time to pull out all the stops that the resources at our disposal could be detourned into a response to the planetary emergency.

But we're not quite there yet. But the thing is, we have all the tools we need to go back to the land and escape the cities that are going down, right? I mean, it's not just unprecedented. It's enormous. But where are the visions for this? We're talking about doom scrolling.

Where is the utopia scrolling? I mean, all the all the paradigm plans are out there, but they're lost amongst the noise, you know, and it won't, you know, there's a classic, the classic allegory that, you know, you throw a frog into boiling water it jumps out right but if you put it into cold water and slowly boil it, it's like this is okay, this is good, what's warmer in winter. Oh look the ice is melting that means we can have trade routes again all green land will be green are we should buy green land they're treating it like a monopoly board and it's a planet right. Because the water is starting to boil and we are going to die and the thing is.

We've died many times before. I mean it's the endless spiritual death and rebirth. And you could interpret that as an ego death, which is why the example of psychedelics and shamanic medicines is so valuable at this time.

It gives us a perspective that it's not bypassing but not attaching to the egoic construct, right? It's important and really the psychedelic community and the indigenous tribes and elders of the world need to come together on a mega zoom call. We need to like have training camps. We need to have a unified message of response to the planetary emergency.

I mean, that would be a good step forward.

DC: I have one last question for you, Rak. I'm curious about what you think think you're learning or what you think the message is from Toad Medicine. Now I've talked about ayahuasca quite a bit, other psychedelics, iboga quite a bit on this show, but nobody's ever brought up Toad Medicine. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Something Bigger Is In Control

RR: You know, I might have to come back, and that could be another show because it is a very big subject. I mean, Toad Medicine essentially amongst its 17 or so different other alkaloids in the secretion of Bufo alvarius toad contains 5MEO-DMT. We contain 5MEO-DMT, so, you know, I like to think that it's a sacred gift from Gaia through the toad to the humans at this time, even though, you know, 5MEO -DMT has been aware in the scientific records since the 30s,and the synthetic 5MEO has been around for many decades, it's never really taken off. It's an incredibly intense experience. I'm starting to see it all over the place, and not all over the place, but I'm starting to see it emerge in circles and stuff.

There's people around working with it. It's fast-tracked. It's really going everywhere now. So essentially, it's the ultimate ego dissolver, or potentially, and I would like to say that it's a gift from the toad but it's also training wheels because what it reveals, the toad medicine doesn't do this experience to you. It has the potential for ego dissolving into a non-dual or a unity state.

Again, it's that ego which we think we are. My favorite phrase is from the poet Rumi who says, "You are not the drop. You are the ocean in the drop." So that ocean at 7 .8 billion drops making making up the ocean of humanity, we don't feel them anymore. We're separate from them. We're separate from the planet. All of the psychedelics are ego dissolvers. That's what they've been called. The ego can bounce back, calcify, and come back stronger and more messianic in its approach after it's had a dissolving experience. Ultimately, what they do is that they reconnect.

When we drop the mind, mind we reconnect to what's behind the mind and that is Source consciousness it can be felt as an ocean of unconditional love, like an intensity, like the heart of a burning star– an endless infinite white light ocean of unconditional love– and there's an intelligence in it that sometimes in the event horizon of the ego dissolving into the infinite there's an understanding in an intuitive sense of all space-time as one organism and a manifestation of Source and Source itself as this infinite loving being, which is having the incarnate experience, not just as humans, but as everything.

So it has the potential to reveal dynamically and quickly what's behind the show, what's behind the illusion. And why is it peaking now? At this time of societal planetary collapse and transformation, I feel it's almost in training us and teaching us where the pathways are within us of one of the themes of what we've been discussing in this call: how do we let go of the ego?

How do we let go of control? How can we let go of control unless there's something bigger that we can trust and that is actually running the show? Because we've been trying to run the show and we've been fucking it up because we don't have the full perspective.

We don't understand the holographic nature of space-time and the intricacies of life itself as it manifests in the miracle of creation. And we've taken one little strand, eating away it, and pulling it.

So this medicine has the potential to reveal that we are the medicine and Source consciousnesses within us and that you don't have to fear, right? And so, if you can have that experience and you don't need to have a toad to do that, it's within you all along, you know, all through history, people have had spontaneous, mystical experiences of the same exact space toad medicine takes you to, because it's within you all along, then perhaps you can come back from that experience with a different perspective that can contribute to your return of your heroic journey to the emergency happening on the planet, which has the potential for emergence.

And I believe that the psychedelic shamanic communities of the world have touched this and have felt this emergence. and are sort of at the spearhead of holding space for it as it comes through.

Because imagine, back in 2012, there was the whole new age hippie rapture meme that went around, we all contain 5-MeO-DMT, the magnetic fields trigger, you know, a lowering of Default Mode Network in the planetary sort of circuit. There's a potential within us all to switch on to source consciousness. And yet we've never been triggered en masse, but the potential is there.

So imagine if everyone did switch on all at the same time, it would be basically a Christian rapture. It would feel like a planetary ceremony. But the ones who have had the experience before would know we're not going mad, would know that there's actually a larger process at work.

And it's almost as if the pressure of the times are going to create a response on a psychic level that perhaps we need a planet,  we're going through a planetary ceremony, but as we've said, we haven't hit the good bit yet. So I don't know, maybe that is coming, have faith, have trust, I don't think this is spiritual bypassing, I think this is trust in the process that there is a larger process happening and something bigger than us is is running the show.

And that in in each species there is an orgasm of the species, a crescendo into a peak experience by the pressures of evolution, and it seems like we're coming up to that potential.

DC:  Yeah, a young friend of mine number years back went to the Amazon to visit our teachers for some Elders and an indigenous tribe that that I'm familiar with and work with. And when he came back, I asked him how things were and of course he said he went and journeyed very deep and the comment that he made sticks with me today. He said, you know what man, fear is the first thing to go. And I just, there's so much fear. There's so many layers of fear. There's so much, I mean, I feel it. I have to deal with it daily 'cause I live here in the matrix. And so I don't think people can see through that fear often.

RR: And so it's my hope. that, you know, people either the field becomes so shocking and so visible that we have no way out but through it, or that people will manage and deal with this on their own through psychedelics or whatever works for them to get through this.

So there's so much fear. I'd like to see an end to that, you know. The great quote from Frank Herbert in Dune was, you know, fear is the mind killer. Fear is the little death.

And this is exactly what happened in an archetypal psychedelic experience. The ego mind that is always in control is being invited to let go. And the fear arises from the unknown.

And that is, fear is a death. Fear is a holding on to this body, to this control mechanisms. And it's only when we let go that we realize we're bigger than we thought, that there's something more.

And that is the opportunity.

So we're all feeling the fear, we're bigger than we thought that there's something more. We're feeling it subliminally in the field at the moment, because we can't plan for the future. We can't control what's happening. We don't know what's happening.

We're living in fear. This is part of the ceremony. When we can let go of that fear, we can connect to each other and connect to something bigger. And it's a process.

And we've got to trust the process, and we've got to support each other in the process. You know? It's like you don't know. You don't like abuse your fellow human beings when they're going through a traumatic experience.

You have empathy, you know, you understand we're all in this together and you hold each other's hand on the way home. That's what it's all about.

We're going home and the question is what is the home that we want to have, you know.

DC:  that's, that's powerful stuff, Rak. I appreciate your time, man. I think I would like to have you on some day and just talk about the toad medicine and like the nitty-gritties of the experience of some of the shamanic plant medicines because it's super, super fascinating to me. You're such a good storyteller, so that would be super fun. But yeah, thanks for your time, man, and I appreciate it. 

RR: It's a pleasure. I hope the conversation can contribute in a positive way to the planetary experience we're having. Because you know, whether you like it or not, there is a new world order coming – and that order is a sense of control, that order is a sense of ego, but the order can be a planetary order.

It can be something else that is ordering us to go home, let's just hope for the best and do everything that we can to make that happen. The only way out is through.

DC: Man that's it all right.

RR:  Much love Planet Earth.

DC: Yeah, much love. Thank you, Rak.