The Flowering Soul

If EntheoGenesis is awakening to the Divine within, what do we do with it then? Is the peak experience of divinity a seed to be integrated and/or a relationship to be nurtured? Is the current surge in Western interest in 5-MeO-DMT from synthetic and natural sources like the Bufo alvarius toad just the latest stage of an entheogenic relationship flowering in human consciousness? What are the other steps in anchoring this God consciousness? Beyond the toad, can we entrain our endogenous ability to anchor Source consciousness, and what would this mean?

So this talk is called “The Flowering Soul,” and it poses a few questions that are quite relevant to shamanic culture and the psychedelic experience, and specifically 5-MeO-DMT.

Does everyone know what entheogenesis is? It was a term that was coined in the 1980s to sort of give a different weight to the altered state experience in the West. The term psychedelic in the 60s was from the Greek, with psyche meaning “opening the mind.” Entheogenesis proposes that it is something, a substance, usually a plant-based substance and natural Gaian earth-made substance, but not necessarily, something that which invokes the Divine within. The substance might not be the thing causing it, but it's triggering or catalyzing your own awakening to your own inner Divinity. So entheogenesis is a term that is quite strategic to the Western shamanic experience.

So yeah, stage one is this term, which, you know, a lot of people are using now because it seems like it's the time for it. It's this idea of awakening, you know, and what that really means as a verb and as an ongoing process, whether that's a shamanic practice or a meditation practice, whatever modality brings you to this state of being this sense of knowing yourself on a deeper level, this is process underway of awakening.

So here's a quote from the The Last Barrier: A Journey into the Essence of Sufi Teachings By Reshad Feild.

So, as I said before, there's many ways as many catalysts, to awakening this divine, awareness within. There's meditation, which is a very noble and tried and true path for many thousands of years and different variations on that like Zen or Vipassana, or mindfulness. There's tantra, energy work; there's plant entheogens, earth sacraments; there's breath work; there's all these modalities and there's all these abilities we have to essentially still the busy mind and to tune back into the full capacity we have as a human organism.

As we may know, in the west, there's been a resurgence in interest over the last a hundred years or so, slowly coming out of the labs in the early 20th century, things like mescaline, nitrous oxide, and eventually LSD; then eventually an awareness of indigenous cultures who have been caretakers of psychoactive plants that change consciousness. And, there has been magic mushrooms, Salvia divinorum, San Pedro cactus, ayahuasca, etc., which have generally been on the cultural radar for a few generations, let's say even the last 25 years as it's really being cresting in the West. So these things are new, but they're very old and they've been preserved by the indigenous peoples of the world.

These are very powerful modalities to not just alter consciousness in a recreational way, but to bring more awareness and to bring relationship and to bring this understanding of who and what we really are and what we're embedded in, this larger reservoir of awareness and consciousness that seems to open up. So it seems to me no coincidence that the Bufo alvarius toad, which has obviously been around for millions of years and has been probably used by Mesoamerican cultures: the Olmecs, the Aztecs, the Maya, etc., for hundreds, if not thousands of years.

A lot of the iconography points to that in the existing, vases and visual representations. Some people argue that the toad is a avatar of the rain and then the crops and fertility, but you can look for yourself and you can see it very prominently placed with other shamanic archetypes, like the Jaguar or Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent, which are hugely revered and hugely central to their shamanic practices and understanding of the cosmology of the world.

One of the great gifts of the plant medicines has been not just altering awareness, but really healing and cleansing. And I think that's why ayahuasca has peaked so quickly and rapidly in the West, because the West has been the focal point of the imbalance in the world. And it’s the egoic drive which has separated us from nature and created this historical cascade which has resulted in the resource draining and the pillaging of mother Gaia and the disconnection from the awareness that she is us, that we're connected and that this is our mother.

So ayahuasca predominantly is a great purgative, and is something which cleans us out and almost reset us to “God's Factory Reset”, to allow us to resensitize and to reconnect. And then culturally, at this point in time, the toad medicine, the Bufo Alvarius toad, has come back into Mexico and into the West. And it allows us to remember the deeper experience, which I think is building upon the previous iterations and generations of plant medicine and altered experience.

So I first experienced the toad medicine in 2015 with Dr. Dr. Octavio Rettig and here’s a little quote from his book, the Toad of Dawn, which I wrote the introduction for:

So the organization I formed in 2015, after some of these initial toad experiences, is the Terra Incognita Project. It was a 501C3 not-for-profit in the States [since closed]. And one of its main thrusts is looking into the science and the shamanism of tryptamines, specifically 5-MeO, but also wider tryptamines. And we like to call this exploration neuroshamanism, because it takes the neuroscience and it takes the shamanism, and I realized that in the container, for instance, of a toad medicine ceremony, there's a delicate art. Like it's, it is pretty much a science, but it's also an art form. And there's so many subtle elements to creating that perfect container.

There is the set and setting that you do the medicine in, and then when you do the medicine, science can measure that, right? So we have sponsored a few studies now looking with EEG, what is happening in the brain with before and after tests on the toad. And it's very interesting. I'm probably going to mangle the results of our good doctor who is preparing his papers for publication. But in general, there's a few different things I can talk about.

So, you know, we have different layers of consciousness, different frequencies that the brain is working on when we are in different areas of thought. So there's alpha beta gamma, delta, theta… and I'm almost positive there's a zeta, you know, there should be as extra level because gamma was only really found in the last 25 years or so in the technology got good enough to register that there was this frequency of vibrational thought, you know, so it makes me think that there's other levels as well.

So essentially we go through our normal day and we alternate in our different frequencies that we're in. If we're in problem solving mode its beta; or just ideating we might be in a sort of dreamy alpha state, in a deeper meditative level.

The interesting thing about gamma is–snails are in gamma. If you've ever seen those YouTube videos where two snails are making love, and they're just like rolling around each other, they're in this unity state.

Essentially what's happening with the brain on 5-MeO-DMT: with most of the psychedelics, they've done a lot of research in recent years, looking at what's happening and there's clustered regions of the brain, which are involved in creating the sense of ego and identity. They call it the Default Mode Network (DMN). All the traditional psychedelics and entheogens like ayahuasca seem to switch off different areas of the Default Mode Network. With 5-MeO-DMT it actually works in the prefrontal lobes, the parietal lobes of the brain and it switches them offline. So something in the wetware.

Basically we know that the tryptamines are very close to serotonin itself, which is like a very fundamental component of the brain structure and of consciousness itself. I often say that, you know, tryptamines are endogenous, which means that your body produces tryptamines naturally, just like the toad, right.

Melatonin will be released from the serotonin pathways after about three days and then you'll start to build up the other natural endogenous tryptamines, which usually are produced in your cerebral spinal fluid, your lungs, different areas like that. We're still not really sure about the pineal gland. It's not being tested on human subjects. They have confirmed N,N-DMT in the pineal glands of rats, and it remains to be seen with humans.

But essentially tryptamines in general are very fundamental to consciousness. I mean, Rick Strassman wrote the book DMT: The Spirit Molecule, which Mitch Schultz then made the documentary about, and they posit that, N,N-DMT at least is the chemical catalyst for those experiences at birth, death, and near death experiences of altered states and the visionary experience.

It also involves 5-MeO-DMT, which is the traditional experience of the white light, the sense of Source, Creation, the Creator, those very deep spiritual experiences. It's built into our wetware. It's natural. I call it God's backdoor access. It’s like we're designed to connect to these realms of being, so what stops that from happening? Usually it’s the sense of ego and identity.

Science says that we actually have three brains. There's the head brain. There's also neuronal cells in the heart, which they really can't explain except that there is some type of thinking capacity or similarity between the neuronal structure of the brain or the cell structure of the brain and the heart.

And there's also the gut instinct and the stomach brain. And we do know now that we're colony organisms. We're not what we think we are as individuals and what the ego is sort of, you know, it ices the cake and gives us a sense of “I”. But we're actually collective organisms as 97% of our DNA are micro organisms that live in your stomach biome in the little ecosystem down there, which we need and we can't survive without breaking food down. These organisms must have some rudimentary consciousness of their own, but they contribute to our collective consciousness, which makes up the “I”.

So interestingly enough, when the Default Mode Network and/or the frontal lobes of the brain go offline and the ego recedes, what remains? What remains to have the experience or that sense of unity? What remains to pick up the signal, which is always being broadcast?

So it brings up this idea of what is consciousness? You know, there's all these levels; what we're really realizing with the shamanic experience and altering consciousness and reconnecting, and with toad medicine and going into these very deep surrendered spaces of egoless-ness, is that consciousness is bigger perhaps than we've been led to believe.

There's a nice little quote I draw upon by Alfred North Whitehead, who was an influential philosopher in the late 19th, early 20th century. And he called consciousness “the awareness of awareness, or the aperception of pattern as such”. It's almost like that signal to noise thing. It's like, what is it?

You know it when you're conscious, but you're not conscious of consciousness till you're conscious of consciousness! The thing is though, when we talk about entheogens, it's almost as if we need an expanded palette of language to differentiate the dual state consciousness and the non-dual state.

Metaphor is really good as well because this is a numinous experience. 5-MeO-DMT is in many ways ineffable, yet I have, and there are other people that can create a scaffolding for the gist of the experience. You can't contain the ocean in a drop, but as the poet Rumi, the Persian poet said, he called the Divine the beloved, and this experience of like, when the drop rejoins the ocean, you know, when that sense of individuality and whatever it is on a molecular level that keeps that drop singular, and yet it's in an interconnected unity of drops, which is an ocean, it's in a larger collection, a larger container.

And when our sense of identity falls away and we realize we're embedded in that bigger universal consciousness –that can't be put into words, but words can help trigger an emotional response or a feeling of groping towards the ineffable.

And I think it's important because our culture needs to have a language of the Divine because without it it's invisibilized, and that erosion of relationship and of connection to mother nature, which is the Divine made manifest, it goes even deeper into the Creator itself. It's like without the language to hold space for that concept, we lose the ability to utilize that pathway.

So out of all of these different shamanic cultures and other world cultures who have traveled the seas of consciousness, one of the best maps I've come across is the Vedas. This actually happened a couple of years ago at an ayahuasca retreat, someone left a big Kriya Yoga book.

It was like an original book on what is now called Kundalini yoga. But in there it was the original Vedic sort of translations. And there was entire chapters on mudras and visioning and entities and Source consciousness. And I'm like, oh my God, this is like everything I've ever really experienced in a shamanic sense, but this is a whole modality map left behind by Vedic scholars, using meditation and their techniques of going deeper into awareness.

And I've been really drawn to the Vedic traditions. I mean the Rig Veda itself is, you know, there's like a third of it– I haven't read the whole text– but there's a large portion of it dedicated to the, to an entheogen called the Soma, which was the thing which essentially awakened the God within. And it seems like there's been relationships in all of these earlier world cultures–it's almost like the mark of a really advanced culture is a relationship with nature, which takes of the fruits, which not just alters consciousness, but plugs us into the larger spectrum of consciousness and of reality.

So in the Vedic tradition, they have different ways to describe the geography of the mind. And I'm just going to touch upon a few of them because they're very appropriate to the non-dual or the unity state that we experienced in 5-MeO-DMT, or with tryptamines in general.

So they have a word for the stuff of the mind itself, the component parts, which they call Citta, and there's different components within that, but there's this idea of citta being the water of consciousness or this metaphor that consciousness has chambers or levels. If the water of consciousness is the citta, then the waves on that water are the vritti, the waves of thought in the citta or the whirlpool, the mental chatter that takes form on a calm lake of the mind itself. That's usually the vritti –the thing that we think of when we're in this egoic battle with ourselves to calm our minds down, or to stop the flow of thoughts, or when the mind just won’t calm down on its own. It's not the full mind. That's the only part of the mind, that's, you know, one level of the mind.

So if you have the water of mind and the waves of thought on the water, the true self in the Vedic tradition is called Atman, or the bottom of the lake. That's the deep soul. And that's where there's not that noise, that chatter of the mind. And so this is a quote from a book I highly recommend. There's a lot of different translations. It's the Yoga Sutras by Patanjali. And he says:

“The bottom of the lake, we cannot see because its surface is covered with ripples. It is only possible when the ripples have subsided and the water is calm for us to catch a glimpse of the bottom. If the water is muddy, the bottom will not be seen. If the water is clear and there are no waves, we shall see the bottom. The bottom of the lake is our own true self. The lake is the citta and the waves of the vrittis when the lake is calm, that state is called sattva, or serenity.”

So it's a very intelligent discernment of these levels of the mind itself. And so with that as the preamble or the understanding as we go into these non-dual unity states, I think it helps us realize that there's these different levels of the mind we can let go of, and then we can start to accept. Because it's almost as if we're not going into a space that is separate from us. We're revealing a space which is within us. And it's just the deeper chambers of that space. And in some really weird 12-dimensional geography, we connect to that space and the pathways have been built in.

So if entheogenesis is awakening the God within, what, then? We've all had the peak experiences and we're all about to go back to the world. And we all have this “galactivated synaptic connection” now. And what do we do with that? How do we retain the benefits of that?

In many of the spiritual traditions the second step after the first phase of awakening is purification. Here is a quote from an online article on the path of purification on meander.org, as implied by the title:

“The path of purification relates to a form of spiritual cleansing and refinement. It is a phase when an individual deeply recognizes that spiritual development can only occur when the distortions or the personality or the lower self have been transformed. Every evolutionary step upon the path is accomplished only because a measure of purification has been demonstratively straight, lovely achieved from this cleansing. An individual is better able to sense the intuitive impulses coming from the soul.”

And this is really important because I think in general, especially with shamanic medicines, they're cleansing and they're reconnecting and they're sensitizing. Because this is the thing; somewhere along the line–and we only have 10 to 12,000 years of recorded history… We know there's been huge geological catastrophes, meteor strikes, tectonic plate shifts, and you know there have potentially been Golden Age cultures, which have fallen before.

There's been trauma in our genetic memory, in our cultural data banks. I mean so much trauma, they've done DNA testing, and they think that all humans, 7 billion plus of us who currently exist, came from a small group of under a hundred people who survived one of these latest catastrophes in larger geological time. And I mentioned that because there's also in many of the Judaeo-Christian type religions and others, there's legends of the deluge, or the floods, or the “Fall,” as well.

So there’s this idea of the “fall of consciousness,” you know, that perhaps it wasn't just a physical event, which could have been traumatic enough. But what if at one stage in the long train of human history, we also had a different level of consciousness itself? Like those larger chambers of consciousness that we can now identify. What if it was as the Aboriginals in Australia, say, what if we had a dream time consciousness and you know, many of these ancient cultures who have been on the land understand cyclic time.

The Mayans and the Vedic culture as well, have these idea of world ages. And within the world ages, there's perhaps seasons of consciousness where we go from, you know, full spectrum, five-bar galactic Godhead consciousness like full, got it. Remember walking in that dream time state? And then it goes down to one bar. And the last 10-12,000 years of history, it seems to have been like one bar of consciousness.

And I feel that's why the ego kicked in, you know, it kicked in as a survival mechanism and as a trauma response for the human species. And so the value of plant medicines in this time, which tribal peoples who traditionally, you know, the uncontacted or the recently contacted tribes who anthropologists have connected with, don't usually have, members who have mental imbalances.

They don't usually have social stressors or the tribe as a cohesive unit supports, nurtures, loves and survives by the support of the tribe. And the sensitivities of the members of the tribe… if you're hugely sensitive, you're probably going to get pegged to be the medicine person role, to be the shaman. It's a absorbed as necessary. Everyone's unique, you know, components become a necessary part of the survival of the tribe.

And so in the West, especially in the last few thousand years as we've fallen out of balance, the plant medicines, which have been held by indigenous tribes as they've come back into the West, only in the last few generations, are re-sensitizing us. And remember, if the whole drift of history has been this egoic response to deep species trauma, then that's what we need healing from. And that seems to be what the earth medicines are doing.

And in that re-sensitization, we can come back to awareness of ourselves embedded within a planetary intelligence and a loving Source consciousness. And we can hold that vibration. So the way to do that once the, the sensitization is underway is to keep that through purification.

So we've talked a little bit about people that have had 5-MeO-DMT and in the days, weeks, or even years afterwards, there's this idea of reactivations. And I really like to say that once you've activated the pathways, the potential is there and it's up to you to maintain that relationship. So it's not that just all of a sudden, you'll have a reactivation. It's when you've learned to calm the vritti, the waves, the mental chatter, and go deeper into that ocean of your own consciousness, which is always there. It's always–the center is everywhere and it's always being broadcast.

And if we're sensitive enough, we can build that sensitization muscle and we can hear the signal, we can feel the signal in the heart-brain, you know, and we can develop that relationship and ongoing practice of sensitization to what has been revealed.

So how do we do that? I mean, it's really good to have support from different modalities. Like we mentioned at the start: yoga, meditation, tantra, breath work, all of these are actually byproducts of a lot of these original Vedic traditions or traditions from cultures in India and Asia. And as we mentioned at the start, in a lot of their original texts they had a shamanic practice, or they had an entheogen, which connected to them. It's yet to be proven. I mean, psychedelic and shamanic culture is still burgeoning in the West– and very rapidly–but the origins are still unknown.

For instance, now the last six or so times I've done N,N-DMT, I’ve had this very curious thing happen where I'd be lying down, you know, the pipe would go down, I'd lie down and IT would activate. And N,N-dimethyltryptamine for people who don't know, it’s a more visionary state where you can sort of end up anywhere in the astral, maybe inside your own DNA, maybe outside in any of the multiplicity of layers between Source and the material world.

It's almost as if the energetic ecology of nature extends out into a vibrational dimensionality which in shamanic traditions, they believe is autonomous and independently connected. But it contains creatures like us, which have their own independent, energetic relationships on the astral.  

So in my experiences with DMT I had this thing happen where I was sat up and my hands formed into a mudra. And the first time it happened, it was like a spinning wheel really fast. Really. I can't even do it. It was like, like super fast. And I'll be like what is going on? And then, you know, this was spaced out over about two years, and every time I smoked normal N,N–DMT, this would happen to a degree.

And I started to see little, almost like phosphene imprints, y’know those little white spermy things you can see in the light. You've seen those? But these were very pronounced. And it was like, I was surrounded by this air bag of consciousness and these little white spermy things–they didn't feel like they were like entities separate from me. And I was just grokking and downloading as I do.

And I sort of intuited that it was basically my, my stomach biota. My microorganisms in the gut which are 97% of my bulk of DNA. And that our sense of ego and identity even extends to the astral. So like, when we think we leave the body, as you seen in Hollywood films, the astral form, it looks just like your body, right.

But what I was seeing was like this externalization, perhaps of my stomach biota and because they were in control of my autonomous system, my nervous system, they were moving my body and they were moving into mudras. And over time that would even raise my hand to my finger and tap my other hand to like, alright, focus, are you ready now? And I'd be like, all right, let's do it. And then they'd do the mudras. And I'm like, this is really surreal.

But what it felt like was like a calibration on the inkjet printers, old ink jet printers when you’d do a test print. It was like they were calibrating my body by doing these asanas and mudras and positions. And so I asked a lot of people in shamanic culture in the West, and there was, I'd say 5% of people who've experienced it. It's a phenomenon.

And then Martin Ball, He's gone a lot further with it. And he can almost do it on command nowadays. He calls it fractal energetic yoga, and he has a whole lot of thoughts on “mirrored bilateral symmetry” and the way the energy of the body holds itself. But what I got from it is that these original cultures, which we think were handed down mudras and asanas, and the yogic traditions, they got the idea from somewhere.

And what I'm getting from my direct contact experiences is that the limbic system and the autonomous nervous system is connected through the tryptamines to both our own intelligent body and then also deeper up into Source itself. So some people even on 5-MeO-DMT do go into spontaneous mudras and yogic positions.

Some people will go into spontaneous shavasana, like a corpse pose, with their body outstretched in like an X position, you know? And so the energy is shooting through and traveling through. And what I got from that is the higher vibrational energy, the density of that loving intelligence super-radiating ocean of love that yes, when the ocean pours into the drop, it shapes us and it forms us and it clears a lot of vibration.

But when it's clear, then it can come in and it can move and dance you, and there's a relationship with Source in its Creation in our bodies, in our temples. So yeah, that really made me tune in even more to these Vedic traditions and think of the relationships. It's almost like these things have been left behind to practice, to optimize and to tune us into these states of being, and allow us to be pure.

And what is it, the value of that? The more purer we become, it's not just a metaphor. Our bodies are temples for the Holy Spirit, for Source to animate. Like, I don't believe that Source or the Creator or the creation made all of creation as like some Truman Show virtual reality thing to watch at a distance. I mean, it's essentially made Creation out of its own essence. And the process I believe is not over. It's continuing.

And it seems the combination of this part of the process is that as more and more of us are tuned in with plant medicines and then toad, there's a cascade and there's a stepping stone and there's a pattern I'm starting to see coming in. And it is cyclic because these cultures have left these maps of consciousness before. They've been here too. It seems to come and go.

So, yes, in the relationship with the 5-MeO state–and it doesn't have to be from toad–what we, what we're getting at here is I really believe toad or synthetic 5-MeO is coming back at this point in human history, in the world ages. And as the energy's rising and the old paradigm is obviously disintegrating before our eyes. And we're going full circle into the new paradigm, which is just pushing through those first little buds and shoots of this flowering.

And in our relationship with this process what I have found is this: I've had activations on other medicines, especially with ayahuasca. It feels like the vibrational field, which is reactivated that first time you had that first breakthrough 5-MeO experience, I call it, the “galactivation”.  Once that's on, it's always there. And it's a choice you will make every day and with every breath.

And I've had times, sometimes for weeks at a time, where something's just present and I feel it more in the heart, you know. It feels like because the ego’s in the mind, in the brain mind, that if you remain in the heart more and it overflows with that vibration feeling, it's the drop wanting to go back to the ocean. It's there, it's always connected to the ocean, but you just have to feel it.

So there's also different levels, as well as the sattva, the vritti”.  and the Citta”. The sattva is the serenity state of the ego, but there's also different levels of what the Vedas call “Samadhi”. These levels of going deeper and deeper into that oceanic unity of the Divine Source. And so the Yoga Sutras maps this really well; essentially there's different translations and slightly different variations, but essentially they list up to five different levels of samadhi.

And so there's different levels of activation as we may have experienced with different dosages of 5-MeO, you know, from that slight sort of micro dose, that activation of the vibration in the body to that deepening saturation, like in some type of gamma cohesive unity field, but you're still in the ego to witness and remember it and to feel it. To then deeper when you sort of go almost all the way into potentially the white light or that sense of unity and there's enough of you left or to realize where you are, but that's all you can hold, a witnessing consciousness, the ocean in your drop.

I’ve only had this once, and it was with synthetic 5-MeO. With many of my first experiences with 5-MeO it would be like, as the ego starts to like peel away and go…  I’d be like, “oh my God, oh, no, please, please. I just want it to stop.” Like, stop would be the key word. And then I realized when I came back, I never really wanted it to stop, but I had to know there was an off switch. 

And then I had this experience once where I went up to like level four, basically what I call the witness. And there's different people at different terminologies. My friend, Richard King, who's a Vedic scholar, he calls it the Cauldron’s Rim. So you get all the way up to the rim. And on that, it's like, there's only unity, but there's just enough of an ego left to witness it in perfect radiating super union, it’s all there is and all there is and all there is and it’s love.

There’s no other thought but that, that's what I call the witness. But I got to that stage once. And then all of a sudden it started to go deeper and slip over, over the Cauldron’s Rim. So there was enough for me to go, oh my God. And it goes even deeper. Right. And, and then all of a sudden–gone, just gone. Like I remember going, and then I don't know how long it was, but let's say five minutes later–STOP came out of nowhere. And it was so interesting because that individual vibrational wavefront of individuality of consciousness, the drop went back into the ocean, it went to level five, it was gone. And the miracle of miracles, how does it do it? But the drop comes back from the ocean! Like joy. Like it's still a miracle that happens.

But then almost in reward or training, I really feel there's really such loving, gentle heavenly protocols and permissions. And we say with people who are doing this work with the medicine, there's a biological component, there's a body weight thing. There's an armoring thing. There's resistance. There’s your sensitivity. There's you saying yes to it. You really wanting it. There's all these real world components. And I know in my heart, there's these permissions from ancestors and from Great Spirit and from the heavenly unfolding.

Because you know, all of space time has already happened. We've already happened, right. We're always happening. It’s like the past is our toe down there on our foot, and the futures, the ear up here. And we think they're separate, but they're totally connected, you know, space times is an organism.

And, so anyway, so basically it felt like the heavenly permission protocol, as well as like, alright, I can see, you're really need to know there's an off switch and an on-switch, but you know what, there's also a crossfade and there's a volume control. And I swear it was like Dolby surround sound of the soul. All of a sudden within that space, the volume knob could go up and down, like the conscious awareness of the volume of Source, how much you can take in and the cross fade. And I'm like, wow, okay, there's all this extra functionality. And that's the only time that's half of it. I'm like, alright, that's something to explore as well.

So all of that, while there's still ego involved is still really the witness level four. And this is what Patanjali says in the Yoga Sutras about some of the different levels:

“…When the sattva state only of the ego remains, but differentiated from all other objects, this is called Asmita Samadhi, and the man who has attained to this has attained to what is called in the Vedas “bereft of body”. He can think of himself as without his gross body. but he will have to think of himself as with a fine body. Those that in this state get merged in nature without attaining the goal are called Prakrtilayas, but those who do not even stop at any enjoyments reach the goal, which is freedom.”

This is really interesting because over my relationship with the medicine lately, I get to that stage of merging with nature all the time. My full release goes into holding the ocean in my drop in unity, in nature with everything. What they're saying in the Yoga Sutras is almost like don't get distracted. You know, it's like all of it is beautiful. All of it is blissful. But the ultimate goal is a true sense of the true self of Atman, of the soul, of samadhi, of that reunification with God. And all of these levels of sort of training us to go deeper and deeper into that full ultimate surrender, which takes everything you've got. And that's the point.

So at that point we get to the flowering, which is stage three.

The Yoga Sutra have a map for this sense of samadhi, this sense of freedom. They say: “In that sort of concentration when there is consciousness, where the mind has succeeded only in quelling the waves in the citta and holding them down, they are still there in the firm of tendencies, and these tendencies (or seeds) will become waves again, when the time comes. But when you have destroyed these tendencies, almost destroyed the mind, then it has become seedless, there are no more seeds in the mind out of which to manufacture again and again this plant of life, this ceaseless round of birth and death.”

Yeah. And that's, that's the thing. I mean, we dissolve into this oceanic unity experience and at some stage we understand it's okay to let go, but we still got these cords. We've still got these connections, these tendencies, these seeds. And it feels like this is training again and again, sharpening the blade of the soul by going in, because eventually there's going to come a time when the body decides it's time to leave, or the soul to leave the body, where we step over. And so this is the practice. This is the great practice. This is the flowering of the soul.

So the Rig Veda itself is a Sanskrit term meaning to “praise or shine” and also knowledge. It's an ancient Indian collection of Sanskrit hymns. So I described those five stages of consciousness. So essentially that seedless Samadhi, to work from the top down that, that full ultimate surrender to God nature is level five. Level four is what I call the witness, which is still has the connecting seeds.

Uh, level three is what they call sambogha. It's like a bliss body. It's that activation of energy, but you're still in the ego and can still, you know, move around and interface. Level two and level one, they’re lower levels. Now, interestingly enough, the Yoga Sutras… sutra means to weave. And the Vedic scholar I interviewed, Richard King, he was saying that basically, when you get to the rim of the Cauldron, you get to level four and all you can do is witness the glory of God and that's it over and over, perfect radiating super-union.

When you go to level five, when you cusp over AND you come back, that creates the weaving, that is the suture of the soul. In doing that individually were anchoring essentially a bit of Samadhi-God nature on earth in us, in our vibration, because we've gone over and we've come back and we've made that loop, we’re anchoring that relationship.

Essentially he believes that, you know, 1800 years ago in the Indus valley, amongst all the political machinations and usual tribal cultural stuff, that the culture which anchored the Rig Vedas and wrote all this down, they had a Golden Age. They had for quite a few hundred years, an era of peace prosperity and both intellectual and spiritual advancement. And they did that because this is what they practiced, right?

So imagine if we apply the map they've left, not just of the states of samadhi and consciousness, but culturally that they did this together. So potentially–here's the thing which Richard and I talked about and we believe was happening–is that collectively and culturally, they made a machine of their bodies and their souls. They made a container to anchor heaven on earth.

So this is a thought experiment. But imagine if you're in a culture in which you can do this, and we support each other to do this, like they did this, and you have, maybe you've got a village and maybe in the center of the village, you got a monastery. And in the monastery, you've got the levels and the layers and the container. And you've got people who are sweeping the floors and cooking and doing the things which are so fundamental to the foundations of that space.

And then maybe they’re in level one activation through their prayers and meditations and whatnot. And then you have people in level two, maybe interfacing with higher, up in the energetic hierarchy of the network. Then you have level three, sambhoga bliss bodies who are maybe in ceremonial space, but around the perimeter and holding that space. 

You have some people in the machinery of the soul who go into level four, who are witnessing and holding the great samadhi space. And then in the center you have at least, and maybe you only need one–you have someone who is in level five samadhi God consciousness–all the time. I don't know. Maybe we could alternate who that person is. I don't know how they do it.

But interestingly enough, when some practitioners of 5-MeO-DMT do group work, they form a gestalt “ship” and the gestalt is this collection of our vibratory fields, of our information fields, of everything we bring to that container. And then as Source pours in, and we do the group work together, someone goes into full release and powers the ship, the component parts we bring to create the vehicle of us as we sail in those inner space realms.

I think that's what they were doing. I think that was the whole point of their culture, not just the yogas and the mudras and things like that. I think they were artifacts and they were modalities to reinforce the concentration and the purification. But the deep samadhi states they reached, they did it collectively.

And it seemed to create an entrainment in each other, in the group, a cohesion. Because remember when the frontal lobe goes down/ offline and the ego reduces, Source consciousness can come through and it's the same Source consciousness coming through in everyone doing the ceremonial work together. And then the Source, like when it forms into the mudras, it calibrates and it knows where it wants to go and how it wants to be, like God's Lego, what it wants to build from that.

So back then, 1800 years ago in the Indus valley, they created a Golden Age. And, you know, it feels that as individuals; in computing terminology there’s this thing called a mesh network. And it's like an internet router thing if the internet goes down. If I have a base station over here, and someone does there, the more people that join the network the stronger that network gets. And the more reach it gets. And it's almost as if we're creating a samadhi mesh network, essentially, the more people who tune into not just toad medicine, because remember all pathways lead to central Source.

You can get to the white light, mystical Godhead space through breath, work through meditation, through tantra, through spontaneous activation. You know, all of these things via the heavenly permissions and protocols are sculpting us– it's sculpting itself. And that's what we are. We’re the formation of itself being sculpted. But together we create this samadhi mesh network and we are the drops that anchor the ocean.

And so this is what I see the real value of perhaps where shamanic culture in the West is going, is to reignite the traditions of mystery schools and to have the peak experience last longer in retreat scenarios. And then to make the retreats last longer into ongoing centers where we can anchor and do this work and weave heaven into earth and create these samadhi mesh networks as they activate.

Because it creates this vibration and then it spreads. It doesn't just remain centralized. It's felt by everyone and everything. And so I really feel that we are all petals on the heavenly flower, and that we can do more as a group than we can as individuals.

So one last little wrinkle on this. The Secoya tribe in Ecuador, they work with 5-MeO- DMT in their version of ayahuasca. They call it yage, and instead of the N,N-DMT in the brew from chacruna or chaliponga, they use wambisa, and wambisa has concentrations of 5-MeO-DMT. But the interesting thing is they say like, you know, most cultures, how did you first put the two plants together?

They say the knowledge was given to them by the star people or the people who live in the light, and they are so sensitized to the way they prepare the medicine. They'd spend about two weeks traditionally back in Ecuador in the old days at least, singing to the medicine, purifying the medicine. So it is so purified that the essence of the star people can come down and be with them in the medicine, in the light, and then they used to drink it in hammocks off the ground so that'd be elevated as well.

So it's that type of sensitization and purification I think that is the next level, you know, and is the way we anchor this relationship with Source and wooing it and inviting it into our bodies and into our lives and our presences. And it feels to me that the first time that I had the toad, Octavio was chanting some of the Seri chants. And some people say, “What's the value of shamanism with 5-MeO? What's the value of the rattle and the songs?

And, you know, if you're in level five or even four samadhi state, yeah. Your ego’s not there. Your ego is not hearing the songs. But subtly the other parts of your unconscious and your body are. It's like creating the layering in the container, but it's also, these songs are ancient and these songs have power and they invoke and they call in the ancestors, they call in the spirits.

And so the first time I did toad within three seconds, I was gone, I was in the white light. And then maybe within 10 seconds, I was back, but I'll still in the light. And I could hear, well, I couldn't hear Octavio exactly. But in the light, there were like these four wizened, Mesoamerican shamans, and they were singing–and they were singing me back from Source, like from deep Source. And that was when everything popped and the baptism and the blessing.

And I realized later, much later–from this idea of the Secoya–that perhaps, if our consciousness is refined enough–and this is what the Buddhists say–that the whole point of life is to refine your consciousness enough that it retains its integrity to step over the point of physical death, into the light and into the afterlife and retain cohesiveness and control, to not be caught up in the wheel of fate and death and rebirth and all of that. But to be able to be functional, to realize that you're not just your body.

And so I started to piece this together over time and I was just feeling like, wow, if, if my experience of beings in the light–and that was obviously maybe like level four, so you can survive at that level–and the Bible says, you know, you can't look upon the naked face of God and survive. And what I feel it means is the ego can't survive level five samadhi, you've just got to let go and be it, you know.

But at those other layers, when you're still deep in Source? It seems to be around, I call it the event horizon, what Richard King calls the Cauldron’s Rim. That's when there's just a witnessing consciousness, but it seems like that's where I always feel like I encounter the ancestors and they exist in the light, on the astral, in deep Source.

And so, wow, I'm thinking if you can survive as consciousness on a certain gradated level of Samadhi-Source, then perhaps there's an invitation to do so. I call this, the orgasm of the species.

In those cycles of history there’s a fall of consciousness and then five bar building again, and the support of all the plants and all Gaia, and all Source to woo us and to come into us and to dance us and to love us and to teach us that this flesh and this biological physical world in all its beauty, which is Source as well, is sort of just like the womb, you know. And the entire physical universe–we can go out there, but the real juicy next horizon is inside. It's in the light.

What if at the same point in history that civilizations always collapsed because that's the time for it to collapse? And all the resources are centralized by one of the species. And we take everything we can for that transformation, from the caterpillar to the butterfly. And just at the point of complete ecological planetary crisis, we step over. Like, we let go. We recognize from all the training we've been doing of our luminous bodies, that we can step over and live in the light.

It’s just an idea, but I'm putting it out there. So this is from my introduction to the Toad of Dawn:

Thank you. I'm Rak Razam.

“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took for blossom,” – Anais Nin.