Wisdom Code: Teachers of the Mystery

Welcome to The Mushrooms Apprentice. I'm your host, Shonagh Home. Well, my dear listeners, you are in for a treat today. Rak Razam is a mythic storyteller, screenwriter, author, journalist, filmmaker, and public speaker. He has been exploring psychedelics and spirituality for the past 15 years, producing the critically acclaimed adaptation of his book, Aya: Awakenings, and now producing his current documentary series, Shamans of the Global Village, which offers an intimate look at the resurgence of medicine people around the world working with psychoactive tools for community healing and enlightenment.

Rak has taken groups to Peru for a number of years to experience Ayahuasca, and he facilitates and works with the medicine of 5-MeO-DMT in countries where it's legal. His website is RakRazam.com, which is loaded with highly relevant writing and videos, and you can type in Rak Razam on YouTube and subscribe to his YouTube channel. I met Rak ten years ago when he interviewed me, and I had the pleasure of meeting him in person probably 4 or 5 years ago, with all his gifts and talents and experience. Welcome back.

Rak: Why thank you, Shonagh. I am, very happy to be here and really happy to see you continuing to flourish in your role within the community. We're all here to give back and to do something, you know, the way we have within us to do. I'm enjoying these connections that we share and thank you for having me on your show.

Shonagh: You're so welcome. You have led a fascinating life. And so I would just first like to hear how did you find your way to the medicine path in the first place?

Rak: Well, this is a it's a very good question to openly thank you. And I'll just back up a bit there by saying, probably hundreds of thousands or maybe even millions of people are experiencing their own version of this at the moment.

So, as we know in the last, you know, few years, what's been called the Psychedelic Renaissance has coalesced and there's a lot more positive, press and sort of momentum behind this movement to re introduce psychedelics and the healing potentials of them to the medical establishment.

A Global Resurgence of Shamanism

But also there's, a movement around the world, what I call the Global Shamanic Resurgence, which doesn't need you to go into the medical establishment, but, to have your own ceremony or your own, connection with the divine within mediated through, plants and Earth medicines. So all of us have a beginning. All of us have an origin point.

Shonagh: And, you know, you were saying earlier, you know, many of us say, well, I'm not the type of person who would do drugs. How did you end up in this path?

Rak: Well, it's very important, you know, because what is the difference between a drug and a medicine? It's intention because everything is a chemical, right? And the ubiquity and the ease of use and the medical establishment and its terminology and sort of placing of these ideas of drugs as something we take.

This isn't the medicine world. This isn't just things we take. These are relationships that we form within ourselves, with our subconscious, with sorting out our issues, and also with connecting them to the larger ecology of the energetics of the planet, which that information and that feeling of connection is available to us as human beings.

So I came on to my path. Well, let's say it's always been an alternative path adding to these type of ideas, and I never knew it was abnormal. But I guess I've always been the black sheep; I trace, some of the, inflection points or the turning points, in, well, 15 years, 20 years ago now, almost.

I was a freelance journalist, and I was working on a lot of countercultural, spiritual, issues. And so my real turning point is I went down to Peru in 2006 to work on an article about Ayahuasca. And not just Ayahuasca is the medicine, but also what the mythic role of the shaman was that archetype in, indigenous cultures in Peru and coming back into the West and what it meant for the West to be reengaging with this digital sacrament of Ayahuasca and with the legacy and lineage of the teachings that it was providing.

So that was really my big initiation into the plant medicine world. I did come from the outdoor music festival, the scene with psychedelics beforehand. And there's always been an element of intentionality in terms of altered states, of being with me, of exploring and making sense of it. You know, these things aren't just recreational – they have capacities that can reveal so much information within us.

So, in 2006, I went down to Peru and I did that article, which turned into a book which became, Aya: Awakenings, and then that book then turned into a documentary adaptation. We had a lot of video footage that we, had taken during that, that first, trip. And, we really tried to recreate the interior landscapes and take people on a journey through the film, just as we did with the book.

The Collective Hero's Journey

So those, those media artifacts sort of set me on the path of being a person who knows? I guess you could say, you know, that's the Latin for the word initiate, one who knows, but you have to have initiation to know. So in Joseph Campbell's archetypal book, the Hero with a Thousand Faces, he maps out this idea of the hero's journey, and there's different variations on it.

You choose. Right. You're not a passive victim. You're in control of your life. And you can choose. And these medicines can reveal, a connection to a deeper level of reality and understanding. And this isn't, you know, hippie dippy, airy fairy stuff. This is, it's. You could call it mystical. We could call it spiritual, but these are plateaus of being and experiencing, which have their own rhythms and their own rules, if you will.

There's a mastery which can happen with your learning, just as if you might learn yoga or something. There's techniques and there's capacities and you learn more about yourself. So the plants and earth medicines are also teaching us. They are the teachers often, you know, in Peru, in the indigenous, language, they'll call that the plants or the spirits in the plants, the teachers.

And so we are engaging with a relationship with nature through the plants, which in Western culture we have atrophied and we have lost that connection. And we've been imprisoned up here in the mind and going to 9 to 5 and living in a box. And, there's more to life.

So I had my big initiation, which meant leaving behind the known world, having that initiation, and then coming back to the tribe in the heroic return with my knowledge, and trying to put it out there in ways which might be comprehensible and help people who are also on the path of discovery.

Shonagh: Okay. Yeah. And then you continue to initiate yourself. I mean, it's quite a process. Okay.

Rak: The real secret is I don't think the initiation ever ends in the sense that there's an infinite expanse of reality, just as if you might, you know, and then you do. You do a white belt and a yellow belt. Blue belt or a black belt. There's levels of gradations of learning, even just within one sort of system.

But then what you quickly discover when working with psychedelics is it's infinite. And so there's people that come to this work with the medicines, maybe for their own personal healing, maybe they have a specific issue they're working on which, you know, psychedelics in general, through all that medical, reappropriation of these substances have proven the efficacy for different issues.

But, you know, these substances can heal specific issues or even in a bigger sense, you don't have to have a physical sickness. When I first went down to Peru all that time ago, one of the main things that the curanderos. 

But this feeling is what's it all about. And so this not knowing is the first step. We have to realize what you don't know, to realize that there's more out there and it's waiting for you. And there are many, many modalities. Obviously, life is an infinite choose your own adventure, you know?

And so plant medicines and earth medicines are just one facet of that. There's many ways to access your own divine knowledge. And what we're saying is that these substances are valid, they have a power, they have a potential, and they have a relationship with humans that goes back for hundreds of thousands of years.

Your Life is Important

It's really only been in the last few decades through the political machinations of the war on drugs and the Richard Nixon administration and all those politics, you know, of the empire of the mind, which is orchestrating civilization to its own little agendas. You know, what it wants us to be and do. But life is bigger than that, and your life is important.

It's like, seize the reins. These substances may assist in revealing that there's more, but we're not saying you have to take them. They're not for everyone. They can be contraindications. They can be reasons why they're not a good fit for people. But, in the the palette of tools that are available for us to truly know ourselves, the planet on Earth, medicines are very powerful and, very time honored allies on this path.

Shonagh: So you've been around for how many years, Rak in this kind of. I don't know if you call it the psychedelic world, but. But how many years would you say it's been?

Rak: Well, 100. We had to draw that line. I would say I came back to Australia after living overseas in 1997 and, started to get into the electronic music scene and the festivals.

And that was when I first really felt that sense of community, that there was a subculture who had its own dress codes and language and understandings. But, you know, I would say probably 97. So a good 26 years.

Shonagh: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So oh my goodness. Have you seen changes in that world? It's become quite commercialized. We are all about that spiritual side of psychedelics and where they can take you to touch deep into your soul and your connection to the greater world.

And we were talking about just how with all this commercialization, now, it's just it's very different and it's become very it's getting regimented. I've studied natural law for a number of years thanks to the mushroom, and there's a maximum law that says, first of all, favors from government often carry with them enhanced measures of regulation. And you can see, you know, I saw that happen with cannabis.

And we're seeing that start to happen as mushrooms get legalized in different states here. And it's just it's just becoming very, just regimented, almost a little superficial. Like it's more about getting that person kind of back to work, back to productivity and less about opening to the numinous, to that that deep mystery within that each and every one of us carries.

That is possible, as you mentioned, to access, not guaranteed, but certainly possible with these medicines. So I'll leave you to it.

How Did We Get Here, Anyway?

Rak: So yeah, to to talk about where we are today in late 2023, in terms of psychedelic culture, we sort of need to step back and understand where we been, you know, to, to compare it. So, you know, for the last 35 plus years as an organization called Maps, the multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies, which was essentially pretty much one of the only, NGOs that were championing psychedelics and the potentials.

And, you know, from the from the mid-Eighties onwards, during the Nancy Reagan era of Just Say No and the War on Drugs and everything is culturally constructed. You know, every culture gets the medicines it needs, just like the it gets the drugs, its needs and the politicians it deserves. You know, it's like it's all part and parcel of where we are at culturally. And there's always agendas, there's always control mechanisms going on.

So, you know, since the 60s, the control mechanisms were to demonize psychedelics, before psychedelics were criminalized in 1966, from about 1943, when LSD was, invented by Albert Hofmann of the Sandoz laboratories there was, you know, an effort around the world to look at these substances.

And their potential was over 4000 studies done with LSD in terms of its healing capacity. There was it was, you know, very well studied. And they knew that its potentials for creativity, expansion, for connection, for healing all of these things. But it was outlawed because, the, the cat got out of the bag and basically it was it was too much too soon.

And it was transforming the social landscape of America, if not the world. But, you know, again, even with that, there was, very proven, verifiable, documented links of the CIA and other organizations, but mainly to say I promulgating acid and pushing it out there and doing a grand social experiment to basically sort of, tease the consciousness and see what would happen.

We don't really know why, but it is very well documented. The MKUltra and all the CIA tests basically created this scenario, which then, made the LSD revolution so powerful in terms of so many people all experiencing it at once. And what these substances do is they are social conditioner; they can be ego amplifiers, they can be they conditioners, they sort of reset the system and you can have an expanded awareness experience.

But you've got to be very careful of the context because there can be conditioning and there can be lots of stuff going on anyway.

But they weren't in the establishment anymore; they were a threat to the establishment. But again, that's right. Was orchestrated right from the start. Right. And so, that were kept at bay. And so in the last few decades, as all the pressures of the world have increased, basically what we're seeing are the control mechanisms of global culture and its not just a commodification.

And the buy in, the social transformations and potentials that the 60s unleashed were revolutionary. Right? I mean, reality was up for grabs and it was a direct threat to the establishment paradigm. And so that potential is still there, but we don't see it with psychedelics anymore, per se. So what's happened is, you know, with the pressures of the world, antidepressants came in in the late 80s/ esrly 90s.

Prozac was one of the first ones. Basically, they've created what Huxley called a soma, you know, something which sedate people, keeps them in their 9 to 5, keeps them going on the rat race and the treadmill of life, which is, frankly, unsustainable and killing us. And it's, you know, the way we've orchestrated culture is not healthy. It's not good for all of us.

And we can see in the world that there's a civilizational breakdown happening in front of our eyes now. But essentially, you know, for a few generations now, a lot of people in the world have been medicated to keep them, as you say, at at the wheel of the rat race and to keep them in the game, you know, without rocking the boat.

Those substances are not proving in the long run, to be efficacious for people. They're not working. And it feels to me that the powers that be want an alternative to keep everything the same. They're looking for another way that's not placebo. They're looking for something which is going to fit the requirements there.

So psychedelics have been proven in some recent studies to be as, as powerful as antidepressants or more efficacious then antidepressants, which only have a very short term sort of effect. And they can assist people in transiting and basically, you know, many indigenous cultures don't have the problems of Western cultures because they live in more sustainable, Earth grounded, ways of engaging with, with the Earth and each other.

But in our culture, in this rat race, we build up the anxieties, the stresses, the busyness, the traumas. And we're not really taught how to process it. So these substances which have been shown to change the chemistry or the formatting of the brain, what the modern neuroscience has shown is that psychedelics in general, lower what they call the default mode network, a regional cluster at the back of the brain, which sort of makes up this channel of reality from incoming sensory data.

And it allows that rigidity where we build up all this stuff and it never stops. It enables consciousness to flow and to go into different arenas and different capacities. And in doing so, it can release the stresses and tensions and anxieties that build up and glitch in the system. So these substances can, they can do that. They can maintain our, mental health.

But that's not in microcosm, like microdosing or in small doses. That's just band aiding the same issue.

They require a way for us to live. That is not the way we're living now, which benefits the few, not the many in terms of the hierarchy of civilization and where the money really goes and who's in control of the whole show. So psychedelics, they open you up and they make things very visible and understandable of what reality really is, and they're powerful tools for that.

Full Spectrum Psychedelics

And so the powers that be don't really want them in the hands of the masses, because it's going to lead to a consciousness revolution which could lead to a physical revolution. And so the micromanager of culture, which have exacerbated and really ramped up in the last decade or two, there are so many global agendas at play at the moment that we almost can't trust anything because, you know, for instance, the, American government has a program called Full Spectrum dominance.

You can look this up every ten years. They update their plan and their goal to remain in control of the world, basically. And they say, and this is all documented, they say that, you know, if a medium exists, whether that's land or sea or space or, cyber space or information space. And there's a big difference between cyber space and information space.

So we know and we hear of threats, you know, it's like terrorists, terrorists, terrorists with people, you know, that are out there doing scams on the internet and cyber attacks and all of that is, you know, possible and not a good thing. But what they've also said is that there's information space. And what they mean by that is culture.

They mean these conversations we're having now, they mean the media, they mean what we're taking in, what we're seeing on television and movies and magazines. If you control the narrative, you control the culture. And so they said a few years ago that basically they are moving into information warfare with the citizens of the world. And they're not hiding this.

They're not denying this. They've said this very clearly. They just don't mention it much. Once they've said it, it's going to happen.

And these substances – the psychedelics are the antidote. They're the antidote to his story or history because they help to dissolve the mind and the ego, which has created the problem. So, you know, we can look at life as something to be scared of or something to celebrate. Is it a miracle or is it a slog? Is it something to, you know, get through?

It can be all of the above. But the thing is, it's it's something that is here for us to experience in its fullness and to contribute and to give back. And we're being blinkered and we're being sidelined and we're being manipulated on a cultural global level constantly. I mean, all of civilization on one level another has done this and this levels of engagement, like it would be very hard to try to control and run a planetary civilization if we had one.

The Ego Out of Control

But, you know, this is the problem. The mind and the ego, which thinks it has to control, is at the root of the problem of civilization, which is only 10,800 years old. It's probably longer. But, what they say, what they will acknowledge and what they they will let us know. But what I'm getting at is there's something at the root of civilization, which is about control, and it comes back to the ego.

And these substances loosen the ego and they loosen the rigidity about not just our way of thinking, but how we see the world. And in that way, they've been a threat to the establishment. So why are they coming back now? Because they couldn't ignore them any longer. And they saw a strategic detainment, a way that they could take these substances and defang them and take out the revolutionary potential and create as Aldous Huxley said, a soma for the masses.

So there's two still sort of theories on how if someone wanted to control a planetary civilization, you could go about it. There's the Orwell approach to George Orwell 1984 approach of total censorship, total surveillance, total control. It's pretty heavy because it takes a lot of energy to continue to maintain that. The other option is the old Huxley approach from Brave New World, which means that you give them the soma, you give them everything, and they're so sedated, they're so complacent that they never challenge anything.

And so we seem to have a mix of the two with the moment in the early 21st century. But the point is psychedelics, as tools, they can be used to control devices that can be used to liberate. It's all in the intention and the way we're using them.

And so what we now have since in 2006, we're talking about, you know, my early years, I went, as my first assignment, I went, to, Basel, Switzerland, to cover the 100th birthday party anniversary symposium of, Albert Hofmann, the chemist we mentioned earlier who discovered LSD.

And basically that was the the turning point where the term the "psychedelic renaissance" was coined and all the world's media was there in Basel, Switzerland, honoring this 100 year old man who had discovered LSD, his problem child. And it was sort of the start of the turn of the media, really looking at these substances and how they could be used.

But what we're entering into is an unprecedented age where the revolutionary potentials of psychedelics as spiritual tools to transform the culture of capitalism itself, which was once a direct threat to, are now being commodified and absorbed by the capitalist system, to be used in microdosing niche ways, or to be used in the medical establishment in a therapeutic certain setting.

If you can afford $9,000 for, three MDMA sessions with your therapists. So, it's and only in that certain setting and then they'll still be illegal elsewhere. So they sort of found a way to bring these revolutionary substances back into the mainstream conversation to get everyone excited about them.

Michael Pollan, the famous also New York Times sort of, food critic, wrote the book How to Change Your Mind in 2018. And this has been the Bible for moms and pops across middle America to get into the idea of psychedelics and want to try them. Of course, what that has created is a supply and demand issue, a bottleneck around tens of millions of, people wanting to try these substances. And yet the medical establishment still hasn't got them legalized and ready.

And even then, it'll be within the therapeutic setting for those that have the insurance and the overheads and the resources to do it. So we we just have this really unprecedented era that we've entered into with psychedelics are back. They're becoming legal in certain parameters within the medical establishment. And yet, no one's trying to levitate the Pentagon or overthrow the war machine or envisage just an equitable world where everyone is fed, healthy and connected to the divine within anymore.

Hardly anyone is doing that because it's now this drive to this relentless sort of capitalist ethic that everyone has now jumped on board this bandwagon to be a psychedelic life coach. It's interesting times. It is interesting times.

Scaling the Miracle

Shonagh: You know, I have a friend in Oregon where it's now legalized and she has been an underground psychedelic person for quite some time. And she told me that she had a therapist come. And this woman has worked with ketamine, but she came for a single session of psilocybin with my friend. And then within days, she is now teaching how to facilitate psilocybin sessions and what she and I were discussing about that was a first of all, one session. And now she's an expert.

But she this idea of there's no relationship with this spirit. The teachers, that's the word she used of the mushrooms. Seems like there's no relationship. I'd love to hear you talk about that as well. How does this thing scale?

Rak: So psychedelics and these medicines are coming back into Western culture. There's 8 billion people on the planet. This is a supply and demand issue that there's not enough medicines for 8 billion people.

And even if everyone wanted to do them, and we're not saying everyone should do them, I mean, it's it's very tricky because these top end discussions aren't being had. I mean, I would know because I'm fully plugged into the culture and some of the leadership of the culture, you know, in this that this is derived now for sort of the life coaches, for the facilitators or the providers, for the retreats, for the lodge, sort of system and for the medical establishment.  

And so what I'm trying to say though, the scaling is like, okay, say 100 million people are coming in to psychedelics this year that have never done it before.

They want to do it. Well, if you have, ten, if there's a 1 to 10 ratio, then you know you're going to need thousands of facilitators. And so it's funny because what we're sort of seeing is that response. Is it a response from the collective? Let's give it a contrast and the counterpoint in the indigenous communities, when they work with medicines, they live on the lands, they're from the land, they're in a tribal structure, and it's a different culture than we have.

Ours is a lot more disconnected and superficial. So they have deep, entrenched relationships with the Earth already because they grow the food, they live on the land, they understand the seasons. You know, the West has this romanticized archetype of the noble savage of this indigenous person. And, you know, it's very rare that we have an untarnished indigenous person.

It isn't sort of, clad in Nike's or hand-me-downs. You know, when I went to Peru and you go all the way up the Amazon, three days up the Amazon, these boats and all the indigenous communities you meet have like all the hand-me-downs, thrift shop clothes and all the all the Western brands and everyone's connected, if not colored by by capitalism and by the globalization of the world.

But in these indigenous cultures, they still have medicine people. So originally, and this is what I was researching originally when I went down to Peru in 2006. What is the role of a medicine person? So the word shaman is really bandied about. We get this for 500 years, Western culture killed its shamans. We killed our medicine people, our herbalists, our whitch women? Our people that had a connection to plants and medicines.

And somewhere along the church really got turned into this sort of extermination machine of exterminating the connections, not just with the individuals they might have killed, but the the body of knowledge that was held in those people and their relationships with the plants and the medicines.

So in an indigenous, paradigm, everything is alive. Everything has a spirit in it. It's an animist type of understanding. The plants have spirits in them. The the rocks have spirits. The rain has a spirit. There's chi or energy or prana or whatever you want to call it in all these indigenous cultures and eastern cultures. They understand spirituality as a system of living in the world and understanding the world and the energetic reciprocation and maintenance.

You know, within that everything feeds and is fed in the web of life. They understand that place. Now, as part of that, there is an energetic ecology. It's not just a physical reality. That tree has a soul or it has an energetic aura or presence. And all of these things are connected and all of them are into penetrating and feeding one or the other and the all in relationship with one another.

Shamans, Shamans Everywhere!

So in their indigenous cultures, they have medicine people all across the world. The word shaman comes originally from Siberia. It's been appropriated by anthropologist Mircea Eliade, who wrote the book shamanism in the late 1950s and really popularized this archetype of the shaman or the medicine person. It was popular in the West because we lacked it. We we killed off or we had an absence of this archetype.

And again, looking at the vectors of history and of civilization and of control mechanisms and of empires and subjugation of the land, you know, it's a story. It's all a story. But you can see the strands and these commonalities and you can see what shape the story. And so essentially what it is, I believe this story is a love story, and it's a story of our separation from the mother and from our relationship of love.

When you're in love with someone, you don't maybe you do hurt them, but you feel this connection, right? And you exchange energy.

And what are we doing? We've fallen out of relationship with nature, right? Of the relationship. We no longer feel it. We might think it. We might see it on our screens. We see it in a feed. We see how bad it's all going out there and all the stuff nature's going through. But we're not feeling it. We're disconnected because we needed.

What the medicine people in their cultures were under Mircea Eliade's definition of the shaman were technicians of the sacred, they mediated the energy in their tribe, in their culture and communities. They help sort things out, you know, keep people good and sort out their issues. But number one, they looked after their health and well-being with plants, with trance, with dance, with awareness of energy and awareness of relationship.

When those load stones are taken out of communities, it gets chaotic. And over time that chaos builds to a dissonance which is in disarray and a relationship that goes bad. I mean, you know, we could use analogies like cancer cells in the body originally they're functioning cells, but something goes off and if it's not mediated and repaired, it spreads through the whole system.

And so over the last 500 years, our Western disconnect has thrown the world out of kilter. And we have dominated the land and the animals and the people, and we have take, take taken. And we are a species, a rogue species, out of control like a plague of locusts devouring everything in our path.

And we don't see it in the day to day because we're living in it. But over the course of decades and centuries, you can see what we've done. But we're still not feeling what we've done because we're disconnected. So these medicine people originally trained, like, for instance, in the ayahuasca tradition, they trained from an early age.

My maestro, Percy Garcia Lozano in Peru, who runs, the Das Ayahuasca center. He trained from ten years old and they go through a period of sacrifice and initiation. They are on a diet where they give up, you know, red meat, sugars, all of these things which cloud the body and they purify. So their energetic systems are sensotive enough to hear the spirits in the plants, which are always talking, but we don't hear it because we're too busy chopping down the trees and building chairs.

It's crazy. It's literally crazy. Modern man is insane. And we look at all these things which bring us back into insanity. We call them insane. That's how insane we are. So these traditions and these roles and these archetypes of the healers, the walkers between the worlds that teaches us, but they work on behalf of their communities to mediate and to to the energetic exchange.

The Eagle and the Condor

And so over time, without these archetypes in Western culture, the sickness is spread and it's spread back to the first world. And it started to cut down the jungles and everything it's been doing. But at the same time, they have a legend in Peru of the eagle and the condor. And they say that after 500 years and this is who's the legend over 500 years old, it would say that there would come a time of rebalancing, a time where the eagle and the Condor, which represents North America and South America, the two totems of those areas, would come back into unity.

And the eagle and the condor also represent the mind and the heart. So Western culture has been in the ego, in the mind, and it's run rampant over the world. It's invented some amazing things, right? But it's not been developing its heart connection. And without knowing why you're here, it's no use knowing how you're going to do your Twitter feed or where are you going to go with.

I mean, these are all just things without knowing in your heart who and what you are, why you're here and what we're meant to be doing, then it's out of control and it's going to run amok. So the shamans or the medicine people are the ones who help. Remember, everyone has this capability within them, but we get busy with life.

So this was a dedicated role that had a lineage or either, part of a genetic sort of lineage where this was passed down. You had the potentials to do this work, which is traditionally hard work on the outskirts of the village, one foot in the world, one foot. Not because if you get embroiled in all the drama and the gossip and all the day to day, you forget your spiritual connection.

Someone has to hold it together when everyone else forgets. That way you can remind people what it's all about and so we have forgotten in the West and in the last generation or 2 or 3, the West has gone back to the old world. It's gone back to the jungles and to to nature. It's gone back to the indigenous peoples, and it's remembered that it's forgotten something.

And these substances have the potential to teach us. The spirits in the plant can directly teach us. They can connect us. They can show us, you know, the the. There's an entire bigger world out there than just a physical reality. It's like an iceberg with 9/10 under the surface. And there's a bigger world in there as well as out there.

But we need to remember. So in the last generation there has been, a weaving or an outpouring of people going back to the old world to remember and there's been, as I call the global shamanic resurgence, a transmission from one culture and one generation to the next, and a rekindling and now generation of this archetype of the medicine person.

We still have a lot of dogma around the term shaman. But, you know, the worst thing is we can't even relish or, celebrate the fact that we're remembering that we are holy and we are part of this miracle of life, and that we are stepping into these roles of medicine people on behalf of our communities. So what's happening to come full circle to your question, they're almost like Instagram shamans, the people with very little training that have their experience.

But remember, if 100 million people come online this month, well, what are they going to do? They're going to have their experiences. Hopefully they're going to be held in, safe, sacred and sound ceremony setting to have their healing and their connection and their initiation. But there's this understandable glamor and excitement and giddiness when you have your first experiences.

Oh my God. 

And then you want to share it, but then to step into the role of serving the medicines, it's a whole other kettle of fish, because there's deep responsibility that goes beyond the experience you had in your ceremony. And there's deep issues and deep traumas and deep, patience needed to hold space for others. And so I do commend the enthusiasm of people coming online and into this medicine world.

And in some senses, it's not their fault, but what I would caution them to do is to take stock and have a reflection from maybe some more experienced people that have been around for a while on what to do and where to approach. So if you go online, there's going to be a hundred. Here's your one week shaman course, or your three day or your weekend course, or is your toad medicine course, your psilocybin course.

And and it's like, it's not enough. It's not enough. And it's it's dangerous to think that you're trained to handle all the eventualities you need to know. But the the upshot I do feel in here is we've got to start somewhere. And so, you know, when that ratio of 100 million people come, come online and want to do these medicines, and it's like if there's 1 to 100 ratio of a medicine person in a regional village, 1 to 100 ratio, then you need a million healers.

You need a million shamans or practitioners of, of ecstasy here of, of the divine arts. And where are they and how do they all come online at once? So we're going through a growth spurt and teething issues as a modern culture. And we have the psychedelic renaissance, which is embedding all of this with psychedelics within the medical establishment, with therapists who are trained to work with the medicines, who hopefully will take them themselves and understand what's happening on the inside.

That's a whole nother issue. But we're also that's just one sliver of it, because there's this shamanic underground which is booming with, a wider variety of medicines available and experiences, and yet it's unregulated and the most important thing is that the community regulates itself, that it grows at its right pace that is safe and sustainable for it, knowing that there is a big, bottleneck and more people wanting to come on board.

But, you know, it's like everything gets destroyed when it gets overworked or overburdened or the system breaks.

You're helping with their integration because the next person. Then don't invite someone, then they have to be responsible. What I'm seeing now is, is a transmission of responsibility, which needs to be formalized and understood. We can't hold back the scale of growth and of the interest of these substances. And it's happening unprecedentedly even bigger than the 60s, right?

The 60s caused such, waves in the mainstream because it was so, alien for white picket fence-Middle America of the 1950s type of variety, you know, crew cuts and nuclear war and apple pie and all of that. You know, it's a shock, but what we need is a responsible growth of that because, it's happening.

And I see this trickle down where then people are coming into the culture, but they only know this much. And you've got to start somewhere. I'm not saying that's not the right thing, but in that community, those new people should be held and there should be a period where they're learning before they anyone answers the call to serve, because what you don't know is your shadow.

And that's going to really affect the ceremony and the safety of that ceremony for people that you may be in service to, that you don't know how to help. If you haven't had experience yourself.

Shonagh: That's absolutely right. What what would you say for people to look for? If they're looking for a practitioner, what would you tell them to look for?

Rak: There's a lot of good information out there. So as we mentioned the start, you know, for me 5-MeO has been my predominant medicine for the last seven years cycle. There's a website called theconclave.info, for 5-MeO-DMT practitioners and the general community. And there's a lot of good information about that on that site, looking at what to look for for a practitioner.

So you can ask how long they've been doing this work, who they've trained with. You know, what the expertise is or whats really important. I mean, I think, you know, it's almost like if we go to a doctor, we go to a normal GP, we bring up online, maybe it's new you've just moved or you don't know what you need.

Need a doctor? We don't ask this of doctors either. We then go to the office and say, oh, how long have you been doing this work? And what do you what are your trainings? And do you believe in fluoride or you know, we don't get a if they're right for us, we just give our power over to this authority figure.

So I, I invite anyone who's interested in working with psychedelics to have a conversation with the person who you've been referred to and see not only what the heritage, their lineage, their training, their capacity to hold space for you, but also does it feel like a good fit, like a woman might want to go with a woman facilitator or, you know, not be triggered by a guy. Or sometimes its men's circles as well, or sometimes the facilitator. There might be a perfectly good facilitator, but you just don't gel with them.

And the thing is, internally, this is such a sacred experience, such a profound experience. And there's a lot of levels of sublimated ego resistance where you're having the experience, but you're holding on.

And why are you holding on? Because you don't feel safe and you don't feel safe because somewhere within you, you just don't know how to let go. And so the exterior ceremony container can be held and safe and sound and sacred. But the relationship you have with the facilitator is what is allowing you to feel safe, or to recognize you're not feeling safe and to ask for help with that.

And so, you know, yeah, ask, ask and ask about your facilitator. And also don't chase these experiences. They're more and more common, more and more people having access to medicines, not all of which should have access to medicines.

Shonagh: Sure. But when they're out there promoting themselves, a lot of people have unprocessed shadow, which is what, you know, a psychological term for all your unprocessed stuff or your trauma or your ego's stuff. All your desires.

Rak: The facilitators energy is going to color every aspect of ceremony. What they play with music and styles, the space they hold, the choice of the environment, their energy and ceremony, how you receive their energy, how they're projecting that energy if they're aware of their energy and ceremony. There are so many nuances.

It's like, imagine you're giving birth and it's like, wouldn't you want to like, check out your midwife or check out your birth?

You want to put a bit of energy in to a special occasion to this thing. The more care and the more forethought, and the more you're aware of what you're getting into and making sure it's right for you. At this moment, the better it will be.

Shonagh: Yeah, yeah. And that's that's personal responsibility. It's on us to to do that. And, and I really my heart goes out to these people who I've noticed that you're so trusting and there have been big problems with practitioners, very unscrupulous and some downright dangerous.

Rak: Well, let's just say the first time I went to Peru, the common refrain I heard from the shamans I was interviewing was, I was saying, well, it's probably people who were talking about the shamans were saying, there's like three common issues all across the board, all in the world, all, all areas that, shamans or medicine people, it's usually men, right?

But no, it's money, power and money and power. That's essentially it is that often there will be advances to women by male shamans in ceremony under the influence or subtle energetics around that, or the money or power. And, you know, it's a role which has a lot of power embedded in it.

And it shouldn't in a sense, because really, it's about empowering the person you know, and it's about holding that space as that role in that archetype of the medicine person to provide a safe space for the person undergoing the journey and the healing journey.

I like to say for me personally, with 5-MeO I feel like it's more like a midwife. It's not like a shaman or a therapist. There's elements of both, but it's this very vulnerable, intimate, sacred space with this person is rebirthing and having this experience, which invariably people say is one of the one or 2 or 3 most important experiences of their lives.

And so you want, you know, to to be empowered, you want to know the person you're working with. But most of all, you want to, you want to make sure this is the right step for you. You know, this is a very sacred work, and it can very easily go dark if the right circumstances aren't there. And you're going into your depths.

And often that is expressed. I mean, you're being witnessed by whoever it is you've chosen to kind of oversee you. So I think it's very intimate and, and trust. You really want to be able to trust that person. You know, to know that they will they will take care of you no matter what. I love midwife because that is the term I use.

Shonagh: I think that is so astute.

Rak: Well again, you know, there's different gradations of, of engagement with medicine. Martin Ball, another commentator, would delineate different archetypes within the work. He'd say there's providers of medicine, there's the facilitators and maybe there's shamans or shamanic practitioner nurses who have more ability in ceremony to engage with the process and energetically assist, and more and more, I think what we're seeing is the entry level people who are providers that providing a space, that providing a medicine, but then might not have deeper training with that.

But it's got to start somewhere and just know what you're getting into.

Shonagh: Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right.