The ego will also adapt and commodify anything that comes at it, including the ancient art of shamanism and the plant and earth medicines – the entheogens – which have now returned into the Western mind frame in the last few decades.
In 2006, when freelance journalist Rak Razam smoked his first hit of 5-MeO-DMT, a powerful and similarly hallucinogenic cousin of DMT, he had it documented. He had colleagues hold him down onto a chair, blindfolded himself to muffle out any extraneous sensory inputs, and by the five minute mark he was hooting and hollering as the chemicals transported him to, as he tells me, an ineffable spiritual ocean of white lights.
Electronic devices have a software restore function known as a “factory reset” that returns them to their original manufacturer’s settings. What if we humans also had such a switch within us, a ‘God’s Factory Reset’ that entheogens can reveal? Beyond the corporate psychedelic pharmaceutical model of personal healing and even of connection to nature, whatever happened to the possibility of awakening the Divine within?
As psychedelics are embraced back into the medical model, the media has created the term “The Psychedelic Renaissance.” In this hour-long conversation with Beth Weinstein from her show, The Psychedelic Entrepreneur, we discuss the booming marketplace of the Psychedelic Renaissance and the vision for psychedelic therapists to facilitate healing legally by 2023.