All through history people have reported having spontaneous “mystical experiences” naturally and through the aid of external catalysts like shamanic plant and earth medicines. Our consciousness is always changing and, like our DNA, adapting to the circumstances of our environment. With the current phase of runaway global warming putting pressure on the earth and humanity’s current paradigm, there seems to be this real crisis, an emergency and from which emergence can happen. We need to evolve our consciousness to see reality if we are to survive.
So, in almost two decades of working with different psychedelic plant medicines and understanding whole systems theory, I realize that everything builds and regulates itself, which is a trigger for our awareness and evolution. Nature wants us to be engaged because we're meant to be working together. In reality, there is no separation. It's only been probably since the Industrial Revolution that we've really distanced ourselves from the earth, and so it's this question of what are we really embedded in? And how can we work in unison with that for the greatest outcome?
Everything changes, our consciousness, everything. Food changes our consciousness. The rain changes our consciousness. The air changes our consciousness; we're walking neurological factories, and so the question is: what is the optimal consciousness we can have? And how do we find it?
The Default Mode Network (DMN)
So, psychedelic science has looked at many of the shamanic plant and fungi medicines in the last decades and have come to some interesting conclusions. It seems most of the traditional psychedelics reduce or lower the Default Mode Network (DMN) of the brain, these regional clusters which help reinforce our “channel of reality”. Psychedelics, in general, are called “ego dissolvers, and yet, while the ego is a necessary driver of our vehicle, it's not the whole vehicle.
And so when this sense of egoic “I” is diminished, what really happens is this oceanic sense of letting go, of surrender, of rejoining or becoming part of something bigger, can occur. So the whole idea of initiation in this sense – which is what these psychedelic medicines do – they bring you into the real direct, experiential knowledge of what you are and what you're embedded in.
Learn more about Amazonian hallucinogenic shamanism
Learn more about Amazonian hallucinogenic shamanism
Beyond the Mind: The Source
Most people will say that you go into this Unified Field through what the Buddhists and the Tibetans might call the “bardo” states. There's the physical world. Then there are these, you know, energetic layers like dimensional membranes or veils and states, which many of the Sanskrit Vedic maps capture.
They might use words like “samadhi”, like that concentrated presence of mind that reveals Source, the great union at the heart of all things. And these Sanskrit words are not random. These ancient cultures have explored deeper reality as part of their human experience. The great religions of the past have anchored these deep experiences of consciousness and left word maps and mythologies for us to follow. But just how deep does it go?
Modern neuroscience is one of the best tools for examining what consciousness is and how it operates. The “holy grail” or neuroscience might just be anchoring the capacity to achieve non-dual states and non-duality, that sense of oneness, calm, belonging, home. The same states that many ancient cultures have described and left tools to access through breath work, meditation, etc. “Non-duality” is a bit of a euphemism for “unity”.
That feeling connected to self, others and the world is what humanity used to have, but has lost in our ego-climbing, civilizational drive away from nature. If we can anchor that unity state once more and evolve our current consciousness forward, we may integrate the understandings and maps of ancient cultures with modern wisdom.
And so the psychedelics (“Mind-manifesting, including lab-made chemicals) and “entheogens” (earth-based mind-altering plants, fungi and creatures) are a natural and powerful way to alter baselines consciousness, plug back into the web of life and remember who and what you really are. Substances like 5-MeO-DMT from the Bufo alvarius toad can reveal an event horizon of a space within ourselves behind the conscious ego-mind.
This deep unity Source consciousness is in all things and is at the heart of the indigenous cosmologies or maps of reality. Psychedelics and entheogens allow the mind to lower and to traverse these inner dimensions, even accessing Deep Source.
Different indigenous cultures say there are world ages and we go through these phases, and it comes to this crest of history when we're meant to do something – and at this point in time these medicine plants which connects us to the planet are helping us to remember what it is we're meant to do.
Those Who Live in the Light
Now I need to tell you about the Secoya tribe who are indigenous to Ecuador and they work with the yage, a version of ayahuasca with wambisa, another plant which contains 5-MeO-DMT. They say they were given the knowledge of this concoction by the heavenly or star beings who live in the light.
When they take their yage brew, it's cleansing and healing, but the difference with the 5-MeO in their brew is said to connect them to the light. And there in the light are the star beings, the ancestors those who have gone before over into the light. Like all indigenous tales, it’s hard for the Western mind to accept. It seems like just legends. And yet…
Narratively, it opens a suggestion that higher life forms graduate from the physical world. The thrust of evolution isn’t just to match your niche and adapt, but there is a higher purpose to the physical world and the physical forms that host consciousness. Our consciousness, like other beings, can evolve and continue in higher dimensions.
Now intuitively, I feel that this is a possibility. Every couple of hundreds of thousands of years or so, the living planet goes through an ice age cycle: things heat up, it gets very, very hot, and as the heat dissipates, it leaves the planet cold. But within the evolutionary mechanism, the species are put through the wringer because DNA only evolves when there's a need for it to evolve in its environment.
This cyclic death and rebirth of species drive evolution, and for the apex species, it may just be an invitation to transcend the physical form entirely. There are phases within natural geological time within which species need to evolve. There have been five great species extinctions on the planet over millions of years, and we are currently in the Sixth Great Species Extinction event.
Time to evolve – or die.
The plant sacraments are vegetal technologies that indigenous cultures have used for millennia to heal, to cleanse, to expand consciousness and to reconnect. I feel that they're really important sacraments and tools to be using in the 21st century.
Key takeaways
- All through history, people have reported having spontaneous “mystical experiences” naturally and through the aid of external catalysts like shamanic plant and earth medicines.
- The “holy grail” or neuroscience might just be anchoring the capacity to achieve non-dual states and non-duality, that sense of oneness, calm, belonging, home.
- That feeling connected to self, others and the world is what humanity used to have, but has lost in our ego-climbing, civilizational drive away from nature.
- Psychedelics and entheogens allow the mind to lower and to traverse these inner dimensions, even accessing Deep Source.
- This cyclic death and rebirth of species drive evolution, and for the apex species, it may just be an invitation to transcend the physical form entirely.
