Rejoining The Web of Life: Psychedelics as Planetary Messengers

The Psychedelic Renaissance is simply the latest label for Western culture’s acceptance of expanded consciousness. Indigenous people across the world have been caretakers for psychoactive plants and substances that expand consciousness and return us to a relationship with the planetary intelligence we call ‘nature’. It’s precisely because we are so distanced from nature and the web of life that we see taking these substances as something new or external to us, when in fact mother earth secretes these substances – which have been called ‘exo-pheromones’ – to directly engage a species and impart an information transfer to understand who we are and what we are embedded in.

Dominator Culture is the Victim Turned Perpetrator

Historically the Judeo-Christian cultural map has seen the earth as something to be dominated by man – and indeed, we see ourselves as the dominant species and able to take the resources and conquer the niches of all other species.

This has resulted in a ‘Dominator’ culture that in the last 12,000 years of history has upset the delicate balance of life and raped and pillaged to create a civilization separate from nature. This delusion of separation from the web of life has created our sense of aloneness, a need for meaning and belonging. Our civilization is currently falling and mental health, PTSD and sickness show a planetary culture of balance, out of touch – and out of time.

Into this battery farm of modern consciousness, psychedelics (substances which open the mind, sometimes made in a lab like LSD) and entheogens (substances which reveal the Divine within, often plants grown in nature like psilocybin) have the promise to lower the egoic mind and allow re-connection to the intelligence and community of the web of life.

Who are we, what are we doing here – and what is our purpose? All of this and more can be remembered thanks to the ego-dissolving psychoactives at our disposal. All of us are part of an ecology and interspecies symbiosis where the miracle of life itself has a plan for how it uses us to express itself.

The Default Mode Network (DMN) of the Brain

Psychedelics switch off the “Default Mode Network” (DMN) of the brain, the “channel of reality” our incoming sensory data feeds create, as well as this sense of the ego identity that we think we are. You can only have a sense of “I” if you are separate from the web all around. We can see new-born children, for instance, don't differentiate even between their mother and them – they have this cohesive, undifferentiated emotional connection which is all about supply and demand of needs.

It's like there's no separation between a baby and the mother and even in some of these expanded awareness states – things like ayahuasca – people report this same sense of reconnecting to the web of life or reconnecting to this expanded sense of consciousness. Psychedelics that lower the DMN help us feel that sense of connection that was always there and is filtered and lost in the separated ego state.

Now “ego” isn’t being egotistical, exactly. We need some ego to help navigate, differentiate, etc., etc. But there are gradations of ego that can be cut away, calmed down; we can ease the busyness of the mind always striving and plotting in it’s flight and fear survival mechanism that doesn’t understand what we are in or how to work in balance with nature, the Mother. We can still have a healthy ego that understands its not alone in the world – that something bigger birthed and loves us, and drives the show.

Interspecies Symbiosis and Co-operation Mechanisms

The Darwinian model of species in competition with one another for resources is obviously valid, but step up a level and there's also an “interspecies symbiosis” and cooperation between all species that trade resources and energy for the benefit of nature as a whole. Like bees pollinating flowers, nature uses all her species to enable the mechanism of planetary life in her macro organism.

No one species can be separate from the web – even humans. Except that’s how we’ve seen ourselves for thousands of years – above nature. Which over time has created imbalances and thrown the ecology out of whack – and our consciousness, too.

Exo-Pheremones: The Planet Secretes Psychedelics To Tune You In

Back in the psychedelic heydays of the 1960s through to the 1990s different philosophers like the poet Gerald Heard, the alchemist and LSD-king Stanley Owsley, and raconteur Terence McKenna all promoted holistic whole-systems theories of the earth and why she secreted psychedelic substances.

Generally, their idea held that these substances, like ayahuasca, San Pedro cactus, the Bufo alvarius toad, morning glory seeds, iboga root, psilocybin mushrooms – and the list goes on – which indigenous peoples see as sacred medicines – not drugs – were something that is secreted by the planet herself. And the planet does not make mistakes.

McKenna quipped “the planet had a plan involving the plants”, showing that it's all connected even in the etymology of the words, and that essentially these substances act as inter-species mediators or communicators of consciousness from one species to another. Which is how species grow and are instructed of their place in the overall web. That relationship between the plants, the planet and the people is essentially what indigenous people have been saying exists, and which is mediated through their vegetal technologies.

The Global Shamanic Resurgence Can Heal the Old-New World Rift

So, these psychoactive substances – when used in the correct way with the correct facilitation and a ritual ceremony approach (which is another of the great gifts indigenous cultures have given us in this modern generation or two of the Western Shamanic Resurgence) – is that we can reconnect. 

We can heal the division which has been that original separation between us and nature. And that's a profundity beyond words – the reconnecting, the realizing, informing the human consciousness of our oneness with mother Earth. Our separated and limited consciousness is like a baby inside the mother that has been devouring all resources in preparation for birth. And now as we reach an ecological tipping point with runaway global warming, that pressure on our consciousness for survival will induce rapid change.

Psychedelics and entheogens which reduce the egoic mind and allow us to feel the earth and the other species, to understand our place, can help us prepare and make this change.

Now it's not about taking these substances over and over. Psychedelics and entheogens aren’t like Western pharmaceutical pills where one size fits all and it has the same effect. Psychedelics allow you to connect with your unconscious, the collective intelligence, and to enable you to work on yourself. And, it’s all about relationship: to yourself, your community and the planet.

Come home to the great web of life and discover where you belong.