We live in unprecedented times that promise to transform not just how we live, but who we are and what our place is in the web of life. Humanity is awakening – whether it wants to or not – and the triggers are everywhere: from Covid 19, runaway global warming and societal collapse… How can psychedelics and entheogens assist in this awakening at the same time forces of control and global authoritarianism try to hold on to the old? How can we let go and trust the process?
Joseph Campbell proposed in his seminal book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, that we need to go far from what we’ve previously experienced in order to start our transformational journey. This departure from the known world is happening all around us. The old normal is never coming back. We are being initiated into a planetary process that requires us to let go of all that has come before to make way for an emergence of our true, spiritual nature.
As that’s happening around us it gives us an incredible opportunity: to begin our spiritual awakening process by facing these personal and global adversities, and a promise to return to the community, reborn.
The Beginning: A More Conscious Way of Living
How can we grow towards a more conscious way of living? Psychedelics and spiritual catalysts are one way, but not the only. By asking ourselves who we really are, by giving ourselves permission to go through various transformative experiences and by allowing ourselves to create and re-create new and “updated” versions of ourselves we can walk the “pathless path.”
The root of all our existence is the mind, and the ego is a program running on the mind’s operating system. Psychedelics and shamanic experiences can help us recognize, accept and loosen – even let go of the conscious ego mind – to reveal a depth of being and presence below it. However, you get there, learning how to let go of our ego on a daily basis is the key to awakening.
The Ego Creates Separation Where There is None
A lot of what’s around us is purely an illusion: capitalism, countries, nationalities, our separate identities. We are more than that and I think we are starting to collectively understand this deeper reality, this certainty that we are not the story we create around us, but far greater beings than we realize.
The story we create around our identity, nationality, and the operating systems we run on: languages, beliefs, programming and other individualized concepts of the self are purely this – a story fabricated by our minds. We are living within a story and we have the power to change it at any time. Realizing who we truly are beyond all these labels – creative beings and co-creators of our reality – is the first step towards our collective spiritual awakening. And I think it’s happening now.
The level of consciousness we're in now is a necessary egoic navigational tool – that's what the ego is good at – but it's to the detriment of our other capacities: our imagination – which is like the magical act of dreaming in new pathways; the intuition – how we receive the signals always being broadcast and be more tuned in (...), etc.
We can let go of our ego by experiencing psychedelics in a safe, guided environment, or we can do this by meditation, mindfulness, breathing techniques and other spiritual inclined practices.
The grand potential of the psychedelic-shamanic experience is to know yourself and to reconnect to something greater. Whether that’s the web of life, your subconscious, or God – it’s up to you to define. There is something greater than these experiences allow us to touch and feel in a way that is much deeper than the mind. And that knowing, that connection is a strength because it means that there is something more than us running the show.
What’s important is to seek and live those experiences and to let them transform our way of being. We need to allow our ego to die and be reborn – that’s actually what’s happening in this awakening process – and to remember our place in nature and the web of life. The planet herself is an alive organism and we are but one strand in the “Gaian” biome. As we let go of our individuality/separation from nature, we come to realize we are part of something bigger and part of a process unfolding all around.
Reducing the mind, reducing the ego, allowing the mind-body-soul to reset itself to God's default settings – this enables an ability to heal and to know yourself fully.
Can We Change The World by Changing Ourselves?
After my first peak experience with substances like ayahuasca in Peru, I asked myself: “How do we keep this going?” And I meant all of it – the dissolution of the ego, the feeling of connectedness, the deep healing of personal, generational and trans-generational trauma. The answer is: we have to put into practice what we’ve learned during our peak experience. We need to anchor this awareness in our beings every day. And as the individual changes one by one, so too, does the collective.
Transformation does not just happen during the peak experience: it happens after integrating all that awareness into our entire lives, after letting go of our old self, who didn’t remember that it was one with this universal essence, and by stepping into this more evolved state of being.
Discover the inner landscape
of the visionary state
Watch the visionary documentary film on Ayahuasca and Shamanism!
A lot of things are happening within us and around us when we live from this place of lightness. We already know that we are energy having form, and when you change, the energy around you changes. When you integrate your healing experience into your life, you signal a different type of vibration, a higher one and a healing one. You grow out of the trauma-based energy maintained by the ego and into the healing energy of oneness.
Those of us that have had deep psychedelic experiences that have reset our beings can hold space for others who are themselves undergoing deep transformational pressures from the events of life itself. We are in the equivalent of a global ceremony, releasing, remembering and being reborn. We can’t awaken people, but the dying of the old world and the birth pangs of the new are completing this process. Mass awakening is the promise of the contractions of history and the birth of the collective soul.
Dissolving [the ego] can have health benefits and a lot of those benefits come from when we release the stranglehold of the ego and the mind and basically any energy trapped in our energy bodies or our emotional bodies. (...) so as the mind lowers and you release these traumas there can be health benefits...
As long as we are doing this collectively (and I see that a lot of us have started their awakening process), we have a great chance to change our world. When the collective starts raising their vibration, transforming the Earth and everything on it becomes possible.
When we collectively remember our true nature, we can evolve as a healed, whole, holy civilization.
Key takeaways
- We have to go out of our comfort zones to start our transformative healing journeys.
- The ego is the illusion we have to let go of in order to start growing spiritually.
- Once we start this process of spiritual awakening we begin to understand that we’re all connected.
- Psychedelics can facilitate the dissolution of our ego, but it is up to us to integrate that peak experience and put it into practice in our daily life.
- Mass change is possible through individual awakening.
