A Holiday from Eternity: 5-MeO-DMT and the Human Experience

Rak: One hundred years ago, before the more corporate consumerist approach, Coca-Cola had cocaine in it. I'm not saying that's better or worse, but I'm saying that it wasn't this war on drugs and this kind of looking down and this, juvenileization saying that as humans, we can't choose what medicines are going to be good for us.

And, you know, by demonizing these substances, we kind of give them more charge. Let's let that part of us, which is not the ego's striving to survive, let's let the divine, unconditional love part of us. Let's let that intelligence guide us and groom us, and show us where we're going and where we need to be.

Robert: Hello, beautiful people, courageous people right around this beautiful, magical, gorgeous planet. My name is Robert Canis, and this is another Beyond the Courage podcast. Today we have another amazing guest from Australia, Rak Razam, who is a world-class expert on psychedelics, mostly 5-MeO DMT. But not only that, and we are super excited to have you as our guest today. Rak, how are you doing today?

Rak: Thank you. Robert, I'm really good. I'm still in the game of life. Yes. Thank you for that kind introduction. I have been a commentator and a facilitator and community organizer in the psychedelic space for almost 20 years now. And so it can be, as we were saying before we started, it can be a challenge to kind of encapsulate, who am I? What am I doing here?

But I do speak on and lecture on psychedelics. And I’m on a few advisory roles for different psychedelic companies as the business of psychedelics becomes more entrenched in the medical model.

In general a lot of my life's work and a lot of my writing and understanding is more on an indigenous level of communities that work with shamanic sacraments like ayahuasca and 5-MeO-DMT, and kind of piecing together what these experiences really mean and what the mapping of this inner space is, what's been called the terra incognita, the invisible landscape, and what this really means to us beyond the medical model of psychedelics and more into this, this global shamanic resurgence, as I like to phrase it. So thank you for having me.

Robert: Yes, we are super excited. Thank you for accepting our invitation. So, I would like to ask you, what is the view? What is your view of life like? What's what is going on here? Well, Terence McKenna was talking a lot about it. What is going on? The what it means to be conscious.

Rak: What? And what a great opening question, Robert. I think that'll do us for the show. Let's unpack this. Wow. What the freak is this that we're here? You know, as you go on what we could call the spiritual path. And it's been termed many things, the Pathless Path.

It's kind of like the self-intelligent universe, which we're part of and not separate from. And yet, we have this illusion of separateness. It is titrating us and grooming us, and preparing us for more of it, somehow. I mean, all I can say is the journey itself is relentless and, ongoing.

And our ability to figure out what we're in is kind of the point of being here. I think. Right. There's a point to this, a point to life. You know, there's lots of different ways to slice this; sometimes people will even say, look, there's no point. It's just the ego's striving so we're always looking to do something. We're always looking to be in this active engagement, to give us purpose and meaning.

And there's actually no point but to actually be here now and to be part of it all. And that's kind of true as well. And, you know, to deconstruct and disassemble what this is that we're in and what we are, is a whole ‘nother kind of layer of reality and of understanding.

And so, we could stay on the surface level of the world and we could enjoy the dawn and the sun as it rises on the earth. And we could go to work and find meaning in our lives, and we can give love and receive love. And that's kind of pretty much what it's all about.

But it's a question of what are we in? What is it that we're reading where we can experience this experience of being human? I like to say that these bodies we have, these vessels are like holidays from eternity, because a lot of my work with, especially 5-MeO, reveals that we're not just our bodies and we're not just the robot body and we're not what we think we are.

And it seems like these are the times we're in now, where the times themselves and the world itself is going through a lot of upheaval, a lot of change, and it's asking us to dig quite deeply into going, well, who are we? What do we stand for? What do we want our lives to be? What are we giving back?

And this is a global initiation.

So I might just throw it back to you. It's a big question. I think we can go a few levels deep into this, but essentially I'd say that we're in something which is intelligent and alive and, grooming us. It's like we have a very small microcosm understanding of our in this incredibly infinite, school of life.

The Universe is a Machine for Making Gods

And that's what many people say. It's a school that we're here to learn. We're here to grow. All of these concepts imply that there is a goal. There is some fruition point. There is a purpose beyond just the kind of animalistic existing and exchanging of energies with people, I guess my shorthand, and one of my favorite quotes comes from a 19th century and early 20th century philosopher called Henri Bergson, who has this paraphrasing this quote that says “the universe is a machine for making gods.”

And I think that's very close to the mark.

Robert: That's an amazing quote. I love that. Well, I totally agree with you that life is amazing. Life is magical. I got a lot of experience with plant medicine myself, and, one of the first messages I got from the plants were that life is not logical and it's not rational. We are trying to make a logical and rational, and it's absolutely unpredictable. And, and we have this mystery of life, which is, I think, also a very good idea that we do not know the rules of this amazing, beautiful game.

Referring to 5-MeO DMT, a lot of your work meant you spent many years, being a facilitator and also spreading the information about it. I really admire your work. Would you agree that 5-MeO-DMT is the most advanced technology? Also, what do we do with this extremely challenging, factor, which is the ego?

Rak: Yeah. Good point. I was going to bring that back to it. So, 5-MeO, is a beautiful substance. We need to unpack and define a few things before we begin. So often the man-made psychedelics are considered drugs, right? They’re considered chemicals that are scary to us. We take them, we change our consciousness. We may have very profound realizations.

But essentially, what we're doing is modulating our baseline consciousness. And like goldfish in a bowl of water, we often don't recognize what we're in. We're in this consciousness. We're in our beings, in our bodies. And sometimes, in these experiences and these substances, we expand our consciousness or we amplify consciousness, and we seem to kind of go beyond baseline into higher dimensionality, or we're receiving more signal broadcast signal.

So to talk about any of these, we kind of have to come back to the base frameworks and the definitions of what all this is. So what is consciousness? Right. So they still don't know. Right. We still don't know the science will… I have no idea the current times we're in. There's so much argument about everything and polarity, but the original polarity of consciousness comes down to basically two options, you know, is it consciousness?

What is Consciousness?

Is it created and gestated in the human being, in our brains? Is it something that needs the base station of the body in the physicality? And is it just in here? And if it is just in here, am I separate then from the consciousness of all other people? And can I ascertain if other people really are conscious or if it's just me – or, you know, what is consciousness?

So, that theory of consciousness being part of the physical organism and it dies with the physical organism–it doesn't ring true to me. And there's been a lot of debunking of that and looking at that all the way back to 1900s when there were some famous medical accidents. In one of them one railway worker was putting big iron nails into the wooden train track planks when one went up and severed his corpus callosum in the brain.

And basically what they discovered is the brain can reroute. And they've had recent examples where people have through disease or infection or different things. You know, one guy had a functional brain the size of a pea, but he had all his higher faculties and all of the usual geography bits of the brain which have functionality, were rerouting.

And it's holographic. It finds a way to continue to work with whatever it's got, and it doesn't appear to be trapped in the physicality itself.

Everything has a consciousness. And this gets closer to indigenous beliefs and a lot of the kind of the animist beliefs of the indigenous peoples who work with plant medicines. They believe that everyone, everything has a spirit, everything has consciousness, everything has a level of engagement, of awareness. But what many beings don't have is perhaps egoic awareness.

So I ascribe to the precept that consciousness is a broadcast signal that we're receiving. And when the brain goes offline or stops receiving, consciousness is still being broadcast. It’s like when the radio or the TV set is destroyed, damaged, switched off, the signal is still being broadcast.

And that's what I think is happening with consciousness in general. But now we get to this next level of definition of understanding and it's like, well, what is the ego? Okay. And we can define this, you know, in the original, translation, the ego essentially just means the “I”, right? In the Latin, and it just means the sense of “I” or the identity.

So we know that when babies are born, for instance, human babies, their brains are flooded with these chemicals called tryptamines. So tryptamines include 5-MeO or 5methoxydimethyltryptamine. It also includes N, N-dimethyltryptamine or normal DMT. It also includes pineoline, melanin, or melatonin in skin pigment. We have an enormous amount of tryptamines all through nature in the plant kingdom, in the animal kingdom, in human beings as well.

And so these things are put in us as neurochemical catalysts. Some of them are very close to neurotransmitters. They work on the serotonin system, basic fundamental chemicals that are not just in the human organism, but all through nature. And the tryptamines seem to be, systemic, systemically involved with consciousness. So not only do we not know what consciousness is, we also don't really know what reality is.

And we don't know what made us or how through evolutionary chance that we have such an intricate operating system that has all these feedback loops and works so incredibly effectively to keep us alive as human beings. But what we can say pretty conclusively, is that we have an ego, we have a sense of I, but we don't always have it.

Tryptamines and Humans

And that to come back to the babies, it takes a few months. It takes three, four, five, six months. When babies are born, the brains are flooded with tryptamines which can engender states of unity. Especially if I have any of what the modern neuroscience is shown with some EEG readings of what's happening in the brain on 5-MeO-DMT is essentially when we take it from an external source and it's smoked and inhaled, as most of the tryptamines need to be.

It goes from the lungs to the blood-brain barrier. All the other trace elements burn off and the 5-MeO goes into the brain. It's like a key goes in a lock and it opens a door. What the EEG brainwave readings have shown is that 5-MeO-DMT reduces the electrical activity in the frontal and parietal lobes of the brain, the same geographic region where they believe the sense of I or the ego is generated.

So just like babies, the I in their brains are flooded with tryptamines, which are both neuroprotective, and also kind of lowering the ego and silencing the ego, we kind of experientially feel and understand and re connect to a wider bandwidth of information of potential. Right. And so babies are born like that and their brains are flooded with tryptamines.

But over time the babies come into this separation from the unity field all around. And they come into this sense of or the ego. Now we need the ego. There's nothing wrong with it. I don't like terms like ego death, for instance, which are very, almost patriarchal. It's very violent. Ego death. Right? It's not true.

I mean, I have crossed over many times with the assistance of medicines and experientially felt the ego lowering. And my favorite quote from the poet Rumi, the Persian poet, is when he says:

And when it lets go, the individual drop becomes oceanic and rejoins that unity field. What 5-MeO has revealed for me is that there's a mechanism of action within us, which lowers the ego and connects us to what I'm kind of calling the wego, or the collective, or the feeling of this unity all around.

Now, every culture, including all the indigenous cultures and a lot of the old Vedic cultures of India and Persia and all through the old Middle East, had an entheogen and a sacred substance that connected them to the divine within.

They used these things to format and to understand and to remember the potential of their operating system. So I like to say the ego is like a program that's running on your operating system. It's like an app, right? But it's not the operating system. You know, the operating system.

A lot of the thrust of meditation and breathwork and the Vedic path or the yogic path is to regulate the body and the mind and the soul, and to be able to direct your attention and your consciousness inwards to lower the ego. Those whole cultures train people to go within and to discover who and what they really are.

In our culture, who and what we really are has become a commodified product of capitalism. And so we're not encouraged to explore this. So we have a broadcast consciousness, we have a base station receiver of our individual beings, which don't need an ego all the time or a lower ego to be functioning.

And as I said, part of the Vedic path... I used to run these retreats in Mexico a few years back, just a few years ago. Tandava retreats with Joel Bierre and Victoria, they still run them. I used to call them bridging heaven.com. The website still up, we did low dose 5-MeO-DMT in a Vipassana-style meditation container to invite and encourage people to go within with a little bit of a kick, to go deeper, to realize that there's this geography within us and this geography is accessible.

Plant and Earth Medicines as Teachers and Healers

Whether you do that with breathwork or meditation or psychedelics. And different psychedelics are like different tools: it's like an operating theatre with the surgery and the doctor might say, nurse: I need scalpel or sponge or suction or suture.

On some entheogens you still have more egoic presence. With Ayahuasca, you engage with your subconscious and you can sort through emotional traumas. 5-MeO-DMT does one thing very well: it lowers the egoic mind and it reveals the divine behind the egoic mind. All the different medicines have different roles and different capabilities.

So the broadcast consciousness, the ego is there. But this is exactly it. It's all about the ego. And so my shorthand over many years of doing this journey work and getting my own downloads and understandings of what reality is and who and what we are, we've got this download that essentially the ego, which, you know, we're evolving beings and we've not always been in this physical, genetic kind of format. We've been evolving our physicality, but so has our mentality been evolving and that spirituality.

And so here in Australia, the Australian Aborigines say that there's a thing called “dreamtime consciousness”. And if we dig into that, it kind of means that there's a state of consciousness where we feel that connection to the web of life in all things. And we've not been in this rigid kind of hierarchical consciousness where we're trapped, you know, in this state of the ego mind for all that long.

And they say that it's cyclic and it's coming back. And many understandings of different cultures, the world understands that things are cyclic. And I believe consciousness is kind of cyclic. And we're kind of at this phase now where we're being invited and bombarded with different energies. And it's, an opportunity to drop the egoic mind and to remember who and what we really are.

What is Broadcasting Consciousness?

Robert: Yeah. Thank you. Thank you for that great answer. It's very resonating with my heart. And Rak, who do you think or what is broadcasting that signal of consciousness?

Rak: Well, okay. Now, whatever word I give the thing which is broadcasting that signal is going to trigger someone else, right? Because we're in this age of polarity and, of triggers. And so, I don't know, we could call it the “Implicate”. That's what David Bohm, the famous quantum physicist, called it. And he said, from the implicate, the explicit is created as a projection or emanation from that space.

The first time I did 5-MeO, which you can see actually in my documentary AYA: Awakenings, you can go to my website, rakrazam.com or look up AYA: awakenings. It's on Vimeo and a lot of other platforms. It was filmed on the outside. And the thing is, you know, you don't really get anything on the outside from what's happening on the inside.

But my experience was going into the classic mystical white light and this feeling of infinite expansion and presence and intelligence. And so I was just a witnessing consciousness going in and in for nine minutes into this white light tunnel kind of ecosystem /ecology. And there was something happening there. And so in terms of what is broadcasting this signal, you've got to understand this is tricky.

And the language that we need to, utilize language. Language is kind of all we have to communicate it, but it's never going to be enough. I mean, inside every human being there is this raging, sacred, infinite space which is behind the ego mind. And so many cultures say this the kingdom lies within. Buddha nature, Christ consciousness.

But these words are just labels, right? So as I went in the first time, in my experience of 5-MeO-DMT, into the white light, it's like there was a tunnel and it was like the tunnel was like a like a cavern, but infinite. And it was white light with very subtle shades of very light blue and gold and that were rotating around the tunnel.

And as I was going into it, it was kind of coming up to meet me or there was a wave of energy in this kind of invisible, infinite space. And I was just a witness in consciousness. But my witnessing consciousness was open and receiving every nuance of everything. And essentially, as this wave hit me, it kind of hit my vibrational wave front of my beingness.

And so what I would say, I have a friend in the States. I'll say a shout out to Hal Lucius of the Temple of Awakening Divinity, who's been working with 5-MeO in a legal church for, over 15, almost 20 years now.

He says that, you know, this word that we're skirting around, whether we call it the Implicate, whether we call it the zero point, whether we call it the quantum field, whether we call it Great Spirit; often we call it God. Right. It exists and we can prove this to you. You might not have the language to call it what we would call it, but you will experience this something.

It's all Vibration, Man

It might be this infinite energy, the zero point field. But within that there is an intelligence. And that space is for me, it's like a vibrational frequency of being. We're in the baseline reality now. Everything's vibration. This is what science says, right? Everything's vibration. And we had this illusion of solidity of the baseline material world because everything's vibrating at a very low rate, which means it looks solid.

We have the illusion of solidity, but essentially everything's vibration. If you continue to raise your vibration, whether through breathwork, meditation or psychedelics or whatever, if you're raising your vibration, you're attuning to different vibrational frequencies and so on. 5-MeO drops the ego mind and you open to the infinite. You're just kind of drinking in the 010101 like the core frequency of God.

And you're attuning to it, you're pattern matching it. And then this realization came to me that, oh my God, with the intelligence that it had that was reading me and my memories were going round and going back into it. It actually was revealing that I was it. And all of this is kind of intuitive, telepathic, you know, it's beyond the normal framework of our normal everyday conversations.

This is kind of spiritual. It's kind of quantum. What I'm saying is we're actually in a new paradigm now on planet Earth. We're in these end times, a new beginning times where we have enough wisdom and enough science and enough understanding, where at least since the 60s and 70s, it seems to be this, this merging in parallel with the Dao, with physics in the 70s and all these kind of attempts to put in language, whether we say the Implicate and we understand the quantum field or we describe it as, you know, an emanation of the divine – the language is going to alienate someone.

But what I’m trying to say is there's a commonality. And with 5-MeO, particularly as a replicable technology of the sacred, we can prove this to you. You can experience this again and again and again, which is another issue, but you can experience it in a way that makes sense that, oh my God, this is happening. What does it mean? What do I take from this? How do I understand? It's another thing.

So anyway, my friend Hal Lucius of the Temple of Awakening Divinity called this space not a geography, but a theography, a divine space. And that space is an infinite vibrational frequency that is so high in vibration that you may see it as white light.

Right? But the white light, some people hear it; basically when we have our five or more senses and they're going out into the world and we're navigating with the ego, this simulation of what reality is. But when we direct those senses inwards, it's to connect to the divine. And some people are visually dominant. They may see white light.

Some people hear the divine tinkling of the vibrational kind of field. Majority of people in 5-MeO they feel this infinite space and this heart activation space. I mean, it's all there, like in the Bible when they say God is love, right? I mean, it's it's not just a Hallmark greeting card or a bumper sticker slogan.

What I take that to mean is the vibration of love, which is the most powerful thing in the universe. And if you felt it, you know, it's like that vibration. It's like if if we feel it in our little human bodies in a small way, like, I love that puppy dog. It's like a little flame. It's like a spark.

And when we lower the gate of our separation, however you want to do that, it reveals this oceanic divine love that is the intelligent creation and being of all things. But the thing is, it exists permanently, eternally, perfectly radiating in super union, being the white light, the shining, infinite unconditional love. And it can't not do that, or it wouldn't be what it is.

But miracle of miracles. What I felt as it was reading me, it was kind of like all my memories or my information as what I realized later as my first 5-MeO experience. When we're born, we come down empty to these base stations to receive the broadcast signal, right? And as we go through life, we accrue life experience.

And it's kind of vibrational because we know we understand a lot with psychedelics and with trauma and with what is being used for in the medical model. As human beings go through life, they have good things and bad things happen. I'm not quite sure where the good stuff goes, but the bad stuff often it lodges in us and it sticks and we take on emotions and then it all holds in our energetic bodies. Our emotional bodies and luminous-like bodies, and it's held in by the ego mind, like a cork in a bottle.

And over time, these traumas and these stresses and these things, these emotions can turn in the physical body to glitches and inflammation and sickness or they can cause mental glitches in the being. But essentially, as we let go, we can clean out all those energies we've been holding on to.

And that's what psychedelics can do by lowering the ego mind. But essentially what I realized in my first experience, all of this stuff I've been holding on to, not just the bad stuff, but everything I've ever experienced was being transmitted back into that frequency when I was there. And it felt like a death experience.

I mean, I haven't obviously physically died, but I have crossed over many, many times with 5-MeO and the ego has dropped and the entrainment of lowering the ego and coming back and lowering the ego and coming back over many, many years shifts your vibrational structure.

And so the psychedelic industry is very much being positioned to come back into the medical model and to get rid of anti-depressants and to work on traumas and to, in a way, placid and sedate the average person to go back to work in a society in the world, which is kind of, you know, rapidly going downhill.

But in general, lowering the ego mind enough to reveal the trauma is just the first step, because what happened to me was I realized, oh, all my imprints, my memories, my experiences were going back into that vibrational frequency. And you know what they say: information has mass information and isn't lost or destroyed.

It's somewhere out there in the Akashic or the holographic field or whatever. So the short and curlies of this is my first 5-MeO experience. What I took from that was many things, but one of them was realizing that the vibrational frequency of God remains eternal and pure in its unconditional radiating-ness. But also I was feeding it. It was feeding for me.

It was it was like a laser on a CD reading information. And what I understood from that is that the vibration of the divine is so vibrationally pure, but it it doesn't stop it. It condenses down and it radiates down and it becomes creation. It becomes the matter world. It becomes this space time kind of game that we're in, and it makes it from its own vibrational essence.

And so to come back full circle to the original question, there's an incredible intelligence in that. There's a divine intelligence in that the divine is outside space and time and all of space time is. It's like the an audio wave file. It's got peaks and troughs, it's got a beginning and an end, but it's contained within space time. But space time is like a petri dish that is being fed by the divine and infused into it.

And why? What is it doing? Well, remember Henri Bergson, the universe is a machine for making gods. So when we come down, we're empty and we go through life and we have these experiences navigating the ego. And when we go back, we are full right. Because when I went back, it was reading me and it was like, oh yeah, it's all this. And I was like, wow. Somehow it's found a way to remain eternal in that frequency and still come down here in the petri dish.

And as Henri Bergson says, it's a machine for our awakening, for us to realize that we are that thing and to kind of, grow more God stuff inside the creation, that's what I really believe is happening. And that's what I believe the intelligence is, which would then mean that what we're in is a school or a container. This petri dish idea, it's a container or a crucible or, an opportunity to learn and to grow and to love.

That's what I think this world is.