Hardwired for God: 5-MeO-DMT, Psychedelics & You

You may have heard of the “Psychedelic Renaissance” and the return of mind-altering substances to the therapist’s toolkit, or the Decriminalize Movement’s reforms in cities across America to allow for the personal use of entheogenic plants and earth medicines.
When used in a safe set and setting and with intention, psychoactive substances can assist in healing and reconnection to a wider sense of community – with all beings. Indigenous cultures that understood this often mediated this multi-dimensional connection through a village “shaman”, but we all have the capacity to connect.

Altered States Over the Years

In the West, the historic disconnection over centuries from these states of shamanic consciousness erupted in the 1960s with LSD. Since then, successive waves of altered states across the generations have paralleled our technological expansion, stretching everyday consciousness into greater understandings of reality. Now with 5-MeO-DMT, a reliable ‘technology of the sacred’ exists to dynamically reveal the Divine within. What is reveals is that we’re hardwired for God.

The Global Shamanic Resurgence is a worldwide phenomenon that is seeing the rebirth of connection to the vegetal consciousness of the planet and the expanded perspective of nature that engenders. Traditionally, indigenous people have been caretakers for the plants and the earth and consciousness itself. This reweaving of the ancient relationship between humans, plants and the planet is a necessary precursor for our deepening into the greater multi-dimensional community that shamanic medicines can reveal.

It’s as if we are being acclimatized through brief peak experiences with psychedelic (“opens the mind”) and entheogenic (“reveals the Divine within”) substances to realize there is more than the baseline physical reality: that consciousness and the energetic ecology extends into normally unseen dimensions that we were once intimate with, but that connection has been lost.

His-story is the Story of Our Trauma and Separation from the Earth

We used to know this not that long ago, but what became Western culture set itself apart from nature, claiming dominion over all the land and its creatures. Throughout “his-story”, patriarchal, dominator culture conducted great purges and massacres of our medicine women and men – the witches, herbalists and healers that connected through plants and potions to the natural world.

Those same religious empires that met the old world of the Americas ruthlessly killed plant worshippers and saw their psychoactive medicines (like huachuma, the San Pedro cactus or the psilocybin magic mushrooms) as the work of the devil. These monocultural religions exported a “white man in the clouds” type of God and a simplified reality along with the church’s sea-spanning empires. Our ego-driven, civilizational drive mechanized and fully externalized the split from our partnership with the earth by the Industrial Revolution. The ego had won. The mind had conquered the external world.

In some ways, I feel we “get the medicines we need” from both the planet and the laboratory. In the 1950 and 1960s, the Western mind was so closed off to psychoactive plants it couldn’t accept a reality that saw them as conscious, the planet as alive and the whole hyperspatial ecosystem that shamanic cultures have traversed for millennia, as anything but fiction.

We needed the assembly line of the laboratory and the respectable doctor-scientist of Albert Hofmann, Sandoz-chemist, to bring LSD to the masses. That helped open the mind in the 1960s, and a generation later, in the 1980s, ecstasy helped open the heart. By the early 2000s, the plant medicine wave had landed on fertile ground, and a new generation of seekers went back to the old world to rediscover ayahuasca, psilocybin, iboga, San Pedro cacti and so many more plant teachers. But each step had to unfold in a stepping-stone of consciousness remembrance before the next was possible, before the West would go back to the garden

The Empire of the Mind and the Default Mode Network

This “Empire of the Mind” has enabled Western culture to spread its ideas, whether they be capitalism, globalism or prohibitionism, et al., across the entire planet, filtering out the original, indigenous worldview of an alive and intelligent Great Being we are embedded in and part of.

This has resulted in separation anxiety, spiritual and mental distress, hierarchy, and ecological devastation. We had forgotten our place in the web of life – until psychedelics mysteriously emerged in the mid-Twentieth Century and the white picket fence reality of post-WWII hit the counterculture with all its parallels to an indigenous worldview.

Modern neuroscience has shown that psychedelic compounds reduce the brain's Default Mode Network (DMN) and the egoic filter. With the ego reduced, the ‘mind-at-large’ of expanded consciousness can connect and reweave a relationship with the self and all its unconscious content. The “holding on” of so much of our psychic and physical pain and turmoil can be released in an ego-dissolving psychedelic experience. 

The mystical sense of “oneness” with all things – which may mean nature or all of existence – is what is revealed underneath the ego-mind: The Source of all consciousness. This geography is part of the greater reality that psychedelics and entheogens can reveal.

In indigenous cultures they have stories, mythologies, maps, and paradigms that anchor and make sense of this expanded dimensionality and aliveness. Each plant, they believe, has a spirit or consciousness and can connect to different aspects of a larger interdimensional whole. All the different entheogens have different frequencies and have been forming relationships with us, healing our consciousness to be able to do what they do – connect to the whole. Because in the core of our neurology, we have the same transmitters as many psychedelic plants – the tryptamines.

Enter 5-MeO-DMT: The Psychedelic Inside Your Brain

One of the most powerful mind-altering psychedelics is DMT (dimethyltryptamine), which comes in various forms, from the visionary N,N-DMT found as an admixture plant in the ayahuasca brew, or 5-MeO-DMT found in seeds like Yopo and plants like Phalaris grass – and more recently found in the Bufo alvarius toad in the Sonoran desert of Mexico.

5-MeO-DMT is the ultimate entheogen to “reveal the Divine within” because its endogenous to humans – it’s just been our centuries of species ego trauma, trapped in the mind and separated from our true selves, that has forgotten how to access what I like to call: “God’s backdoor access” code. Like other psychedelics, 5-MeO is most likely lowering the Default Mode Network, but also the frontal lobe electrical activity of the brain. Breathwork and meditation lower the same exact areas of the brain, according to neuroscience EEG scan comparisons of monks meditating and people on 5-MeO.

Is All Consciousness Psychedelic?

It was once described to me that all the different entheogens are like baubles on the different branches of a Christmas tree – or the Tree of Life itself – and that the 5-MeO-DMT is the star at the top of the tree. It’s often referred to as the “light” because it mirrors the classical near-death or mystical perception of the Clear White Light experience of the Divine.

What most people aren’t contextualizing is that unlike say ayahuasca, or magic mushrooms, you have 5-MeO-DMT inside you, believed to be produced in the lungs and cerebrospinal fluid, and kept from registering by other MAO inhibitors in the gut. But meditation, breathwork or external 5-MeO all trigger the pathways to reduce the ego and reveal the Divine within.

We have a natural psychedelic in our systems to remember Who and What We Really Are.

With 5-MeO-DMT returning to awareness in the West, medical clinics are exploring its potential to heal stress and trauma, but the bigger potential is to reverse the egoic filtering separating you from your Divine awareness.

Remember, remember, remember…

All is One.