Greece. Maui. Yellowknife. Greenland. The whole world’s burning, flooding, melting. We’ve entered an age of apocalyptic new extreme weather formations now the Jet Stream is irrevocably broken: the heat domes, atmospheric rivers, firenados, bomb cyclones, zombie fires, etc. After the bushfires in Australia, the Amazon, Canada, Europe, the worldwide floods, there’s a sense that things have not just changed for the worse, but it’s escalating. Tipping points have been breached. Life support systems of the planet are going down. We’ve entered the planetary emergency. Yet in the face of the now undeniable and exponential global warming – the biggest threat to humanity and all life on earth, including the plants and vegetal kingdom – why do we remain disconnected from this during our plant medicine ceremonies? Is there a way we can strategize and synchronize to come together in the medicines with an intention not to fix things, but to listen to the Mother, to understand what she's going through?
Extreme Weather and Climate Change
Psychedelics and plant medicines are said to reconnect us back to our place in the web of life, to help heal trauma and to re-sensitize us, clearing the ego cache. Despite that “ecodelic” sensibility, akin to an indigenous knowing, you don’t really hear from the plant medicine community about its take on global warming. One reason may be that some still don’t believe in it, or the scale and speed of change coming.
There's an entrenched attitude within some of our community in the psychedelic space where they don't trust government. And they’re right. But some can’t see the forest for the trees. The powers that be have been steering cultures towards their agendas for as long as we’ve had civilizations. Someone always owns them – and yes there’s a long-range plan. And they have the think tanks, the media, the armies and the infrastructure to roll out their plans over generations. As Terence McKenna said: “culture is not your friend.” .
Regardless whether you believe global warming is man made, a product of natural geological changes, or directed by secret cabals with energy weapons – Mother earth is still breaking. The Arctic is warming seven times faster than the rest of the planet and enormous amounts of methane are being released from the shallow deposits in the Laptev sea. As the Hopi prophecies say: the 12th hour is here.
And what are you going to do about it?
Remembering the Mother
Science says we're going through the Sixth Mass Species Extinction event right now. Previous extinction events have nearly wiped out all life on the planet, and the extra impact from human activity may have speeded up and deepened the effect. All of the extreme weather events are reported as these discrete separate phenomena because no one really wants to acknowledge the pattern. The earth is changing. Now she’s always changing because we’re in a planetary biosphere: Mother Earth. She’s alive, and climate change is not just a headline on your screen or a carbon budget on a spreadsheet. It’s a bio-physical process underway akin to a planetary puberty.
In the Incan Quechua language they call her “Pachamama,” or the World Mother. The Greeks called her Gaia. Every culture still connected to her feels her and remembers what birthed and sustains us. And the medicine culture that has bloomed in the last generation or two in the West, spearheaded by ayahuasca and San Pedro, by the ninos, the spirits in the magic mushrooms, and now the bufo toad and others, all these medicines that connect us back to the Mother, help us heal and remember. The whole biosphere of the earth is an alive and intelligent organism whatever name or label you want to give it. And on the plant and earth medicines we can feel that connection, that love emanating from the earth Mother.
Humans have undeniably added extra greenhouse gases to the atmosphere and accentuated the global warming cycle. But that cycle is a life cycle, and Mother earth is a living organism that undergoes warming cyclically as part of her life span. Until we can understand that fully, and her place in the galactic ecosystem, with solar forcing, intra galactic energy like the complex electro-magnetic wave that emanates from the center of the galaxy (the Galactic Superwave, part of a larger Galactic Current Sheet), then we can’t understand the process she is currently going through. The ego mind will try and “fix” something it doesn’t understand. The same ego that has been wounded and disconnected from the Gaian intelligence, taking resources and throwing the delicate homeostatic equilibrium to the free market grinder.
The same ego that has been in denial of the problem for so long will begin to spiral through the other stages of grief: anger, bargaining, depression, and finally acceptance of the full reality. It may be, as James Hansen, former NASA climate researcher and arguably the world’s most respected climate scientist, says there’s a 10°C baked-in temperature rise coming down the line no matter what we do. The real climate scientists with the raw data feeds are pointing to exponential rises by 2026 and there may be literally nothing we can do: geo-engineering won’t scale nor work in the very limited time we have left. Warming is runaway. Deep adaptation is needed, to face the problem, not the greenwash. And that my friends, is when we pray.
The ego of humanity that has contributed to creating the problem will not fix the problem. We have become so distanced from the living essence of the planet that we're still in denial about the emergency, and what may emerge from it.
The Planetary Birth Canal
“So, the metaphor for us to go into this future with dignity and hope – which I think is the only appropriate response – is the metaphor of birth. If you had never heard, if no one had ever informed you, of the facts of life, and you were suddenly to come around the corner and encounter a woman in the act of giving birth, this situation vibrates medical emergency – blood is being shed. Clearly, there's a great deal of physical pain and agony, pleading, a sense of helplessness. It looks as though an enormous tumor is metastasizing out of someone's body. It would be a real leap of faith and understanding to be able to contemplate that for the first time and to know or to guess that this is how nature does it, this is how we move to the next higher level, this is what is happening to us.”
What I see happening is informed by the late Terence McKenna’s idea that Mother earth is undergoing her cyclic changes and we are in the planetary birth canal. All the destruction and break down of the old is part of her process of rebirth. We’re not meant to hold on, to try and fix a broken civilization that has separated from her rhythms and control. We’re meant to evolve forward and use this cataclysmic event as a springboard. To become something new.
So, while the extreme weather: the floods, fires, earthquakes, crop failures etc. are increasing, the poles are melting and the magnetic fields are dropping, everything seems out of control. Things are getting apocalyptic and there’s a rising panic and fear in the global consciousness. But we’re a plant medicine community – surely what’s happening on the outside reminds you of your journeywork on the inside?
Haven’t you felt all those same feelings in your plant or earth medicine journey? The fear, anxiousness, the introspection, the awareness that there’s a sickness that needs to come out? Sometimes what the medicine experiences can teach us is that fear is the product of the mind. And the mind is controlling and wanting everything to be normal, to be okay. And yet that same mind has actually created or contributed to the problem by its dysfunctional relationship with the earth.
Learn more about Amazonian hallucinogenic shamanism
Connecting with the Teachers
All around the world there are now hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people doing psychedelic and plant medicine ceremonies on a regular basis. In Peru the indigenous curanderos still often drink ayahuasca every Tuesday or Friday nights for themselves and clients, and they’re aware that by all being in the medicine at the same time, the field is strengthened. Other indigenous tribes all drink ayahuasca together, and shape and receive collective downloads and visions. I feel its time we do the same – with a collective intention.
In the indigenous understanding with plant and earth medicines you're not just going into your own mind – you're going into sort of an astral realm or the DMT frequencies or a frequency of consciousness where there are other beings, including all the divas and intelligences and spirits of the earth. So that community is there on the inside in “hyperspace," and we can connect to the doctores or the teachers, the helping spirits. Surely as other emanations of the world soul, they may know what's going on. Perhaps re-connecting to them on a collective level is part of the birthing?
So, what I ask the global plant medicine community is this: can we have a collective intention that reflects the needs of these times?
Can we face our own imminent destruction–or transformation? Can we go in on our journeywork and can we connect with these intelligences: the plant spirits and allies, the ancestors, the aliens, our own subconscious – can we connect with these resources to address this central and urgent issue of climate change and what that really means to Mother earth and all her species?
To digest and own our embedded relationship with the Mother, to not try and stop her process, but to reconnect and share the journey with her? To be vessels for change that she needs, not what our egos cling to.
To come home again.
Planetary Medicine Circles
There's been experiments like the synchronized Global Meditation, where they get millions of people all across the earth at the same time to just meditate and come together in a collective field. It seems the more nodes that come online the stronger the network goes. Iterations of this have been practiced for decades, but the tightening gyre of the modern world means we can synchronize with our screens and technology, as well as our minds and hearts.
We have millions of people already doing plant medicine work – so what if we just held an intention to listen to mother earth, to Gaia, to have a synchronized Planetary Medicine vigil?
A vigil is, in the classical definition, like a prayer. We're already going into these ceremonies for our own personal healing, and that's all good and well, do that. And can we also hold a collective intention for the planet, for the mother, to connect to her? To renew our relationship with Pachamama, to be in partnership with the earth as she births the new cycle?
If we start to do that as the emergency starts to escalate in the months and years ahead, if we can come together as a planetary medicine culture, to learn how to trust the process, then we have a better shot of not just surviving, but transforming together.
Will you join us in praying for the earth in ceremony?
Key takeaways
- Extreme weather events and climate change are accelerating at an alarming rate, yet these topics are often neglected in the plant medicine community.
- Erosion of trust in governments and mainstream authorities has weaken the collective response to climate change and its consequences, like the rapid warming of the Arctic.
- Humans are undergoing a "Sixth Mass Species Extinction", and the planet is undergoing a sort of "planetary puberty," a bio-physical process we don't fully understand yet.
- The collective intention within the global plant medicine community is to connect with "Mother Earth" or "Gaia" and better understand the planetary changes.
