What the Heaven? 5-MeO Has a Plan

CHAD: All right. Thank you, Rak, for being here. I want to start with, I guess, my own Rak and why I asked you to come and share you, yourself, your wisdom, your knowledge. It's very personal, actually. I share, I get a lot of inspiration from the way that you articulate the [5-MeO-DMT] experience, number one. And I also get a lot of inspiration from you and how you see the potential of this experience and how it plays out and it can play out in human evolution, the evolution of consciousness, human consciousness. I don't know. These are the things that I'd like to riff on a lot today because it helps me put into perspective my own sense of purpose as a practitioner.

Why am I doing this? And when I lean into it, I continue to listen to old podcasts of yours and interviews of you on YouTube, and every time, it instills in me a lot of inspiration, like, yeah, right. Like, we don't know a lot. And yet I get a, like, right, this is why I do this. This is why I keep doing this. I could have fizzled out some years ago as a practitioner, but no, I keep doing this. And it feels good. It feels right. And that rightness is bolstered a lot by you and your take on things.

And also, I would add that a personal appreciation that I have with you is, I guess I feel that all along from having met each other, I think at Burning Man for the first time, there's been this, on the same pageness of bringing practitioners together regardless of how they're practicing, regardless of, like, there's an openness to, I guess, a diversity of how this can come into people's lives. And that has also inspired me as well.

And I think that's why we've continued to be in the same circles and cohorts together because we share that. So that's why I asked you to be here. That's why I wanted to invite others to hear you, listen to you, be with you, talk with you, and jam with you on some of the things that you bring to the proverbial table in really eloquent ways.

Not that I'm expecting you to be super eloquent at 6 a.m., but I've known you, I'm sure I've seen you at all different types of hours of the day, and it always seems to be invigorating what you have to say. So thank you so much for joining us at such an early time of day.

Rak: Well, thank you for your lovely words and your reflections. And, yeah, I see you too. And, you know, this is a really, obviously, important time in history. And within shamanic and medicinal and psychedelic culture, 5-MeO is a really significant event. And it's chosen us, really. It's choosing all of us: its like some of us are turning on in advance of the others.

And so we have that duty of care to support each other as we all awaken and you know it really feels like we're at this crunch globally with the darkness and the light. It doesn't all have to come from from external source like 5-MeO, but we have it within us and I really feel that it is strategically significant and still underappreciated in modern psychedelic culture. Essentially we are treating 5-MeO-DMT like a product, like an external catalyst, which it is, but we're not seeing the elephant in the room: that it's endemic and fundamental to our consciousness and our beings.

God’s Backdoor Access

I call it ‘God's backdoor access’. It's been put in there for a reason. It can be accessed, obviously, endogenously. And I really think that's the challenge for 5-MeO culture globally: to get beyond the ceremony, what I call the ceremony of life.

We have this initiation through the external catalyst, but it's all on the inside, and the kingdom lies within.

So thank you. And I'm happy to be here.

CHAD: Well, when you say the backdoor access, somehow that brings to mind something that I really want to jam on you with is: I never asked you this directly, but I kind of want to know more about your take on maybe what we could call simulation theory? Because when I think, okay, backdoor access to what? What is being accessed? Do you espouse the theory of simulation and or would you call it something else?

Rak: Okay, that's a big one for 6 am. But, you know, this is the thing. It's almost as if you can't really talk about the part without talking about the whole. And this is what I really feel is fundamental. It's a good question to start with, because before we get into the nitty gritties of serving and practice and all the mechanics of [5-MeO-DMT], it comes down to what the heaven is going on.

Like, what are we in? What are we accessing, why is it happening, the who, what, where, when, why's, right? So, you know, simulation's just a modern buzzword.

Elon [Musk]'s made it very popular and, you know, different scientific thinking. But you could say samsara, you could say lila – many cultures have an appreciation of the fact that reality's not as it seems, or there's more, you know. And even modern science will say that like dark matter exists which is 90 % of the mass of the universe, but we cant see it, or this or that.

There's there's many different lenses to view this. But essentially when you have the 5-MeO experience, there is a potential for an understanding which transcends the egoic mind, the rational mind, the logical mind, the need to reductionize down to facts and figures to make it palatable for that part of your consciousness.

And so for me, in the 5-MeO experience, there is a intuitive understanding, a welcoming home, a knowing, a presencing that feeds me and it feeds my soul.

And to deconstruct this over the years, I have started to–I guess you'd say, dabble in Eastern mysticism more. I have this little book right next to me, which I got in India a year or two ago– I was on retreat there–and I now use it to carry my feathers in ceremony. But essentially, these cultures that have an understanding of Source consciousness with their language, like in the Vedas, in the Vedic traditions in their mapping of the cosmology.

Essentially, this is going to be my mashup and my sort of appropriation of all these different things. But essentially, you have a baseline consciousness. It's all vibration. Everything is vibration, as they say. And we're on a baseline material world consciousness. And then if you raise your vibration, you go through a spectrum of the full spectrum of consciousnesses out there.

As I say, it's like modern studies have shown with classical psychedelics that they lower the Default Mode Network, this regional cluster of the brain that aggregates into sort of this channel of reality that you're on. With 5-MeO, of course, it's also working on the frontal and parietal lobes, where at least partially that sense of ego is generated. It's lowering that sense of mind and it's revealing what's underneath.

Source is a Geography That Lies Within Us

It's not an external reaction. It's not the synthetic or the toad that is doing this and making you feel this feeling. It's just lowering the impediment or the filter between you and Source consciousness. It's a geography.

And so when we talk about the simulation in the baseline world, that geography, that deep source consciousness, it's infinite, it's endless, it is perfect in its infinity, and yet somehow it also creates this world. And so there's many different lenses.

In quantum physics, David Bohm, one of the famous physicists, has a language, he calls it the ‘Implicate’. And, you know, the Implicate creates the ‘Explicate’. The Shipibo tribe in Peru, they say that this world is a dream and that the ayahuasca visions are the deeper world, that is, the originating reality. Many different cultures will say this.

The Aborigines in Australia talk about dream time consciousness. You know, all these shamanic cultures and now all these quantum physics and all these different lenses are pointing to the fact that reality itself is multi-dimensional and that we live basically on the surface of the vibratory realm of the full spectrum reality. And so the great mysteries come in, not the geography of the where, but more like the why, right?

And so the first time I did 5-MeO-DMT was in Peru in 2006, which is recounted in my book and in the film Aya: Awakenings. And it was a pretty unique thing to be filmed with the EEG helmet and getting the brainwave readings.

I think James Oroc was riffing off the Shulgin scale with saying there's like a plus four experience [with psychedelics]. And sometimes your first time, if you get over the ego barriers and have the full ego dissolution, there's something quantifiably different, maybe because it is your first time and the ego doesn't know how to adapt or it has no expectations or there's like a virginal type of freshness to the experience, which adds a layer to it.

But my first time was with the EEG helmet, Dr. Juan Acosta, did this. We did meditation and some breathing and I wore an eye fold. And so there was a transition between a deep relaxed alpha state and then into the white light tunnel. But that was, you know, the peak experience of my life and it shaped everything.

And my feeling is, time goes both ways. You know, it's like the geography that we're describing internally, all of space time, all of this simulation reality is actually also a geography of God, of Source. And so, as I was going into the white light, it was the classical mystical experience with no expectations of this, you know. But there was a consciousness, there was a witnessing consciousness that was aware.

It could be do nothing but be aware of awareness–which is actually one of the classic definitions of consciousness from William Morris Bucke in the early 1900s–and that witnessing consciousness was going in really slowly into this infinite oceanic void, which was sort of a tunnel as well. There was a sense of tunnelness and coruscating light and I was feeling the vibrational wavefront of Source coming into me and opening me and I could feel all of my memories cascading out of me and feeding into the tunnel. All of this happened without the conscious mind anchoring to any thought.

It's just a telepathic awareness of everything. But there's an order and a seamlessness to that experience. So in this experience, I fundamentally felt the beingness of that Source consciousness in that deep space, that the void was pregnant with everything.

White light in the spectrum of light, the white light is all color, not the absence of colors, it's everything. And so it's like some of my N,N-DMT experiences where there's been a lot of visions and a lot of content, that feeling, though, of tryptamines when it's stretching and expanding and distributing consciousness.

But that expandedness, you know– in that space of the void in Source, consciousness expands forever. But here's the thing, to come back to simulation theory, it was feeding off me. And that word is loaded. It might not be feeding, but it felt like the wavefront of Source as it was opening me was revealing that I was it. There was no separation.

And, you know, the key phrase I love to use now, the analogy is from the poet Rumi when he says “you are not the drop, you are the ocean in the drop.” And so I use a lot of metaphors but, you know, they stick. And sometimes they get under the cultural resistance.

Source Condensates Into Matter

So that ocean that I was in, that Source consciousness ocean, it condensates down. My analogy is like the moisture cycle on earth. It feels intuitive to me that nature repeats its energetic invitation to let go into the oneness of that infinite oceanic radiating love, like a super union, like, you know, deep source consciousness.

But interestingly enough, it was like a laser reading a hard drive. And my friend Tanya Phoenix calls it a ‘heart drive’. And it felt very resonant. It felt like I was home, and you know, Rak's vessel had returned. When a baby comes down as a soul, into the physical body, let's just say it's empty. There may be samskaras, there may be past life imprints. I don't really know all that. But essentially, in this iteration, it's empty. And what happens through life, we fill. We fill ourselves up.

It's like were a battery. And it's not just energy, it's experience, it's accruing these experiences down here in the baseline matter world. And so when I went back up and I was releasing all my energy, but I could see sort of how my energy was circulating around the tunnel and feeding into the tunnel, like it was being absorbed.

And so it just left an impression that essentially, you know, mystics all through time spend all their consciousness and waking thoughts to get up, get back to God. And then, if you get there, what I experienced was that God was spending all this time to come down into being us.

And so there's this feedback loop where there is this exchange of energy, obviously that’s why we're here. We're here for a reason and we don't really know, right? But my intuition from my experience is that the Source was growing itself because I was shedding or I was sharing or it was reading me. And I'm not saying that I don't still have my memories, but the data or the gist of what it was getting, it was adding to Source.

And so, you know, we get very narrative here and very projectionist here, but essentially, So urceconsciousness is believed to be infinite, eternal, perfect, and it can't change. There's no time there. It's outside space time.

And yet the tendrils of it, it condenses down from its pure high vibration. And my feeling is that the different psychoactives activate different things, but essentially they're raising your vibration, which you can do through breathwork, through Tantra, through other modalities. As you raise your vibration, you're passing through dimensional plateaus or membranes, and all paths lead to Source, eventually if you go high enough up the vibratory scale.

So coming back down, you realize it's a continuum of energy exchange. There obviously must be some programming code, some templating, but it creates as an extension of itself in the material world. So if we are to say it's a simulation, yes, it's an easy term. It's more a reductionist term, you know, at least in some of those earlier cultures, maybe like lila or samsara, it's more lyrical and beautiful. But it's not separate.

And so, it feels like Source consciousness is extending itself down into the baseline world, which is essentially like a womb or a creche or some type of platform, a container to grow more of itself.

Now, Henri Bergson, who was an influential 19th century, early 20th century philosopher, he has a very famous phrase. He says, “the universe is a machine for making gods.” And it was plural. You could say God. But it's like the process is continuing.

So sometimes we may feel–I've felt this once or twice, and I've talked to Martin Ball about this–this feeling of like, what is God doing in its infinite perfection, radiating super union, in its eternalness? And is it lonely? Is this an anthropomorphic projection of us, of our duality in our humanness to even consider that God is lonely, that it is creating a container to grow more gods, to make more gods.

Does it need that? How can God be incomplete? And yet, if we are made in God's image, in the universal container, in this simulation, things replicate. I mean, things grow. There is space time, and space time is a medium. They actually call it space time now. There's a new riff on time, like a new four five dimensional thing but it seems like it is a platform and a container for life itself in the material world.

Fom our experiences we can also understand that there is life beyond the physical material world and that there's an ecology, an energetic ecology all through those murky shamanic NN-DMT realms and all the way up to Source consciousness, but it's not separate.

And, you know, it comes down to this why. It's like not just why are we here, but why is God here? And there's a perennial, almost impossible graspings of the intellectual ego. We can sort of let it go because maybe we'll never know, but the map is not the territory, but it helps to have the maps. The relationship is what it's all about.

So if God is growing more God in this simulation that we're in, it just begs so many more questions. It's very interesting trains of thought. Because, you know, over many lifetimes, through that cyclic moisture cycle where it rains, it goes through the earth, and then condensation goes back up. I mean, think of souls in that cyclic approach to energy exchange, that there's a gradation and a refinement of the quality of energy over time.

And, you know, in the Rig Veda, actually, I think it's in the Upanishads, there's a beautiful riff where they describe the seed of God within us all, close to sort of this idea of Buddha nature, that we all have this potential.

So if we are not separate, we're all like petals on the flower. And we've all, we've all got this individuation seemingly, but the root structure leads to same central source. And so when that opens in the 5-MeO experience, say in a group, it's not your 5-MeO and your 5-MeO.

It's the same central source in everyone. That geography is the overlapping sets. It's the underlying wireframe of reality that creates the physicality.

And so we all have this potential, this seed, and it grows over time and there's a relationship of it growing.

The Toad of Dawn

CHAD: Well, I want to stop you there only because when you said let go, I want to let go a little bit of the intellectualization here, simply because here we are as practitioners. And so a lot of this, we might have our own pet theories of what's going on, and yours is remarkable, and it's remarkably developed.

There's something that I thought of. I kind of want to go into the question of, well, okay, back to that back door. What is the back door to?

But actually, what comes to mind is just knowing you a little bit. And I've experienced you as at least at different times over the years, as I would say, maybe you even said this, but I would say as a reluctant practitioner, that there's sometimes as a practitioner, there's been, there's been this tug of like, hmm, am I in this? Am I doing this? I feel like even you coming into being a practitioner was not something that you jumped on right away, like many of us in the world of practice. And I'm curious if, you know, I guess I'm looking at like, what is with all of this explained somehow, with all of this very metaphorically brought into an image, brought into a picture, almost as if listening to you, I almost want to say that I understand it all. And I don't, and I like it. And I guess what in this that you're explaining, that this grasp of what's going on here, how does it play a role in why you continue to be a practitioner?

Rak: Well, it is pretty fundamental. We started with the geography and the big why because it does really inform why I do my work in the microcosm.

So just some context is that, you know, that first experience I just described in Peru in 2006, everything came from that because it was like so transformational, but It felt like an initiation in the classical sense. I didn't go near 5-MeO for like eight, nine years because it was so big and I was digesting and putting it into the media.

But I come back to this now. So, you know, when Octavio [Rettig] visited Australia in 2015 and toaded me, it was with the awareness of going back into that space. And there was another level of initiation in that, which I wrote the introduction to his book, The Toad of Dawn, about my experiences there.

But, you know, I said this about ayahuasca and going down to Peru in 2006, that the media is a cover story. It's like my secret identity. It's the Clark Kent thing. It's like, yeah, I make hopefully good books and docos. For me, having the experiences is the in-breath and communicating them is the outbreath; to continue to trickle and percolate that energy into the collective to continue the awakening process.

And it's true, but, you know, it's the baseline reality. I'm still being led on the path and I'm still hungry for the path and I still desire the path and the path changes.

But whenever I don't do medicine work for a while, I do miss it. I get back in the saddle. I'm like, oh, my God, this is it. It's like the highest calling I have is being in service to Source. And if that means serving clients, then that's what I would do, right?

CHAD: Would you consider saying, like, that you are, as in when you say, I'm in service to Source, thinking that here is this exogenous catalyst that we can use, although, okay, it's in us, et cetera, it's endemic, yes, but in service to it, I decide to do this. Are you serving source? Are you literally serving source? It's like, here's a dish of Source right here.

Rak: Yeah, this is what I like to say. I say, who do you serve, right? And that's not the person just in front of you, yes, physically. But if you're not serving Source, if you're putting money first, if you're putting something else first, that's not the correct energetic from my feeling of this.

It's like I serve Source. I'm a vessel. I'm a conduit and I empty myself so Source can work through me. And the thing is, I am in relationship. And so it's been, well, essentially, it's been 15 years since this first experience now. And so it's a long-term commitment. And, you know, I joked that I'm monogamous with five. I don't serve other medicines. I'm not interested in other medicines.

I used to really be chasing NN-DMT for quite a long time. And as soon as five came into my life, or, you know, the toad came into life, then that just fell away and there was no room. There was no space because it was all about five. And so I feel that I serve Source and I feel we serve Source, but we need to feel that connection and that relationship individually.

I've been through a seven-year cycle of ayahuasca, finished the book and all of that, emptied out, was left going, what's next? Boom, literally, boom, it arrived. Chad and I have a fellow practitioner, dear friends, we'll call him Solo. And, you know, I assisted him back in 2017, basically from about October 2016, my whole life just became 5-MEO. It was like, I mean, it just took over. And I was in about a 14 month, I would say, apprenticeship without realizing I was in an apprenticeship with multiple practitioners from my own self-inquiry, assisting, helping, because it brought me closer to Source.

I was sniffing around the edges of Source, all this practitioner stuff… It felt like in that formatting I described the first time that the formatting and the release and the emptying out is so that seed of God is growing within me.

And it comes to a plateau of conscious awareness in you that it's no longer just you navigating the world. It's you and this third thing, this space within you, this aware relationship and as it goes out into the world what does Source want, right? And so within the parameters of the ceremony in the set and settings that can become very tangible, but then as we step back from that into the baseline world, the memory is still with me, that you know, I'm Rak, I'm Source having the Rak experience and it's it's important to for me to ground that and to remember and to not take the game seriously because it is the game, this samsara thing.

And the phase we're in of the game is quickening and trust the internal relationship and the process and to be guided by that, but also let it guide, let it drive as much as you can. And so, you know, there was a long apprenticeship where I was like the orange boy or the bucket boy; I was doing the event, all of the event management, I would drive the bus, I would nurture the clients, I would do the vomit buckets, I would walk them up to the practitioner, I would do everything but light the pipe, like literally every single aspect, almost like one man band. And I have an ability, it's like that distributed consciousness thing, of just feeling into the flow and it's knowing where to hold that beat so that the energy isn't lost.

It just keeps going. It's like a multidimensional tracking thing. It's an intuition. It's just feeling the rhythm of everything. And it's part of the writer's thing of looking at the beats. It's part of me.

But then there came a point, you know, about, let's say, 18 months into this thing where I had done my time and I started to feel this, this ripeness, this fullness and a slightly little bit of resentment of just doing the levels I was doing. And I was like, what is this feeling? And really, because I was not looking to be a practitioner. I thought, I'm too public. It's too, it's too much. It might be dangerous. I don't know. I was rejecting the call. But the whole time I was in service to the call. And so there came a point where I realized, oh, like, I remember the moment. It was in Hawaii on retreat where I was just like, Oh, like it felt like I could feel it in me. I'd already done everything but that lighting of the thing.

And it's like, okay, I'm going to claim that responsibility. And I'd been avoiding it because it was that ultimate responsibility like, what if someone dies, right? What if someone is injured? And I know I worked with so many people and learned so much, and it was time to put it into action. I just had to say yes.

And it would have not felt correct to not say yes and so internally it came to that fruition point and I said yes and that's all I ever do on this part is I say yes at each junction, whether that's oh let's do a WBAC or oh let's do Conclave or it's like I'm not doing this, I'm feeling into it, my intuition I feel it's Source using me, just to play with all the lego parts and God's Lego.

CHAD: This is good. Thank you for sharing that. That feels very personal, like your personal journey. And a lot of it, I feel, is there's some similarities in mine and some dissimilarities in mine. And the similarity is how, and I'm sure I've shared this, you know, with the others here, part of my apprenticeship was really working with other practitioners and absorbing their offering and learning what they are doing.

Why are they doing what they're doing? Is there a why at all behind what they're doing? And part of the what they're doing is sure, there's the nitty gritty, the nuts and bolts of the practice of the set and the setting. And yet what informs that a lot is whether or not somebody is working and, you know, we've talked about the surrender or the submission approach, that bottom up psycholytic way or that coming down way or that just the, the prescriptive approach of like, this is the dose, this is the scene, this is what's happening.

And I'm just curious, out of all of the practitioners that you've worked with in whatever capacity, as a co-lead, as an assistant, as just, you know, absorbing or receiving from them, maybe use numbers. Maybe it's a percentage, but how, what would be the proportion of the practitioners that you're aware of, the ones that you've work directly with that are using what I would probably call either a submission approach or kind of like one size fits all approach.

Rak: That's really hard to say. I'd probably say 50-50. I mean, the thing is I hear about a lot more practitioners that I've actually sat with. And I sort of always make some inquiries and just try to figure into, you know, where it's at. I don't know, but hopefully more and more. I mean, to come back to that, you know, I do use the surrender approach myself.

I mean, I first got this from basically people who'd worked at the Crossroads Clinic and that was working with Ibogaine and then toad a few days later. And of course, it's a little bit different dynamics because they're very sensitive and ibogaine. But they would do the three-step method. And it was described to me like a 10, 20, 30, like about that, or just radiating it, you know, up. And that made a lot of sense. You know, and I'd seen basically the opposite of that. Basically, Octavio was my first, you know, toad.

And in fairness, I don't know how big a dose–the Mexicans often eyeball it and it's a whole different scenario. But there was definitely with the “doctors”, there was definitely that Yang, macho pushingness–and I'd seen damage. I'd seen too much. That wasn't the way I wanted to work. And so it felt to me there's a whole story that basically, Michelangelo is carving the statue with David, but he's not egoically thinking, I'm going to carve this statue with David. He has this block of marble and he already sees what is within it. And all he has to do is reveal it.

And I feel that's the same with the client. Each client that presents, you do your pre-screening, you get to know them, you form a relationship with your induction call. And then on the day, you know, you give it all up, right? But what I find is it's my empathy and my mirroring and the nuances and whatever I know and whatever relationships form. But then it's like, I describe it to them. I work in this stepping stone method.

I do like a handshake, a hug, and potentially a full embrace. That three-step approach is always customized. It's not always three steps. It may be four, five, or maybe two, you know. But each person, I try to pattern match to what their needs are. And sometimes what their needs are is not what they think it is. Sometimes it's not what you think it is.

You adapt in the moment. But starting small allows you to go bigger. And, you know, I've worked with Vapasana meditators that I've given five, 10 milligrams of toad and they've had a full release.

I'm like, wow, glad I gave you five or 10, right? And then I've worked with corporate CEOs or people with trauma and you know you give them huge amount and they just can't let go of the mind but then it's a matter of pattern matching and playing around with those parameters to soften them up or to assist.

I really liked your article on the submission and surrender approaches and I fully support that and believe that we can't do it for them; it's not our position. We're not doing it, we're not healing them, but you can push them through but that's not the way. It's just not the way because it shatters and my short hand is yeah, we could helicopter you out to deep ocean and we could drop you down boom and then what happens often especially with people with trauma…

I find with trauma a lot of times the somatic physiology just girds it like it feels this force and if the force is too strong it just contracts. It's part of the the weaving of how it's fundamental and so the softness is often the way to go but with that softness as well I describe the geography of the space and it's like this ocean within and this is Vendanta type of geography of the layers of Samadhi.

And there is a depth to that geography where they're like a handshake will take them into the shallows and they're up to their knees. And they're still conscious. Most of their consciousness may be there, but they're getting sensitized and they're feeling.

And I say what it does, it gives them the choice to say yes. It gives them permission. And they're giving themselves permission. I say, look, our role on the outside is to make you feel safe.

And so often, the handshake will allow people to go into the shallows of that experience. It might be what some of the mappings of the Samadhi states call stage three, the Samboga bliss body. So it's like a frequency of just blissfulness. And they're present enough to feel that. And it's like, oh my God, this feels good. I feel good with this.

Then they come out, they write it down and then, you know, a little bit of dialogue, not too intellectual. But then it's like when they're ready to go deeper. And according to how they've gone, how deep that handshake was, it may be a hug or maybe the handshake was more of a hug and it'll adjust to go deeper. But they're giving themselves permission. They have felt the space. They trust the space a bit.

Here's one of the sort of sticky issues of the geography and the facilitation. It's like, what is what is it we're looking for? What is the result we're looking for? I mean, if you give a big dose up front with no real adjustment to their individual needs, often people have the white out, you know?

And it's like, okay, so boom, they go basically Nirvakulpa Samadhi, which is like, stage five of the Samardi level. Stage four is that witnessing consciousness where you're not at the beach, you're not in the shallows, you're out in deep source. But this is four plus on the Shulgin scale. If you use that analogy, yeah, potentially.

But the witnessing consciousness, which is really, that's the sweet spot I find where it's like there's just enough consciousness there to not think about anything else, but like, oh my God, oh my God, it's just receiving, oh my God, oh my God, but they're there to remember it.

So there are dynamics around, you know, the mechanics of ceremony, which is where the client wants to have an experience. So if they white out and 10 minutes later, they come back and they go, what happened, you know, energetically, they may be getting a good release, and it can have a lot of benefits, but tangibly they're walking away feeling disappointed. So then, you know, you can scale it back and try to find that middle ground.

But also, what is the result? There seems to be a potential for a sweet spot deep in source consciousness, and yet they're aware. So we're not trying to have this ego death or kill the ego. We're inviting the ego into the back seat, we're inviting the person and their fullness to choose to go into this space.

And the space is already within them. It's a geography. It's lowering the mind. It's already within them. But there's fundamentally giving them the power to choose, which enables them to be responsible, to respond to Source consciousness within them. And that softness is something which I believe the culture in general could benefit from cultivating more and from tuning to the needs of the client versus that forcing and that thrusting.

CHAD: That's so interesting to hear you say this right now because part of the reason why I wanted to talk about this with you is because throughout time of either having direct interactions or just being in the same spaces together.

First of all, the surrender approach, it's, my opinion is it's the most empowering approach because there is that yes, you're explaining it just, yeah, I get that. And yet there's been sometimes over the course of just getting to know each other and and dialogues that I see ourselves in or one-on-one is this idea of like, okay, and I kind of allude to this in that article with surrender in mind. And it is, okay, so I can have that surrender approach. And I see all the benefits.

And my why that I have in that surrendered approach, it's pretty developed. You know, it's like, I do this because I'm believing that this is the most empowering way to go towards that, the four plus, the in between four and fifth stages of three and five of Samadhi or whatever we want to call it. Now, there could be a very developed why or reasoning behind having a submission approach of like, just get people through the back door. Just get them through the back door.

And that once they're in the back door, whether their personal consciousness has any recall or memory at all, what does it matter? What difference does it make? That there's a prioritization of getting people through the back door seemingly sometimes at all costs, or if it's a little more nuanced, then it's not so much at all cost, but that is the direction. It's a top-down direction.

Let's just make sure that that happens because that's the priority. And that's the purpose of this medicine, and that's the purpose of why we're serving it. And so I can imagine, and I've met many practitioners who have, that's why they would have an opposite approach to what you do. And quite frankly, it's the opposite of what I do as well.

And I'm like, oh, I think it's very nice to have this nice approach that I have. It sounds very, you know, there's lots of good reasons there. I'm, you know, trauma informed and I care about people, et cetera. Excuse me. And yet, if it's 50-50 in your experience over many, many years now, and having worked with and heard about, you know, the amplitude, there's so many hundreds of practitioners in the world, and if 50 % of them are having that approach, and perhaps many of them have very solid reasons why they're having that approach, what's wrong with that?

Is there anything wrong with that? I understand why you choose the way that you work. And yet, you know, perhaps there's a different kind of Michelangelo trying to reveal something quite different from that block of marble. What are you thinking?

Rak: Oh, it's a wrecking ball. And they've got a wrecking ball. Well, again, this comes down to the fundamental is why do we do what we do? What is the outcome? What is the goal? And this is the ego deciding, right?

And so, look, in my experience, everything about a ceremony is infused with the consciousness of the practitioner, from your set and setting to your approach to the outcome, right? And so if you believe that Source consciousness is growing more gods in this reality and that we're in a phase where the awakening is happening and we're all waking up…

5-MeO is you know, the premier tool for awakening consciousness at this time but it's also within us, so it's not– we're seeing the external mechanisms and appropriations and the mechanics of the absorption of 5-MeO into the culture, but it's this incredible replicable tool for achieving Source consciousness.

So it comes down to the goals of the practitioner. And the thing is, we are not healing people and it's not sometimes this isn't even healing if people have trauma sure, they may be healing. I mean, you could say awakening but it's like personally you know there is an attachment where it's like i want the best for them and i want to create a conducive environment for them and I want them to experience the thing that I know is there.

Are they having this awakening? Is it this peak experience? But what are they getting out of it? I mean, if seeds are awakening, and at least, you know, my short hand is it's like when a forest fire goes through and it burns off all, let's say, the egoic construct in that moment. And the seed of God from the intensity of the heat of the experience is germinated and then it's still awake in them and their mind comes back, but underneath all the pathways are still still on and vibrating. And so if that is what we are contributing to with this culture and this work is the germination of the seed of God within, then we must remember that that seed is actually in control. I mean, the person can resist the experience. You know, we're not the one doing it. We're providing the support, the setting, the coaching, the empathy, and the love.

You know, I really feel there's a deep level of soul-to-soul recognition and support of this person. But then the process itself is beyond us, okay? It's Like we're conduits for it, but we're not the thing. I say mechanistically, there's three things with a ceremony. There's the dosage. And obviously, sometimes higher dosages can assist bringing them in.

They're choosing to go into this space. We're supporting them in that and in that awakening it's them and Source and that's what so there's the dosage there's the armoring or the sensitivity of the people is the second thing which affects that process. The third thing I like to say is it's the heavenly permissions and protocols it's like when the the drop remembers it's the ocean the ocean has been in control all the time.

 I had one ceremony once with the Temple Of Awakening Divinity with the argon lamp. I undershot and then he goes go again and I went again and i overshot but there was a 60 second delay between the other bit kicking in. I went deep into Source and I'm just witnessing witnessing, and then the other bit kicks in, and then there was this conscious engagement with the space which my mind was interpreting receiving the signal into words and it's like, I'm going, I thought this would happen years from now. And it's happening now, and everything is unwound like an orange peel and complete ego dissolution.

But the point is that space is in control, right? Sometimes it's like, not today, no matter how much you give. Other times in the smallest amount, the door opens a little bit, takes you, it takes you. It's in control. And in microcosm, that seed, and germinating that seed, it's a delicate thing. You know, it really is like a rebirthing.

We're assisting in the revelation. And in that process, if you're all going really well with it and you should in Shavasna and surrender, I'm there holding space, but I'm not going to interfere because you're doing what you need to do.

If you're rolling around and your ego is recoiling and you're getting naked and roaring like Shiva and you're going to hit your head and I'll go in there and then maybe touch and I'll support and, you know, and as the midwife, you have to go in and assist, but it's still a natural process. So it's a delicate responsibility. It is. To respond, but not to dominate, not to take over.

It's not about you. You're just a vessel to support this natural process of this germination of the seed of God.

And I can see how some practitioners there's a desire to want to show them. You know, one analogy I use, I don't like the term ego death because it's not dying and you need the ego there to experience the experience.

And for me, the takeaway in the guts of this experience is to form a relationship with Source, an ongoing relationship, not just a flash in the panI would love people to godgasm. I would love people to actually have that culmination, that fullness.

Sometimes if they only get into the middle bits and it's like, oh, yeah, I could feel this something. It was sort of nice, you know, or yeah, whatever. And you're like, okay, but I'll explain to them there may be more, you know, and it's always their choice. And sometimes if they walk away and they've only had a glancing thing. It's like, okay, that's all you're going to get, that's their choice.