 Hey there! A couple of weeks ago you might have seen a video we published called Iowaska, Journey into Infinity. We were amazed by the reaction that video received, however we also noticed there was some confusion surrounding this topic. After some investigation we realized that we simply went too deep, too fast, as many people are still very new to the concept of entheogens, and that it was incumbent upon us to provide a better bridge to understanding these concepts from square one. So, with the help of Gaia, we have built a miniature movie out of their first three episodes of their series, Psychedelica, in order to provide a really solid foundation of understanding around plant medicine, their benefits, ancient origins, and how they can affect us today. Now, this does mean we're going to be taking down the previous video, but fear not, all of the same information, plus tons more, is present within this video we're sharing with you today. Before we begin, we'd just like to share with you something we've personally learned in our experiences with plant medicine. First, intention is everything. If we treat these substances as a sacred medicine for deep spiritual healing and transformation, our experiences will come to match this intention. Further, our environment makes a tremendous impact on the experiences that we have, since many people have expressed that these entheogens allow you to expand into the energy of everything around you. With that in mind, having your experience in nature or somewhere sacred is of the utmost importance. Thank you so much. We'll see you on the other side. The mind. It's our link to consciousness, our thoughts, and as a by-product, the expression of our soul. That free and unfettered aspect of being human that no one else has jurisdiction over. But as easily as the mind expresses the depths within, it remains easily lured into a false reality where thoughts become the object of attention and the source becomes forgotten. It is here where some scientists and philosophers believe we have lost the true reality and in turn become products of our environment and culture. And it wasn't until scientific study partnered with ancient rituals that they discovered that there might be a way to reconnect the soul and the mind more quickly and intimately. But are these just escapist tools or could they actually be a cure for the common human issue on this planet? The sleeping mind. I don't know which half is trying to get into the other half but somehow or other and I seem to be going like that. Suddenly you notice that there aren't these separations, that we're not on a separate island shouting across to somebody else and trying to hear about their same misunderstanding. Well I mean that there are the colors and the beauties, the designs, the beautiful way things appear. When it comes to drugs, please for yourselves, for your families, for your future and your country, just say no. But what are these substances that have such a negative social view and how did they come into the limelight? One specific drug that captured the hearts and minds of scientists and young adults started a particular investigation of the inner workings of the mind. As World War II was ending, Swiss chemist Albert Hoffman was investigating migraine medicine and pulled an old vial off his shelf of LSD-25. His accidental dosage opened his eyes to a new experience that he wanted to share with the world as he believed that this substance elicited a form of psychic loosening or opening. Czech psychiatrist Stanislav Groff believed that the psychic opening allowed experiences to resurface that go all the way back to birth and even pre-birth trauma. So he was willingly among the first to experiment with LSD to investigate what it does to the mind. Then I met Albert Hoffman quite a few times. He loved nature. He was taking small dosages of LSD in his garden until his death. And he said, I see the hand of God there. And if anybody thinks that the atoms can do it all by themselves, they just don't know what they are talking about. I was trained in Czechoslovakia when we had the Marxist regime. So I got the purest, materistic doctrine, you can imagine. And it was clear for me during graduation that consciousness is the product of the neurophysiological processes in the brain. And when the body goes, the brain goes, and there goes consciousness. It was as simple as that. Now I see it very differently. I realize we have absolutely no proof that consciousness is generated in the brain. Very few people realize this, including scientists. So those are tremendous contributions that psychedelics can bring. But the psychedelic experience wasn't something new when LSD hit the scene. Since the late 1800s, experiments were already being conducted on the psychedelic plants containing mescaline and psilocybin. Mescaline comes from the peyote and huachumacactus, and is used in many Native American rituals. The huichol mothers of Yalisco, Mexico would introduce peyote through breast milk and by chewing off bits and feeding them to their children. Even the Spanish chronicler, Fre Bernardino de Sahagun, reports that among the Chichimeca and Toltec, peyote was being used at least 2,000 years before the European explorers arrived. Archaeological artifacts were found in a cave near the lower Picos River region in Texas, dating back to 3700 BC. In South America and prehistory, the Chavin were using the huachumacactus in their own religious ceremonies. Huachuma has many different psychoactive compounds than peyote. So the experience is said to be slightly different. But the sacramental use of each were both used to connect with the divine. These cacti species are native to the Americas. Silocybin is from a class of mushrooms and used by indigenous from nearly every continent. In Central and North America, we see mushroom imagery in many indigenous artifacts, such as the mushroom stones found in Highland Guatemala, which were used to grind mushrooms before their use. Some images refer to the Amanita Muscaria mushroom, which isn't a classical psychedelic as it works on different neurotransmitter pathways. But still is a psychoactive. The Olmec, Toltec and Aztec imagery shows that the Americas once had a rich history of mushroom appreciation before the European settlers and missionaries resisted their use. Imagery in Siberia among the Chakotka appears in rock carvings. In Hindu imagery, such as Lakshmi, holding what appears to be mushrooms, some have debated these images as misidentified everyday objects, but believers of the deep psychedelic and shamanic roots of almost every ancient culture and religion say that you'll even find references in the Bible. The King James Version of Exodus 1614 gives a description of mana that seems very similar to mushrooms in shape and location and even the time of day that they appear. Even a modern look at the witch hunts and trials shows a deep appreciation for psychedelic and psychoactive plants that account for their tales of flying on broomsticks and shape-shifting into animals. There are too many to deny that psychedelic mushroom and cactus use were integral to many cultures worldwide. Whatever the conquistadors of the New World were so afraid of seems to still be present as we fast forward to the end of the 1960s. The revival of psychedelic appreciation among young adults began affecting the national narrative and anti-drug propaganda was beginning to lose its effectiveness. How would the world deal with this new problem? People attempting to dissolve the reality constructs of culture. What would this mean for the rest of society? Psychedelics are the antidote to propaganda in some ways. They help you develop a mindset that sees through all that. That's the real reason they're considered dangerous. As Tara said, psychedelics make you have funny ideas, but funny ideas are dangerous ideas. So that's the reason psychedelics are prohibited, because they encourage you to think for yourself. So that nation-states act as though it's kind of normal to have wars. People drop bombs on people, send in the troops. It's kind of normal thing to do. It's not a normal thing to do at all. It's a completely abnormal, aberrant, psychopathic thing to do. We shouldn't be going out there and killing other people for some sort of weird national goal. It's a terrible, terrible mistake that we're making. And now the toys of war have become so big and so huge that they actually pose a threat to the whole future of humanity. The power of psychedelic plants for perceiving higher patterns and seeing through rhetoric led to a desperate reaction by superpowers, shutting down the collective memory of traditional indigenous practices and cutting off the public from legal use. Quickly, independent chemists were making slightly altered compounds, which were technically not illegal. To combat this backdoor approach, the Analog Act was passed and the DEA was granted emergency scheduling power, in which they could declare any substance illegal and may take up to a year to decide what schedule to class it as. Psychedelic plants and synthesized versions were put into schedule one. This category proclaims the substance is highly addictive and has no medicinal value. Was there any evidence for this claim or was it a fear move? The classic psychedelics have been used for millennia really if you think of mushrooms and peyote. No evidence of toxicity. If you took heroic doses, I suppose you'd see increased blood pressure, but in the normal doses in the studies, you really don't see that happening. There is no craving to take them. As a matter of fact, they're anti-indictive, you know, in the sense that you often have to kind of screw your courage up to take them. The addictive qualities of psychedelics are non-existent. In fact, many of the psychedelic plants are used to quit highly addictive drugs like opiates. Alcoholics anonymous co-founder Bill Wilson reportedly used LSD to quit drinking in the 1950s at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Los Angeles. Classic psychedelics like psilocybin LSD, mescaline, they're not addictive because they don't activate actually the reward pathways in the brain involved dopamine. Psychedelic plants mimic the neurotransmitter serotonin. And tolerance builds quickly at these receptor sites. Even those plants that don't build tolerance still eliminate themselves quickly and leave behind virtually no toxicity. They're also being shown to treat addiction rather than add to them. There are so many benefits coming to light from these substances that groups such as MAPS, HEFTER, BECLE and many others are organizing a science-based campaign to reverse the prohibition because the evidence is clear. They are not addictive and they have remarkable medicinal and therapeutic value. So the question remains, why are highly addictive and toxic substances in Schedule 2 with widespread medicinal use while these age-old plants with a safe and ceremonial history going back many thousands of years and no evidence to prove physiological harm are in Schedule 1 lockdown? Is it a war on drugs or a war on the mind? Why haven't the institutions that make these suggestions turned back to the original use of psychedelics? A return to Mother Earth for answers. Since the dawn of modern humans, every culture in every region practiced what some would call shamanism. This mystical practice is scarcely understood but not forgotten. In the 1960s, amateur ethnomicologist Gordon Wasson wrote his first book titled Soma, Divine Mushroom of Immortality. After noticing the indigenous mushroom culture in Siberia, Siberian shamans would collect the fly agaric or emanita muscaria mushrooms and either dried and ate them or would feed them to reindeer and drink the urine to get the effects free of nausea. Because this culture neighbor ancient Indian culture, Wasson surmised that the emanita muscaria mushroom must be the lost ingredient of the drink Soma. Soma was the sacred and psychedelic beverage of ancient India. But how could this mushroom have ended up in a foreign religious sacrament? This drove Wasson to dig deeper to discover what shamanism truly is. The term itself came from the Siberian cultures and was brought into English through Russian and German and people started to recognize it as a phenomena that was found in many parts of the world and started applying it to Native American practices and to Australian practices and things like this. What really is a shaman kind of depends on the perspective we take. So the shaman is like a spiritual bounty hunter, you know, he or she deliberately induces these altered states with drugs or other means, but then they just don't sit there and have the trip. They can actually actively navigate in that world. The shamans have attained a sufficient sophistication to explicitly understand that the vessel of alchemical transformation is the body and the plants lift the imprisoning structures of the ego and the ego flows out into the world. Beyond the confines of small tribes in Siberia, author Gordon Wasson discovered that larger societies were also using psychedelic plants as a form of societal shamanic ritual. Even in studying the Hindu culture, the Ganges River comes out of Shiva's top knot in very many depictions. You see a picture of a cannabis leaf on top of Shiva's head and also he's holding a vessel that contains bong, B-H-A-N-G, which is a cannabis containing beverage that is flavoured with cinnamon and cardamom and other spices. And I was also very interested to learn about the Ellusian Mysteries. The Ellusian Mysteries in ancient Greece clearly had a psychedelic sacrament. We even know what it was now. It was a form of ergot clavicepaspale that grows on barley. It was used in a beverage called the kaikion that initiates the Ellusian Mysteries' drank. And then they had extraordinary and life-changing experiences. In the dark halls, they were addressing setting there as well. These experiences were undergone in a place called the Telestrian, which was underground and in darkness, probably dimly lit with little lamps here and there, a setting for the experience to unfold in. And the initiates of the Ellusian Mysteries, who included people like Plato, people like Socrates, people like Cicero, came out and afterwards reported that their lives had been utterly transformed by the experience that they had undergone. They had lost their fear of death. They knew that they were immortal spirits, that they were just temporarily housed in a human body. From ancient India to Greece, ancient plants have been used for deeply spiritual quests and large-scale healing. But what was the first well-organized psychedelic society? Scholars and historians had all but given up on uncovering the mysterious beginnings of the Shamanic society, when in 1976, Soviet archaeologist Viktor Saryanidi unearthed the 4,000-year-old temple complex in present-day Turkmenistan. This complex is nearly a half a million square meters, divided into a large northern and smaller southern region. Its walls, made of clay bricks, spanned 120 by 115 meters and were reinforced by 20 rectangular towers. Roughly 1600 to 1700 BC, the northern region was burned down and the whole complex was abandoned quickly, leaving the mystery of its origins, only with the artifacts found there. Author and researcher Chris Bennett spent years investigating the spread of cannabis in the ancient world, and began piecing the puzzle together from this location. The debate about Soma and Hailma, the origins of them, has changed lately because of archaeological finds. And one of the really important ones is the work of the Russian archaeologist, Viktor Saryanidi. He wrote about this in his book Marjiana and Proto-Zoroastrianism. And Saryanidi was doing work in the outer regions of Afghanistan known as the Bactria Marjiana Archaeological Complex. And in this region he found a number of temple sites. These were big temples about the size of a football field. And half of the temple sites were dedicated to the preparation of this beverage, which Saryanidi has identified as Soma Hailma, the sacred beverage of the Persians and the Indians, the ancient Indians. It is still debated whether this lost city of Gonur Tepe had a supreme ruler or simply an elite class and high priest. In many ways, the priests of larger civilizations mirrored the role of the predecessor, the shaman. So the shaman in the traditional role is basically a liaison for the community to this realm of the supernatural, you know, and the supernatural forces. So in that sense it's kind of a priest-like, you know, function. At Gonur Tepe, the high priest was the gatekeeper to spiritual and psychedelic experiences. The psychedelic trip has been equated to a mystical experience, as it allows the user to peek behind the veil of cultural conditioning, and the high priest was the one that bestowed these vision quests upon the people. Only through his approval were commoners allowed to drink this sacrament. Gordon Wasson claimed that the Amanita Muscaria Mushroom was the psychoactive ingredient in Soma and Hailma, because of the mushroom's common use in nearby areas. But this claim is unproven, and some believe quite implausible due to the kind of experience these mushrooms elicit. So the mystery has continued through the ages, until Victor Sarianidi sent scraping samples from Gonur Tepe out to be analyzed. Based on archaeological evidence that's recently come up in the last decades, they found big bowls in the ground where the Soma would have been ground with mortars and pestles, and then also straining devices, as well as bowls with fossilized remnants in it. And so they took some of these fossilized remnants, which was like a fossilized liquid substance, and had it tested, and they found evidence of cannabis, ephedra, and in some cases poppy. And all these plants grow in this region as well, still. Poppy is the base ingredient for opium, which elicits a sedative and euphoric effect, while ephedra, the base ingredient for amphetamines, is a stimulant and appetite suppressant. And lastly, cannabis elicits a slightly psychedelic effect with an increase in appetite, causing this beverage to act as a symphony of mind-altering ingredients for these ancient Indo-European cultures. And it's interesting it has its counterpart in the Avestan religion over in Persia, where it's known as Heyoma. Because of language similarities and mythological similarities, they're both Indo-European languages, this combined use and identity indicates a much older origin from an identical cult, so going considerably far back into history. We know that they were involved in trades with another Indo-European culture living in central China, known as the Gushi culture, and we found numbers of perfectly preserved specimens of both cannabis and ephedra at this site. And it's likely that these Indo-Europeans living in China who were exporting cannabis were likely the suppliers of the Bactria Margeana Archaeological Complex use of it and delivered by Scythians. My view is that the Chinese term for cannabis, which is huma, traveled with cannabis into the Bactria Margeana Archaeological Complex with this name that became Heyoma, and then through dialectical changes as it reached into India, became soma in the Vedic language. There is a Polish entomologist and anthropologist, Sula Bennett, who suggested that this Hebrew term, canabosim, was a reference to cannabis, and that this reference appears for the first time in the Exodus 3023, where God who appears to Moses in flames of fire from within a burning bush commands Moses to make a wholly anointing oil. And every time that Moses is to speak to the Lord, he's to go inside this enclosed area called the tent of the meeting, and he covers himself in this oil and he also places some of the oil on the altar of incense, and he speaks to the Lord in the pillar of smoke over the altar of incense. None of the other Israelites in the biblical story ever see or hear the Lord, they can only tell if Moses is talking to the Lord, if smoke is pouring out of the tent of the meeting. Moses is believed by historians to have lived in the 16th century BC, just after the period of Gunur Tepe and connected to the same trade routes. The phenomena of inhaling mind-altering substances in order to speak to divine sources are also seen with the Oracle of Delphi, which ranged from the 8th century BC and possibly earlier in the late Mycenaean times. The scholar Martin Litchfield West wrote that the Pythia, or Oracle, exhibited central Asian shamanic practices as she reportedly sat upon a tripod above a chasm from which vapors poured forth as she inhaled them and prophesized. If it is true that these age-old stories show a deep appreciation for mind-altering plants, how much farther back can we trace shamanic traditions into history? That evidence, we first encounter it in the painted caves of Upper Paleolithic Europe going back close to 40,000 years ago. Curiously enough, just quite recently in Indonesia, was discovered a series of painted caves which date back to more or less exactly the same period, the high 30,000s, almost to 40,000 years ago in the past. There are certain types of imagery that regularly and routinely crop up in those deeply altered states of consciousness brought on by psychedelics. And it's precisely those types of imagery that we find in the ancient rock and cave art all around the world. You'll often find geometry in the paintings or engravings. You will find, and this is really quite diagnostic, you will find creatures that are referred to as therianthropes. That's from the Greek therion, which means wild beast and anthropos, which means man. They're hybrid human and animal figures. Not only were these visionary illustrations important enough to appear in humanity's earliest art in the painted caves, but they were also immortalized in the flesh as the therianthropic paintings on the cave walls conjure similar imagery to that of the Scythian tattoos. There are remnants of shamanic practices in every corner of the globe. Might we also find references to psychedelics in the creation myth of the Bible? If you look at the imagery that is conjured up of the serpent in the Garden of Eden, I'm not saying that painters in the 14th century actually saw the serpent in the Garden of Eden, but if you look at the imagery that's conjured up, very often, actually I would say about eight times out of ten, you'll find that that serpent is a therianthrop, that that serpent has a serpent body and a human head, for example, or maybe equipped with arms and legs, brushing off that serpent body in some cases. So right there there's a suggestion that we're dealing with a classic entity of vision. In the mainstream Christian position on the serpent in the Garden of Eden is that it represents the devil, the bad guy who's come to tempt and mislead Adam and Eve. But the very powerful alternative point of view provided by the Gnostics is that the serpent was one of the ancient teachers of mankind, that he's coming to say to Adam and Eve, you need to learn the difference between good and evil. If you go back to the book of Genesis, the forbidden fruit is the knowledge of good and evil. That's what that tree is. It's the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and its fruit is therefore the knowledge of good and evil. But is there a deeper layer to that? Could we indeed be talking about some kind of natural psychedelic? What would it mean to discover that the forbidden fruit that the parents of our species ate was psychedelic in nature? And is it possible that this fruit initiated the rapid expansion of the human neocortex? Well, there's an interesting set of findings about how humans differ from our chimpanzee relatives in terms of the use of these psychedelics and what happens in the body. The human serotongic system is much more sensitive to these substances. The binding of the serotonin neural receptors with these psychedelics is two to four times more powerful than what happens in chimpanzees. John McPartland and Dr. Jeffrey Guy, the founder of GW Pharmaceuticals, both have speculated that cannabis may have played a role in this time period, that the psychoactive effects of cannabis may have resulted in new novel ways of thinking and approaching problems, and that creativity aspect may have provided that element for the Great Leap Forward, you know? Another theory popularized by the McKenna Brothers was the potential for copper-filled spores or rather manure-loving mushroom species like psilocybin as being the impetus for humanity's Great Leap Forward. Cattle worship is seen throughout ancient Egypt, Greece, Israel, Rome, Germany, and is seen in Jainism, Hinduism, and Zoroastrianism. Our ancient ancestors, seeking food in the plains and grasslands, would have eventually found the cattle that grazed in the fields and noticed a strange mushroom that grew from their droppings that influenced the lingual and problem-solving regions of the brain. Were cannabis and psychedelic mushrooms possible causes for such drastic differences in intelligence between modern humans and our ancestors? How much of our modern society has been influenced by our shamanic roots? Really, it's out of shamanism come the roots of religion, for sure, pharmacology, but chemistry and poetry and theater and all of these things really find their roots in shamanism. There's a certain point when religion doesn't want the shamanism in there anymore. That's really where we see the decline of the shamanic use of these substances as religions become more politically motivated as a means of controlling society and organizing society. There became, I think, both a theological and political desire to unify the people under one consolidated head and rule. As religious institutions and political leaders began combining their powers as we see mirrored in major corporate mergers today, the momentum was to keep spreading. And at the start of what we call the modern period, European nations began sending forces to the Americas and as a result, indigenous tribes were decimated and countless generations of shamanic wisdom was erased from the earth. Was there an agenda? If so, what was the purpose? The position that modern societies have taken on psychedelics, we've demonized these substances, we've made them illegal, we've subjected people to harsh prison sentences if they're found in possession of psychedelics. This is a terrible error that is being made in modern western society. We are losing contact with our fundamental roots by doing that. The traditional shamanic use of them nearly always includes a community and ritual setting. Shamanism is essentially a living tradition of alchemy that is not seeking the stone but has found the stone. The ritual simply means an arrangement of the certain setting for certain intentions. This would also be true, for example, of a Native American church peyote ceremony. They have the same kind of thing. It's a group of people, they know each other, some of them are friends, some of them are neighbors, maybe invited. They share the intentions. And then they have the traditional songs and invocations. They invoke the spirits. And that's completely different than the scientific study. There's no psychological discussion. It's not a modern western system. The shamanic cultures were very clear about this. They viewed the psychedelics as instruments that opened up the brain, the mind to telepathy, to clairvoyance, to precognition, to pre-sentience, and that ultimately it may be necessary to view the perceptions that occur under psychedelics as our brain basically tuning into a different channel and receiving information that we really don't know how to define at this point. For roughly 20 years, across the world, the prohibition held firm. No public use. No medicinal use. Not even research to back up the claims that place these plants in the strictest category. The sleeping mind of the people seemingly fell deeper into consensus trance. It was as if the innate pattern recognition and problem-solving faculties of human consciousness were missing a critical ally, one that had been with us since the dawn of modern intelligence. It seemed that the propaganda campaign had worked. Then in 1990, Rick Strassman, a medical researcher specialized in psychiatry, applied for a federal grant to give dimethyltryptamine to volunteers to simply see what the effects might be. Well, so there was a group in Germany, which got started around the same time or sooner than I did, studying mescaline. But my DMT study was the first in the U.S. and the first that used DMT in quite a while. It was pretty frustrating. I never really expected to succeed, and I don't think many people did. Public opinion of any mind-altering substance tends to evoke the belief that the experience is simply what happens when the brain fails to function properly, as if the default state most of us spend time in is the proper state to operate from. However, even if this were true, when someone's brain becomes dysfunctional and then hours later returns to normal, how would that individual explain the experience? Well, I think the most sort of striking part of the research and what I really wasn't expecting was the sense of reality that people returned with. They felt the experiences were more real than real. The importance of the feeling of more real than real is we make our decisions based on what we believe is real. You know, the outside world, we're assuming is real. Our inner world is real. And we make decisions based on reality, inner and outer. So if there's a state that feels more real than real, then do we make decisions based on the information there? What really is the bedrock of reality? Is the consensus world we typically operate from the more real one? Is this where we'll find the universal truth as we seek to make life decisions from? Is it the psychedelic realm that some believe is more real than real? Perhaps it's neither, and they're both merely reference points implying and pointing to the underlying universal truths, encouraging us to engage with our own truth-seeking impulse. Our innate memory, an inner sense of our integral place within the fabric of reality, that we are all aspects of a singular phenomena appearing as independent things. Even Taoists and Buddhists believe that the outer visible manifestations of life are the illusion of temporary garments, cloaking universal and unchanging principles that inform, instruct, guide and breathe life all that we experience around us. So why do we experience the illusion at all? What mechanisms cause us to collectively share such a misleading perception of life and living? Perhaps we should take a deeper look at the physiological effects of the chemical compounds in these plants that the government feared so much. Classical psychedelics activate a type of brain serotonin receptor called the 5-HT2A receptor. And what that means in real terms is the cells become more sensitive. What you're doing is really sort of ramping up the ability of these cortical cells to process information quickly and more effectively. There's an area in the brainstem called the locus ceruleus, the LC. It sends projections up to the cortex that release norepinephrine. And the locus ceruleus has been referred to as a novelty detector. So normally if you look at firing in the locus ceruleus it fires in bursts, so it won't do anything and you'll see burst of firing. So what happens is psychedelics increase those bursts. So we can imagine if those bursts correspond to the locus ceruleus detecting some novelty and maybe it looks more novelty. And I've used the analogy when people take a psychedelic and they look at, say, a flower. It's as if they're seeing it for the first time. So it increases the sense of novelty. What would be the biological purpose of these plants causing humans to see the world as if it's new again? It is a well-known phenomena to be looking for something like your keys while they're in your hand or right in front of you, but you don't see them. Your eyes have even spotted them, but you don't acknowledge that you've seen them yet. Our perception works in pattern recognition and this allows the world to become predictable so we can find a rhythm to operate within. These plants and their effect on the detection of new information from old patterns may be the direct cause of neurogenesis and neuroplasticity. It has been shown that these serotonergic plants initiate the growth of new brain cells as well as new neural connections and patterns to emerge. Let's think of this less as a causation and more of a correlation. Neurogenesis and neuroplasticity could be occurring when authentic childlike learning is happening. The neural growth seems to happen most in the hippocampus which regulates emotions and is involved in memory. A symposia.com article says new studies are showing that neurogenesis in the hippocampus activated by psychedelics might be a part of the acquisition of new behaviors and new pattern recognition. With proper set, setting, and skill, these changes in the brain may likely be why psychedelics have been so effective in treating post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, and depression, where other treatments have failed. Imagine for a moment that you were just born again or that all your memory has been put on hold and you're seeing the world free and clear of cultural conditioning. Imagine all the explanations for what this world is and why it is the way it appears have been erased. Imagine you take a look at the people in your neighborhood, the animals and homes and in nature, the health of the oceans, forests, and communities. What questions would you begin formulating and what role do you play in all of this? These are the questions one starts asking when introduced to the world of psychedelica. The mind begins asking broader, deeper, and more timeless questions. And perhaps this is what makes them so difficult to properly name. They allow new patterns to be recognized and new behaviors to be adopted where most of what the Western world calls medicine tends to disengage or mask the symptoms while leaving the root cause untouched. You even have another term which is entheogens for usually for the weaker, the amphetamine related and so on. Something that awakens the God within. I myself prefer to call them like sacred psychedelics or sacred medicines because that's what they are. That's how the native cultures saw them and I think it's accurate. It seems that these ancestral tribes understood the many healing qualities of these plants. The most profound effects seem to be the self-reflection people go through under their influence. The ability for these plants to confront you with your regrets and worries. Psychedelics help deconstruct old behavior patterns and build newer and healthier ones as seen from the creation of new neural pathways and the birth of new nerve cells. A quality long thought to be impossible shortly after childbirth. Very, very often what the psychedelic experience will show you is the mistakes and errors that you've made in your life where you have chosen the dark side rather than the side of light where you have chosen evil, maybe very small, maybe very large, where you have chosen evil rather than good. Psychedelics can give you insights into how to be a better person. It won't make you a better person and if you're a bad person, you may still be a bad person. The language facility in the brain is destabilized as well. So the combination of our self-identity and our language being put off balance by simply ingesting a plant gives rise to the ineffability of the experience. Just as we see with any mystical or spiritual experience, words are not enough to communicate the magnitude of the experience. But the possibility has to be considered that what the psychedelics are doing is retuning the receiver wavelength of the brain and actually allowing us to gain access to veridical alternative realities, parallel dimensions. We have the same situation in the television. We would laugh if somebody would study that set and go down to a molecular level of the transistors and the wires and would believe that this gives you an explanation why you get a Mickey Mouse cartoon at seven o'clock in the evening. If Stan and many researchers are correct in positing that consciousness is not generated by the brain but tuned into, what then are these psychedelic plants trying to show us? Across the range of the psychedelics, you can definitely say that there is a broad range of imagery that is common. Not everybody will have all those images all the time. Not everybody will agree on every single aspect of it. But it starts off with what I refer to as entoptic phenomena because they're considered as originating in the ocular system where you start seeing zigzag lines and cross-hatches and geometrical patterns, sometimes fantastically complex and elaborated mandalas appear in the geometry. Then there tends to be the sense of passing through a vortex of some kind into a seamlessly convincing parallel universe. Is this the same phenomena that humans have been experiencing since the time our ancestors were painting their visions in caves some 40,000 years ago? Were those entoptic images, engrams and portals depicting a dimension that we are still tapping into today? What is this vision? And could it be some kind of collective consciousness of the human soul experience? It's important to keep in mind, I'm not just saying that this is the perception of alien trans-dimensional thing. It might just be a psychological construct. It might be the result of brain activity in certain areas in relationship to each other, in which case they would still be as interesting as if they were anything else. Are psychedelic plants here to introduce us to ourselves? To the shadow of our psyche and the ills that come from the sleeping mind? What if the greatest threat we face is not out there in the world of symptoms, but in here? In the dark corners of individual psychology and its rippling effect into the masses, since the dawn of time, psychedelic plants have been there. They've seen the horrors of the past and have always produced the medicine most needed by these dangerous minds. A class of compounds that, when all is said and done, offer us an honest look at ourselves. And from this new perspective, humility, compassion, and community bonding naturally emerge. Perhaps they confront us and give us the only medicine that may help us out of these dark times. Love. And how far back can we trace the human-psychedelic relationship? There is really an enormous wealth of evidence to suggest. I would go beyond saying to suggest to prove that our ancestors, deep into prehistory, were using the kind of substances that we call psychedelics today. And these would be the natural psychedelics that are available from plants. These plants have played a fundamental role in the human story. It is likely that in traditional shamanic communities, the whole group was not only involved in the ceremony, but they all had similar belief systems, allowing all of them to be more rooted in the customs of their ritual. If one person was experiencing a healing crisis, the rest of the group was likely holding space for their healing rather than distracting them with unnecessary noise or movement. If they understood the basic criteria for psychological healing, are there other shamanic anomalies that may have a physiological or neurological basis? Shamanism has certain characteristics that are pretty much universal. And a lot of what the shaman does is retrieve souls. Illness, mental and physical illness in these cultures is often understood as a loss of souls. The idea that a shaman is a soul traveler will often go to what's conceived as the center of the universe, you know, the world tree. There's a well-known phenomenon of the out-of-body experience or astral production. What we know is that there's a particular part of the brain that's supposed to integrate our sense of self with our body, the temporal parietal junction. And when this part of the brain is taken offline, then we're able to experience ourselves independent of our body. Does this mean that the shaman simply convinces his or her own brain that the mind and body are separating? And if so, does that mean that it's just a mirage? Or is belief, imagination and creativity the physical mechanisms by which an aspect of the shaman leaves his or her body to perform work in other dimensions? Perhaps this is the underlying knowledge that shamans utilized when crafting a healing environment. What would the shamans of today look like? Would they still be wearing the same clothes and singing the same songs? Or would they be doing brand-new work with the same spirit, joining hearts and hands in ancestral twine as Xavier Rudd would say? And if shamans of the past did healing work for their village, what would a modern shaman truly use to get their music and their message to the people? If this shamanic power is still present today, it would be present within all of us and the real tragedy from there would be to remain ignorant of this gift. The modern mindset seems to marvel at the latest and greatest technology while disregarding the importance of our heritage. What if this is exactly why the health of the masses and the health of the planet is struggling to keep up with the rapid changes that we are causing? What if the passing of each generation to the next is a direct connection to our shamanic ancestry? And the biological technology of the human body remembers all that our lineage has been through? And what if the remedy to all our human problems is simply to remember who and what we truly are embodied in the heart and soul? If psychedelic plants and shamanic rituals are a vital key to unlocking our past, is this why they've been suppressed, feared, and crusaded against in the old world as well as the new? Indigenous people have been their stewards, they preserved the plants, they preserved the practices in a certain way, but now all of a sudden psychedelics are going global, you know, and you get a phenomenon where ayahuasca is like taking over the world. Deep in the heart of the Amazon, out of generations of indigenous people, from mysterious origins, birthed from a specific combination of plants comes a visionary experience, an ancient healing tradition, modern controversy and massive interest from younger generations, all surrounding a sacred brew called ayahuasca, a beverage that contains DMT. DMT is a tryptamine that even our brain produces, but the shakruna leaves contains much more. Left alone, this molecule will be metabolized before having any effect, so the sacred vine is added to protect its entry through the body, into the brain, and into our experience. From scientists to shamans, many theories abound regarding the strange effects of ayahuasca, and yet it still is not fully understood. So ayahuasca is, it's a whole bunch of things, but you know, on the nuts and bolts level, it's a beverage that's made from two plants, at least one of which contains dimethyl tryptamine. At the cultural level, it's much broader than that. These are essentially shamanic practices, and ayahuasca is at the center of that kind of traditional medicine, you know, which is really a mind-body kind of medicine. This mind-body medicine has been used for so long in a region devoid of literature that the true beginnings of ayahuasca are left to oral traditions and myth. There are only a few cultural artifacts that have survived this hot and wet climate before being completely decomposed and recycled back into nature. And the mystery of how the indigenous discovered these two ingredients among countless other species has baffled the world. Why do these few plants out of a half a million in the world have these unearthly effects on the mind and sometimes on the body that they think can transport him to outer realms of space? And they believe that in these plants, there is a resident spirit. Ayahuasca was the only psychedelic session where I had a sense of a personal therapist, kind of like a spiritual guide of some sort, which I didn't see, but it was a very clear sense of energetic presence and telepathic communication. Guiding me in a very specific way through my sessions, looking what I should look at, what I should work on. And if I didn't do it, it sort of returned and was sort of putting some pressure on me to do it, you know, had any intention for me what I should do, what I should become in that session. The indigenous of the Amazon referred to it as Mother Ayahuasca, known by some to be the divine feminine principle and the first woman of creation. The ayahuascaros or healers say it is her that we commune with for guidance, before, during, and after drinking ayahuasca. It is she that allows us access to all that we've forgotten in this life and all others. However, in the initial ceremonies where people are introduced to this resident spirit, it can be painful and quite confrontational because so much of our trauma is unknown to us and therefore we rarely acknowledge our baggage as a part of us. So what ayahuasca does is she goes through the physical and energetic body, which are an emotional body that are totally interconnected and she's going through and our traumas are held in the tissues and so she's going and ripping out that stuff and so it hurts, whether it be physical through nauseousness or even actual pain or sometimes we have that stuff in our thought processes, our patterns and so we're holding on to the stuff and ayahuasca is opening, opening, opening and pulling that stuff out. Everyone's experiences are different in personal ways. Not everyone experiences pain. Some are left in ecstasy, but no two ceremonies are identical. Some describe the evolution of ceremonies as the medicine speaking a story of our blind spots and ailments. Although traditionally the main purpose of ayahuasca has been for healing, it's typically the visionary quality that initially attracts newcomers. They come with curiosity, expectation, ambition and a drive to become enlightened, a mystic, a spiritual savant. But if you listen to those who have spent many years with the medicine or even just a few weeks in a traditional setting, you'll learn that the path to heaven often comes through the belly of a personal hell. The wake up call happens when those who want to merge with pure divinity are faced with their fears of death. In ayahuasca culture, facing mortality is a prerequisite to evolving on the path of spirituality. The vine itself is called the vine of souls or the vine of the dead, and even though these difficult encounters are well known, there are still thousands of people journeying to the Amazon with the desire to peek behind the veil to receive the overflowing gifts of life and uncover these painful yet fruitful mysteries of death. The pulse of ayahuasca is slightly different for every person and even changes from ceremony to ceremony. Visions begin swirling and pulsing in front, behind and everywhere around us. Time and space may dissolve and the visions become the only reality and it is at this point the creatures of the jungle appear. I have seen and experienced a lot of identification with animals but there seem to be preponderance of certain animals like jaguar and anacondas. They may be entirely animal, they may be entirely human, but sometimes you get these therianthropes. Again and again they crop up in visionary experience. I've had such visions myself under the influence of ayahuasca. So it doesn't surprise me that ancient people had those visions as well. Shamans are drinking ayahuasca to enter a deeply altered state of consciousness and a great many of those shamans paint their visions today. Are people under these states experiencing the same visions that our ancestors saw in each corner of the globe? How would it be possible that humans are connecting to ancestral visions through a plant combination? Various aspects of the visual cortex are stimulated by the presence of psychedelics. So the fact that we have visions we can easily explain. The content of the visions, what it is we see presents some much more significant challenges. How is it that the brain gets access to information that people often claim has nothing at all to do with what they've experienced before? Well perhaps some of this can be understood as the stimulation of what's been called archetypes, archetypal structures. Archetypes are common types of people or forms that seem to emerge from mythology and visionary imagery. From cultures separated by time and space with no known contact or communication. Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustaf Young wrote extensively about these visions from patients and psych wards who spoke of seeing imagery that is nearly identical to mythological figures that at the time were not even translated into English yet. If these archetypal forms are not withered by the passing of time, is there a reason for their arrival in our visions? Some believe these are messages for our personal advancement by showing us who and what we truly are. Not the individual body or identity we inhabit, but all the events that have unfolded since the origin of life and beyond. I think what happens with plant medicine is that plant medicines help you like get yourself out of your own body and look at yourself. You know, there's your birth, but then there's your mom's birth. Your grandmother's birth, the birth of a nation, the birth of humanity, the birth of the universe. It's like this longer life, you know, kind of very much like quilting where in the quilt you might be just one stitch, but you're one stitch of this big, beautiful quilt that's this big, beautiful pattern that for us would be a story or the history if you want to call it that. Whatever the source, these visions are almost always outside the realm of anything we've ever experienced in this waking life. They tell stories, reveal hidden truths, conjure emotions, and even lead the mind into realms unknown. Many who try to explain these visions by conventional means come up short of legitimate answers. Some say that visions are alive. In combination with these visions comes the strange bodily sensations and the physiological effects of the beta-carbolines in the vine. The common result of this is what some call lapurga, the purge. The need to throw up is why there are typically buckets set out next to the beds in the ceremonial maloca, and the belief of many indigenous is that purging is the physical outlet for an energetic release and surrender. With the purging, some people might say, well, why are you going to put yourself through that? But it's actually part of the process of not only detoxing, but also healing. I think it depends on where you're at with the medicine. I think in the beginning, a lot of the purging has to do with physical stuff that's in your body. Because when you come out of a ceremony, you really recognize how your diet affects you, be it the water or lack of water you drink or the type of food, how healthy or unhealthy it is. Once the physical part kind of passes, or I don't want to call it the next level, but maybe a deeper level, it becomes more of an emotional purge where sometimes you will realize that if you go into this storyline and if the storyline is a negative storyline, that's when the purging, like the feeling of purging starts. Then after a while, you start realizing that your habits kind of recreated again. And then the next ceremony comes and you're still getting it out and then you're just kind of repeating that cycle. So it'll get to a point that all of a sudden the purge is the acknowledgement of there's something there that you need to work with. Working with discomfort, the trauma and unknown aspects of the psyche is not a modern western approach where most medicines dull pain, mask symptoms, and require no work after being taken. Ayahuasca on the other hand is impossible to take and forget about and requires the courage, strength, patience and understanding to face the darkest aspects of us that we've forgotten. We want to develop, we want to know ourselves. And it helps to surrender to yourself in fact because what Ayahuasca is it is a jungle medicine that opens up your own subconscious. So if you see a beauty, then you deserve to feel that before you can maybe be confronted with your behavior that is not always beautiful. When you see darkness it may indicate that there is some shadow energy in you that needs to be digested. The strange ability for Ayahuasca to introduce you to your own shadow in a detached and unique way is why the indigenous have used it as a form of mind body medicine for millennia. The profound revelations under the medicine often come once the purging is over once the difficulty and discomfort subsides and the medicine begins the softer part of the journey in which the shattered pieces of the story we've told ourselves begins to reassemble into a more humbling more real and holistic narrative. Part of the Ayahuasca in the west as well as when you do these ceremonies together you hear other people's pain you hear their purging and you hear their connection and you feel interconnected and you come out and you're very bonded. There's been some one test I know that Dennis McKenna and Charles Grubb and others did a few decades ago now with the Ayahuasca project looking at one of the Ayahuasca churches in South America and it wasn't just that the Ayahuasca was increasing their serotonin in the brain which it was on a neurochemical level they felt more integrated and more connected because their community what Ayahuasca can really do they can say it can be like 10 years worth of therapy in one night because when you're in like therapy in the west you're talking and you're engaging the intellect but Ayahuasca makes permeable your unconscious it opens the heart more and it becomes very visible anything you've been holding in your energetic field anything emotionally or you suppressed can come up and it comes up in a way that you're not attached to it so you can entertain it experience and then you can we can let go of it another South American Ayahuasca study was conducted by Terrence's brother Dennis to evaluate the therapeutic value of this plant mixture in a modern context and we found in our Ayahuasca study in Brazil that long-term users of Ayahuasca had an up-regulation of the serotonin transporter when we got into it it turns out that deficits in those transporters are linked to all kinds of pathologies alcoholism suicidal ideation intractable depression all of the things in fact that Ayahuasca is good for treating so that can't be coincidence it looks like Ayahuasca can actually reverse these deficits over time and really not just control the symptoms but actually repair the brain at some fundamental level so that's a remarkable thing family physician and Ayahuasca researcher Dr. Joe Tafour has been looking at epidemics across the U.S. as having a common origin whether it's anxiety or PTSD or addiction or depression or even psychosomatic things like migraine they have problems in their emotional processing and that the psychedelics and plant medicines are an interesting way to approach such problems we have evolved out of tune there's an enzyme problem that is caused us to fail to suppress the ego and then this creates a spectrum of cultural effects that drives us all nuts and so they have a kind of psycholithic therapy to correct that and isn't it interesting that the fix turns out to be not a drug but a shifting of the ratios of neurotransmitters already present in the organism the tuning and harmony of neurotransmitters cause for the inner atmosphere of the body to become suitable for physical and psychological relaxation and a rewiring of thought patterns however the strongest and most lasting effects neurologically happen in the gut the enteric nervous system has about 100 million neurons similar to what dogs have in their brain this neurology is in communication with the microbiome or colonies of bacteria in the gut that are integral to our health and even our impulses it is believed by ayahuasca shamans that the real medicine is not the brew itself and in the jungle if you talk to the mythros and they say oh you want to study the medicine dieta, dieta, dieta they don't say ayahuasca, ayahuasca, ayahuasca what they say if you really get down with them is that the diet is everything and that you're a tourist and you're here for a few weeks and yes we'll give you ayahuasca but what this is really about is controlling diet over a period of months even years and taking a regular regimen of this stuff transforming yourself into some kind of other person in the shipibo tradition a diet, a dieta is to go through this kind of restrictive phase with your food no salt, no sugar, no dairy no hot spicy no greasy, no oily no red meat, no pork in some cases no chicken it's this kind of purification of sacrifice and then while you're doing that you're taking this other plant that most likely is not psychoactive at all in any measurable form but you take it every day or in some kind of format and so you're connecting to the spirit of that plant through the diet the indigenous believe that it is this other T of dieted plants that adds another layer of intelligence and guidance to the ceremonial healing journey a deeply revealing truth of the importance of a dieta most every health concern in the modern world that is preventable due to lifestyle comes down to what we feed our bodies ayahuasca has gained a lot of popularity as a healing medicine which it surely is but only when taken in conjunction with a plant based diet and listening for the messages that the plants impart the more one listens the more it is evident that these plants actually have their own language and are attempting to teach and prepare the body and mind for ayahuasca but the indigenous as well as westerners who devoted their lives to this culture and medicine believe these master plants don't speak in a dry language but rather in a way that sings to our higher faculties of perception well we know that music entrains the brain in certain ways and so do the psychedelics so music can be used to augment the effects of the psychedelics and this was well recognized by the shamans they often viewed it as the spirits are being called in by the music these people have some kind of authenticity that you can absolutely feel it's in the voice I met many ayahuascaros and the good ones all had this voice thing going on that they could cast their voice way back in their throat and they kind of purr the indigenous of the Amazon as well as many other shamanic traditions from around the world believe the only medicine is truth and authenticity whether that comes through a shamans particular vocal vibration a movement of energy through dance a cleansing of the body through diet or even the mind opening properties of psychedelic plants truth and authenticity is a state of being that a human can surrender to or continue to defend against but if one is open to acknowledging their blind spots a new state of being unfolds it's a flowing with the energy of life and I think that's why people have so much synchronicity after they have experienced ayahuasca or have experienced these kinds of medicines you start to run into events in your life and it seems like you just surrender to the flow and it takes you exactly where you need to go and this is why ayahuasca has not simply remained in the jungle but has spread across the world and also why the culture stays traditional in some regions yet evolves and updates in others the udv and santodime churches have been established for semi-traditional and even syncretic uses of ayahuasca even the native american church that originally protected peyote use has now included ayahuasca some say that ayahuasca is growing beyond the jungle first through awareness and now being grown in many different locations causing not only the medicine to spread but the cultural mindset of being one singular species on a turbulent and rapidly changing planet very often I'm surprised how common it is for people to you know come to south america for example take ayahuasca and they come back with this really broadened perspective about how we fit into nature as global culture rediscovers these ancient medicines we're also rediscovering the traditions behind them which is a good thing because they do have traditions and that's something that you know as a society we lacked I think in the 60s we didn't really understand that now we do so we're adapting shamanism to our own purposes and developing variations of shamanism that you know may not be traditional but they're more appropriate for who we are at this time perhaps looking at the world in new ways relating to all nature as if it's an extension of ourselves is the real medicine for the people not just through the visionary features of ayahuasca but also through the master plants of the jungle that the shamans diet to teach them the mysteries perhaps the jungle really does speak or sing the messages of gaya that must be heard sooner or later and all those singing and living that message are embodying the medicine the truth and the authenticity that the world needs most stepping aside from dogmas and experiencing real moments of connection real compassion for others lucid reflection upon global issues and inspiration for future endeavors through visions of animal guides spirits and entities this path is not for the tourist not for the curious this path is for those who have accepted and committed themselves to the health of all beings and the whole planet up next we explore the unique and lightning fast phenomena of the DMT experience and the strange inhabited feeling of this space wow once again thank you to gaya for sharing this powerful and moving piece with us this series psychedelica is a 14 part series each episode as moving as this compilation going into psilocybin, peyote DMT and how these various plant medicines affect us and support us in our deep mental emotional and spiritual healing to watch the full series click the link in the description and please enjoy this groundbreaking original series where experts explore the history and use of entheogenic plants see you soon planning more on the way follow your curiosity to gaya.com and unlock the entire library with a special start up offer click the link in the description to get started for only $0.99