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Psychedelics have helped me build a cosmology.

It gives you a sense of a wholeness

that you didn't even know you could experience.

And just transcending into that moment.

Made me realize

that there's more to life than what my senses can pick up.

Contemplation of what's beyond the ego.

We are living through

a global psychedelic renaissance,

with increasing mainstream attention on scientific research

showing that psychedelic substances

have powerful therapeutic potential.

From MDMA and psilocybin now being used

as effective therapeutic agents

for treating trauma and anxiety,

ketamine or iboga are also now being used

to treat addictions and depression,

and we can also witness the widespread popularization

of the Amazonian tea ayahuasca

that many people are taking

to experience deep spiritual healing.

I've been deeply involved

in the psychedelic community for over two decades

as a facilitator of these medicines

and as the prime creator

of the DMT-ayahuasca smoking blend known as Changa.

What I often think is missing

from the new psychedelic medicine discourse

is that for most people,

the psychedelic experience is typically a self-initiation

outside of the legal channels or the medical model,

and perhaps it always has been.

Unfortunately, there is surprisingly little guidance

about how to navigate the experience

beyond the typical psychotherapy model.

As the taboo around the subject fades,

we need a more honest discussion of how to prepare oneself,

create a safe environment,

and to contextualize and integrate

these most powerful and profound experiences

in the days and months afterwards.

I decided to capture and distill the wisdom

from within the Australian psychedelic community,

focusing on personal ruminations and contemplative thought.

I also collected firsthand experiences

from people's very first initiatory journeys,

powerful revelations, encounters with beyond-human entities,

and visionary experiences

that sometimes leave even more unanswered questions.

The people I interviewed are from all walks of life.

They are scientists, academics, psychotherapists,

business owners, artists, mothers,

and people from the corporate world.

For myself and the people interviewed in this documentary,

psychedelics are not just therapeutic tools

or one-size-fits all drugs.

They are transformative medicines that open people's minds

to exploring the spiritual dimensions

and the mysteries of consciousness itself.

They are a portal for deep and meaningful contemplations.

Well, I didn't even know what tripping was.

I had no concept of it.

All my friend said is, "Oh, you trip."

And I'm like, "Trip?

I've been on holiday trips.

What's he talking about?"

I think I was maybe 14

when we went picking mushrooms

in a cow paddock

and chopped them all up and then cooked them in rice,

vegetarian rice, and then ate them.

And we were absolutely tripping, as you can imagine.

It was so joyful and so exhilarating and so colorful

that it was impossible to explain it.

'Cause one of my other brothers was there,

and we had eaten all the rice,

so there was none left for him.

And so he's watching TV

and we're sitting and running around the lounge room

and then looking at still paintings in the rest of the house

and realizing that they are just as animated

as the television,

because I'm now open to a whole new perspective of reality.

And trying to tell him that, you know,

like this still image is moving and makes as much sense

as the TV that you are sitting there so engrossed in.

One of the other things I remember from that experience

was the sun was rising,

and then lying in bed and then the lights coming through.

And whatever music I wanted or imagined to hear,

it sounded perfectly in my ears.

Pop music.

Ambient music.

Some silly cartoon.

And that was just an incredible,

beyond linguistic experience that, you know,

obviously still to this day,

it has a powerful effect on me,

and I gained a deep level of direct experience learning

from that experience or those experiences

during that, you know,

first time of having such a positive mushroom experience

at sort of such a young age.

Yeah, yeah.

When I left school, I got a internship.

One day we were driving out into Namadgi National Park,

and I turned to my friend and said,

"Where are we going today?

What are we doing?"

And he goes, "Oh, we're not gonna work today, James."

And I said, "We're not?"

He said, "No."

He said, "What do you know about LSD?"

And so we dropped these sugar cubes of acid in the car

and we went for this walk.

That experience broke down

the container of perspective space

and enabled me to see the micro and macro layers

that make up the whole of both consciousness,

but also of nature itself.

Watching the condensation patterns in clouds,

becoming more acutely aware of the shapes

and fractal nature of fluid dynamics to the naked eye

that normally were not apparent

in the normal state of consciousness.

And to me, this enabled me

to pierce a veil of perception and understanding

and deepened my inquisition

into both the nature of consciousness

and also the nature of reality.

Yeah, that was my first really deep experience,

and bizarrely, it was on a work day.

I've found over the years,

psychedelics for me have been

one of the most consistent tools for self-growth

that I've had available to me.

In my late teens,

I was smoking a lot of pot and I was quite dysfunctional.

I'd dropped out of school and, you know,

was just kind of kicking around.

At some point, I had some psychedelic experiences

that really helped me catalyze what I wanted to do

and how to go about doing that.

So I stopped smoking cigarettes, I stopped smoking weed.

I went back to TAFE

and finished my high school qualifications

and then went to university after that.

Even now, like many years beyond that,

if I don't take some time out

to have some psychedelic experiences

maybe once or twice a year every now and then,

then things that are maybe in my blind spot,

like things that are interfering with the way

that I want to be in the world,

the kind of relationships that I want to have to people,

they might just grow into bigger problems.

And I've found drugs like LSD, magic mushrooms

can kind of break down your normal ways

of thinking about yourself,

your normal ways of relating to people and other experiences

in such a way that they can kind of illuminate

these blind spots that we have

where we might not realize how our behavior is manifesting

and how that's causing us problems.

You know, I think this is one of the reasons

why psychedelic drugs can be useful

in the treatment of different addictions.

Essentially, my first experiences were in the container

of the electronic music culture and the doof

and a permissibility that I could really go wild.

So I basically had a second childhood.

There's a certain personality matrix we're born with

and that we are allowed

and is shaped by our culture, our peers,

our set and setting of the culture.

But when you have catalysts like LSD,

they allow you to step outside the cultural box and the norm

and to play and to explore

and to create yourself anew.

And so, you know, I actually formed this,

I guess you'd call this a performance troupe,

called the Barrel Full of Monkeys.

And we would go around playing Barrel of Monkeys

on the edge of dance floors

with, like, totem tennis and Twister and games,

and we would reinvigorate this sense of play.

And I remember, like, electronic music parties and Confest

and being, you know, in nature,

being on the banks of the Murray, being in mud pits.

Those landscapes created transformational opportunities

in that set and setting to grow.

So it's a great opportunity

to be given that freedom of expression.

And, you know, if I had have just been

potentially doing LSD in the streets,

it would've been a whole different kettle of fish.

But to be amongst a community

which was about mind expansion,

and in fact encouraged people to be creators

and to create from their freedom of expression

and to be part of this belonging of a tribe, you know?

It was part of the cultural tapestry

to express yourself to your fullest and to give back.

It was a time and a place that I dearly treasure.

My youngest son got into serious trouble

in New South Wales with magic mushroom.

So I thought, "Bugger it, I'm gonna try magic mushrooms."

What I got was completely unexpected.

I took it at an odd time, first thing in the morning.

The sun was only just coming up.

Now, I do understand a bit of what Einstein says about time,

but it almost seemed to stop.

The thing that really interested me

was that I felt a presence.

Didn't actually see anything to start with,

but I just felt that I was surrounded by some entity.

And I'm basic agnostic,

but it really became a spiritual experience.

So that was a bit of a shock,

to feel that there was something out there

that I'd been denying for a long time.

And I guess it was a bit like a near-death experience.

It was more that I felt

that I was surrounded by this shining life.

And once I let go of that,

then it became quite warm and comfortable,

surrounded by love, acceptance.

Well, you are what you are, you know?

During that experience,

I actually came across the Rainbow Serpent.

And again, you know, like I'm thinking, "What?

So there is a Rainbow Serpent, is there?"

It probably lasted an hour or so,

but there was no concept of time at all.

It could have been days.

It could have been just a few minutes.

But it was almost religious.

It was certainly spiritual.

Well, growing up in New Zealand,

we didn't have a lot of access

to psychedelics as a youngster,

which I'm actually quite grateful of, to be honest.

I think my earliest experiences

would've been with psilocybin mushrooms

we picked on the peninsula at Otago,

around Dunedin University.

The first time I got to take LSD was in the United States

when I was about 20.

And it was quite funny really,

because I had read a lot about acid

and I actually done American '60s

as a history class at university

and had read a great deal of literature about that time,

so I was very curious.

It was in the winter in Wyoming,

and taking it was such a different experience

to all the literature I'd read about it.

I couldn't believe the disparity.

I ended up running around in the fields of snow,

basically screaming, "What, this is it?

This is acid?"

I was really astounded that this vilified substance

I'd heard so much about was actually so wonderful.

When I smoked 5-methoxy-DMT for the first time,

I was a pretty hardened scientific rationalist atheist.

And then after smoking,

I suddenly believed I'd had

an intimate relationship with the Godhead

and had actually had a true mystical experience.

A dissolution into light, that mysterium tremendum.

I spent the majority of the next five years

putting together a worldview

that made sense of what had happened to me.

I call it the greatest intellectual adventure of my life,

contemplation of what's beyond the ego.

The most powerful experience

that I felt pulled me out of the matrix with plant medicine

would have to be 5-MeO-DMT.

Up until then, even though I played and sat

and explored with mushrooms for a fair while,

like at least 10 years before I sat with 5-MeO,

it really ripped me out, almost brutally.

Like it allowed me to all the stuff that I dabbled with

and read about and studied at uni

in cosmology and metaphysics,

when I felt like I died on that medicine and I disappeared,

the last thing I fully consciously remember as this person,

'cause I believe I'm not the same person I was

before I sat that ceremony.

I feel like I'm a completely different person.

I remember inhaling it, and as I'm going back,

then all of a sudden there's just darkness.

As there was darkness, I felt like I pixelated.

My body pixelated, my identity pixelated into the Earth.

There was literally Mother Earth.

I fell back into her and I became her.

My identity disappeared,

my ego disappeared,

this Kate person disappeared.

I was consciousness itself.

I don't know how long I was there for,

I was just consciousness.

And then I got sucked back through my entire life,

right back to when I was essentially born.

Then I started to come to,

then Kate started to come back,

and I remember, like, on the ground and I was like,

I kept apologizing because I didn't know where I was

or who I was or what was going on.

And at that stage then,

I guess a psychedelic trip where I was here

and the trip was happening,

which I'd experienced with LSD and mushrooms

many times before, happened.

And we were all connected and, you know,

the trees are beautiful, similar to the cactus,

and that was all lovely.

And I saw hearts in the trees and lungs in the trees

and I saw Mother Earth alive,

and that was the most poignant,

life-changing experience I've ever had,

because all of the things that I had studied,

talked about that,

but up until then, I'd never experienced it.

It was life-changing, completely.

Yes, whoa, wow.

I'd been ritually smoking DMT for a long period of time.

This one evening after a period of maybe,

I think it was a week of really flat-out work coding

and going absolutely bananas at work,

it was indicated to me that I would be initiated,

where I was to be given

what I was told to be my inheritance.

What I did that night was had taken LSD at the time,

I smoked DMT at a certain time after that.

I was doing things according to instructions

that were intuitively coming to me

and following them to the letter.

And I laid down into the space.

It was what seemed to me like an ecstatic party happening,

and it was centered around me.

The beings that I knew as my friends said,

"You know something that we know you know,

but that you've never told us."

I didn't know what that was at first,

but then it occurred to me.

It was a recognition of the fact

that in that moment I was Godhead.

And so I said, "I'm God."

And they were ecstatic from that point.

I was pushed on top of a pyramid.

And then I looked up, and as I got higher,

my face pushed through a veil

into another dimension again above that.

And I was flying counterclockwise

past what looked like seven, I think seven orbs.

And I intuitively knew

this is where souls were born from in hierarchy.

And as I was getting higher and higher,

I was seeing a cross at the top

and the cross was radiating all the energy,

creating all of this dimension

and this experience that we are.

And as I got closer towards the cross,

I was forgetting my humanity,

but also becoming more and more infinite.

And I settled into an infinite white light

and had no recognition of ever existing before.

No consciousness.

And then I found myself coming back from that space.

And as I was coming back down,

I saw the cross and I was looking at it going,

"Oh, I know that for some reason," as it passed me,

and I looked it up, went, "Oh, I know this.

Why do I know this?"

And I was coming back to my body

and parts of me were coming back to me.

You're a human, the Planet Earth, Sydney.

And then I landed back in my body.

Everything was still vibrating

with the energy of what I'd just learned,

saying, "This is God, this is God.

Looking at the walls, "This is God."

This is all God, all the time.

All the time.

Honestly, it changed my life from that moment.

Clearly,

psychedelics are extremely powerful agents

which expand and challenge the limits

of ordinary human consciousness.

At times, people can have difficulty

integrating these earth-shattering experiences

back into ordinary life.

The dimensions and doorways that are open

can be so real and expansive,

they can lead to profound changes in one's entire cosmology.

Many of the stories in this episode are cautionary tales.

They reveal the difficult and sometimes messy process

that takes place whilst confronting these truths.

Even though the results are often positive,

the journey isn't always easy

and can involve many complications.

One time when I was living in Canada,

I was around 19, 20 years old,

I was experimenting with a lot of mushrooms

and LSD at the time,

and I'd had a very strong and profound experience

at this very small little festival on a very small island

right at the top of the archipelago of Vancouver Island.

And I was feeling quite brave and sort of untouchable,

and I was offered a tab of acid, and I took it.

Three, four hours went past and there was no effect.

And so I took another one.

And then they both charged into presence very quickly,

and it didn't stop for days.

And days.

And I got to a point where I felt the edge of psychosis.

You know, nothing had ever lasted

for such a long time before.

This question came to my mind

of what if this thing doesn't stop?

What if this experience never ended?

I remember being terrified

that the lucidity of waking consciousness

that we experience on a day-to-day basis would never return.

Despite the challenges physically or mentally

that sometimes we encounter when having these experiences,

sometimes the journey

back to normal consciousness or lucidity

is actually one of the greatest gifts,

because we're able to appreciate

how complex and beautiful it is in its,

in its basic or natural form,

and that it is not simple at all.

It is infinitely and immensely complex to be lucid.

People not taking care

with the vulnerability of the experience

is probably one of the biggest downsides,

because it does make you quite vulnerable

and it can make you suggestive to new ideas.

So if you're not creating

a safe, comfortable place for people to have that

or for yourself to have that experience,

then, you know, there's kind of risks there.

More psychological risks than physical risks, I would think.

This experience that I had

began in the botanical gardens with a friend

when we took quite a large dose

of psilocybin mushrooms on a blue moon,

somewhere in the realm

of six to nine dried grams of mushrooms.

Which, obviously,

should probably not be done in a public space.

The moment that the kind of drop fully emerged

was I was holding onto a piece of bamboo

in the bamboo forest.

And from my head down to the base of my spine,

I received this shuddering sensation.

And I started to go into dialogue

with an amaranth plant that was in front of me,

and they seemed really nice.

But then this other voice kind of emerged

from underneath the amaranth and opened up into a vision.

And it seemed kind of like that DMT space,

for want of a better adjective,

with the lights turned down.

And this being called Enki presented himself to me,

and he said, "We need you here."

I said, "I don't really like it here."

He said, "Yeah, but we need you here."

I said, "Yeah, but I don't like it."

It didn't have a good feeling within that place.

And he said, "Well, okay, you've made your decision.

If you want to find yourself

back into the realm that you came,

you have to rid yourself of your dreaming body."

So when I returned to that dreaming space,

I was face down, it was raining, it was windy,

and I was in a battlefield from World War I,

seeing all these young men

having their faces blown off and dismembered,

shells as they came, fell in the trenches,

and it was very, very extreme.

It was horrible.

It was a fucking horrible experience to see that.

And I was actually just at that same spot

for the first time in four years the other day,

and there's actually small plaques

at the bottom of each tree

with details which battle each battalion had fought,

And somehow I dropped into a channel of space

of one of those battles.

And I think it's interesting

that when we speak about visions,

the way in which it it concretizes them or crystallizes them

away from the kind of inner evolutions that occur

and that allow us to continually

pull things from that experience,

kind of like reading a book

a second, third, fourth, fifth time.

You know, there's always gonna be more there, more content.

I think that there needs to be a lot of respect

around the consumption of psychedelics

in terms of preparation of the setting

and having appropriate care available on hand,

'cause different people can react differently.

And some people might not need care,

and some people might need care.

So the dangers with psychedelics,

it's not in the substance itself,

because they're neutral, really, by nature.

It's really the human that's using them

which is really gonna make all the difference.

So I think if you don't have the right foundations in place

and then you go into a psychedelic experience,

it may project all those delusions onto your experience,

and then because the experience feels so real,

then you clinging onto that experience

as this is the absolute truth.

So I think there's a lot of traps that people get into,

like myself included.

'Cause I didn't do the necessary work,

I thought I was, and I had an ayahuasca experience

where I had a complete psychotic breakdown

that I thought I was gonna die

and I thought the only way out of this hellhole

was to end my own life.

But luckily I was in a good set and setting

and there were facilitators there to take care of me.

I came back down from it like, "Oh, I feel silly.

Well, glad that's over."

Yeah, so about five weeks after that,

I took a small dose of iboga.

It was one of the most physically challenging experiences

I've ever had in my life.

But that wasn't the hard part.

It was the next two days.

That's when,

had the existential crisis.

It's like I was in the abyss

and I felt like I was just in this infinite loop,

like my consciousness was permanently stuck

on like the impermanence of nature.

So just that acute awareness that everything's gonna end,

everything's gonna die, suffering is inevitable.

We're in this satanic matrix hell and I've never going,

that was fucking horrifying.

I was feeling the collective suffering of humanity.

And I was going through, like, this identity crisis.

What the fuck am I doing with my life?

What is this reality?

My ego just completely got fractured.

And it took me many, many months to get over this.

I mean, I can distinctively remember going crazy,

and believing so as well.

And I was like, "Okay, I have lost the plot.

How am I gonna communicate to my family and my friends

and tell them what happened?

My work?"

And I just felt this tremendous amount of embarrassment.

And I believed wholeheartedly that that was my new reality,

and it was scary as hell.

But on the flip side of that, when I came out of it,

when I started to come back to my body,

I had the most intense appreciation for life.

I remember going out of my veranda and just screaming out,

just going, "Fuck yeah!"

Multiple times, I was just in absolute joy.

And it even makes me feel, you know, good now,

you know, thinking back about those experiences

and just an incredible appreciation for life.

I mean, and that lasted for months.

It was that fear of going crazy.

And I did go crazy,

and it was very scary and very confronting,

but I definitely got a lot out of it.

There came a time when I felt like

I couldn't really exist in both worlds.

On one side of things,

I was seeing interactions as being, you know,

energetic battles,

and experiencing things that I would perceive

as psychic attack or magical attack.

And also in my experiences dealing with and encountering

entities of all sorts and communicating with them

and sharing space and sharing energy with them

perhaps in a not very discriminant manner.

This was when I was 19 and I was buying acid in Ipswich.

And I remember going to my dealer's place

and she had these blotters called Fat Freddies.

And she was like, "Oh, you should really just take a quarter

'cause they're really strong."

But my friend was like, "Huh, whatever," and just ate it.

And I was like, "Fuck, I need to eat it as well

so I can keep in tune with him."

But pretty much within about five minutes,

I was already tripping balls.

And then decided to try and walk home.

But along the way I just started feeling

these waves of hatred coming from houses,

coming from people.

And then I had this sensation,

like I walked through a spider web

and got bitten on the face by a spider.

And after that I just felt this huge wave of adrenaline.

And with that adrenaline

came this overwhelming feeling of hate.

Hatred of humanity, of society, of people,

and it was coming from all around me.

And the road was waving,

and in front of us was light,

and everywhere behind us was darkness.

The telephone calls were bending

to turn around and look at us

and following us as we were walking,

and I started feeling this cosmic ancient energy.

And I said to my friend, "I have to go

or I'm gonna fucking kill someone."

And then I just started running as fast as I could.

So fast.

And I spewed a few times while I was running

and I didn't stop,

and just spewing and running at the same time.

And then I was sitting underneath a street sign

just screaming out, "Help me, help me!

I'm gonna fucking kill myself!

I'm gonna kill someone!

I've been trapped on this Earth for 26,000 years.

I'm the alpha, I'm the omega!"

All this kind of like apocalyptic stuff,

shouting in tongues.

And there was this evil,

kind of like death metal growl kind of voice,

like:

And then I remember

walking across this bridge in north Ipswich

and I'm just screaming out what I think in my mind

are these prophecies about this entity

who seems to have come into my body,

who is one of the 12 original creator spirits

of our galactic system or something.

And it had something against humans,

that humans were going to do something,

to create some technology

that would threaten all of his creation.

And so this entity was very pissed off

and had come through me.

I was the vessel through which all the votes

about all sentient beings on this planet would come through

to decide whether or not they wanted to continue creation

or whether they wanted to end creation.

Suddenly a moment of clarity,

and I saw the police.

There was, like, three cop cars and an ambulance,

and I just kind of said, "Oh fuck."

And I just kept on looping, "Oh fuck, oh fuck!"

And the cop is like, "Yeah, oh fuck, mate.

Looks like you've had a good night.

You know, now it's time to pack it in."

And the cop cars were levitating

and I was reading the policeman's mind.

And then that's where things in my mind

kind of start to get a little bit crazy.

I'm still telling them about these ancient prophecies,

about being here on the planet for 26,000 years,

you know, whatever this entity was going on about.

And then the next minute I'm, you know,

I've been gang-swarmed by these police

and I've got wasps and ants coming out of my eyes

and my nose and my mouth and my ears

and my face is being pushed into the grass by the police

and I'm biting on the grass and growling,

frothing at the mouth.

And my voice is saying, "Help me, help me,

you know, help me!"

And the police goes, "We're trying to help you mate.

We're trying to help you.

What have you taken?"

And then the other voice is like, "LSD."

And then he starts, like, chomping at the grass again.

And then I got injected

with probably Valium or some antipsychotics.

What I remember next after that,

my body was chained to a metal chair, bolted to the floor,

and I'm just in front of a person with a wooden desk

and his name was Flying Officer Ackland.

And my consciousness was just observing

while this intelligence officer

was asking this being who is inhabiting my body

about secret passphrases.

You know, what's the passphrase

to operation delta nine tango or whatever, you know?

And it's answering all of these things,

but then it's also saying, "You can't stop me.

You know, this is the end."

And that kind of went on for a while,

and they'd come to the solution

that the only way to deal with this entity

was to seal it up in some kind of polycarbonate sarcophagus

and then send it in a rocket into space.

And then the countdown to that rocket just kept on looping.

And then I woke up in handcuffs in the hospital,

in Ipswich Hospital.

Yeah.

Certainly I've seen some people

have negative reactions to the use of psychedelics.

And so what tends to happen

is perhaps there's a spiraling upwards of anxiety

and a lack of control of one's own thought processes,

which can start to blow out

into psychotic or schizophrenic reactions.

I have to say that I haven't seen that

in many instances at all,

but I've seen a couple of people

have some real problems dealing with their realities

associated with psychedelic use.

I've been thinking along the lines

that if you're nutrient-deficient, then shit goes wrong.

And I think that a lot of plant medicine is like that,

that quite often we're nutrient-deficient

when it comes to soul work.

And then when we go into it,

it can be really scary and it can knock people around

because they're not prepared for the intensity,

what worlds can manifest from that place

that can be dangerous.

And especially when you have the experience

and then you come back into your body,

I think some people can never want to go back, you know?

So I specialize in working with people

with mental health, anxiety,

well, I think one of the things

that we're talking about today is integration of,

or trauma as well, and also psychedelic use.

If you grow up with a very rigid view of reality

and then that's pushed, but you're also very fear-based,

you know, in your belief systems

and you've grown up with that,

then yeah, I think you should look out.

You know, that's a hell of a combination.

If you're psychologically fragile,

when you have an experience

that completely blows up your concept of reality,

I think that can be earth-shattering.

And then once you kind of come back in,

you're trying trying to navigate that map and that world

and then live your everyday life

within the expectations of a society and a community

and a culture and a family.

Yeah, I think those things can cause

massive amounts of internal conflict.

So psychedelics or entheogens

or shamanic plants and substances are tools.

They're tools of consciousness,

and they shape us as much as we shape them.

Every up has a down.

It does definitely stretch your boundaries.

And in stretching your boundaries, it can be dangerous.

So essentially there's been a learning curve

and there's been a generational uptake of these substances.

And there can be fallout, there can be shadow material.

So especially with something like, say, ayahuasca,

where it's been underground,

and then this is part of the thing.

In the West, a lot of these substances are used

as part of an underground network

that is supporting and growing and feeling the connection

and feeling the benefit of these substances.

So we're autonomous communities

which police and support ourselves, you know?

So there's evolving notions of things like duty of care,

of right relationship, of set and setting, of integration.

And there's not external authority figures which say,

"You must take one ayahuasca cup

and then you must integrate for six hours."

And, you know, there's not these Western

nanny state sort of figures

which tell us how to have our own spiritual experiences.

There's lineages, there's indigenous connections

to teachers and curanderos and people like that

who have been doing this for a very long time.

And from those cultures,

we have learnt to adapt our own best practices.

And we need best practices because this is deep work,

it's soul work and it's dangerous.

It's dangerous in the sense of there's a shock ideologically

when your reality opens up to a larger perspective.

There can be physical issues.

That can be physical dangers,

especially with things like ayahuasca,

with MeO and contraindications of people's health.

There are definitely people

that shouldn't do psychoactive drugs or medicines,

that aren't ready for this,

that it'll be too much for,

that have underlying psychological issues

that really need to be dealt with.

There are people who are coming to these substances

in search of healing and of connection

that may have underlying psychoactive conditions.

And the funny thing is,

in, well, indigenous tribes,

they say that, you know, indigenous tribes around the world

don't necessarily have psychological conditions.

They have sensitivities

and they have a support mechanism

within the tribal structures

to embrace those sensitivities,

that potentially the people

who are seen as crazy in the West

are the same ones that indigenous cultures

would see as potential medicine people

because of that sensitivity,

because of their connection to altered states.

Perhaps they have higher concentrations

of DMT or dimethyltryptamine,

or perhaps hearing voices is something

which only the West sees as crazy.

If it was embraced, if it was supported,

if it had a place within the community,

then perhaps they could be supported

in nurturing that as a gift

and not medicated to, you know,

see that as something which is bad.

So these things are very powerful,

and with great power comes great responsibility.

The psychedelic experience

can be very disorienting

and it can be tricky to find one's bearings and navigate

when we often don't have very good maps of the terrain.

In this episode, we look at how the individual

can optimize their own understanding

to gain insights related to what they have experienced.

Here we explore how people

can prepare for the psychedelic experience,

how to optimize the set and setting,

with the most conducive attitudes and approaches,

sprinkled in with techniques and useful tips

from experienced explorers

in order to make the most of these states of consciousness.

It is also important to give yourself time and space

to integrate the insights

after a psychedelic experience is over.

This is a chance to process the psychological ramifications

of what you've been shown,

and provides an opportunity for the individual

to create meaningful change,

question their beliefs, shift values,

and reshape personal orientations.

Psychedelics have helped me build a cosmology

in the first place.

Because as a 14-year-old, I,

well, I had a map, but it would've been Christianity,

and it would've been

sort of secondhand smoke Christianity, you know?

Like I didn't diligently go and become a Christian,

but I grew up in a society

that basically was neutered Christianity, right?

So we're not Christians,

but that's the structure we're in,

so we get basically that.

And I think those acid experiences,

which were very disturbing initially,

firstly plunged me deep into psychological maps

and they plunge me into the unconscious.

You know, sure, God is in heaven

and Jesus died for our sins, whatever that means,

but there's a lot of stuff beneath the surface

that is scary and weird,

and no one's given me a map for that.

So it was Christmas 2012,

and, you know, I go visit my parents

and I had this little ritual that I would go to the beach

and usually smoke some pot or whatever on Christmas Eve

and do my own little rebel thing.

I went down the beach and set some intentions

and did a little ritual.

And really the point of it was, hey, what's my purpose?

And I just sat and did a little meditation,

and I happened to have a vial of Changa at that time.

And, you know, it was instant.

Right in this kind of jeweled, colorful matrix.

You know, I was sort of shocked to be there,

and I was face-to-face with what I kind of identified

as insectoid beings.

There's this sense of, like,

we are the guys that collect all the info, we see everything

and we store it in jeweled structures and we know shit.

And it was just quite cold,

in the sense of they were interconnected to everything else.

So they were in a state of love,

but there was no emotion.

And we kind of had a telepathic chat.

And I literally got to frame questions.

We just start off with, what is my purpose?

And I asked them about money.

And it was kind of like this alien laughing,

of just like, "Ugh, humans and money."

"You guys don't get that you're living in a world of effects

and you treat them like causes,

and that's how you treat money."

And I'm like, "Well, what should I focus on?"

"Power."

And it didn't mean, you know, political power.

It was like mana, life force, creative power

is the driver of everything else.

Focus on creative power

and everything else will follow that around,

whether it's money or results

or things you want in the world.

"These are the fundamentals underlying

how your universe works.

Use them or die."

It wasn't really spelled out in these words,

but just like transmission, you know?

And then I sort of gradually came back,

did some movement,

and did some breathing,

and then went for another round.

And this one, it was a different sort of state.

It was like I didn't go fully across.

I kind of could have my eyes half open

and be sort of between the two worlds

and it would seem like if I breathe or move

it would prolong the state.

And then I got this strong download

of the magician archetype, how magic works,

how the magician archetype sits with me and my world,

and how it sits on the cusp

of polar opposites of light and dark, give and receive.

All the paradoxes meet,

you know, the pleasure and pain, loss, gain duality,

that this entity can sort of balance both sides.

If the mystic is the one that goes beyond that,

the magician is the one who stays in this world

and plays with those dynamics

to create things and to create results.

And if I go back to it,

that event was really like an opening of that channel.

And I think I was unpacking and filing what that meant

for about a minimum six months.

You know, I was like, I would journal,

I would ask, what the fuck does that mean?

What do I do with this, you know?

And it really led to me learning a lot more

about what I would refer to as states and stages

and how information comes through those.

Of all the meaningful experiences

that I've had in my life,

they've all started with, like, actually doing something

that I was really afraid of.

My fear has kind of been my compass,

and I feel like psychedelics have assisted

in training me to relax into that.

Depending on the context it's taken in, the dosage,

it's not just, like, more of the same thing.

It's a completely different experience.

So what I tend to kind of encourage people

is to find the thing that most resonates with them.

So like doing it at nighttime

is different to doing it during the day.

Sunset, sunrise, eyes open, eyes closed,

sitting, lying down,

with music, without music,

in a group, on your own.

All those nuances create quite a very different experience.

And so finding the thing that you feel most relaxed in,

but also encouraging people to not just do it

and have the experience happen to them,

but actually exploring practices

that they've been developing,

whether it's meditation practices,

whether it's creative, artistic,

whether it's movement practices,

and then taking DMT whilst then doing the practices,

and just noticing how having a particular technique

drives and orientates the experience

in a very different way.

And then so what I found

was like when I would do movement

before taking any substance,

the actual experience felt far more fluid

and precise to navigate,

because it felt like the movement itself

had primed the body maps,

which are the maps of my body in my brain.

And it'd like, if you wanna look at

the nervous system as like a highway,

especially the central channel of the spine.

And so if there's a certain amnesia that happens

as a result of, like, not moving certain body parts,

then those kind of roads are under construction.

And then when you take a type of chemistry,

it's almost like going into peak hour traffic

with roadblocks.

And so the movement stuff literally lubricates

the actual physical body,

which I feel the psychedelics actually affect as well,

but also the neurological circuitry as well,

which then allows for just a more functional

and a way of optimizing the actual journey.

So that's partly why I teach the movement stuff

as a way of preparing for psychedelic experiences,

that then can also be used

as a way of navigating psychedelic experiences,

and then also different qualities of movement can be used

to integrate psychedelic experiences.

Some useful things to consider

when integrating a psychedelic trip:

spending time in nature,

spending time with friends, family,

exercising, meditating, having cold showers.

Just, like, really simple stuff,

but it's so important.

Like really important to take care of your physical vessel.

I think talking through those experiences

can be really valuable.

It can stop you diving down weird rabbit holes

where you might lose your context

or you might magnify things that seemed important

during the psychedelic experience,

but not really considering how they might impact

your real-world circumstances.

Who are you tripping with?

Think about it.

Who are you journeying with?

Be careful.

Not everyone has good intentions,

and some people can be there

to drag you down into their chute,

and you don't need to be there.

Maybe step away from, like, nihilistic philosophies

and, like, things that are just gonna get you

further into your head,

and focus more on the everyday, human, mundane things.

Journaling is great.

We're not in touch with our own unconscious minds.

And so anything like this brings us right in touch with it,

and it helps to be able to come back to the normal world

and be able to access some of that.

Also, I think it's important, you know,

not to go straight away back to your day job.

Go for walks, go for swims,

you know, be in nature, take it really slow.

Because, you know,

you just had your chakras and your whole energy system

just blown right open,

and now you're sort of putting all the pieces back together

and you've gotta make sure they go back in the right spot.

And I think also part of that

is eating a well-balanced diet.

You know, the mind and body and spirit are so interconnected

that you can't have one without the other.

Maybe fasting if you are able to

and maybe guided by somebody.

And another thing you can do

which works really well is meditation.

And of course, check in with other people.

Make sure people know you're doing it,

especially if you are in a really dark place already.

It's better to have people monitoring your situation

and willing to help you out.

The other thing as well is preparing,

knowing where you want to go and what you wanna do.

You know, why are you tripping?

You know, if you're tripping for spiritual purposes,

have a question, have a place that you want to go.

Have something that you want to connect to the divine about.

'Cause if you don't go in with a purpose,

if you don't go in with some idea of what you wanna achieve,

you'll come out the other end

probably not having had the depth of experience

that you otherwise could.

Look, I'm a big believer in the power of ritual theater.

Not on the bounds of overt religious practices

where we place too much significance

on the adornment of an altar or, you know,

the lighting of incense,

or practices which take us away

from the very purpose of the practice itself.

But rather creating practices around these experiences

that are indicative of the modality

in which we wish to experience.

I was lucky enough to find DMT when I was 20, actually,

and started using it in a ceremonial ritual way

and having great visions

and entering into psychedelic worlds and really enjoying it,

but not actually changing anything in my life

in the way that I really kept coming up

against those same blocks again and again and again.

And I was using it as a divining tool of truth

when I needed something figured out in my life.

And it definitely gave me answers

to things that I'd been looking for,

but it wasn't until one day I sat down and I thought,

"Okay, what question am I gonna ask DMT today?"

And this day, I just didn't have a question.

So I said to DMT, "I want you to show me the question today

that you want me to ask you."

And they said, "Now you're talking."

And that's when everything started to open up for me.

And I allowed DMT to be the teacher

and I allowed myself to go to places

that it wanted to take me.

And then it wasn't a joke anymore.

There was absolutely undeniable truth and understanding

that this realm is completely real.

Not only are we a part of it,

but we are the creators of it.

We are it.

And there's nothing to be afraid of in there but yourself.

Learning from the wisdom of the elders

and from the generations that have gone before,

things like set and setting, things like correct dosage,

things like, are you psychologically prepared for this?

Do you have a support network

to help you integrate afterwards, you know?

Are you in nature?

Are you out in the middle of the streets

where you're gonna be bombarded and overwhelmed

and trying to keep it together?

I mean, the worst thing in the world

is if you're completely tripping balls on acid

and you're somewhere in an urban environment

and you're trying to remain normal.

I mean, it creates an internal tension dynamic

which is just ongoingly tense.

And really the best

set and setting for these experiences is nature,

where you can just open and roll around

and let go and, like, melt.

You want to open to these experiences.

That's the whole point.

I remember the first times

I started taking psychedelics in natural settings,

in ceremonial settings, and walking in jungles and forests.

I experienced a type of flow which was pure resonance

when you feel like you are part of this ecosystem,

and there's almost like this two-way communication

with the ants and the ferns and the leaves.

Whilst that experience is absolutely profound and beautiful

and healing in the moment,

you take that away with you,

you take the memory of that,

of that deep connection away with you

into your non-altered state reality,

because it never leaves you.

It's this remembrance that, oh my goodness,

like, I've lived my entire life

as though I'm not part of this world out there,

but yet I've had this amazing experience

where I was part of that world.

And it actually reframes your wiring on a very deep level

to allow you to remember that,

oh, huh, actually, I am part of this.

And I feel like that is a massive flow enabler,

because you're removing actually

the basic fundamental block to flow,

the illusion that we're separate.

And yeah, that's probably the biggest

flow catalyst there is.

What I think that people out there should try

is to go to a natural place and just go for a walk.

Try and find a place for you to just be and to contemplate,

where you're not gonna get hassled by anyone.

And see if there's any particular trees that draw you.

Express to the trees that you're there as a humble human

and that you want to dance for them.

Take off all your clothes

to humble yourself before the trees and before yourself.

And then just dance.

Just let go and dance for the tree.

At first you'll feel very awkward,

but you just need to move through that.

Try and keep in your mind that humbleness

and openness to communicate with the tree.

And if you need to sing, sing as well.

Allow yourself, don't think about it.

And then after a while you'll be dancing,

but you'll also be receiving impressions.

Just let it come.

Let the visions, let the thoughts, let the sounds,

let the song come out of you, let the dance come out of you.

Be open to the impulses that you get,

whatever it is.

That space is accessible to anyone.

That was one of the things that I learnt.

One of the most compelling aspects

of the psychedelic experience

are the reports that people share of encounters

with otherworldly entities.

These most often take place

when people partake of tryptamines,

whether that be smoking DMT, drinking ayahuasca,

or eating higher doses of mushroom.

Typically, experienced psychedelic explorers

report an infinite ecology teeming with life.

In Western culture,

these experiences are considered hallucinations

or some kind of aberrant psychosis.

Yet for those I interviewed,

the vividness and sophistication of these visions

appear as convincingly independent entities.

In most traditional cultures around the world,

there is a cosmology which accounts for spirits,

gods, and various entities of a spiritual nature.

If indeed there are other dimensions to travel to,

it would be surprising if such realms

were simply empty of sentient life.

In this chapter, we document a range of testimonials

about this experience

and various musings on these visitations.

I don't know, I don't know about entities.

I don't really look at it whether it's, like,

real or unreal,

but they're definitely very valid experiences,

and they're consistent, right?

Because a lot of people have these psychedelic experiences.

It's like, "No, I've been to that realm.

You know, I've met that entity.

Yeah, Baza, he's a good guy, yeah."

Really an interesting one,

because you'd think if this is just stuff

that's going on inside your head,

there's no way people will be seeing the same stuff.

Everyone's different.

Everyone has come to where they are

in their particular points of life.

through completely different experiences.

When I was in this space,

it was kind of like suspend your day-to-day reality

and to accept that whatever's happening is happening,

and, you know, treat it that way.

And so the impressions that I got, you know,

when I did experience what I felt

was some kind of entity contact or communication,

it was just so real

that in my mind there was no question

that that's what was happening.

Yeah, I think the mystery is important.

I think that it lies somewhere between

the real world and our minds,

but it's our shared minds as well.

It's not just what's in my mind right now,

but these conversations that we have.

And when you talk with people,

it, you know, creates things.

There's something strange going on in our mind

that we haven't quite figured out yet.

Well, my name's Mike Rigby.

I'm a remedial massage therapist.

Since around 2005, I've done some serious investigations

into psychedelic medicines.

You know, firstly to treat my own PTSD,

and in later years, to delve deeper and deeper

into spiritual emotional realms within me

and to expand my consciousness and heal my body.

You get to a point where you realize,

wow, this is my mind.

The subconscious mind is so much more powerful

than we realize,

and it can create all of these things.

And I'll go along like that in life thinking,

"Wow, you know, I'm tapping into

some really deep subconscious knowing."

And then I'll have a massive journey

that I know couldn't have come out of my brain.

Long story short, I smoked DMT.

I had never smoked.

I'd never done, you know,

used a bong or anything like that before.

So I sort of, you know,

breathed the smoke in and I held it and held it and held it.

Nothing happened.

I couldn't hold it any longer, you know?

Breathed out and then thought,

"Oh God, I did it wrong."

But then suddenly, reality turned very two-dimensional

and it became like a curtain or a blind.

And through the tears I could see a Hindu temple.

Whoa, I don't know anything about Hindus.

Let's move on to the next apparition.

But it didn't go away, and ,

I was stuck in it.

I'm looking around this dimension that I was in.

It was obviously bigger than a temple.

It was some sort of dimension made of fibers of light.

And I just looked around,

and there sitting over to my right was Ganesh, you know?

And I just thought, "Oh crap, the Hindus are right.

Now I'm gonna have to shave my head

and sit on top of a mountain

for the rest of my life," you know?

You know, Ganesh, just very sleepy,

he kind of opened his eyes, looked in my direction,

and fell back to sleep.

And then he jumped up,

like a two-year-old who's just recognized you.

Jumped up and he started dancing towards me,

and I started laughing 'cause I thought,

wow, I was just about to give up my life to Ganesh,

and he seems to know me better than I know him, you know?

And he's dancing over to me

and his trunk reached out and just locked into my heart

and just filled my heart with the knowledge of the universe.

And then his arms reached around,

which I didn't really recognize as arms,

'cause there were four of them.

I didn't know Ganesh had four arms.

They reached around, locked into my heart.

And then the two of us

were just dancing in this intense bliss,

you know, what seemed like hours,

but it was of course, you know, only minutes.

I think I opened my brain to things

other than just concrete maths and science, you know?

Yeah, the DMT experience is a whole lot more shocking

than say the LSD experience.

So the LSD experience,

essentially your ego is having an altered experience.

With DMT, the ego is hurtled

into a completely alien landscape,

disembodied from the body.

So it was ideologically shocking.

In my experiences with DMT over the years,

I've had my fair share of alien encounters.

I don't know what they are,

but you need to take it at face value

that it's something which you're viscerally experiencing

and you've gotta make sense of and make meaning from.

You know, a lot of the mythology around DMT

intellectually prepares one

for a sense of the other or an alien landscape,

but to tangibly feel

that you are engaging with interdimensional entities

who are perhaps operating on you or connecting with you

or transmitting information into you

and to feel that you're in a space

where there is something going on.

DMT has opened up a sense that there's an ecology,

both of souls, of entities,

of beings that are engaging with us.

I know that shamanic cultures around the world

which have DMT in the ayahuasca brews,

they say that they use these substances

to connect with the ancestors

or the elders or the beings that are out there,

and we can establish rapport with these spaces

and with these potential beings that exist there.

In the Tibetan cosmology,

they say there's levels of vibration or bardos

that we progress through,

and that when we encounter the hallucinatory realm

of the demons or of entities,

that they're actually projections

of our own emotional states.

And it seems to be that this is the time

where Western culture integrates an indigenous perspective

on what might be happening with these substances.

I come from a culture who was always into that stuff

and I was raised to believe in all that stuff

and I kind of was aware of it.

When I was a kid I used to see little spirits all the time,

like around lights

and doing all sort of weird moves and stuff.

And then I just kind of grew up

in a very skeptical sort of friend group in Western society,

in a very sciencey, sort of cynical,

sort of, you know, '90s era,

and so I learned to shut that down.

But I was always reading about it,

like even when I was sort of a nihilist,

I guess subconsciously I was still into that.

You know, I was always reading books

about spirituality and religion, all that sort of stuff.

But then when I started doing ayahuasca,

suddenly it was like a tangible reality.

I was like, "Oh, I've read about this stuff,

and now I'm, like, talking to it now."

Like, "Oh shit, this is how you're supposed to do it.

Like in a good setting with an intention."

And also then I realized the spirit world was real.

And then I was like, "Oh, well,

I'm not an nihilist anymore, am I?"

And then, you know, stuff like meaning started to happen.

To me, it's very, very much about this conundrum,

this conundrum of having free will in the self

and me or you having your own being,

but the conundrum that all is one and we're all connected.

And how do we hold these opposites,

this gnosis, this knowing?

You find a place to actually hold those opposites.

I think this is kind of a fundamental of the plants,

it would seem to me, a fundamental theme.

I guess at the end of the day,

does it matter if I see

a talking three-headed elephant in a psychedelic experience,

you know, for example,

and I get important lessons about how to act in my life?

It doesn't really matter to me

whether the talking elephant is real

in another dimension or not.

I try and take the lessons from the experience

in whatever form they come.

And sometimes the lessons, they're quite abstract.

So you're seeing this cartoonish kind of world

under the experience of a psychedelic,

but what you're really getting

is a lesson in meditation, for example.

So learning how to maybe drop into a non-judgmental,

meditative state a lot easier.

It just happens to be that the context for that lesson

is a really surreal, psychedelic space.

Yeah, it was extremely hard to come to terms

with the existence of these realities and these beings,

because, you know,

I'm not a naturally spiritually-inclined person.

I've been sort of taught to believe that, you know,

what we see and what we feel through our senses

is all that there is.

And through these substances,

I've definitely become more spiritual, you could call it,

or in touch with these belief systems,

that there's more to reality than what we may perceive.

Up in a waterfall called Minyon Falls,

I smoked some Changa mix of DMT.

And I went into this other dimension,

and I was effectively sitting

up on top of this kind of throne

and I was looking out and it was nearly like a desert

and nothing was there.

And then an entity came up to me,

and she effectively said that,

"Wow, it's great you're here.

I've got so much I need to tell you and show you."

And she was literally throwing

these patterns and information at me.

And in some ways you could say it was violent,

that she was like, "I've got so much to teach you,

so much to show you, and I don't have much time,"

because the Changa, it would only last 10 or 15 minutes.

And I came out of that and looked out onto the rocks

and I could see Aboriginal spirits all in the rocks,

with their faces looking really proud and humble.

And I just got this really amazing sense

that I was accepted.

But from that experience

probably was one of the most profound realizations,

that's more to this reality than meets the eye.

The entity thing is a funny business.

People either think you're a fruit loop

if you talk about them or whatever.

I went into this years ago

being pretty impartial about it all,

but the more you take these medicines,

the more you realize

is that there's parasites on every level.

And so just as our bodies are full of parasites,

what do the statistics say?

Our bodies weigh more of parasites

than we actually do with our own physical self.

Our bodies are a microcosm of parasites.

And if you've got a yeast parasite in your stomach,

it will tell your brain to eat yeast all the time.

So I believe anyone who takes these medicines

ends up believing that there is parasitic energy

that's going around attaching itself to people.

Call it entities, call it parasitic energy,

but it's certainly a thing.

So for the last 2 1/2 to 3 years,

I've basically had a lot of time on my hands

where I've had to be able to become one

and find myself again

through using these magical healing compounds,

especially microdosing psilocybin mushrooms,

to be able to stop that underlying depression,

the anxiety and everything there.

But mostly from that 28.3-gram dose,

that's where the healing began.

I started feeling it in about seven minutes time.

I was at a plus three experience by about 20 minutes,

and I had extreme entity contact,

but I was blocking them out,

because I'd been blocking myself out

from so many things for so long.

They kept coming to me and I kept breaking down in tears.

I kept getting very frightened.

And a dark entity sent me down into the depths of hell

where I was surrounded by these horrible cockroach beings.

I was seeing fiery, fiery lava pits and everything.

I was in an absolute dark space.

And then I managed to get myself together

and I started traveling towards this point of white light

at a phenomenal speed.

I felt like my body was accelerating.

When I hit this white point of light,

I then saw molecular structures and everything,

ancient geometry, pyramids.

I saw spacecraft.

What we know as the gray aliens

started malevolently taking me apart,

cutting me open.

And inside me I could see basically robotic parts.

They were removing blue fluid from me

and they were putting green fluid into me.

I then got dropped back onto Earth.

I was in a field

that seemed like I was in Peru, South America.

And I went down to the atomic level,

lower and lower and lower,

until I came to a world

of just ever, ever-increasing tetrahedral patterns.

I feel that was probably going on for roughly an hour,

and I was probably at about three hours

into the experience then.

I then ended up back in this field,

I saw the destruction that mankind

was doing to places like the Amazon through deforestation.

I started crying again.

And then I ended up back in my room

and I was surrounded by beautiful entities.

They were Medusas.

They had snakes coming out of their head.

They were coming up to me and touching me

and putting this glowing light, this energy into my body.

I had mantis beings come up to me and merge into me

and start filling me with information about the universe

that the English language cannot even pronounce.

I was told that I was still a beautiful person,

that I still had everything inside of me

that I used to have, that I hadn't lost anything,

I'd just lost touch with it.

I then lost all the entities

and I was just in a room that was the walls moving,

seeing beautiful geometric patterns,

seeing colors and things,

and remembering my experiences from years ago.

If there are entities which exist,

well, are they good or are they bad?

Some of the shamanic lineages in Peru,

they say, well, it's like if you experience an entity

in an ayahuasca vision or trance,

you don't speak its language,

but feel into the feeling.

Is it trying to, like, face hug you

and lay larval eggs in your brain?

Is it trying to communicate to you?

Does it feel good or does it feel bad?

All you've got is your sense of feeling,

your intuition of if it's dangerous or not dangerous.

So if there's good or bad,

there's good and bad humans,

I'm sure there's good and bad entities.

How do we distinguish from them?

How do we protect ourselves from them?

This is a generational mission.

If I have a trauma,

let's say I was abused as a child,

and I drink the medicine

and I have a lot of dark or hellish experiences,

that might be interpreted quite literally by the Shipibos

that, you know, maybe from that trauma

they put entities on you

or because of the soul loss,

other things have come into you as a result.

And now part of their intention

is to help remove those things

and kind of energetically put you back together.

Then you could also work at it from the psychological level,

like what I'm experiencing is my own trauma

projected out onto the screen of my mind

and now I'm going to find ways

to relate to it in a healthy way,

which is going to allow me

to release what needs to be released

and integrate what is there to be integrated.

And then there's kind of the mythic level

and awakening level.

I've seen a lot of people go there as well,

where it's kind of like,

well, none of this really exists anywhere.

Let's just see through the illusion of self.

And through that process,

which can be amplified by the work of ayahuasca,

that's how we do a lot of the healing.

'Cause you're just kind of cutting through the idea

that there's even a self

to be harmed in the first place, you know?

So there's so many different levels,

and I personally don't believe that there's one way

to work with an experience.

I feel like, you know,

they're all helpful at different times,

and I feel like it's really important

as part of the integration process to be able to be flexible

and use the different lenses when necessary.

That will help you to integrate it as best that you can.

And then holding all of that in that wider container

of what is this shit anyway?

Do I even exist, and does it even matter, you know?

And that, again, is the paradox.

Why do people that take DMT

report entities so consistently?

How can it just be a projection of our unconscious?

How can there be these

archetypal god forms in there all the time

which seem to be represented

in all these ancient civilizations?

It seems like a message, a transmission.

It seems like a relationship is reaching out

and wanting to be established

through the modality of these substances.

So you know how like we have DMT in our brains,

and there's been the famous Spirit Molecule,

studies with DMT where people under medical supervision

reported alien encounters going into these realms.

And it's not just us that has DMT in our brains.

Essentially it's threaded all throughout nature.

We have an intellectual capacity,

we have an intuitive capacity,

as well as an imaginative capacity

to connect to these spaces.

What if we open up the full spectrum of our consciousness

and go into this energetic realm?

What if all the other creatures which contain DMT

are also in that realm?

It's like we're interfacing

with a greater dimensionality of the world.

It seems like a relationship is reaching out

and wanting to be established

through the modality of these substances.

It's like a species outreach.

It's really spirit contact.

Our understanding of the shamanic experience is limited

when we think of it in those terms,

when in reality, spirit contact encompasses the fact

that we are multidimensional beings.

And those dimensions are fully populated with spirits,

and they're all ready and willing for contact.

Some of those spirits have nefarious plans, some don't,

and some that are friendly and some that are lonely.

It's just the same as it is in this reality.

And it's a matter of opening ourselves

to those dimensions in a conscious way,

so then you can increase your experience of life.

Across the world,

psychedelics are increasingly understood

as powerful tools for treating conditions

such as trauma and depression.

Although science and sanity

is on the side of decriminalization,

these substances still remain illegal

and carry the stigma of drug abuse.

However, many of those

that have had transformative experience with psychedelics

believe they are profound tools

for healing the human mind and psyche,

which inspires a greater sense of meaning in their lives.

As humanity faces many difficult collective issues,

psychedelics offer a way for us

to become a more conscious, sustainable,

and sensible civilization,

enabling our collective evolution.

Martin Williams, a post-doctoral researcher

at Monash University in medicinal chemistry,

and I'm also the president of PRISM,

Psychedelic Research in Science & Medicine,

which is aiming to have psychedelic compounds

approved for medicinal application in Australia.

I suspect that a lot of the stigma

that has accompanied drug use generally,

maybe psychedelic use in particular,

has been the direct consequence of government propaganda,

probably in conjunction with church

and other social sort of structures

which have endeavored to paint a picture for people

that they will be moving well beyond the safety zone

that's provided by straight society.

And so probably people have just accepted that propaganda

as reality, as fact.

And because they're not encouraged

to actually question the system,

question the political status quo,

question the structure of the church

or the general sort of community collective belief,

they haven't really been prepared to step outside that.

And so the stigma has just built up around that.

So that stigma associated

with something regarded as an aberration

or some sort of antisocial behavior or something

that's just a little bit of a different perspective

has become so entrenched

that less and less people are prepared

to challenge that stigma.

And that has branched out into so many areas of society.

So whether it's in academia,

whether it's in the professional field,

in the job market, in whatever it might be,

it's just become sort of calcified.

It's just become part of the scenery.

And so it's become more and more of a big step

to actually look out beyond those limitations.

I feel like it needs to come out of the shadow.

I understand that we have

legal ramifications in this country.

However, I believe collectively,

if we could find a way to still advocate it,

because in order for it to be built to a level

where we can get it legalized, I'm a dreamer.

If California is about to legalize psilocybin mushrooms,

I have hope for Australia.

We need to advocate it and be really vocal somehow

amongst the people that don't know about it,

amongst the people who are gonna tell us that we're crazy

or we're hippies or we're, you know, losing our minds

and we need to go into the loony bin.

They're the people we need to talk to

and share our experiences with,

because the power is with the people.

We think it's with the government,

but there's a lot more of us than there is of them.

So if we had a collective movement,

that we're all for this, I feel we could make great change.

However, what I've come up against,

and I do understand why,

a lot of people don't want to talk about it.

They wanna keep it in the shadow,

and I was one of those people.

I didn't wanna talk about the fact

that I used LSD and mushrooms

and that I love mushrooms a lot

because I was afraid of the stigma.

However, the change I've been able to make in people's lives

from just speaking about it,

people have never heard about it, has been huge.

I've been able to encourage people

to sit ceremony with other medicines

that otherwise would never have done it

'cause they're afraid.

So we've just gotta talk about it more, top hiding.

Back in 2013,

I went into a police station on three occasions,

once up in Warburton and twice in Lilydale.

And I said, "This is what I do.

Feel free to arrest me."

And the police said, "Go away, stop wasting our time.

You know, we've got real criminals to deal with."

And so by the time I did get arrested in 2016,

I said I was in possession of LSD and the cops said,

"Okay, well, you're in possession of LSD.

We've gotta arrest you."

You know, they were actually really good.

The cops actually, you know,

we ended up having a great chat

and had a pretty good time of it.

So I rocked up to court, I pleaded guilty,

and the magistrate dismissed the charges.

And I think that's significant,

because to dismiss the charges

from someone who's pleading guilty for drug possession

is actually, why would they do it?

Well, clearly because he recognizes

that I'm fit and can vet what I'm doing.

So I then stood up in the court and I said,

"Okay, Your Honor,

might as well get this show back on the road.

I'm in possession of LSD as we speak.

Can you please have me re-arrested?"

Yeah, everyone in the court was kinda like,

what is going on here?

And he's kind of pointed to the police and said,

"I'm sure they're happy to do it."

So when I did get back to the magistrate's court,

I was able to argue the case successfully.

And the magistrate did me a real favor

by summing up the entire argument

and basically agreeing with everything that I said.

And he said, "The only reason

I'm not referring it to Supreme Court

is it's not important enough.

You know, I could refer it to the Supreme Court,

but based on their case load and everything,

they'd just throw it out."

So when you're looking at the science,

the science is unequivocal.

LSD, magic mushrooms, ayahuasca, and mescaline

are all non-addictive, non-toxic, and psychologically safe

in appropriate dose set and setting.

So when it comes time

for a demonstrative, justifiable reason,

the government actually knows

if they take me to the Supreme Court,

which is what I'm trying to do,

they would actually lose.

But when it's just me and a handful of people,

it's very easy for the courts

and the politicians to go, "No."

If 10,000 people were to stand in front of the court

and say, "Screw you, this is important to me,"

the court would have no dramas

with referring to the Supreme Court.

There's definitely an emotive bias

against psychedelics in culture.

But one of the difficulties is

is that the brain resists change.

We struggle to update our precepts about the world,

and on a cultural level that takes even longer.

And it really isn't based on evidence

that what we decide for policy

or what we decide for our own beliefs,

and very frequently they get formed

by initial reaction and stay that way for a long time.

Funnily enough, psychedelics are drugs that allow us

to more frequently update and decondition ourselves

from these strict, rigid beliefs.

People also don't fully understand

both the benefits but also the risks

of not adopting psychedelics.

Everyone knows someone with mental illness.

Everyone knows someone who is stuck.

And we have a solution,

and it's not being studied in Australia

to the degree that it should be.

We are falling behind the rest of the academic world,

where John Hopkins, Harvard, UCLA,

they have psychedelic studies.

We don't.

And what is it about Australia?

There is definitely a academic conservatism,

there's definitely conservatism within the medical field,

and it's really a loss of opportunity

to make our mark on a area of science

that is going to be revolutionary for psychiatry.

I found myself on a DNA staircase.

It was a white staircase

that was just going way up into the sky.

It was so high that I couldn't see the Earth underneath me.

And I was about four or five steps from the top.

And I'm standing there on my own

on this staircase in the sky,

and I took a step.

And as soon as I took a step,

I just got hit with another vision.

And now I was away from the staircase,

and suddenly I was watching an apple orchard

and there were apple trees everywhere.

And I was kind of seeing like a fast lapse, time lapse.

And I saw apples falling,

and some of them were falling and rotting and just dying.

And then some of them fell in a certain place,

the right place at the right time,

and a seed sprouted out of the ground there.

And I watched the next 10 years or so

as that apple tree grew up.

And there was some kind of narrator or guide or something,

not talking in English to me,

but kind of explaining a story to me, saying,

"Well, see, it does matter

whether some things fall left or they fall right

and if they're in the right place

at the right time in the physical world.

Things can either grow or exist or not exist,

because of whether you go left or right," kind of thing.

And then,

I found myself back on the staircase again,

the DNA staircase.

And so I think to myself, "Right, well,

I've gotta take another step."

So I take another step on the staircase,

and this time I get hit with another vision

and I'm thrown into a corporate office building,

and I'm just halfway through opening a door

when I arrived in that place.

And when I opened the door,

there's a woman behind the desk

and I recognize her as my boss, and she's crying.

And I think to myself,

"Oh, that's not good.

That's not good."

And I said something really kind to her.

And then in that moment I got a narrative again,

and this time it was, "Well, you see,

you said something nice, and because of that,

she's not gonna go home and kill herself,

which is what she was gonna do.

And 'cause she didn't go home and kill herself,

she also went on to have two children, and here they are."

And then I watched 'em grow up from young kids to adults.

And then it was like, "So you see,

because you said some kind words,

two lives were the result of that."

Out of each breath is a domino of reactions.

And then, so it matters, in the spiritual realm,

what you say and what you don't say,

what you think and what you don't think maybe.

Then I found myself back on the staircase again,

and I'm two steps from the top.

So I take another step,

I take another step and I get hit with a vision again.

This time I'm thrown out to outer space

and I'm seeing all these large orbs

and rocks floating around,

and they're all moving, meteors and things all twisting,

and they're all spinning around

what looks like a black hole.

And everything's spinning around this black hole

and it's all slowly getting sucked in by it.

And the narrator's like, "See,

in some parts of the physics world,

it doesn't matter what you do, it's inevitable.

All of this stuff is gonna come together

and there's nothing you can do about it."

And that was like the opposite of what I got told before.

And then,

I come back to the staircase again.

And so I'm one step from the top.

And all this time, I later spoke to my friends

and they said that during that,

during the time when I must've been having that trip,

I was sitting down on the hallway floor,

like in a cross-legged yogi kind of position,

just sitting there quietly.

But then when I took a step up onto the final step,

I started getting this story

about how everything is evolving

and that it's all moving slowly

towards learning lessons of love,

and that everything makes mistakes

and then it refines itself and then it tries better,

tries again to be better,

and then it does it again and again.

And everything, every refinement in that process

is an elevation of love,

in that it's learning not to be cruel, but to be loving,

again and again and again.

And he said, "And it's all evolving

until this universal point

of where everything realizes that it's in love with itself

and there's nothing you can do about it."

And so at that moment I was like, "No."

Yeah, I'd started speaking, my friend said.

I don't remember this part of it,

but they said, in an Irish accent, weirdly,

"I don't fucking believe it.

No fucking way.

I don't fucking believe it!"

And then I screamed at the top of my voice,

"You fucking beauty!"

And I'd stood up in the hallway,

stomped down the hallway

and jumped into the air with my hand like this

and landed on the floor.

And in my movie,

what I'd done is just jumped off the staircase,

thought, "Wow, this is amazing,"

and jumped off the staircase and jumped into the clouds

and off the top step.

But in reality,

I actually jumped and had hurt my hip really badly,

and still I was not aware of any of that.

And they dragged me upstairs apparently.

And then started a second movie,

which was finding myself flying through space.

And I was flying through space inside a sunbeam.

So I felt like I was in a sunbeam, for some reason,

and I'm,

that's all I could hear.

And it felt like it was going on for half an hour.

And the whole time I was thinking,

"What the hell's going on?

What the hell's going on?

What the hell's going on?"

And I feel like I'm like looking left and right

and that there are other souls in sunbeams as well,

other beings like me.

And then I kind of realized that I can see the Planet Earth,

and I'm getting closer to it.

I'm thinking, "Wow, that looks amazing."

And it slowly begins to dawn on me,

"I'm entering the atmosphere, whoa!"

And then I get into the atmosphere

and I'm still flying through this.

And then I start panicking and I'm like,

"Oh shit, I'm going to go the ground!"

And then before I can consider it too much,

I hit the ground.

And I just go deep, deep into the soil.

And then we lay dormant in the soil

for what was meant to be thousands of years.

And then we just woke up and started living.

And that was it,

like an immortal kind of existence.

At some point I asked a question,

what's it feel like to be God?

And then I find myself behind someone's eyes in their body,

and I'm moving around.

And I realized that I can be in that body,

feel what that person's feeling,

and I can jump from body to body

and I'm bouncing around from one body to another.

And I'm just going through

a whole bunch of different experiences where I had fun,

for, I don't know how long that went,

but it went for a while and I was really enjoying it.

Then I get pulled out of that and the narrator's like,

"Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

But if you want to understand what it feels like to be God,

you have to realize that God

also does the suffering lives as well."

And then I was thrown into the body

of someone who was in prison and getting beaten up.

And then I was put into the body

of a woman in India who was getting raped.

And then I went into a child's body who was being abused.

And then I just kept happening.

Sorry.

Again and again,

I just kept going through

all these really harsh experiences.

And by the end of it I was totally exhausted,

and I'd come out of it feeling sorry for God,

or whatever has to feel everything.

And the guide was like,

"See it's much better that you're just James,

'cause you just get to live by your little parcel

and you don't have to experience everything.

But you should feel compassion for God,

and that's why you should try

and reduce the suffering in the planet,

because God has to go and live all of that out

and it's not fun."

I see the planet now as being a single animal.

So I see the rocks are like bones

and the trees are like lungs and the rivers are like veins

and the moon is pumping

the water on the planet like a heart,

and I don't think I would've paid attention to that.

So I think that in the future,

we need to get to this point

where humanity can stare into each other's eyes and say,

we're actually part of the same animal.

What are we gonna do next?

Yeah.

I think we need a long view of this.

The classical definition of shamanism

is the archaic techniques of ecstasy,

and by ecstasy in the original Greek definition,

they mean extasis, connecting to the divine within.

Behind all of these medicines is the one central medicine

of consciousness itself.

And that's not just a mental thing,

it's a heart feeling thing, it's an intuitive thing,

it's an intangible thing.

It's a thing which essentially needs a unified approach,

whether that's medical, mystical, shamanic, psychedelic.

It's something bigger than the sum of the parts.

I love the medicalization of psychedelics.

It's much needed in our culture.

I love the shamanic approach which is coming back

and giving people a reconnection to spirit and to source.

I love the fact that these are the times

and we are the ones we've been looking for,

because if we're not, who the fuck is?

What we're going through is a consciousness shift,

because these substances increase our awareness.

These are just one tool amongst many,

which very potently

and very quickly accelerate consciousness.

There are pitfalls and there are dangers,

but this has always been the way.

It goes all the way back to fire, baby.

This is the Promethean initiative,

and it's time that we explore this frontier.

The universe is more consciousness based

than it is matter based.

This is an experiment in consciousness.

We are the ultimate evolution of that experiment,

trying to understand the experiment

that got put into work in the first place.

So it's changed my whole view

of what living's really about in lots of ways.

Well, I like Teilhard de Chardin's comment:

"We are not human beings having a spiritual experience.

We are spiritual beings having a human experience."

So I just try and enjoy my human experience

as much as I can.