Ayahuasca and Psychedelics as Potential Catalysts for Personal and Societal Evolution Transcript

Ayahuasca and Psychedelics as Potential Catalysts for Personal and Societal Evolution Discussion

Summary: 

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer and my guests today are many. There are about five or six of us on this call. We’re going to be talking about ayahuasca and psychedelics and the role they play or may play in exploring consciousness and facilitating awakening. I’ve already gotten some feedback from people asking me why I was even having this conversation because some people consider this to be outside the realm of legitimate spiritual endeavor. But I must say that I’ve thought that way for many years myself, having indulged in some of this in the late 60s. My experience was basically that LSD knocked holes in the wall and showed me there was something outside the house, but then I was left with a house with holes in the wall. It took me years to repair those and get to use the doors and windows properly. But in listening to the folks that I’m going to be speaking with today over the past week, watching Rak Razam’s movie, listening to Chris Bache’s talk in a conference and so on, I was so impressed with everyone’s eloquence and clarity and depth of sincerity and understanding that it really was a boundary breaker for me and helped me expand my understanding of or just legitimize the whole thing more deeply, but not without provisos and cautions and so on, which we’ll be talking about.

So, first I’d like to introduce all the people who are going to be participating in this. It’ll take me a couple of minutes to read a brief bio on each of them and then we’ll get into it. I think I’ll go from east to west. First there is Christopher Bache, PhD, who is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Youngstown State University, where he taught for over 30 years in psychology of religion, transpersonal studies, Buddhism and world religions. He is also adjunct professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco and for two years was the Director of Transformative Learning at the Institute of Noetic Sciences in Petaluma, California. An award-winning teacher and international speaker, his work explores the philosophical implications of deep, non-ordinary states of consciousness, especially psychedelic states. He has written a pioneering book in psychedelic philosophy and collective consciousness, Dark Night, Early Dawn, Steps to a Deep Ecology of Mind. In addition, he has written Life Cycles, Reincarnation and the Web of Life, a comprehensive study of reincarnation and karma in light of new information emerging in contemporary consciousness research. In his book The Living Classroom, Chris presents his revolutionary ideas concerning the transpersonal dimensions of teaching. In addition to working with sacred medicines, Chris has been a Buddhist practitioner for many years. So, I should have done this a second ago, but I just brought Chris’s image on the screen so you can see him. So, welcome Chris.

Chris Bache: Welcome Rick. Thanks for inviting me. Nice to be here.

Rick: Working to the West now, Jeffrey and Cielle Backstrom live about a block south of me in Fairfield, Iowa, and they’re among many people who make Fairfield an interesting place to live. They call their work Stepping into Freedom, explaining that “with each step we release or transcend old limiting patterns of being, seeing, acting, and open to the beings our souls are calling us here to become.” They offer shamanic healing work and deep practices to facilitate embodied awakening and opening to the soul’s calling. In the past several years, Jeffrey and Cielle have studied with indigenous medicine workers and teachers in the Andes and the Amazon Basin, who represent ancient traditions grounded in the sacred feminine and Mother Earth. Since 2009, they’ve been welcoming their students to accompany them to experience these connections for themselves. These traditional practices include the use of sacred plants in healing, divination, and spiritual transformation.

Talat Jonathan Phillips, from San Francisco, is co-founder of the cutting-edge web magazine Reality Sandwich and the Evolver Network. He is a well-regarded life coach and bio-energetic healer who has been practicing for over a decade. His memoir, The Electric Jesus, The Healing Journey of a Contemporary Gnostic, has become one of the must-read books of the New Consciousness Movement for its honest portrayal of life on the emerging edge of the transformational culture. He is creator of the Ayahuasca Monologues, Tales of the Spirit Vine, a religion blogger for the Huffington Post, a Reiki master and bio-energetic healer who does Skype sessions for clients around the world and in his San Francisco office.

Finally, on the East Coast of Australia, Rak Razam is the author of two books, Aya, A Shamanic Odyssey, a travel memoir of his time with shamans in the Peruvian Amazon, and a companion volume of interviews, The Ayahuasca Sessions, published by Icaro. In 2006, he visited Peru on a feature magazine assignment to see what the almost mythical archetype of the shaman was really like in the 21st century. Excerpts from Aya, A Shamanic Odyssey have been published in Australian Penthouse, High Times and Filmmaker Magazine online. He was also interviewed and appears in the CBC’s 2007 audio documentary, In Search of the Divine Vegetal, talking about his Ayahuasca experiences, which, due to special demand, has been broadcast twice to millions of people throughout North America. The founding editor of Undergrowth, Australia’s leading counter-culture arts and literature magazine, Razam is an experiential journalist who participates in the experiences he writes about, giving his global audience an intimate familiarity with his subjects.

Great. So that introduces all of you. Now, as I was preparing for this interview, I realized that there was no way I was going to have a clear structure in mind of points that we would actually follow, but I have a feeling that once we get rolling, we’ll just roll and we’ll have no problem filling up a delightful two hours or so with this discussion. I just want to say that I don’t take this whole topic lightly or trivially in any way, and I don’t think any of you have approached it that way. You know, in the late ’60s, 90% of the people were just thrill-seekers in the use of psychedelic drugs, and there were many casualties. I’m afraid that today this is also the case, and perhaps one of you can suggest what the percentages might be, but I really wonder.

In addition to the direct casualties of people indulging in substances which they probably don’t have the adequate preparation to use, there’s also a sort of a dark underbelly that’s developed in Peru, at least, of people who are in it for the money. And there have been instances of sexual abuse of people who are down there, high on ayahuasca, and all kinds of strange things. Here in my town, there is a young woman who took ayahuasca and has been in and out of mental hospitals ever since. So, I’m not doing this discussion as a kind of a come one, come all invitation and encouragement for anybody who has the slightest inclination to go ahead and experiment in whatever way presents itself to them. I would say from the outset that if one is going to explore this area, it should be done with the utmost seriousness, under the guidance of someone who really knows what they’re doing. If you are not sure that those criteria have been met, don’t proceed until you are. So that’s my answer.

Rak Razam: I’d like to jump in and maybe answer a bit of that question or comment on that. I use some of those terms myself. There is this difference between seekers and thrill-seekers, and I think some of those analogies you were saying about the 1960s are very apt. But I think we need to be very careful about the language and how we frame this conversation, because underneath this idea is still the seeking. And so, whether people think they are doing this recreationally or think they are doing it for some type of thrill, what is beneath that? What we are really talking about here is the fact that usually Western people have been very distanced from a spiritual reality, have been taught over multiple generations, if not thousands of years now, that there is nothing but a reductionist mechanical approach to what reality is and to the fact that they have bodies. They are meant to go through the education system, have a little white picket fence reality, be good consumers and shop. They are really distanced from this ability to connect to themselves, whatever modality that takes. But I think this idea of thrill-seekers is a bit of a misnomer as well, because I think what is really happening is that these people have a really deep thirst and hunger in the human experience. And the only language we have for it in a consumerist Western culture is thrill-seeking. It is like this whole idea about escapism. If you look at the vast majority of the entertainment complex at the moment, it is actually escapist. There are tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of people who stare at their screens for most of the day and engage in a virtual world which is sold to them by the corporate establishment. But it is this quest for something deeper which people really want.

So, when I first went down to Peru in 2006, it was very obvious that there was a business of spirituality and a business of shamanism going on. And it is all about the supply and demand that yes, many people on the ground there in Peru and in the West are catering to this hunger and this thirst for connection to spirit. And they might be thrill-seekers but also, as you say, there is a smaller majority of people within what we call thrill-seekers who are seekers. One idea that I came to see to reconcile this disparity is this idea that, I guess it was in Christian terminology, there used to be this idea of the pilgrim. And many people going down to Peru and going on this journey of the soul, we might call them recreational users, we might call them thrill-seekers, but really, they are going on a very deep journey. They are going away from their native land, they are going to the jungle and to these foreign environments and they are undertaking a rigorous and very arduous experience. And so, I don’t like to pigeonhole people and I understand there are lots of dynamics in the business of spirituality embedded in that and there are lots of issues around duty of care and the safeguards that the industry of shamanism must be taking up to safeguard people who are participating. But just to the core of that question, this idea of thrill-seekers or seekers or why people are doing this at all, the way I see it, I’ve spoken to many, many curanderos, the shamans of the Amazon, and they basically said at the outset that, choosing these statistics pretty randomly, there is a certain segment of people who are very identifiably going down for healing, for the healing that not just ayahuasca but the dieta and the reconnection can bring. But the vast majority of people, they said, weren’t sick in the traditional sense that their patients were. But what they recognized was that there was a sickness but it wasn’t perhaps a physical sickness, it was a malaise of the soul. It was this idea of disconnection from their spirit and from connecting to nature, how we connect to nature with the great spirit. And so, for these people, the curanderos were really understanding. And yes, a lot of them were really in search of the visions and the visionary component of ayahuasca because, modern Western culture is very visually driven. But underneath all of that, what I really believe is happening is that there is this Western hunger for a reconnection to spirit and to an authenticity that these experiences can bring. So, I think it is really important to reframe that question and look at it in those contexts.

Rick: Good. I agree. And in using the term thrill-seeker I did not mean to insult anyone. I am just saying that in my opinion, this whole thing is something which should not be approached in any kind of trivial sense. Ideally, at least, there should be a deep sincerity and earnestness and purposefulness. And perhaps the more of that there is, the more profundity you are going to get out of it and the more benefit you are going to get out of it. I don’t know. Although it is maybe naïve to assume this is going to happen, but maybe it will in time, there should probably also be some sort of screening process, for both curanderos and participants, so that firstly you don’t get bogus guys setting up workshops or whatever they do and actually harming people. And secondly, so that people who are on Prozac or have some kind of problem which would really be counter-indicated in terms of the use of this aren’t just rushing into it blindly and getting into trouble as a result.

Talat Johnathan Phillips: Rick, can I say something on this? Because you mentioned thrill-seeking, and that is a bit of my specialty. I’m a healer, and I feel as if one of the hugest therapeutic things I realized this year is fun and finding your edge in learning it and exploring it is one of the most powerful things you can do when you are prepared in a safe way. As you are saying, for healing. If I look back to growing up, the most spiritual experiences I had were skiing. I was in the elements. There was this element of adrenaline. There was stress. There were challenges, and there was a sense of freedom. And I feel as if when you engage in certain psychedelic experiences, if you don’t engage with some sense of inner adventure and outer adventure, you may have a victim story that is going to play out. And honestly, if we are talking about trauma, which I think a lot of people are healing from; abuses in the family line, sexual lines, the whole thing; you’re talking about adrenaline. Because adrenaline comes in the system, and it overpowers the system, and then we have fight-or-flight modes, and people are stuck in these things. So, I actually think a study of thrill-seeking and the deeper seeking that Rak was talking about is key for reclaiming adrenaline and letting it flow and healing the overall system. I’ve noticed it. I became obsessed with big-wave surfers because they literally, as an energy healer, they were riding giant waves of energy for massive adrenaline rewards in it. And I think you have to be careful of that. I think there is an addictive thrill-seeking, but I do think being prepared and being a good psychedelic surfer is key to going into this work because a sense of bravery, what I heard Rak talking about is almost a hero’s journey. And if we’re going to overcome a lot of the personal societal issues that are embedded in our psyches, I do think a combined sense of courage and humility are key in accessing these more complex biodynamic dimensions that can be opened up.

Rick: Good. Let me ask Chris or one of the Backstroms, would you like to respond to that?

Cielle Backstrom: Yeah, I would like to. Along the same topic, one of the times that Jeffrey and I took a group of people to Peru, to the jungle, to go to one of the retreat centers, this particular center was established by a woman, an Australian woman, who is an addiction counselor. She herself is an alcoholic, although she is not currently drinking. And she found that with her clients she felt as if the talk therapy she was doing with them was bringing them to a state of sobriety, but not very quickly and not very permanently. So, she started bringing in ayahuasca as another way, another medicine that might be able to get to the deeper causes, to unroot the deeper causes of their addiction. She herself is not a curandera, and so she does not lead the ceremonies, but she would bring her clients to other curanderos in South America, and then she would coach them throughout the week of their ayahuasca ceremonies and things like that. Anyway, she set up a whole center herself, and a lot of the clients that come there have addictions. But when Jeffrey and I found her, we didn’t go there because we had particular chemical addictions, but I just trusted that she was all about healing, and the shamans she would work with were about healing. So, one time when we went there with a group of people, and these were all people who were seeking awakening. The first night, in my first night of ceremony, a lot of difficult material came up for me physically and emotionally. The shaman who was also working with us, was not just giving us the medicine we drank, but he was working through his sacred songs and other kind of extraction processes he used. He worked with aroma therapies and light therapies as well as the songs. But the next time he said, “Cielle, I don’t want you to drink tonight. I want you to come to ceremony. I want to do healing practices on you, but I don’t want you to drink.” And then two nights later he said, “Cielle, great. I want you to come to ceremony. I don’t want you to drink.” And so, this trip we went on, there were going to be five ceremonies, and he did not have me drink ayahuasca three of those five ceremonies. He gave me some perfumed water to drink. Different people on the retreat came to me and said, “Aren’t you disappointed?” And I said, “No, I did not come here for experiences. I came here for healing. And I’m trusting that this man is finding the best path of healing for me, using other plants.” He was doing other healing processes with me during the day as well. And so, for me, the whole idea of going to the jungle where this plant grows with people who know it has been part of their culture for a long, long time, there, healing is more of their intention. And it is not to say that there aren’t newer shamans down there who are out for money, but there are very many reliable healing centers and curanderos down there, who really have a holistic healing for their clients as their intention. And it may or may not work, and ayahuasca may not be the main ingredient of the healing that they are invoking in people. So yes, I do like the fact that it is important to be looking for the center and the ayahuasceras who you’re working with, but it is not all about experience. To me, it is more about healing, however that comes with a whole bunch of different kinds of plants and healing techniques, of which ayahuasca was still his teacher which informed him on how to work with me in a different way.

Chris Bache: It is very difficult to make generalizations in this situation because there are so many different types of psychoactive substances and so many different contexts and so many different healers who work in different ways. Fundamentally, I understand the reservations that the spiritual community, particularly the contemplative community, has towards psychedelics. We have that old historical prohibitions against drugs which cloud the mind in Buddhism, and psychedelics have often been interpreted as drugs that fall under that category. To me, the critical difference, whether there is spiritual value in working conscientiously with psychedelics is first whether you are working recreationally or working therapeutically. I think we are all on the same page that it’s therapeutic work which is the important work. But then when you are working even therapeutically, the states that one enters into are temporary. That is the nature of the beast. They are temporary. So, the critical condition, I think, is how you choose to work with these temporary conditions and whether you are trying to affect a fundamental shift in the baseline of consciousness, fundamental healing of the various pathologies of ordinary life so that consciousness can become more pliant, can become more open, relaxed, more sensitive to its own ground of being. If that work is being done in that fashion, I think it can be very helpful and can be well integrated into contemplative practice. If it is not being done in that way, if it is not being used to confront the deepest hurts of the human spirit, then it is probably a distraction in one way or another.

Rick: I just want to say that the effects of meditation are temporary too. It’s a non-drug thing, but they are cumulative. You meditate every day, then there is a cumulative influence over time. And obviously the same would be true of drugs. They are producing a change in the brain or whatever. And I am sort of curious about something. In listening to some of your talks, Chris, you mentioned that at a certain point you decided to ease off on the high-dosage LSD explorations because it was taking a toll on your body and perhaps especially on your subtle body. And I guess I’m just playing devil’s advocate here, throwing out some of my doubts and questions. I wonder about the subtle influences of these things. I think either I read it someplace or Rak said in his movie that ayahuasca actually has a cleansing influence on the brain. It flushes the brain clean and improves receptor sites. So that is interesting, if it is true. Sometimes you hear about the use of drugs causing receptor sites to be less receptive to the body’s own chemicals that it produces when it has become dependent upon ingested chemicals. And particularly, I guess that is true of the harmful ones like heroin, which I guess lowers your receptivity to natural serotonin or something, or so I’ve heard.

So, I’m just wondering about these people, some of these curanderos who have been doing this since the age of 14, and now they’re maybe in their 30s, 40s, 50s, how do they strike you as human beings?  We have a certain image in mind of enlightenment and what that might be. All of us from our various backgrounds have pretty clear conceptions about that. Do these fellows seem to be measuring up to that type of thing? I mean, Rak said in his movie that certainly most of these people are still flawed human beings, and of course the same could be said of most Eastern gurus, you know, the various things that end up happening. But what is the long-term influence? And as in the case of Cielle, is there a certain point at which further ingestion of chemicals would be counter-indicated, because you don’t need them anymore? You have already achieved whatever it is they are capable of providing. Or is it a never-ending investigation?

Rak Razam: To give context, the quote that you mentioned in my film AYA Awakenings is looking at the study that was done in the early 1990s by Charles Grob, I think, and Dennis McKenna, and a few other Western scientists and doctors who were studying members of church groups like Ineo de Vegetal, for looking at what regular ayahuasca use did to them on a physiological level. And they did double-blind-controlled test studies on them. They found that basically, ayahuasca was working on the receptor sites of the brain, and it was basically flushing everything clean and almost like defragging, like on your computer when you do regular maintenance, you know? It is as if it was linking everything back up. And so, it had a very verifiable, scientifically proven, healthy effect on the brain structure, as well as working as a purgative and working to cleanse the body as well. What they also noted in that study, though, was that it was also the follow-up, and not just the peak experience, but it was the follow-up in the days and weeks around the ayahuasca ceremonies with groups like de Vegetal, who were a community. And so it was that integration time which was so important to the holistic nature of the experience and integrating it into their lives. But ayahuasca does have that effect as a cleansing agent, as well as the psychic effect. And you were mentioning earlier as well just the hardship. I think that all pathways have limitations, we’re saying that meditation is temporary and ayahuasca is temporary. All these things are pathways which are available to us in the gamut of experience that nature has provided. And, as you mentioned, there has been a stigma associated with not just psychedelics, but psychedelics and magic and even tantra, and what is often referred to, I guess, as the left-hand pathways of the shortcuts. You know, I think they might get you to the point in a shorter amount of time, but there is no less depth to the experience. This is the matter of guidance and of context and of being able to integrate the experience. And I guess with a more peak experience thing, maybe that can be more of a challenge to integrate. But I think there is a value that ayahuasca generally brings as a medicine, which is what it is called in Peru. You know, people around the world who are taking it up understand it is not a drug. It is a medicine. And we were talking before about this, I guess, it is an unproven spiritual belief that drugs can put holes in your aura or things like that, which makes a lot of sense. You know, when we are talking about an energy body or an energy field or a light body, things which often marshal all the chi and all the energy of the body into a peak experience may leave a deficit somewhere else or may peak and may cause issues around that. But I think with ayahuasca, no matter how rigorous it is, it can be very hard on people. You can go through that dark night of the soul and face your shadow. Biologically and neurochemically, it is a medicine because it can be a hard thing to swallow figuratively and literally, but it is actually purging and it is helping release and bring to the surface a lot of the shadow material. So, I’m not really sure if it is going to be damaging in that same effect as some of the more somatic drugs, as the Western sort of drugs like heroin and cocaine and things like that might be doing. But it is taxing and demanding as well. But generally, what I want to say about ayahuasca and DMT to some levels as a separate adjunct, is that these things, what I feel is, while they are working on the body and working to cleanse on that level, they are also helping to raise the vibration. So, this idea about the energetic body and if it’s damaging or not, and everything needs to be done in moderation and there needs to be very much respect paid to the integration process and how this informs our lives. But I think over time cumulatively, what they are doing, as well as setting up neural pathways, as well as bringing the unconscious into the conscious for healing and working on the shadow material, I feel that what they are doing is they are feeding that light body and they are raising the vibrational nature of our selves. And then it is up to what we do with that in the world, how we retain that. Because what all the curanderas say, there is no point in having a peak experience with the ayahuasca and then going straight back onto the coffee and salt and sugar and pork and alcohol and sex the next day or the next week and not changing your behavior, not changing your patterns. So, what the ayahuasca medicine can do is it can reveal your own patterns and it can reveal your own nature to yourself and it can help heal. I believe we ourselves are the ones who do the healing, in concert with the spirit of the plant. It is not just the ayahuasca neurochemically which is healing, it is what it is revealing and our abilities within ourselves that really do the healing. But then that needs to be integrated into our lives. And if we do that, the curanderos say you retain the vibration that you have gained and cleansed on ayahuasca. And as opposed to many other drugs and even with psychedelics, I don’t know if, neurochemically, I know things like LSD can put a toxic load on the body and into the liver and things like that, but ayahuasca seems to be sort of unique amongst the gamut of planetary entheogens is that it does work as a healing agent, a cleansing agent and it can help to raise the vibration if we participate in that integration process afterwards.

Rick: So, if the vomiting or the purging that takes place is symptomatic of purification of stuff from the psyche or from deep in the body, regarding the most experienced users such as the curanderos themselves, are they able to drink the stuff without vomiting because they have been purified of everything that needs purifying?

Rak Razam: We are generalizing again here because not everyone purges. That is how I have experienced it. Sometimes I don’t purge, other people don’t purge. I do find that people who are more clean physically, if maybe they are vegetarian or maybe they are just not taking in the impurities or the processed foods or the sugars and salts and things like that, if you have more of a clean bioenergetic system to begin with, then you have the sensitivity that is needed. So, the curanderos quite often might only have a sip of a cup or maybe not a cup at all. Usually, they will have at least a homeopathic dose just to be in the vibrational frequency and to touch base with that and then go into the realm. And while working in ceremony, they don’t traditionally want to have a big dose. They want to be able to navigate and be able to physically facilitate in ceremony. But the curanderos and even very sensitive people, sometimes you can drink a cup of ayahuasca, it may come straight up again or maybe you do not even get to drink it at all. But if you are so close to the vibrational frequency of it, sometimes that is all that is needed. You can tune into someone else’s journey or you can tune into the subtle vibrations. So, people who don’t vomit and aren’t clean, sometimes I find that they have this real resistance and there is a vibrational resistance to opening to the medicine. And the curanderos can sing an icaro, one of their magical songs that invoke the vibration. And they can do an icaro to make someone purge or to bring on the visions or many, many other facilities they can do. But it is really about the sensitivity of our energetic bodies to the medicine and then also to the dimensional realms that the medicine opens up.

Rick: Okay, good. Jeffrey, you haven’t had a chance to say anything yet. Would you like to chime in?

Jeffery Backstrom: Well, following on that, it wouldn’t be a bad time to, you know, try and tie in a couple of these threads because we’ve sounded a little like blind guys trying to describe the elephant. But you know, the plant in the Amazon is sometimes referred to as our teacher and sometimes as the doctor. So those are the two aspects that we refer to when we talk about healing, talk about purging, talk about clearing and cleaning the body. And on the other hand, when we give attention to what are the visionary components of the experience or what kind of things are revealed to us. I’ll just give you another personal example. So, one of the pieces that I worked on one time had to do with some really early childhood wounding, which of course everybody this day and age thinks that is what happened to them. And a lot of what happened to us is that. But the ayahuasca then showed me where that came from and even generationally. And I had an experience, an inward experience of going to one of my parents in his childhood and seeing that wound in his field and extracting it and then experiencing this great burden kind of lift off myself. Now it wasn’t until a trip or two later that the curandero I was working with wanted to show me a bit about how to do extractions. And he said, “Watch for the red spot or red light in that person’s field.” That was what the experience had been that I had. So, there was some teaching going on and some healing. And I’m sure we are going to hear from Chris particularly on the teaching side because I’ve loved what he’s contributed in terms of depth psychology and this kind of work from what’s a little bit more of a Western perspective.

But there is something I have to go back to and that is the reference you made early on, Rick, to a young woman who is now having a very hard time. And it clearly seems to be connected to an experience that she had. It is really important to recognize the need for care. And I guess I’d have to say, even for some kind of regulation, things that are illegal fall into the hands of criminals in part because there is no care taken by the broader culture to assure that those substances are going to be pure. And we have heard a lot of stories about people drinking ayahuasca that had some other plant mixed in. Sometimes this is done to make the person more open to suggestion from a ne’er-do-well of a so-called shaman. As far as we know, that was probably what happened to the woman in our community. So, I think your concern about safety is a very important part of this whole discussion. But I don’t think it is so much a part of the question of whether ayahuasca, if we are properly prepared and working with someone who is dedicated and has years of experience in a safe surrounding, is a viable adjunct to our healing and awakening process. That safety piece is very much about how we in Western culture are going to come face to face with these whole other dimensions and these other kinds of medicine and decide whether we are really a free culture or not. And if we are, how to make it possible for people to have this kind of deep healing and these profound awakenings without having to worry that they’re going to be taken advantage of. It’s kind of like if you thought, well, the Christian churches, we can’t regulate them so we are not going to worry if there is some scoundrel who calls himself a preacher and spikes the communion brew with some sort of illicit chemical. It is a political issue and it is one that needs to be addressed.

Rick: Chris or Jonathan, I haven’t heard from either of you in a while. Are either of you moved to say something?

Chris Bache: Well, I guess, yeah. If you work with psychedelics, whether they are organic or synthetic psychedelics, you have to pay a lot of attention and work very deeply with the energetic systems of the body. And it is not just ayahuasca that has the purgative effect, but when the system begins to open up into deeper states of consciousness, by definition, deeper states of consciousness are higher energetic states of consciousness. So, there is a cycle of purification that takes place whenever you are opening into deeper states of consciousness, including using meditation as the driver for opening up into deeper states of consciousness. And there is a building up of energy and a catharsis sometimes and a letting go of that energy and throwing up or purging, throwing out a lot of physical energy out of the body, throwing up a lot of emotional energy out of the emotional body, a lot of mental constrictions out of the mental body. I think that is the nature of the game, whatever type of substances you’re using, if you are working therapeutically to fundamentally increase awareness of those basic blocks or obstructions.

But I’d like to shift the conversation a little bit and take it out of the personal realm, because so far, we are talking about personal blocks or ancestral blocks, with Jeffrey talking about his father. But you can open up into states of consciousness that are so profound you start working with very, very large swaths of collective blocks. The energy involved in those collective blocks is often many orders of magnitude more intense and higher than working with personal blocks. And so, I’m going to let go, but I just want to mention, since you mentioned something I had said, that after working with psychedelics for many years I wanted to step back, because it was energetically very demanding. I just want to put that in context that that was after 20 years of work and very long sustained work, working with very high doses of LSD. Even though I was working very conscientiously with a lot of attention to the physical body, a lot of attention to my energetic body, working with Vajrayana practices before and after the psychedelic sessions. When you move into deep, deep, enormously expanded states of consciousness you are moving into profoundly different energetic realities. Those energetic realities are just an enormous exercise, a challenge of integration, or even just managing the expansion and contraction process repeatedly through the years. So, I think when it’s done well, we don’t really have to worry about these substances causing cracks, fissures, holes in the energetic body any more than, I mean, I think we develop holes in our energetic body by going to see some of the crap movies that many people go to see. I don’t think there is a singular cause of issues like that.

Rick: Go ahead.

Talat Johnathan Phillips: Yeah, Rick, I would like to say, thanks Chris, I really love what you had to say there. In my journey I was looking for what I call the ayahuasca silver bullet or the miracle cure and I see a lot of people kind of fall, I don’t want to say fall victim to it, but put a little too much false hope into it. Oh, I have depression, I have anxiety, I have cancer, I’m going to go down, do a week or two dieta and ayahuasca and come home healed. I did that twice and it didn’t work. I have done over 100 ceremonies and it didn’t work. In my own journey there was this whole question, we have talked a lot about ayahuasca and I do want to just say we have MDMA and how the Iraq war veterans with PTSD are being treated therapeutically with that now, people mention DMT, even ketamine which I don’t trust at all. Some people have had really good experiences with that. Personally, my journey has been with cannabis. I used to laugh at medical marijuana. I thought it was a joke, as if it was an excuse for people to smoke pot and eat Doritos and watch Cheech and Chong movies. But after being really disillusioned with ayahuasca and Santo Daime ceremonies, 100s of them, and also the other spiritual practices, what I found was a fusion of them worked really well. We’ve been talking in either/or language which doesn’t resonate with me very well. Serious spiritual practices, psychedelic practices. My whole practice is a fusion of these. It’s using cannabis, for me cannabis slows things down enough and opens up the quantum field to then do deep yoga work, deep Tai Chi and Qigong work, energy healing. In fact, when I do energy healing work on people, I have a puke bucket. I smoke Santa Maria cannabis sometimes on special sessions. You go deep into those systems.

I think we need to start having these dialogues. Rick, this is why I’m glad we are having this conversation because we can learn from each other. What I learned, in the coming year, I’m launching this whole Psychonaut training program because I have heard a lot of people talk about the brain and energy fields. We need to get psychedelic people in their bodies more. Having physical experiences, opening it up so that they can handle these intense states on their nervous system. I’m interested in transformational programs. Chris, I have seen to such a large degree things that I never would have believed in held in the collective psyche and constricted in the human energetic body, especially around wars, World War II, Holocaust. All of these things seem to be coming up a lot more in my healing practice. Man, people are hitting the puke bucket more and more and lifting these things. My hope is that both personally and collectively, we can illuminate our collective shadows and usher in a more, higher vibrational reality, which Rak was talking about the effects of ayahuasca doing.

Chris Bache: Yeah, I think the collective psyche is being highly energized for a number of reasons now. There is a tremendous purging that’s taking place, not only at individual levels, but at very deep collective levels. It’s coming out in all sorts of symptom clusters and all sorts of associated cleansing practices. I think there is an enormous release that we’re pushing towards as we come to this critical tipping point in history, because we are at a death and rebirth survival point. We are flirting with systemic species extinction. That is an enormous evolutionary driver. That touches all of us individually, but it also touches the collective psyche of humanity collectively. If you work spiritually, if you are working with contemplative practices or psychedelic practices or body discipline practices, you are working on the foundation of a tremendous activation of the collective psyche that is taking place.

Rick: Rak dropped off the call. I’m trying to get him back, but he mentioned in his movie, I believe it was the word, “Pachakuti,” a great change is now upon the world in which everything will be turned right side up and harmony and order will be restored.

Chris Bache: Yeah. My book, Dark Night, Early Dawn, uses this theme of the dark night of the soul, but it is really about the dark night of our collective soul. I think we are at this profound instability point. We are approaching a bifurcation point where the physical and psychological consequences of tens of thousands of years of civilization based upon egoic consciousness, which is basically a fragmented consciousness, that has produced a situation of a profoundly unstable and fractured and injured world structure and planetary ecological structure. We either shift to a different register of consciousness, we either heal the consequences of the ego’s tens of thousands of years of history, a hundred thousand years of history, or we perish. We have to take it to another level. I think meditators encounter this, spiritually prayerful people encounter this, and psychedelic spiritual people encounter this.

Rick: Interesting. Jeffrey and Cielle and I used to be students of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and I remember him once saying, when someone asked him, “Well, what happens when you get rid of all the individual stress? You’ve worked that all out.” He said, “Then you start working on cosmic stress.” He was always fascinated with collective consciousness and doing experiments in which you would take large groups of meditators and put them in a trouble spot, such as Iran. I spent three months there just before the Shah left, and seeing what effect their collective practice had on the measurable statistics, such as war deaths or crime rates, or things like that. The principle being that there is … Jeffrey lent me a book by Stanislav Grof, and he had this little diagram which showed individual consciousness as these little tiny nubs, and then it was almost like a fractal, and then bigger nubs which would be like a family consciousness or a tribe consciousness, going down to a collective global consciousness. I imagine we could even go out and think of solar system, galaxy, clusters of galaxies each having their own collective consciousness. There is a reciprocal influence between these larger collective consciousnesses, if that can be a plural, and individual. One can influence the other back and forth.

Chris Bache: I think that is exactly what happens, that the large influences the small, and the small contributes to an influence at the level of the large, the morphic field dynamics.

Talat Johnathan Phillips: Rick, I’ve gotten into a wild study that is just throwing me for a loop, which is connecting to archetypal realms, to guides, like multi-dimensional reality, muses, and influences. I never believed in any of this stuff before, but now I literally feel like there are spirits that come in and help guide. It is almost like fractal upon fractal, and I’m starting to see maybe we are little bits of a much larger organism, and there is an awakening to this deeper quantum reality that is happening. For me, and what I’m hearing in a lot of psychedelic states, is it is very quantum. It is almost like sci-fi stuff, but I do feel as if there may be a great turning happening. Psychedelics is one of the most powerful ways, because if you are stuck in a rut, sometimes you need a little push. For me, it was when I fought George Bush winning the second election, and he won. Yeah, funny, but I fell into a total dark night of the soul, especially around the systematic species extinction. Three species an hour dying on this planet, and yet we are in this collective fog and sleep where everyone is still watching what the Kardashians are doing. What I’m finding is, for me, I had a girlfriend at the time, and she said, “You’ve been stressed out about this stuff. You need to take some MDMA and get your butt on the dance floor.” I did that on my 30th birthday, connected with community that was probably, at least some of them were on psychedelic experiences. Energy started rising in me, and then poof, I started seeing energy fields. That made me start paying attention to religious systems across the planet, and they all seem to be saying a similar thing. If it weren’t for MDMA, pure ecstasy, I would have never gone on a spiritual path, perhaps. I may have never become a healer, never learned to meditate. These things sometimes can turn people on a dime. I have a joke that I say that most atheists I know are one or two cups of ayahuasca away from a spiritual experience.

Rick: Yeah, that is a good point. Back in the ’60s, that’s definitely what gave a lot of us our start, and I’m sure it is happening today. It was such an eye-opener for me the first time I took LSD. It was like, “Holy crap. Everything depends upon how you perceive the world.” That had never occurred to me. I always just assumed that everybody perceived the world the same way. And so, I’m sure that some of us do need a good swift kick in the pants.

Talat Johnathan Phillips: I still do.

Rick: And incidentally, and Rak is back by the way. He dropped off the call for a bit. This thing you say about archetypal entities and so on that you’re experiencing, all of you touch upon this in your various writings and works. Stanislaw Grof talks a lot about it in his book, but there are realms and realms and realms, subtle realms, with all sorts of intelligent forms of life. I have friends who have never taken a drug in their lives who perceive these beings as routinely as you and I see people at the mall. It is just part of their everyday reality. Some people say, “Well, that’s just a distraction. You really want to get down to the non-dual essence of things. That is where you should establish yourself.” Yeah, but once that is established, or perhaps even before that’s established, but especially once that is established, okay, what next? What next is exploration of all the subtle realms of creation and discovering what’s there and what advantage can be had by familiarity with those.

Chris Bache: Yeah, for me, this raises an issue of the relationship between working conscientiously, therapeutically, spiritually with psychedelics and enlightenment. I know that I began my work basically seeking enlightenment and willing to confront the shadow more aggressively working with psychedelics in order to hasten the blossoming of enlightenment. But over time, over the years, I began to realize that there was a lot going on in my work that really was not concerned with enlightenment at all. And conversely, you don’t need to engage the archetypal dimensions. You do not need to transcend time completely. You do not need to go into these radical expansions of consciousness in order to open to the transparent non-dual ground of reality. So, I think it is an ongoing question of what the shamanic and neo-shamanic path, the relationship of those journeys and dynamics is to enlightenment itself. And again, I agree that these are, I think these are a synchronous phenomenon. I mean, I have never been working only in one or the other. I have always been working in contemplative practices, householder practices of raising children and teaching and what not, and psychedelic practices. So, it is not an either or for me, but it is an open question of if the goal is enlightenment, what is the most effective way to work with psychedelics to facilitate that goal? But I think there are other goals other than enlightenment that emerge in the psychedelic journey.

Rick: Just to throw in one quick comment, because I’ve been talking a bit more than I want to because there are so many of you, I want you all to say more. But just to quote Maharishi again, since several of us were his students, he often used the analogy of “capture the fort.” And what he meant by that was that life is like a territory and there is a fort that commands the territory, and that fort is the transcendent, the ultimate ground of being. And that you should strive to capture that first, because if you go exploring the territory without having captured it, exploring this diamond mine or this gold mine or whatever, it’s not really your territory. So, you are on shaky ground, and also since you are not in a position to command the whole territory, you are just grasping at straws. You are getting this sort of piecemeal bit of exploration without having discovered that which provides the benefit of all explorations, the source and goal of all creation. So, what you said, Chris, just reminded me of that analogy. If one can do that, it puts things in a proper perspective or orientation. And without having done that, it would seem to me that one could spend lifetimes exploring all sorts of subtle strata of creation without really ultimately knowing the ultimate reality.

Rak Razam: I think there are some really good points here. I think we were talking about the elephant in the room before. There are definitions for this, and I know a lot of your listeners are probably engaged with this in their meditative practices of what is enlightenment. One thing that I think catalyzes for me in this work with entheogens like ayahuasca and even whether there is a whole planetary smorgasbord of substances which the planet secretes. A psychedelic philosopher, Terence McKenna had this riff, and he was actually quoting another 1960s personality, Bear Owsley, who both had these intuitions from psychedelics, that the entheogens specifically are secreted by the planet to connect with us. You know, they create pathways. They are all over the planet. Each landscape has within it an energetic sort of vibration, and it produces a certain plant entheogen. Bear Owsley called these things planetary exo-pheromones. He was saying that they are produced by the planet who loves and nurtures us and wants to connect us to these substances for a very specific role in our evolution. It is as when you’re a teenager and you go through puberty, and these pheromones course through your body and all these different catalyzing changes happen, and they happen at a certain stage in your evolution for a reason, because it’s built in. And so, the planet doesn’t really make mistakes. It does evolutionary vectors where it tries out different species, but the thing we must remember is one of the great things I’ve learned from my entheogenic and psychedelic experiences.  There is a real nonlinear perception of reality and how to basically rock or have a deeper appreciation for a nonlinear framework within everything which interpenetrates and affects and is in a causal relationship with everything else. Just as everything affects everything, we are all connected. And so, the planet in its connection to us is producing these substances, which, the Western War on Drugs started by Richard Nixon in 1971 is really commodifying into its agenda. But the planet is secreting these things which have a direct effect on us. Medicine people across the planet have retained this knowledge and retained these portals to these larger states of awareness. But are these states of awareness enlightenment? Not necessarily. What they can open up are pathways for hyper-dimensionality, pathways for an appreciation that the life force permeates higher dimensions. We can see these entities we described before. We can recognize and journey into dimensions, vast dimensions of energy and of being, and realize there is basically what I call a galactic ecology. There is life all around us in inner space and in outer space. And some of these substances can bring us back to this awareness. So, this idea of these substances as planetary exo-pheromones or I look at them as almost training wheels, that at some stage in our evolutionary history, I think we have all had the sensitivity of a vibrational sensitivity to engage with the larger dimensionality around us. But as we have come into the last 6,000 years of history, of agriculture and of industrialization, of cities, of EMF, we have basically been eroding and declining from our full energetic potential. So, at this point, nature is giving us these substances as reminders and as healing agents to cleanse, to regain our own ability to know that the Buddha lives within or to be enlightened or other such types of phrases we might say. But is it real enlightenment? I think it is actually just remembering that these potentials exist. And then eventually, when we have regained this ability as a species, we don’t need the substances. These are stepping stones. These are training wheels and the planet is guiding us very carefully and gently to say, “Remember, remember, remember, you can do this yourself.” And whether that means stepping up to the curanderos in Peru, so there are all these hyper-dimensions, there are these levels of the ayahuasca experiences, you go deep into what I call the Godhead and what the Sufi mystics called the Godhead. But we can travel into these spaces, we can bring something back, whether that is an entity, a good or a bad thing, or the knowledge of these realms. And we can perhaps map these realms, and we can be explorers for our species. But ultimately, I think there is going to be a tipping point where, as a species, we regain the ability to navigate and to operate as galactic beings or hyper-dimensional beings. And then we don’t need these plants. We basically have the ability within ourselves.

Rick: Beautiful. Jeffrey and Cielle, I haven’t heard from you lately. Do you want to say anything?

Cielle Backstrom: Oh yeah, just this whole subject about ayahuasca and plant medicines and awakening and enlightenment. We’ve had the great fortune in Peru to work with one young medicine man who is native to Peru, to the Andes, and he also is experienced with some of the plant helpers there, mostly with San Pedro cactus that grows in the Andes regions, and a little bit with ayahuasca, although he does not himself do ayahuasca ceremonies. So here we come from this long-term background in plants and medication, and this desire for enlightenment. And with him, it was curious, it took me many times of being with this man to realize that we were ultimately talking about the same thing. He just did not call it awakening or enlightenment. It wasn’t like an attainment for him, because in that culture, it is as if being one with the Creator is just a given. You just expect that you are one with the Creator. You know what creation is all about, and you know what it is to be one with. I mean, Jeffrey and I were floored one time taking a walk with someone. We were actually kind of being babysat by someone. Someone who was going to do business was busy and said to her uncle, “Take them for a walk.” And so we went on this walk, and we kept being asked again and again by this uncle who did not speak almost any Spanish, let alone English. “Would we like to rest? Would we like to sit down and rest?” And we kept saying, “No,” like, “Yeah, we’re gringos, but we don’t need to rest. We can keep walking.” And finally, after about the fourth time, he said, “The energy by this river is so good. We should sit and meditate to take in the energy of the river.” He just was using the word “let’s rest,” but what he had to explain to us that we didn’t know was, “Let’s connect to the energy that is here, that is present, if we can pause and connect with it.” So, there are certain parts of their life about being one with the Creator, being one with the Spirit, being one with the Hachamama, the basis of all of the world we live on, that is just part of their culture. So, they don’t talk about awakening or enlightenment, because it is like talking about breathing. Of course we breathe. Of course we are awake to who we are, essentially, and of course we have a connection to the divine. And so, it took us a while to realize, to find someone who spoke English well enough, to listen to him deeply enough over extended interviews and conversations, to realize that a lot of this work with the plants is just about bringing more life to us, more and more life experience to us, and being all that we are. You know, just as I think that analogy you were making, Rick, of first owning the territory, really owning it before you go and explore the different glories of your territory. Well, a lot of people who we are meeting in Peru, the Curanderos, are already owning the territory, so much that they don’t even talk about it. It is a given. And they are exploring the territories using things like San Pedro cactus, using things like ayahuasca, and other plants, and other forms of meditation to explore all of the realms of creation that are available to us. So, they don’t seem to separate the two. It is all part of them, but they don’t even separate them out to talk about them, because it is just who they are.

Rick: Cool. Jonathan, were you about to… Oh, Jeffrey, you have something?

Jeffery Backstrom: Well, the other overlap is between healing and awakening, or purification and enlightenment. There is a sense in which the only thing that prevents us from recognizing our true nature is all of the, I guess I’ll say ego structures, but the kind of coping that we create in response to trauma, whether it’s young in this lifetime, or whether it’s perinatal, or whether it’s collective unconscious. We are always fortifying ourselves against that. And this process of purification, or cleansing, or healing, just by allowing us to release those, is really the same process of opening, or coming into an enlightened or awakened state. They’re really just two ways of looking at the same process. So, I happen to feel like for most folks that is what is really showing up. And I don’t have any quarrel with the notion that some of us ought to be doing these explorations. In fact, I really think, yeah, that should be one of the occupations that we try to find more and more people to do. I also think that the shift in the collective consciousness gets supported by each individual who releases whatever holds him or her back, steps into what is really that person’s soul’s calling, and gets grounded, gets that connection with wholeness or spirit in the process. Once that old stuff is out of the way, then yeah, the energy by that stream, or the energy by the stream where we live, suddenly shows up for us. It was always there. We were always clouded by the old compensations that we’ve been making and clinging to.

Rick: In Rak’s movie he quoted a Sufi saying, “There are 50,000 veils of illusion between you and God, but none between God and you.” So, it’s all here, you know? It’s just a matter of removing the veils. Anyone?

Talat Johnathan Phillips: I’d like to speak on this a little bit, Rick, because I feel like I’ve gone on a journey with this. As far as exploring these realms and the enlightenment, I mean, personally, we just heard about defense systems for abuse, trauma growing up. I did that a lot, and I just withdrew, that is the bioenergetic defense I did. I escaped my body, not really being present. And the world was very theoretical for me. It was a concept. It was an idea. It wasn’t a living, breathing being. And through the work of ayahuasca and cannabis and these things, I started understanding the chakra systems more and how each power center, whether there are different modalities, relates to a different element. You know, you have an earth element, you have a water element, you have a fire element, and these are all waves of existence. An earthquake wave is very different than a water wave. And I just started really noticing the elemental journey and interbeing of the elements in myself as having all the elements within me. And suddenly, through this process, the magic of the universe actually just started opening up. I saw life everywhere. LeBrock was talking about this galactic life perspective, but I don’t know. In some ways, I feel as if we are going through an initiatory process of the elements. And a lot of yogis think we are in this third chakra element, which is a fire element. We have gone through earth and water, the elements of civilization. And I was just watching a World War II documentary, which I think is a huge collective demon for us, and it ushered in the atomic age. A lot of yogis now are like that destructive power. I was watching the mushroom bomb on this video hitting Hiroshima, and it first looked like a mushroom, and then I saw this giant, gorgeous, toxic, disgusting tree of life. And I was thinking of how that atomic power of that third chakra, the fire center, may be pushing us, as I hear a lot of yogis and spiritual people saying, into this heart center, which then opens up the upper power centers to more of a spiritual reality. And then after atomic energy, I suddenly started studying the unified field theories, theories of how there are these energies. You were talking about God being out there, that we are already connected with. And I personally think this might be one of the most revolutionary things that is happening, if it is happening. It is like discovering fire, that there is this fire within us, this God power within and without. And it may totally revolutionize spirituality, the energy, how we collectively organize ourselves, finding our own autonomous sovereignty, and even healing this disease of separation and scarcity that I think has caused so much grasping and suffering on the planet. It is a little bit of a wild theory, but all of these things and this incredible journey through the elements, through psychedelics, has brought me to some realizations. And maybe most importantly, what it brought me to was just feeling more like an initiated man, instead of like an angry boy-child-teenager. Suddenly it is very exciting to be a male homo sapiens on this planet at this extraordinary time, realizing it is all up for grabs and everything dies and is reborn. So, I don’t know, it’s weird. By going so far out, I feel as if I am much more human and grounded than I have ever been before.

Rick: Cool. Anyone? Okay, everybody’s good at the moment? Well, one theme we’ve been talking about, I think you were off the line, Rak, when I read that word “pachakuti” from your movie, “a great change is now upon the world in which everything will be turned right side up and harmony and order will be restored.” I interviewed Llewellyn von Lee a couple of months ago, and he has written a book which is a little pessimistic. He almost seems to feel that we are not going to make it. It’s called “The Darkening of the Light” or something like that. I have it on the shelf back there. But my hope is that, just as we have the notion of a tipping point in the climate change discussion, beyond which it’ll be impossible to reverse the runaway global warming, we may be on the brink of a tipping point in spiritual evolution for the world, which we could be very close to without even knowing it. Because generally when phase transitions happen, they are not evident until they have happened. Like even the boiling of water, it can be almost 212 degrees Fahrenheit, but it doesn’t look any different than if it were 100 degrees Fahrenheit. But then as soon as it reaches the boiling point, it starts turning to steam. So, you know, Rak was talking about all the plants that are being offered by Mother Nature, Mother Earth, as methods of facilitating our evolution. It may be, I’m hoping, and get your responses to this, that the response to environmental degradation and mass extinction of species, which Talat talked about a little earlier, is being met by the acceleration of human consciousness, the raising of consciousness, and that all sorts of unseen intelligence is facilitating this and promoting it, which is why, from my perspective as somebody who has interviewed a couple hundred people, there are spiritual awakenings happening like popcorn all over the world with apparently greater and greater frequency. And again, speaking of nuclear fusion, which Talat just referred to, there is a certain point at which it takes off and you have the atomic explosion. Hopefully there is something akin to that happening with spiritual development on the planet.

Rak Razam: Well, I think so. It is really interesting what you point out, why does there seem to be this tipping point in spirituality and mass awakening, or at least hunger for mass awakening, with many, many people within not just the spiritual community, but more and more people within the mainstream, through different modalities, all encounter spirit in some form. I was talking right at the start about this supply and demand and this denuding of our relationship with spirit in Western culture over the centuries. You talked about the Pachakuti and this idea many cultures have, pretty much all indigenous cultures, tribal cultures which have lived on the earth and understand cycles and seasonal cycles and greater cycles, have different calendricals or different mythologies that point to the fact that there are different world ages. In larger blocks of time, there seem to be almost cosmic seasons that we go through, where there are different energies within those blocks of time. So, we have just come through a grand conclusion in the Mayan calendar back in 2012. It wasn’t just that it was 2012, that one target window on December 21st, 2012. It was actually a grand cycle that came to one level of completion and a new cycle began.

So different cultures say it is the Kali Yuga or it is the new cycle of this or the new paradigms coming through, but everyone seems to feel that in history, we have been going through this process of transformation in history itself and through global culture, metastasizing into global culture. And we can see all these different streams all paralleling and pooling together now at this point in time. Here we are on Google Hangouts all across the world, all linked up in this hive mind and there has never been a greater ability for people to connect, at least in Western countries which have the resources for that. So, this idea of can we, is there an impetus behind that, is there some type of energy which is building us to this point, I believe is true. In my movie, Higher Awakenings, I quote some of the indigenous prophecies and I see that this re-emergence of the shamanic paradigm and this re-acquaintanceship with nature herself, with Pachamama, with Mother Nature herself, is all part and parcel of the process.

And so, as we are groomed back into this awareness of our own spirituality, of our own energy bodies, of how we connect to nature and the energy in nature, those of us who have had contact experiences with nature herself, we will eventually find, as it feels to me, that there is definitely an entity. Sometimes it is loving, sometimes it is harsh. I mean, it is a true parent. I feel there is a larger intelligence, whether we call that Mitákuye Oyás’in or Great Spirit or Pachamama or whatever label we give it, from my experience, there is a larger intelligence that is behind all this planetary activity and behind the plants and behind us ourselves as well. And so just at the moment, to have so many people on the planet who have the ability to communicate their own experiences as we are now and to share and to pool their own experiences and to remember that no one path is true for another person, that all of these experiences we’re describing, whether with ayahuasca or psychedelics or meditation or alien abduction, whatever, is that all pathways are valid and all paths lead to God or whatever label you choose to give it in the end. I feel we are being nurtured. It is like when you panned for gold in the old days, you have to sift through the sand and it gradiates the soul and eventually the right vibrations reach and everyone finds their own right pathway. So, there is a collective awakening happening as we come full circle.

My shorthand for this is that we have basically been going through long periods of history where it is as if you are on a mobile phone and you lose reception. You go down from a four-bar signal to one or two bars and it gets a bit fuzzy. It is as if we have not been receiving the right signal from source. My shorthand is that we are getting four-bar galactic signal now. It is coming through because we’re cusping over into this new geophysical pattern where we are lining up in a different alignment with the center of the galaxy and the Milky Way and all of the astrophysics to it. But also, there is this energy coming in, animating things and we are getting more. We are getting a larger signal and it is animating. It is like when you are out camping or something and the sun comes over the horizon and the day starts and the animals wake. Then you feel that heat and you cannot remain asleep any longer because it is getting hot. Something is happening and energy is coming in and it is activating.

This is why I feel the plants are working for the planet and they all have a plan. It is basically to find our own pathways to awareness because this energy is coming in and the more we can be cleansed through whatever modality you choose, the more signal we can receive. The more signal we can receive collectively, we form a species circuit to hold that energy and to anchor it on Earth and anchor it not just for our species but in the web of life. If you hear the insects in the morning, they send off this cascading signal through the ecosystem where the insects will wake up or they will switch on other insects and the frogs and the amphibians and then the higher level of animals. Nature herself speaks through all the species at once, not just the humans. As this energy comes through and animates and expresses itself, it cascades and it activates all the other species because collectively we form an interspecies symbiosis and a group circuit to hold the energy coming down and that awakening is not just that we are there or awake and we are going, “What do we do next?” We have a role to play on the planet as the planet, as the collective intelligence of the planet to hold the energy coming in and then to express that however that is. That is the cusping into the new paradigm which we will have to do when it happens and it is happening.

Rick: Beautiful. I can see why you’re a journalist. You’re so articulate with this stuff. It is a joy to listen to you.

Rak Razam: Thank you.

Cielle Backstrom: Rick, I wanted to say a little bit about this Pachakuti that you threw out. The most simple definition of pacha is just time and space and then kuti is just a turning over. So again, it is just a turning over of our time-space continuum. It is a Peruvian word, a Quechua word. The people, especially in the high Andes in Peru, their culture was telling them that around the turn of the 20th century was going to be the next Pachakuti, the next turning over. One thing that they noticed in that turning over, they don’t necessarily know what it is going to be, a good thing or a bad thing, but things are going to be turned over. They particularly started noticing their glaciers melting at a place where they can be melting every year but there shouldn’t be continually steaming year after year after year after year so that the glaciers melt, because that is what is going to bring them their next harvest with the snow melt. They started noticing them receding at an alarming rate. So, without any TVs or anyone telling them about global warming, they could see the effects that were happening and they thought this is a sign of this Pachakuti. We need to do something so that this change can be held by the collective in a way that will bring us all forward in life. So, one thing that they started doing amongst themselves, asking, what can we send to the rest of the world? What can we give to the rest of the world that can help the whole world through this change? And the people from Queros at least, in the high Andes near Cusco, with some help of some Westerners, put together a series of initiations to help each of us become more fully present to who we are. So, for instance, one of these initiations is to initiate healing for ourselves and others. Another is to open up the third eye, especially the third eye and connect to the heart, that kind of vision that comes through those. Another one is to balance all of the chakras. So, there is this series of initiations. The culmination one is what they call the creator or the spirit rights. Again, it is to connect us to source. The thought is that you are not going to connect to source very well, unless there is a lot of balance and empowerment within your physiology to begin with. So, there is a series of initiations. And this series of these karpis or empowerments were freely given to the people of South America, to give to the people of the world. They are kind of like rescue missions. When there is a big tsunami that hits some place, we all rush in with medical supplies and fresh water and healing hands, medical hands. Well, they were going to rush to us by training as many of us as possible to give these particular initiations, especially towards that healer rite, that creator rite, spirit rite, to bring us all into harmony with spirit, with source, so that we can ride this wave of pachakuti with awareness, with integrity. I love that idea of these athletes, these surfers that are riding these waves with the power that it gives them. Sure, those waves are dangerous, but if we can ride them with sensitivity and awareness, we become empowered by their energy. So, the same way we can ride this pachakuti by being very adept at having a fully integrated physiology and connection to source. So anyway, it is a word that you will hear there, it is taken very seriously this turning over, but they are not just passive, like, “Well, what are we going to do? Life is turning over.” No, let’s go connect to source and be as full as we can be, so we can all collectively ride this wave, for the power it can bring to us, not for the disruption it could bring.

Rick: Interesting. I’ll just throw in one quick thing and then let somebody else respond, but this image of riding the wave, you can’t ride the wave unless you catch the wave. Beach Boys wrote a song called “Catch a Wave.” If you don’t catch the wave, then I guess you can get clobbered by the next wave or you have to wait for the next wave. But in the case of this metaphor, I wonder if there will be multiple waves which people can catch or if there is just basically one huge wave that we should attempt to catch or else we’re going to get swept up in the undercurrent. Some prophecies and so on say that it is not going to be a pretty picture for the vast majority of humanity and that only those who have prepared themselves adequately will really flourish and others will go through a real hard time of it. Do you have any comments on that?

Chris Bache: I’ll throw in. I am really comfortable with what Cielle has said and what Rak has said in describing the dynamics that we have entered into and are entering into. I think if you work in any self-conscious spiritual practice, including psychedelics, one makes contact with the fundamental intelligence and intelligences that are driving the evolution and evolutionary process. So, this crisis that we have entered into is being driven by cosmic intelligence. I personally don’t doubt it, but it is a very fierce intelligence. In the Upanishadic scriptures it says “she eats her children,” life eats life. So, the fact that it is compassionate and the compassion of oneness and the fact that it is intelligent and the fact that it is extending us countless invitations to learn and grow and become more fully what we already are in essence, that doesn’t mean that we won’t go extinct in the process because we are extinguishing life on this planet faster than any time since the meteor hit that took out the dinosaurs. So, we may not have the right to this planet if we are willing to allow, if not cause, the extinction of life at the pace that we are. Among my circle and people who are very conscientious students of global patterns, I would have to say that there is a very educated 50/50 assessment of whether humanity is going to go extinct in this process. I come down on the positive side but it is not because of the data, the only thing I rooted in ultimately is my own visionary experience. But I do not think we are going to change deeply enough at the soul and at the collective level without an enormous amount of pain in the process. Many estimates are placing the carrying capacity of the planet, of the new earth, which means the eco-compromised earth, at somewhere between a billion and two billion people. We are going to hit nine billion by 2025. So, between one or two billion and nine billion, that is a die off of potentially seven billion people. The ordeal that is mounting in the 21st century, the ordeal of loss of that many of our children, is just going to be painful beyond our imagination right now. My concern is not whether we make it, I believe deeply that we will make it. My concern is how many of our children are going to die before we wake up. The faster we wake up, the faster we cooperate with this process, the fewer of our children will have to die and the stronger we will be as a species coming out of it. But we could cripple ourselves even if we make it. We could cripple the species so badly, it could take us 500 years to recuperate and get our feet back underneath us, our survival feet back underneath us.

Rak Razam: Chris, to jump in there, I think that is all very true. One of the things that I see happening in a lot of the global movements at the moment is that even people who are embracing change and are wanting to get back to sustainability and lower emissions, everyone is still trying to basically retrofit the existing paradigm. Even talking about nine billion people or two billion people, we are all still in the same playing field there.

What I see happening is what I think Jonathan mentioned before, that this is basically an initiation. It is a global initiation. It is a planetary initiation. It is a cosmic initiation. We must remember that whether we call it Pachamama or Gaia or planet Earth, whatever the intelligence in nature is, as you said as well, she can be ruthless and she is so with the species. All the species are actually just clothes that she wears. In some senses, it doesn’t matter. The form that we take is just the outside manifestation. It is the level of the soul vibration or the intellect or the intelligence and how that interacts and interlocks with the need on the ground. There is a process underway when we are talking about these world ages and this crisis that we are facing. There is a process of transformation. I think the big call to action here is to go with the flow. I think it is the Hopi saying that says that the river is running very fast now. Don’t hold on. Don’t try to hold on to the existing paradigm. Basically, they are saying go with the flow and see where it takes you. That may mean not just a paradigm change in terms of how we operate as a civilization, but I would hope how we operate as a species on a cellular level.

We have seen through different scientific analysis of historical time and they have done deep core analysis of the ice and they have seen different cosmic ray bombardments and different isotypes in the ice that have been affected by that. They can tell energetically what has been happening over tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of years. We are now being bombarded yet again by intense cosmic ray activity from a solar system level and a deep galactic and a universal level. There are cascading changes which are meant to be happening on an evolutionary level. The whole wave of evolution is to change and to change not just to retrofit little bits here and there and have a two billion strong civilization that is sort of the same on the other side. It is to basically change on a spirit level. So, your body might change. The whole shape of your vehicle as you go through the world might change, but it is the soul which has to be strong to survive these coming times. It needs us. I believe that all of these mini-initiations are happening to gird ourselves and to strengthen our soul bodies to be able to intake the coming energy and to do whatever is naturally meant to happen. We know that our bodies are 70 to 90% water and they are electromagnetic vehicles. Energy is coming in and it is meant to be activating the DNA. The DNA is programmed by light and by the energy coming in. We have to trust in evolution, but we also have to be strong enough to be these vehicles for evolution that it’s asking us to be.

Talat Johnathan Phillips: As I mentioned, I watched World War II movies, World War II in Color, which is an amazing 13-point documentary. There is just this frustration when it starts that everyone is waiting. The Nazis are building. This is happening. No one is doing anything. It is appeasement, appeasement, appeasement, da, da, da. I just felt like that is us. We are in this monoculture. It feels like we are all talking about civilization. The first civilization, Mesopotamia, totally collapsed because they irrigated, they over-salted the rivers. I think we are looking at a 10,000-year journey in civilization that looks as if it is on the verge of collapse. What really struck me is, once they finally got the message, it would have been a lot easier if they had acted a lot earlier, is the amount of alliances, innovation, creativity, dynamics. They were trying to fight Hitler in these dark forces, you might say, with the old paradigm, World War I mentality. You cannot fight a blitzkrieg this way. I think we are looking at a planetary blitzkrieg as far as economics and climate change and species are concerned. It’s on. People aren’t getting it yet. Maybe the blitzkrieg has to get stronger. What did inspire me was how seemingly impossible forces could be overcome with collaborations, with innovations, with human ingenuity, spirit. Winston Churchill, it’s weird. He became this weird mentor for me in a way of how do you stand up to the darkness when it seems so hopeless? How do you have patience and firmness to have hope knowing it could take years? This may take generations, but I feel like everyone listening, let’s activate whatever. Not to scramble, not to struggle. I feel as if we see a lot of scrambling going on in the news, a lot of trying quick fixes and things like that, but we need to step up and heed the call to a very deep journey, what I feel is perhaps spiritual warriorship. I never thought my healings would be about hunting, but when I do energy healings, it is very much about being on the aggressive, going in for the attack to meet the shadow and confront it, to then help it transform. It is a journey of love. It is almost like a war of love and reunification, but I had a very lazy universe-heal-me way. I think it fits in with the surfing metaphor very well. You have to get your board, you have got to learn, you have got to train if you want to ride these waves. I feel as if the call is here for us to find our power, find our gifts, get creative, and really collaborate with each other and create new systems of creativity and collaboration that value innovation, individual and community spirit at the same time. I really think we need a miracle, and we have a very lazy idea of miracles. You pray, you do this. For me, my miracle, my healing practice was like the John Elway touchdown drive in 1985 or whatever against the Cleveland Browns. It was on the two-yard line working with a team step by step by step. And then finally after years, punching it through the end zone. I kind of think that is the kind of miracle we have to co-manifest together.

Rick: There is the David and Goliath story. Speaking of Winston Churchill, he said, “America always does the right thing after trying every other alternative.” This is fascinating stuff and we can milk this for a bit more perhaps. I don’t think too many of my interviews have touched upon this theme as much as this one is. Just the fate of the earth and what is going on and what higher energies there might be that are influencing it. It’s interesting that this conversation has morphed in that direction.

Chris Bache: May I make a suggestion? I think in some ways that is one of the natural derivatives or consequences of working with sacred medicines. The contemplative practices do shift you into dramatically different states of consciousness, but they often work within the near at hand states of consciousness because the purpose, as I might summarize it quickly, is the clarification of consciousness until the very nature of awareness shines through unobstructed. Sacred medicines shift you, are concerned with that as well, but they also shift you into very radically expanded states of consciousness in which one begins to experience not only larger fields of awareness, but drop into the evolutionary patterns that hold your life and hold your time in history and hold patterns of the evolutionary structure. So, in working with sacred medicines, individuals repeatedly learn that it’s not a personal story. The story of earth is not a personal story and the story of evolution, the story of enlightenment and spiritual awakening are not personal stories. Right now, that species of which we are a part and the planet of which we are a part is coming into this crisis time. It is the very nature of psychedelics that it dramatically and radically expands our frame of reference from within. We understand our own life process itself. There are some drawbacks to working with these dramatically expanded states and there are some advantages, but I think one of the advantages is that it has sensitized many of us to an accelerated appreciation of the forces that are driving society and culture and history at this point in the 21st century.

Rick: I’m sorry, who was about to speak?

Rak Razam: I think that is one of the reasons why they are illegal. The consciousness expansion creates individuals who are aware of awareness, let’s say. It becomes a lot harder to create sheeple, people who are easily led into the battery farm paradigm where we are inhabiting in 21st century earth. When you do expand consciousness and when you see outside the box you want to connect with others and be an evolutionary agent. Yeah.

Chris Bache: Yeah, which then throws the question back in the direction of traditional practice. What is the purpose of traditional contemplative practice or practice which is focused on awakening in any kind of classical sense? The image of the Buddha at the Gas Pump, well, we are past peak oil now. It is almost the image as if is trying to contextualize. What is the purpose? What is the relationship of traditional spiritual practice and the evolutionary crisis that we are all part of in this time in history?

Rak Razam: Such a good question. I will just respond to that as well. Some of the things which deeply sadden me when I look at the news, the situation in places like Tibet where there is political oppression and there are very spiritual people, the meditative community, the monks and the Buddhists of Tibet who are basically self-immolating themselves, setting themselves on fire in protest and in a cry to the world to say things are that bad on the ground politically. The oppression of their feeling as a community is such that these people, who have presumably taken vows, life-affirming vows not to kill and things like that, are actually taking their lives as a human sacrifice to publicize the events. What you were saying, Chris, about what value can these established spiritual communities have, and how do we counteract this feeling of great oppression in the world, whether that is from the banksters and the financial systems or governments and totalitarian regimes. Spiritual practices alone can raise our awareness and can open us up, but then there needs to be more practical, on-the-ground solidarity between not just awakened people but everyone who can hear the cry of people in need like that.

Chris Bache: We see that in engaged Buddhism. The whole movement within Buddhism, Buddhism is not simply about awakening in some psycho-spiritual sense, but it is an awakening within a social sense. It is an awakening within a larger contextual historical sense. If that is missing from it, then that is missing a fundamental theme of enlightenment cultures. But I think also awakening has different connotations today than it did 2,000 years ago. The context is different. We truly need a green Buddha. We not only need a feminist Buddha. We need a Buddha Gaia. We need to contextualize our practice. Whatever drivers we are using in our practice, we need to contextualize it within our moment of history. This is our moment of history.

Rick: One thing is that it often seems that the politicians, the corporations, the bankers and so on, wield all the power and spiritual people are relatively uninfluential. But if spiritual people are really learning to operate subtle realms of creation, we know from the examples in physics that subtler realms are more powerful. Perhaps the spiritual folks are the ones who really have the ultimate leverage.

Talat Johnathan Phillips: Could I make a suggestion here too? There is just a thought. I brought up the surfing metaphor, especially big wave surfers. It was a big deal, first of all, when the first person discovered a surfboard and figured out you could do this. I think it was an evolutionary force on the planet of, “Oh, this is a way to integrate adrenaline and things into the human psyche and spirit.” Then they figured out they could surf Waimea, but then they were stuck because technology didn’t keep up until they figured out, “Wait a second. We can pull boards out on toes and hit giant waves.” In some ways, this 10,000 year division between science and spirituality, you guys are saying spirituality and it’s not resonating with me that well because for me, spirituality is kind of up and out and not here in that way. I’m very interested in how is the new consciousness and I think Chris was suggesting this, the technologies meeting each other. I think we can amplify evolution through responsible use of technologies. I’m already seeing this in the economic models. I Airbnb my apartment. I use Lyft taxi services. I have all these friends who are creating alternative economies through these things. I really am looking forward to when the medical institutions discover the energy fields. Then finally, we will have intuitives and scientists meeting. I really think some of the parasitic quantum stuff, we could be reading it on frequency readers and things like that and stuff that we thought was uncurable, depression, bipolar, schizophrenia can be illuminated through the field, through consciousness and the synthesis of consciousness and advanced technology. What happens is when you have people feeling better, they are empowered, they have their gifts, they act totally differently with the world. Instead of being takers who are like a drowning person, they become enabled people who can help other people learn how to swim or grow things or nurture reality. I think this fusion is going to be very important. We have seen very bad examples a lot in the last century of how technologies can create separation. Studying living systems and integrating that with technology and biomimicry I think is going to be a huge field in the coming century.

Rick: I just had a circuit blow. That is why I disappeared for a bit. We just had to restart the circuit. Anyway, glad we were able to carry on.

Jeffery Backstrom: Right as we are talking about technology?

Rick: Just to finish the thought, as Chris was saying earlier, we might go from 8 or 9 billion down to 2 billion. But another way of looking at it is that it seems like most of, or at least a great many of the things that people put their energies into, the businesses, the industries, the things we consume, really don’t have any place in an enlightened world, as most of us would conceive of it. And if that is true, and if we are going to transition to a very different world, a so-called enlightened world, then probably all these things are going to have to crumble. And the crumbling process could be extremely traumatic for people who are invested, literally and figuratively, in all those things.

Rak Razam: That’s the whole chestnut about attachment, isn’t it? It is the root of all suffering. We become very attached to our way of living in 21st century Western culture, and the third world craves what we have. And so, there is this trickle-down effect, and everyone is attached to this paradigm, which is basically dying and basically transforming at the same time. They want more of that as it is transforming. So how do we lose our attachments? And the ego dissolving of deep meditation or of psychedelics and substances like that can be a catalyst for letting go of attachments, although at other times it can also exacerbate and strengthen some of those ego desires and attachments as well. So, there is no easy pathway, but that is the mission ahead, yeah.

Chris Bache: And Rick, I would like to double back around to your observation of the power of spiritual persons, or persons who do deep spiritual practice. A different image, if you run your finger in the water, if you stick your finger in the river and a ripple spread out from the dividing point of your finger, it is just a finger but it has a much broader effect. Or an image that comes to mind frequently from working in deep states, it is like when you go deeper and deeper into the structure of the collective psyche and into the deep constitutional patterns that hold humanity in certain dynamic configurations. If you can cause a small shift at the deep collective level, that can ripple out in time almost in an earthquake-like fashion, eventually in a large effect at the social or the collective level. So, to me, a spiritual practitioner is like the diamond bit that’s drilling deep within the earth and deep within the collective psyche, it takes an extremely hard substance to crack these very, very deep levels. And if you read the biographies, the autobiographies of great saints, they knew these territories, they were entering into collective hells, they were entering into terribly arduous processes, they experienced enormous suffering, but they kept plowing through and kept pushing through until eventually the light that they were able to bring to focus was able to penetrate and have an effect on very, very deep collective shadows. Those can have a very profound radiating effect, and anyone who is doing spiritual practice is hardwired into other people who are doing spiritual practice so that we are all sort of dropping shafts into these very deep collective shadows.

Rick: Beautiful. Another metaphor I find handy is if you think of a river, if you want to change the course of a river, if you try to do it at the mouth of the river where it enters the ocean, it’s too late, the river has already run its course. If you go halfway upstream, you can change it quite a bit, at least half of it maybe, but if you could get to the source of the river, then metaphorically speaking, although you would probably not really do this, you could send it off in any direction because you are at the source from which it springs. So spiritual practice can be seen as a way of swimming upstream, so to speak, in this river, getting back to the very source of everything, and then by effecting change there, just a slight, tiny shift can bring the ultimate outcome in a completely different direction than it was otherwise going to go.

Rak Razam: I would just like to jump in. I think that is really great. I think it is absolutely true that basically, if I could use this term, psychedelic activism is the next step forward for a collective response, not just an individual response. Things with entheogens, with ayahuasca, there is a focus on healing and the right context to it, and many people are still going through their individual journeys and individual healings. Some people I know in the psychedelic community are already exploring this avenue, this collective work. Over the years, I have taken part in a few different rituals where I feel that when people are on the same psychic morphic resonant frequency, when they are on the same journey together, some of the individual egos can be overcome and a gestalt can be created. It is that gestalt type of consciousness which can actually either go deeper or be more effective in the astral or in the psychedelic realms. I think it is a very valuable tool that should be explored more as a community, this idea of group work. I know that even with, say, the curanderos in Peru, quite often, and this is sort of a historical legacy thing that many of the curanderos drink on Tuesdays and Friday nights, they find that when there are more and more people on the astral all working with energy at the same time, it builds the energy, and so it is easier to work when there is a collective out there on that same playing field. I do not see this happening that much in the entheogenic community at the moment, but in the psychedelic community, and we are talking right at the start about the difference between thrill-seekers and seekers, some people who are working on this group sort of modality work are doing it not for their own healing and not on an individual level but on a group level, and I see this happening. There are some DMT communities, and there is a well-known website called DMT-Nexus, and it is a learning community. It has a lot of different forums and things like that. But they have previously done experiments with a group DMT ritual, and things. If I look at the tribal level, I guess there were many indigenous tribes that would basically trip together or would take sacraments together and do it in a group scenario, and it is something which is sort of overlooked in this current wave of ayahuasca usage, that there is something that is not important about the bonding that happens to a group which does enter altered spaces together. And then also I think the gestalt and the creative potential that is available. As Chris said as well, I think that some of the best work that can be done is in the formative realms, because all of this manifestation in the world, as you were saying, Rick, it is almost too late, it has already manifested, it is already concrete, and it has hardened. If you can work on the upper levels of vibration, and the slightest little tweaks, as you were saying, and especially if you can do it in a measurable way, if it is not something as all-encompassing as world peace or whatever, but you could do psychedelic activism for really direct results on a very measurable way, I think that is a very, very powerful tool that we should be exploring as conscious communities.

Rick: Interesting. So, you are saying that, for instance— Go ahead, Jonathan.

Talat Johnathan Phillips: Well, Rak just inspired me because I felt like I got a real treat in the Santo Daime Ayahuasca mystery schools, because there is not one shaman singing the acaros, the healing songs, everyone does, and they are received channeled songs. People do not just write these, they come to them. I think the act of singing in group is one of the most healing things we can do for the ego and letting go, because we are harmonizing, we are coming into vibration, and you will see in these Daime ceremonies, it is just the finest line of beauty. If you have someone singing too high, too low, making movements, it kills the wave. But when you all hit that sweet spot, you go on the most beautiful journeys together, and I really think a lot of the fighting we do, we are not in harmony with each other. It sounds silly, but I really think if we could get politicians to sing, get communities to sing, we might start at a whole different resonant level. We’re out of resonance right now, collectively, and I think that’s a huge issue. The sounds also activate the energy centers, so the vowels are very sacred things. The consonants activate, the vowels release. I’m hoping there is more medicine and just general healing work through song and vibration.

Rak Razam: I think Terence McKenna commented on this back in the ’90s when he was, in some senses, mythologizing ayahuasca use. He was saying that there is an Amazonian tribe that would actually, collectively do, I think it might have been the DMT snuff ritual or it might have been ayahuasca, if they are on the same vibration and the same intent, they would all see the same manifestation of this purple, viscous fluid, this super fluid. And with it, they could sculpt objects into existence, they could make things or they could collectively work as a group. This whole idea of a collective, consensual trip into a reality where you are all seeing the same thing solidifies the truth of that and also helps steer the group towards the ability to manifest and to set goals and to realize them. Part of the origins of the psychedelic experience, according to anthropologists and whatnot, is saying that the tribe would often use it as a hunting mechanism or something where they would draw on the cave walls the bison that they wanted to find, and then the next day it would manifest.  Then they would go out and they would see the bison and it would be there. To really realize that psychedelics and entheogens can be very practical tools for a community and for a tribe to work with and to manifest their immediate needs and to give back to the planet as well as taking in their manifestation.

Rick: Here in Fairfield, Iowa, there are a couple of large geodesic domes that have been here for about 30 years on the campus of the TM group University, Maharishi University, and every day all throughout these 30 years there have been anywhere from 1,000 to, during special courses, as many as 8,000 people all meditating together at the same time for at least four hours a day. So, I am just mentioning it because it is part of that principle that you are mentioning, although it doesn’t involve psychedelics.

Chris Bache: Anything important about psychedelics is unique to psychedelics, and it also will manifest in any other practices as well. So, the accumulation of effects that you are pointing to is very powerful.

Rick: And it is measurable. You can measure various social indicators and see if they correlate with the fluctuations in the numbers of people doing it. They have done studies like that, and gotten them published in peer-reviewed journals. And just one thing to throw in with this whole point we are making now is that in nature there are a number of examples of where very small numbers of elements in a system govern the whole system or can influence the whole system. For instance, in the heart, 1% of the cells are pacemaker cells, and they regulate the beating of the whole heart. Or in a laser, the square root of 1% of the photons, if they line up coherently with one another, induce the other photons to become coherent, and the whole thing begins behaving as a single photon. So, we don’t necessarily have to think in terms of X billion people all participating in some sort of intense spiritual thing for huge social change to take place. Backstroms, I haven’t heard from you in a while. Do you have anything to say in all this?

Jeffery Backstrom: There is something coming up for me about this. We played a little bit with the distinction, just touched on it between these, what somebody called up and out spirituality, maybe more conventional kind of spiritual practices. Or I would think it is more post-agricultural versus indigenous practices. And just this last piece we are talking about, this is kind of speculation on my part, but my experience with the plants is that awakening that is engendered in those practices is much more embodied. The traditions are traditions that are still in a constant daily interwoven contact with nature and we are using a plant spirit rather than a spiritual practice which is thought of as coming from what I’m going to call the masculine expression of the divine. As you mentioned, Rick, I have been here in Fairfield since the seventies. So, the sense is that I have had a long time with that more sort of rarefied kind of spiritual practice. And then, I have to confess, I felt it wasn’t really synchronizing very well with who I am, although I have recently started practicing TM again. But then, over the years I got more and more drawn to these practices that are, I don’t know, we have this earth-based wording for it, they’re just tying me through the body into the feminine manifestation of the Divine Mater, the mother. It’s got a whole different feeling and to me it has a greater sense of promise in terms of our, as a species, being able to heal our relationship with the ecosystem, if you will, to fit into that system in a way that’s more harmonious. Not to detract from the thousands in the dome, I just think if we’re going to make it through this, we should try everything that is available to us and some kind of balance between these masculine and sometimes even hyper-masculine spiritual paths and what is now. We are collectively becoming much more aware of the grounded, embodied, feminine path to awakening. I think it has a lot of promise for those reasons.

Rick: Yeah, I wasn’t mentioning the dome thing as some endorsement of it in any exclusive way, everybody is doing their thing and I just used that as an example because of what the other fellow was saying.

Jeffery Backstrom: Yeah, I am drawing more lines than you were, I acknowledge that. I am just saying, I think the one is great and I think we really need to be open to these different forms of spirituality that are being made available to us by our brothers and sisters who have been spending all this time barefoot.

Rick: Oh yeah, you know one thing I noticed is that, very often when people step back from a path that they had been deeply engaged in for many years, very often they blossom. Some profound awakening takes place, which is not to say that they had been wasting their time in that thing, but somehow, they have hatched. It is time to leave the incubator, and when they leave the incubator then they can really begin to fly. So yeah, it kind of relates to what you are saying, just be open to whatever your heart leads you to do.

Chris Bache: If I can throw in maybe an historical point, as someone who teaches world religions or taught for most of his life, I think about 5000 years ago when we began to break through, when we began to develop the technology, the psycho-technologies to go beyond individual consciousness and began to experience the mother universe, the universe which is the generative universe, when we began to experience that reality, and that reality is so much more instantly gratifying and satisfying than time-space reality in some ways, it led us to develop up and out cosmologies. All the religions, Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, Islamic, all the religions are basically variations on up and out cosmologies, which make perfectly good sense in the first phase of the discovery of that generating universe, of that profound mother, the Buddha womb.

Rick: And just explain what you mean by up and out, I know what you mean, but maybe some of the listeners won’t get it.

Chris Bache: Well, I mean, where the goal is to achieve some type of realization, some enlightenment, and then leave the system, so that the first term for Hinduism is moksha, so you achieve escape of moksha, escape from the planet. Who wants to be on the planet when you can be in heaven? So, to achieve salvation, and salvation ultimately is realized in an off-planet place, or an off-planet condition, and all of the religions basically sought that. But that to me is a symptom of the relative psychological or psycho-spiritual half-maturity or immaturity of the human species at the time. Because ultimately, all the up and out cosmologies leave the question unanswered, when God was existing, when the divine was existing in the pre-manifest state, why did God manifest the universe? Why did God self-manifest the universe itself? And now the more we understand the size of the universe, and the complexity of the universe, and inherent intelligence of the universe, it basically undercuts the logic of the up and out cosmologies, because it leaves unanswered the question, what’s the purpose of time-space existence? And I think the shift we are going through is not only tied to specific practices like a psychedelic practice, but I think it is a profound philosophical, psychological shift. To recognizing that awakening to the mother universe, awakening to transcendent realities is only the first step. It is good to ground on that reality, it is good to open to that reality, but ultimately the evolutionary thrust is to bring more of that reality into time and space. And this is Sri Aurobindo’s fundamental insight, in that process, it is an incarnational spirituality in contrast to an up and out spirituality. So, we open the doors, open the channels, bring it in, and actualize it here. And I think as we do, we are going to find that all sorts of limits that we thought were the limits of the human body are going to turn out to be the limits of the consciousness animating that human body, so that we have much more open-ended potential for sensory acuity, for auditory acuity, for physical sensation. And we really are limited by the quality of consciousness that has yet been able to animate this particular biomass that we are.

Rick: What did you say, Rak? Just say amen.

Rak Razam: Aho.

Rick: Aho. Great.

Rak Razam: Aho. Well, I agree, it’s a very interesting question. Just to jump in just very briefly there, my film documents some of my journeys on Ayahuasca as well, but there is a core part of the film where we are just lucky enough to have footage of a 5-MEO DMT experiment that we conducted in the jungles in Peru with a Western curandero and a Western scientist with some brainwave activity. And to shorthand it, the 5-MEO experience is typically the white light tunnel merging with the godhead type of mystic experience and initiation. But from my experiences in that realm, it seems to me that yes, I totally agree with Chris that it is not just about the up and out. It is about the fact that the explicate or the world that we inhabit, which has been created from the implicate, is manifesting and it is grounding and as much as we are journeying up and out and peering up above the frequency crash that we are in down here, we are recognizing there is an interdimensional ecosystem. But it is also, at the same time, feeding into our material plane and it is incarnating and it is anchoring. And so, this idea of awakening and transcendence is an historical legacy from some of the world religions. But I feel, on a natural system, that what is happening is that the godhead or the whole engine of creation is such that it is incarnating into this material plane and it is manifesting. And so, as part of the world shift and all these things that are happening, the divine is alive and well and it is incarnating on the earth through us and it wants to have more of that incarnation happening on the world. The word is becoming flesh on planet earth.

Chris Bache: Yeah, yeah.

Rick: Well, this is wonderful stuff. Cielle, were you about to say something?

Cielle Backstrom: Yeah, just along the same subject of up and out spirituality, I was just reflecting on the word ayahuasca, which we haven’t really talked about that much. So huasca, this means vine. The plant itself is a vining plant and aya has a couple of ways we might translate it and one of the translations for aya is soul. And to me it is a plant medicine that takes me deeply into my soul, perhaps connected to other souls as well. But again, it is not to connect so much the ayahuasca experience, it is to connect me to my soul. So, it is a downward descent into the interior world of my soul. The other word that we might use to translate aya, and I’m really convinced that if we really understood these languages, probably soul or the other word death, neither one of them would probably be adequate for the actual indigenous experience. But again, death, but it is not dark, it is just again, it is going beyond our personality. It is into a more subtle world where the personality is not dead, but into a deeply mystical place when the personality is left behind. But again, it is just that we are talking about how, when each of us individually can find our own souls and actually really befriend our own death, that we can then create an orientation towards life that is much more universal and compassionate and with that interest in the collective. But it is such an internal experience, an inward, not an ‘upward and out’ to reach so much source, but a ‘downward and in’ to reach our nature. I think that is an aspect of this particular path that might make it unique from other contemplative paths, but more connecting as this was.

Chris Bache: Yeah.

Rick: Okay. Does anyone want to make any concluding remarks, or was that a good concluding remark right there?

Chris Bache: That’s pretty good.

Rick: Good.

Talat Johnathan Phillips: I feel as if we went into really wild territory for a talk that was just about psychedelics. I feel really honored to have learned from all of you, and I hope your community does too. Thank you to everybody.

Rick: Yeah. Well, I particularly feel honored. I often feel like an amoeba doing this show, because each week I reach out and engulf a new person, and listen to all their stuff, and read their book as much as I have time to do. Each time it nourishes me and expands my world. But this week the amoeba has really bitten off a big chunk, interacting with all of you folks and getting familiar with what you are doing. I really feel nourished and enlivened and more mature in my understanding of the whole spiritual landscape as a result of preparing for and doing this discussion. So, I appreciate it. Thanks to you all.

Rak Razam: I would just like to add, Rick, maybe as a parting comment, that basically, as I said earlier, in my understanding, all paths lead to the same central source. What is right for one person might not be right for another. Everyone should just trust the journey as it unfolds, while still diligently pushing their own envelopes and questing and asking questions themselves to be that seeker on the path. It is the journey, not the destination. So, trust the process that unfolds and push yourself as much as you can. And yeah, God bless.

Rick: Yeah, there’s a verse in the Gita which says, “Because one can perform it, one’s own dharma, though lesser in merit, is better than the dharma of another. Better is death in one’s own dharma. The dharma of another brings danger.” So, it kind of relates to what you just said, that basically, if we tune in and listen, we are going to know what the next step is for us. And it is not necessarily what your next step or your next step is. It is what one’s own next step is, if you are sensitive to it.

Chris Bache: Yeah.

Rick: Good. Well, let me make just a few concluding remarks. I won’t bother reading all the names of the people we have been talking to. We have done that in the beginning, and you are familiar with it by now if you have listened this far in the interview. I also won’t bother just reading all the different websites that everybody has, because that would be hard to get down anyway. But this whole discussion will be on a page on batgap.com, and if you go there, you will find short bios of each participant, linking to their websites where you will find longer bios, lists of their books, movies, whatever they are involved in, healing practices, counseling things. There is a whole wealth of opportunity here. So just go to batgap.com, and you will find that. There also you will find a discussion group for each interview, and I suspect that the discussion on this one is going to be quite lively. There is a donate button, which I appreciate people clicking. That makes it possible for me to do this. There is a place to sign up to be notified by email each time a new interview is posted. You will see that. And there is both an alphabetical and a chronological list of all the interviews I have done. And there is also a link to the audio podcast, if you would like to just listen to the audio of this on your iPod, you can sign up for that. So that about does it. So, thanks for listening or watching. See you next week. Next week is going to be Lama Surya Das. Thank you all.

Chris Bache: Thank you, everybody. Thank you.