What's up everyone,
Welcome to Simulation.
I'm your host Alan Sakian.
Very pumped to be talking about the global shamanic resurgence.
We have RakarZam,
Niles Heckman,
Joining us on the show.
What's up guys?
Hey,
Good to be here.
Pleasure Alan.
Back for,
I don't know,
You guys are getting into the high numbers of rounds.
I think this is four for Rak,
This is two for Niles.
They're the minds keep going out to evolve and grow and then they come back and share their experiences.
Rak and Niles have been out doing the second episode of Shamans of the Global Village.
If you haven't seen the first episode yet of Shamans of the Global Village,
Pause this.
Go and watch it.
You can find the link in the bio below to the first episode.
Pause this,
Watch it.
And then your life will make more sense.
Give us some context.
Some context for what we're going to be talking about,
Which is their second episode in the series.
They're both co-creators of Shamans of the Global Village,
Which is a documentary series exploring indigenous medicines and the global shamanic resurgence.
We can probably do a little bit of context here.
We've done so many shows together now exploring spirituality,
The nature of reality,
Why we're here and most recently our show has taken a turn where we've now been exploring what is happening in modernity and how many of the principles of indigeneity around the interconnectedness with each other and with our environment are lacking in modernity.
We've been talking about that so much on the show about how to architect a social fabric that's more prosperous,
Especially with some of those principles.
You guys in a sense are going and capturing some of these principles in some of the most beautiful styles of documentary series that I've seen.
It's really well artistically put together.
Give us a little bit of context regarding you two deciding to come together for this creation-ship around Shamans of the Global Village and the first episode.
Give us a little taste of it and then also we'll get into the second one.
Yeah,
Creation-ship,
Good word.
I'll just initially say that the show is basically the union of our skill sets and brings the best aspects of both of our skill sets together.
It's the pinnacle of what we've done so far in terms of an artistic piece that we're very proud of.
The pilot episode was made in 2016,
We finished it?
15,
We shot it in 2015.
Yeah,
I will just initially set it up by saying that typically a show is done by the entire season being completed with some level of proper budgets.
This show is very independently made so it's being done in a little bit of a different way where we've made a pilot episode and then essentially I kind of joke that hopefully we'll get to every other episode more often than the band Tool makes an album.
Each episode is a very big undertaking,
It's kind of like making a documentary feature and documentary features can take years to make.
So here we are about four years later having nearly completed a second episode because of other life requirements,
Right?
So we've made essentially what is the equivalent of two feature documentary films on the subject which we'll get into but here comes the second one numerous years later that the gears are turning slowly but they are constantly turning and so we'll get into that.
But do you want to give some insight as to the first episode in the background?
Well I guess I'll say it is an ambitious project.
I think it's almost a bit like the 12 tasks of Hercules,
Right?
It's like some big thing and I think it's a necessary thing because as you're talking about modernity and indigenous sort of perspective and wisdom there's an imbalance in the world that is out of touch with the wisdom of the ancestors,
Out of touch with the wisdom of the indigenous people,
Out of touch with the planet and ourselves and a show like this is visioned to communicate the essence of what these cultures are doing mediated through plant medicines which come from nature and are all over the planet and these people are the caretakers for and they're caretakers not just for the medicines but for the energy behind it,
The relationship with the planet,
How that mediates their communities and so as I've been noting with episode two and we've envisaged a series that's probably 12 or 13 episodes which looks at entheogenic or psychedelic compounds which have been used traditionally all over the world like many of them are in Mexico,
South America,
Potentially Egypt,
Iran,
Australia,
You know Siberia,
There's all around the world the planet secretes these substances and there's been relationships with them so it is a big undertaking and an ambitious one and I think it may take the rest of our lives buddy at this rate but I think it's worth doing because there's a lot of diversity within each episode and you're seeing a lot of different capacities of the role of the healer or the shaman as well.
And conceptually the way that the first episode is structured and the plan for future episodes is that each episode focuses on a specific medicine,
Plant or animal and a specific practitioner who works with it so we have kind of a primary people we focus on per episode and then there's sometimes these secondary or tertiary guests with rack hosting but yes I mean shamanism is as old as the hills and it's not just about the medicines but it's about the practitioners,
The legacy you know and much to do with environmental issues,
The rights of indigenous peoples which we know are very much always under the boot of modern structures of commerce and imperialism and just the day-to-day ways that the west operates or all of the east and west in terms of commodifying everything in the natural world so this show is a very full spectrum show and we learn a lot by doing it.
Each episode is such a huge pilgrimage for us that it's a massive undertaking.
Each one is not only such a huge creative project but it's such a life learning journey as we do each episode because we don't necessarily know how the next one is going to happen we just let it kind of synchronistically come about with our other roles and responsibilities through life so it's like when are we going to get through this episode,
How are we going to make it happen,
How are we going to implement it,
There's things that are always when you're doing things independently,
How are you going to have the financial resources to do it or how are you going to bring this into manifestation and we find that we very much are led as each episode comes into fruition and we've you know hopefully we'll continue to yes get a full series under our belt sometimes before we croak.
It's really cool also artistically seeing your forces come together to manifest this like you said that you guys have these key components that when pieced together can make Shams of the Global Village exactly the work of art that it is.
I want to ask you both about this.
We're going to get into much of like the ethos and the philosophy of what we're talking about as we explore these conversations so I don't want to just ask a question about that specifically because it's going to come up naturally but a question that I think could interest so many of us around this is how do you pick because there's so many indigenous cultures around the planet that have these sacred ritualistic relationships with plants and for awakening,
For healing,
For all these different methods and you have on your website you have your series roadmap.
You listed all these countries,
How did you pick those and you know the first one was on the Sonoran Desert Toad right so how do you guys pick that one?
How did you pick peyote for the second one?
I guess the shorthand is that they pick us.
In the sense that well to backtrack a bit you know I first went down to the jungles and worked with Ayahuasca in 2006 and in writing a book about that experience and about what the west was engaging with I started to see that there was a pattern that had been happening generationally where the west had been re-encountering plant medicines and earth medicines which were care taken by indigenous peoples and so there was an understanding that you know through research that all these different cultures around the world originally had an entheogenic or a psychoactive sacrament and that's not just indigenous cultures per se it also goes back to the Greeks with the rights of the Lucis and the Kike on their medicine,
The Romans who had something,
The Judeo-Christianic religions had you know Acacias and cannabis and the anointed you know themselves there's no war on drugs in prehistory right and so in choosing which shows to do in this culture in the modern western paradigm we have been constrained by legalities and we have upheld those legalities right so number one it's like are these indigenous medicines utilized in a country where they're legal and then number two it comes down to well what is the medicine of that area like for instance we've been we've done two episodes now in Mexico because culturally and geographically Mexico down through Central and South America is where the repository of a lot of psychoactive medicines still exist so there you know is the Bufalvarious Toad which was episode one there's psilocybin magic mushrooms in Mexico,
There's salvia divinorum in Mexico and there's peyote in Mexico indigenous to Mexico there's also other sacraments but we didn't want to get top-heavy with Mexico.
Finding countries where they were legal and then it comes down to in my almost 15 years of being in the western shamanic culture having worked with Ayahuasca and the Bufalvarious Toad in the last few years and encountered at conferences and online different people it's getting the pulse of the global shamanic community and in the global shamanic community contains both indigenous people and westerners or you know first worlders who are engaging with the medicines but it is a collective whole and so within that and this is maybe drilling down a bit much but there's a lot of a diversity a lot of good practice and some bad practice and so sometimes it's been a matter of reputations and of working with people that I personally know or that their reputations seem to be integral enough to want to represent them and sometimes you find out things or things happen after you've worked with a practitioner.
So we recognize that there is a duty of care to our viewers in who we present and for instance the lead of episode one Dr Octavia Redig who is was and is very controversial in the Bufal Toad community has become even more controversial and people have died and we acknowledge that people have died in his care or lack of duty of care regardless of his intentions and that there is a delicate balance in doing this work and representing it as media so we aim to document as documentarians we're not advising people do these substances we're not advising that they do have these experiences with the people that we show we're trying to show what's and all the character of the person that works with these medicines and when I first went to Peru almost 15 years ago I was told within the first few days there were three things essentially which curanderos or as we call them shamans have almost every single one of them issues with money with power and with women right and so it is hard in a key toss to find someone in Peru one of the ayahuasca hotspots to find someone that doesn't have a shadow or a skeleton in their closet and so we do that and we do look at people and things will either that we don't know or things will come up in their practices and sometimes there is there's two sides to the story sometimes there's things that happen with the people that shamans work with especially with Westerners and there's lots of issues sometimes around a culture clash or different cultural expectations or also around the role of you know this ego guru worship of the shaman in Western culture because of the absence or lack of that archetype in our culture and the need for healing but there's often a response to put these people on a pedestal so we don't want to do that we want to show what's in all we want to show the pressures of the role the duties of the role you know what that is like and yet I will say that if as this continues and we do this work reputations change so people should really look into the current status of the people they work with as we have tried to do and also there's an element of documentarianism where it's focused on the person to tell a story about the medicine and there's so much to learn culturally there's so much to learn about these spaces of spirituality that I would hope that the final product no matter what the reputation of the practitioner is still worthy as a documentary documentary yeah honesty transparency is key and it's true it's like indigenous cultures have problems just like modernity does you know there's nothing perfect about anybody just like every individual has their pros and cons and nobody's here that's not perfect that's perfect everybody's got things they're working on so it is interesting to see when we visit a tribe which in the second episode for example we're with the we're going to a specific part of Mexico where they do an annual pilgrimage and just to be there is a special process but you see the way they live and how they have massive struggles and you know how they're very poor and they have things that they do well and other things that they do not well in the sense of how modern culture operates some of the things that we do are great and other things we need to learn a lot from indigenous tribal communities and vice versa so that's a huge learning experience every step of the way and highlighting that the shamanic experience specifically what is essentially the psychedelic experience in a shamanic container is very important for a part of getting to have some glimpse or insights into gnosis of experience and knowing that spiritual processes spirituality is your life so a shamanic experience can help give you is a tool for the larger spiritual process of your life so just like rack said not putting these experiences up on a pedestal but knowing that they are there as a way to help us find balance with nature and Gaia and divinity and cosmos and reunite with the greater ecology of things because one thing that indigenous tribes have typically done well and that we've seen during the processes of visiting them is that they have a much more beautiful balance and harmony with nature and how they live and we know that much of western society today and modernity is on a very unsustainable path in a lot of ways so these are all good things to highlight and each episode is a huge learning experience to say the least and it's always good to highlight that nothing is perfect and we are always trying to make a piece of cinema that is as educational as possible as transparent as possible and hopefully as entertaining as possible as well yeah yeah oh yeah it's quite interesting that these pick you and come through you but also discussing these grand challenges of trying to take all of the beauty of the relationship of of different indigenous cultures with nature and with each other and figure out how to best share that with the world so that modernity itself can awaken more to the beauty of that and how to integrate it within itself meanwhile the these these these issues and anthropologists and archaeologists have for the longest time been trying to figure out how to not be extractive but be symbiotic yeah in the in the relationships and and this is a very difficult thing when colonialism is pushing in on on capitalizing on on extracting resources from these lands rather than treating them like the divine things that they are like they've been treated and then also the commodification of this we actually did a recent conversation with the American anthropological associations annual meeting with someone that's doing fashion anthropology and this is a very wild statement and I'll get back to the main stream thought here but the idea is that by working with different indigenous cultures around the world in the way that they communicate sacredness and divinity spirituality through through fashion through their clothing through their sacred objects these types of things and then by in a sense allowing a little bit of the economic machinery into that so that they can share the sacredness with more people around the world can catalyze the awakening more and that in itself is a very strange statement because it's allowing the economic machinery in to try and spread the memes of what the sacredness is through like yeah through fashion anthropology I don't that's it that's just a statement that I thought was really interesting yeah no you know okay it's a it's a complicated it's a complicated discussion because of many reasons like essentially indigenous people are to a large degree broken or traumatized by the first world you know by the new world by the people that are essentially almost like their ancestors in some sense you know there's a there's a South American prophecy called the Eagle in the Condor and essentially it says after 500 years of colonial conquest by the Spanish and conquistadors that you know the country will come to a reunification of the Eagle in the Condor representing North America and South America and the mind and the heart but you've got to remember that all across the world the old world was raped and pillaged and plundered and slaughtered yeah on mass right so what is the mental driver of Western culture that is so damaged and so hurt that it goes out into the world and does repeats the victim mentality right it's been traumatized itself and this dichotomy between old world and new left and right we're seeing it in the world everywhere at the moment I hope it's a precursor to a grand reunification right wise because I mean these loaded terms we're all indigenous to planet earth yes right and the labels we give and the separation we give are just that they're just labels so the indigenous people in their situation that the majority have found themselves even in the first world countries decimated and put onto reservations and have held on to the sliver of their spirituality you know and their practices where they can and in larger countries where they're still in nature in the jungles and in the environments where they are they may be impoverished and surrounded by you know the capitalist roll out but they still have some connection to the land and you've got to remember that to the indigenous people what we think of a spirituality it sounds like a hashtag it sounds like a buzzword it's like let's get all spiritual and fuck you know oh ayahuasca it's trendy or this and that it's like it's not necessarily even about the plant the plant is a interface for a relationship with the land and spirit and spirit is what sustains you yes not if you're just indigenous spirit is something which we all have we're like spiritual beings having a human experience but we've forgotten so we're just as damaged as the indigenous people that our ancestors have decimated and this is a process of species trauma I think we're all getting through and I mean essentially I don't know if it's the soul problem or the main driver but capitalism is based on this idea of capital which is based on the idea of land which is based on ownership and possession and money if you look at the original etymology of all the linguistics in English of money the riches come from the soil it all goes back to Egypt right the banks are you know the devices on the side of the thing which would alternate the water flow the levies they would put on things in tax terms are about water it comes down to you can't eat money you know it comes down to the of nature and spirit is what the original currency is and so spirituality isn't this fattish thing that capitalism can absorb and yet capitalism is a virus which devours everything until you have a dead planet so at the same time plant medicines are being devoured by capitalism and they're being diluted and for a large part I would hope and most people I know in the West who have felt the call of the medicines to be caretakers to be providers or to be facilitators or if they even dare call themselves shamans which is a loaded word in the global shamanic community you know there's a role and a responsibility and to a large degree they have good intentions but there's a huge responsibility and we are seeing a dilution of the purity of shamanism and of the purity of the relationship of spirit and ceremony itself in Western shamanism and so these are really huge issues with no easy answers and as the medicalization of psychedelics juggernauts ahead and they cage God for relieving the anxiety of a capitalist culture which is battery farm them into depression and trying to kill them there is a potential for the soma for the masses where these things can be absorbed by capitalism and yet there's also a potential where capitalism and the people within those structures are receiving healing from these medicines while they're being commodified so it's a bit of a chase you know in both directions and I trust that there is a culmination of this process and the things will all be well but it doesn't mean the shits not going to hit the fan as we go through this process yeah and it seems like the shit hitting the fan is not this overnight zombie apocalypse thing it's just a very you know the the twilight of empire is obviously upon us so we see a slow degradation back to some level of authenticity and what human beings are naturally designed to be like which is somewhat indigenous right so people are terrified of this you know peak oil post you know assuming that global global capitalism assumes and demands a planet of infinite resources which is you know you could argue materially we're on a planet of very finite resources I think mentally we have aspects to bring a lot of things into manifestation that are very powerful but it's it's it's very obvious to a lot of people that things must change and like you've talked about on the show oftentimes Alan we need society up upgrades and new operating systems and ways of doing things so many of those things aren't just endless tech thinking that it will save us it's just more getting back to authentic ways of being and living in the world and indigenous peoples have constantly struggled with this but it's it's beautiful to see that at the same time their spirit is often not broken right like Rak had said so it's very beautiful to see that getting back to ways that are more authentic which definitely means that we might have to chop wood and carry water a bit more in the future isn't necessarily this awful thing right it's like we can find a way of balancing commerce you know with ways of being decentralized and not as hierarchical and it's not going to be the dynamic where a shaman you know says that I can't pay my bills with a feather and a stone but there is ways to do to continue forward and in in ways that are much more in balance and harmony with nature right and I think a lot of these things were at the point now with what's going on environmentally and ecologically that nature will force us to do these things which seems scary and seems overwhelming but oftentimes it'll just lead us to more authentic ways of being right and it'll it's it's a slow process so that's why it's good to to have community and to have a not not fear you know fear is the mind killer as Frank Herbert said so to realize that so much of this is the larger spiritual process which is spirituality's truth spiritual spirituality is your life so just look to somebody's life to see how they're doing in their spirituality and just look out the society is doing as a whole in their spirituality which yes in the modern world a lot of people's lives are a mess so the society and the culture is a mess but as each note on the network does things to work on bettering themselves and we can talk about the whole reason and why that you would do that but you can see how we'll get back to some of these more authentic ways of living more spiritually in harmony with nature I always bring it back to nature the ultimate specialty yes yes exactly yeah exactly yes um so the more that I embark on the depths of this spiritual journey that that this one is on that the more it feels as though this is perfect that this reality is perfect in the sense of it being a perfect constant harmonization and flux between the classical yin and yang of good and bad of light and dark of it's whatever you want to call it and that the extreme the extremity of the younger brother going out into metropolises and having all the tinkering with innovation but also the issues that are also arising from that meanwhile the older brother is still in the depth of interconnectedness with nature and the land in its most sacred ways that in itself is that same perfect balance right there and that when we say things like it's out of balance it's we agree with that statement because we're like that's why you're doing the global shamanic resurgence documenting this and trying to share it with the world to catalyze the awakening of this good side of this resurgence meanwhile at the same time it's as though there's on this on this evil side that's constantly going up with the good is that there's better and better propagators of old archaic corrupt codes that are trying to manipulate and own more and choke more the nature choke more the spirit and that those two things being in this ascension together pressed up against one another seems like why it's such a perfect creation I'll get to another question after that but how do you guys feel about about that I like it Ellen yeah thank you I got a little bit of racks of approval so you know it's this idea about sound bites and again and like the hashtag thing it's like spirituality isn't necessarily what you think it is you know and good and evil aren't necessarily what you think it is and this polarity of the way we see the world you know we're so stuck in duality and we've forgotten the way right so we're saying technology or nature nature is a technology it's a vegetal technology she's secreted she created us a biological technology consciousness is a technology I mean all the labels that are just illusionary things that create fragmentation and separation and so what is the value of shamanism right why are we doing this show what is the global shamanic resurgence what is a shaman right we created that term the west created that term it comes from Siberian medicine work from the salmon in their language and western anthropologist merci Eliad in his classic book shamanism in the 1950s he defines the role of the shaman as a technician of ecstasy right and again the the cultural drift of what the words means ecstasy originally from the greece ecstasis means like communion with god right it's that it's that powerful it's that pure the ecstasy the joy of discovering your spiritual nature is that you're not separate you're not who and what you thought you are you're an emanation of the godhead having a human experience right yeah and these labels and these words they're like maps leading us back to truths which we've forgotten and so the shaman is also in potentially a western interpretation a healer a priest a traveler between the worlds a mediator of the invisible energies all around and he or she and many cultures had female medicine women and still do was a mediator of energy because they understood that humans are not separate right indigenous people born in nature didn't live in a cubicle shut off from air and sunlight most of their lives of the dna atrophied you know it's like they were embedded within an ecosystem with multiple life forms multiple energies which extended out into the the energetic or the astral and they had to mediate those energies for the health and survival of of their communities so number one the shaman was in charge of the health of their communities right yeah and so as part of that the plant medicines are really important but there's also so many other roles often shamans would be village elders or chieftains or the personal politics that all people have within them you know that affects that we i'm just waiting for someone to create a nap talking about technology that can visualize the energetic ripples of when this person says to that person and they get angry and then they go and say to that person and pass it on and if you could visualize you know there's those visualizations to see on youtube of internet signals and like the 5g radiation and stuff and it's like rainbow things if we can visualize the emotional impact we have on everyone around us even if we live in our box and withdraw it's all connected but the big picture is the west has forgotten through its trauma through its disconnection through its focalization on you know this outcome on everything that's out here it doesn't look back here anymore it doesn't connect to the feeling and so the idea of technologies aren't good or bad right consciousness is not good or bad it's what you do with it so an egoic western mind focused on survival and out here and playing the game of life seeing it as separate from themselves seeing where to climb who to kill how to take out how to look after me me me has created the planetary emergency we now find ourselves in which is still perfect and still going according to some higher unification plan wow so the technologies you are mentioning aren't necessarily wrong but the intention unless as modern humans we can deeply drink from the well of remembrance and remember who we are what we are why we're here then how can we go out there and do anything that isn't going to fuck up everything know thyself yeah and shamans you know through all time we're just the medicine people of the village right and that's mentally not necessarily physically right like we have physical doctors of today but we have a lot of mental illness in our society and the shamans could help with that so you talk about societies that have lost their way I mean we don't have any initiation into adulthood in the modern world with this Germanic experience where indigenous cultures would typically have a young sprout go off and do some pilgrimage and have some experience whether or not there was a sacrament involved or not that initiated them into adulthood that brought in that ecological balance with themselves and the larger greater ecology of things so that's what a lot of people in the western world or in the modern world I mean obviously look at parts of the east which the cities are firing on all cylinders and being even more destructive in some ways than parts of the west it's not just a west thing it's a modern modernity thing that finding ways to reach maturity and adulthood is is tough and that can only be done through experience it can only be done through harmony with the way that you find processes and live more authentically and it's not done through sitting in your cubicle and the nine-to-five you've talked about the bottom line and the rat race a lot in your material island and yeah everybody's realizing that there's there's so much more to life than that and so much of what you spoke of in your metaphor of the two brothers is just about yes this polarization that we see just on such full spectrum firing on all cylinders now with politics and everything and that what rack speaks of is this maturity through experience and initiation into unity of not binary but you know non-binary right just this this unity of one realizing what we are is more that we are all one which sounds like a very wooey metaphysical thing and what do you what does that really mean when we boil it down the oneness of everybody is that we are all collectively having the same experience and we could think of much of what we're doing is just you know this dream of life and how do we learn from this polarization as a teaching tool maybe life is just to teach us about all these things that we do well and that we have to take away and when this mortal coil wraps up be like what did you learn from this crazy wild life of not to be in fear but to just think of wow what a ride what an amazing ride this life was so the point of all this is just to say that the show is one of our ways that rack and i hopefully can do our ever so slight part in highlighting some of these larger overarching overarching brush strokes but then also showing to people what some of these indigenous ceremonies are like and some of these initiatory processes you know what's the importance of the journey the sacraments the pilgrimages and the ceremonies which specifically the second episode really highlights as we go through this earth air fire water process in the episode of these specific ceremonies and the importance of them and why they're done in the context with the medicine in the ceremonies with the tribe with the village with the unity of the whole community perfect segue into this so we've talked now so much actually right prior to that i just want to say there's another thing that we've been talking about on the program quite quite a bit recently and it spoke to this idea of being able to visualize the energetics especially between like humans and one thing that's very interesting is this idea of being able to to have a of a biometric measurement of a state of consciousness so if if we were to take the state of of like a Dalai Lama or something and their biometric state of consciousness and catalog that as deeply interconnected or unconditional love the drops in the ocean and then try and like analyze the biometric state of like like Xi Jinping or Donald Trump or Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg and you just really just start like being just blatant like there's 2500 billionaires submit them all into the biometric consciousness analysis and see how many of them need little tiny nudges towards these states of interconnectedness and so we've been talking about that quite a bit on the program and then you know we're using these words and this kind of is another great segue into what i wanted to mention off of what you just said which is that if you take these words of xtosis or these words of yoga which we have to remind people all the time means union in sanskrit union with the one and you can take whatever path you want to take right there's eight billion of us that have eight billion unique communions that are like snowflakes or instruments being played in the symphony that then commune with that that there are all of these different modalities in terms of communion in terms of and so part of what this question that i want to that i want to ask is is that the modalities are there's so many of them for thousands of years this practice of meditation for thousands of years this practice of of sacred plant medicines and our interactions with them there's so many from dalek's so question being in episode one and in episode two it seems like in episode two there's so much of a like a really deeper highlight with these four elements to walk us through the process of the communion that people are having because maybe it is that the more that we talk about our own unique communions with the one as well as sharing our stories sharing these practices of indigenous cultures around the world of the communions that we can then excite more people to care about their own processes of communion so you know we're saying how we choose these uh these episodes and number two chose us it fell into our lap of a group of modern mexican spiritual seekers who live in la who are also media makers who had seen and liked episode one that invited us to go down to mexico this march and that is the season when the whicho people of mexico who are one of the the oldest tribes in mesoamerica that weren't you know conquered or culturally sort of decimated by modernity who live in the the remote mountain ranges and they have a relationship with what they call hickory and what we call in in the west piote which is you know in the cactus family contains mescaline and other alkaloids and is a profoundly visionary experience but yet again that's just the outside wrapper to describe it so the medicine person of the which hole is called a maracame usually a man it's usually passed down through the lineage and there can be multiple of them there's dozens and dozens of maracame villages in the area they still live and there's hundreds and hundreds of maracames so this is a community where shamanism is still vibrant and alive and again isn't just about this one plant it's about that they're part of that maintenance and reciprocal energetic exchange keeping the community healthy and in well-being so we were invited down in march because uh the which i'll go on a pilgrimage you know which in the judaeo-christianic terminology really a pilgrim is a seeker it's a seeker that's in search of knowledge or connection or a spiritual outcome and it has a religious connotation right it's not just a holiday it's not just drug tourism as vice would probably call it right this is an indigenous ceremony and it's not just about the peak experience so for me this was the big difference from episode one in the sense that the maracame don don jose ramarez who is a very well respected chieftain and maracame shaman in his community he's in his mid-60s and he's been working at this since he was about 10.
Again these cultures which have an intergenerational legacy of working with the medicines don't see them as evil or bad or drugs it's relationship it's like you're going to breathe air you're going to you know like get out there and swim you have a relationship with the elements and with nature so don jose was legendary he's there's been other documentaries made about him but as a archetypal representation of the maracame medicine man what the big difference was with this episode was really about the pilgrimage and about the resacralization we had a little tribe of men women and children there was probably about 50 or 60 of us and we'll travel on those little minibuses and cars and we went from san luis potosi and zakatekas the capital city where we all met and we would just travel out and we did not sleep right this is no this is no no no well because here's the thing is that is that we had a very short amount of time and the multiple maracames from their villages in the mountains who travel these hundreds of kilometers on the pilgrimage go there both to re-enact the original meeting and there's a lot of cosmology here where they have representations of the peyote as a spirit as the blue deer and that originally the original tribes person had found and met and taken peyote and that kept a continuity of the legends and the mythology but a lot of the journey was about all of the journey was essentially about tracing the route of the sacred sites on the road to wirakuta and wirakuta is the holy of holies it's like nature's desert vatican for them no structures per se but it's where the peyote is indigenous to and where it grows in quantities now we've got to warn that peyote is an endangered plant medicine and sacrament and vegetal substance partially because of climate change and of outside factors but also partially because of western interference and that you know it takes about seven or eight years for a peyote pup or a bud to grow into full blossom and it can take multiple peyote buds to get a crescendo of the entheogenic visionary experience so you know the west has known about this for decades but the the drain or the pressure put on the ecology and the cultivation of peyote is a big issue that we want to talk about in the documentary and it is a big issue here and in north america where it grows in texas and other regional states around there as well it doesn't grow anywhere else in the world it's been transplanted but not in it's a desert bearing you know cactus there's efforts underway to sort of with multiple plants that are endangered because because of both the western demographics drain on resources ayahuasca is the same there's a whole movement to repopulate ayahuasca same with the buffo toad from episode one for fair trade toad a peyote has been endangered for decades and there's not enough for even the indians you know for the mesoamericans so the whole tribe came with us all these people men women and children and they prayed right it's not just let's go to a weekend ceremony where this visiting shaman is doing his thing it's like there was hardship there was sacrifice there was ritual there was tradition there there was relentless ritual sacralization of what needed to be done at each site and the reason for that is the maracarames believe that the earth is alive and when i say alive obviously it births certain life but it's intelligently alive it is the great being or part of the even greater being and that great being has a reciprocal relationship with all its creatures which must be maintained just like the maracarames maintain the health of the well-being of their community so too they're maintaining the well-being of the earth community and how humans interface with the other species and the earth itself this is not a metaphor i think terence mcgana might have said the earth is alive yeah and we're in relationship with it and it's not a healthy one at the moment so some of the sacred sites that we saw you know where for instance that the holy springs where they believe when the great floods recited thousands of years ago when life first reflourished surrounded by fences in the backyard of suburban st louis potosi and they've got cultural issues about getting access to their sacred sites because of capitalism buying up the land and other associated features that there was really this ragtag poor in a sense pure people that were on their annual pilgrimage to gather as much peyote as they could to take it back to the rest of the village and their tribes in the mountains to do them the entire year and on the way we stopped at all these sites relentlessly sacralizing and giving thanks and blessing with water and with prayers and with feather and with live animal sacrifice because blood is the great carrier blood is you know the great conductor of life of spirit so there are ancient traditions that had to be maintained and don jose ramirez's dedication to the rituals was really hard opening and to go on that pilgrimage over multiple days to endure to give it up to be present with it that is what was needed to approach taking the peyote with respect and permission in the final legs it wasn't just you go to this weekend ceremony there was this pilgrimage there was this purification and there was this sacrifice and we shy away from sacrifice it's too hard it hurts let's put nets up around our trampolines let's put helmets on let's protect ourselves from the wind and the sun and the earth and the element of danger which makes you feel alive right it's like we're molly coddled in our society and it's like there's no safety net out there on the edge with shamanism and that's how and why you can encounter something real within yourself that you're connected to that is also outside of yourself and what you speak to alan with the elements you know like we've obviously talked extensively about commodifying the elements and how that's completely unsustainable with you know selling corporate water bottles or buying up land and especially over somebody's sacred site or burning the amazon over some indigenous tribes like place that they've had for hundreds of thousands if not millions of years that stuff is not going to last but in terms of the elements energetically i mean visiting these sites for the earth the air the water and the fire these have deep you know principles within the magic of practice right and so it's it's important to realize that magically and spiritually what you mentioned in your question is so much people realize all of these various modalities of spirituality are turning people inward and when you turn inward you realize you start to have these chrysanthemum blossoms about realizing these things within you it's so much about your your state of mind and your way of being and your the way that you harmonize with others yourself your inner self your higher self and the community as a whole which is the guy an ecosystem which the tribe yes very wisely says is a living entity a wiser creature so these elements are really highlighted through this pilgrimage which is always sacrificed because think of in your life how many times you've been you've done something that's struggle and difficulty and how much that's led to great reward right so it's like there's some old alchemical quote that says like the oldest forests and the deepest the tallest mountains and the deepest deserts as climbing a mountain is obviously like an allegory for this spiritual path so that's the struggle and difficulty and it is it is making this thing like as rack said we did it in about three days of shooting which is very very tough it's a very tight schedule and it was very that alone is tough and then doing this pilgrimage in a very beautiful landscape where could where could is amazing it's like it is a desert but it's like a cactus jungle where you think like desert means you're going this like just dead rock of moonscape but it was really actually quite lush and beautiful and the peyote is a beautiful yeah little access doorway to this inner experience it looks like a little beautiful muffin and it is a living entity it's a beautiful little almost alien entity yeah and that's why like we're wearing these wristbands that show some aspect it depends on people's inner experiences how you are when you have an experience of ever so slight gnosis and gnosis is just a knowing that something is the case my experience was very visible and visual and rack and I are wearing these wristbands which the tribe makes as a way to through their own creative art give a little bit of insight as to what some people oftentimes experience but it's it's our struggle with the show is always like how do we show these inner experiences which to some extent can never be done lensed externally but my goal as a documentarian and racks goal as you know my co-collaborator is to always try and deliver the best product possible in terms of the show and yes the commerce of day to day modernity which we do sell the episodes but also combine beauty with wisdom you know combine some of these wisdom aspects that we've talked about during this conversation with what is beautiful show it in a beautiful way because beauty has this beautiful relationship with truth you know if you go and look at a Rembrandt painting you know there's some truth in that thing right there was a manly p.
Hall quote that once said something to the extent of like all unreal things are ugly and all true things are beautiful and you know I'd like to publicly just again just acknowledge the beauty of your cinematography and direction the ability to capture so when you're in nature there's this thing and you know modern humanity live in cities over 50% of people in the world now live in cities and you know they're not nature right it's like culture is a cargo cult that is like blossomed like a candida virus or something within nature and it's separated it drains all resources from the periphery to the center of where and it it stays in its little boxes and it tries to control its relationship with nature when we were out in Wirakuta which is the holy of holiest lands as Noel said very beautiful in its desolate aridness you start to pick up a sense after days there of the shape of things of the fact that there are energetic rhythms you know and like you'll see the sunrise and the beauty and you'll feel the wind and you see the the birds and the animals wake with the sun and you realize oh the energy exchange of the sun and the light and the heat and the day and it's like seeing the great being wake up yes and then there are these moments when you know there'll be just these astounding synchronicities where a cloud will part and sun will come through or you know a flock of birds will all turn left all at once even though they're like this group entity that's one being and who's leading and and there's these rhythms within rhythms where I really start to see the contours of the great being right of what why they pray to nature why they resacralize why they reconnect because you can't be separate unless you choose and even then you're not really separate you're just not tuning in but there's there's an energetic reciprocal relationship I mean we haven't even mentioned you know the sixth great species extinction and the planetary emergency that has hit the fan everywhere right and so the thing is the planet won't die but things are hitting the fan the carbon dioxide the methane release the forest fires burning the bushfires the flooding the extreme weather the coral bleaching and the coral bleacher everything is dying off and it's it's like we're ignoring it we're ignoring it because we've ignored nature we just like where do we get the refill from and it's like you know it's like okay the living being that we are and when we say embedded in these words don't do it justice right it's like we're in the mother we're in this wholly sacred creature which is the womb of life and we're hiding away in our concrete little boxes right draining all the things looking at Netflix and creating a virtual world where we can be more protected it's not going to end well so I just want to bring it back to this idea what is shamanism why do we do what we do what do we document this why is this important right and I'm not saying you have to go off and take peyote and if you do do it with the indigenous people and their permission that because there's not enough to go around the harvesting of the medicine and the how you know but to have an experience to whatever modality whether that's breath work whether that's rebirthing whether that's plant or animal psychoactive medicines whether that's tantra or lovemaking whatever tunes you in to your deeper being reconnects you to the web of life and then you can give and receive and you can become a whole human being because the modern human is atrophied it is bastardized it is like this zombie really you know racing towards the apocalyptic cliff and it's not good it's not healthy and that's why the earth is in transformation and upheaval it's purging the human virus because the children have lost their way and these indigenous cultures who aren't the noble savages we're not trying to lionize and grand eyes them into these pure beings they have their own shit and their own politics and their own egos but to a degree from whatever sliver of a degree they remember the spiritual connection not just as a lifestyle but mediated potentially through their medicine men and women as the west is relearning they can navigate the shitstorm of modern culture are you saying we can't buy rainforests on amazon.
Com right it's it's true i mean it's such a beautiful way to say it that navigating how seeing what they do well is definitely a teaching tool and everything is a teaching tool everything's a learning experience so inward processes are a great way for you to have the best insight as to what is truth for you and for the larger collective as a whole right and that's what is so key i mean this through all that we've talked about in this conversation much of which sounds very interesting some of which sounds kind of bleak but there's a lot of positive things to be gained by people turning inward and not ignoring things or not becoming very egotistical but saying that inward processes are kind of the forward escape the forward progress the forward forward and upwardness just a moment um as you have now documented the process of communing with the one with nature is a process of of deep reciprocity there's ritual throughout that is deeply oriented about communing with nature in so many different variables when you look at a a brief a brief landscape take out the phone selfie aka a selfish take on and then leave that in itself is cancer compared to arriving and seeing the depth that you were describing where you can actually experience the sunrise and the awakening of the conscious being the plants the animals in that area um for that day and seeing when you look for an extended period of time at a landscape you no longer just uh see it you feel it even beyond feeling it becoming it and you also just you there's way more nuance that is seen um over time than if you look at it for just a couple seconds this process of going and stopping over and over again along this path towards um towards the the the harvesting of the sacred uh plant medicine and then the the process of of going on the these these spiritual journeys there's something that deeply reminds me we've talked about this so many times niles wrack of going inward and this process of knowing yourself and having these these experiences can be so uh simple they do not need um such great complexities of needing to go to uh 10 day silent sittings or to go to the um the locations where you can uh take on these plant medicines it can be as simple as we've mentioned this on the show so much that to leverage the breath as the divine tool that it is that communes you when the sip of water comes and we take it in to realize the divinity within that the bite of food the divinity within that the powered by the sun which then gives you power all of these tiny things that happen throughout your day that you do on a daily basis um to have the deeper amounts of gratitude and the deeper amounts of communion through just those tiniest micro pieces um catalyze the small butterfly effects when you when you also pause before you eat a meal with someone and just pause it look at them in the eyes and take the time to bless the fact that you are sharing a meal together and to bless that food before you take that sip of water with someone say that it's so beautiful that this water is nourishing us right now and those tiny little things um can also catalyze that deep inward journey that we need to build to architect that social fabric that enables prosperity um that is so healing and regenerative um speak speak to that alan you just very eloquently i don't know if you consciously did it or unconsciously did it you just talked about four things which are four alchemical elements that we talked about that you what do you do you bring them into your body right so those are there's a little hint right there that your body is the alchemical vessel and we talk about these things in terms of like what is the point of all this it's yes it's this journey of finding a beautiful balance and health with of body mind and spirit and then also finding a a way that you can essentially use your mind in a way positively realizing so much as mind base using your heart in another beautiful way because ultimate reality you don't know until you can actually feel it and a lot of these shamanic experiences allow you to feel reality what is actually real and not just five cents material reality which is only part of the puzzle and then how do you pursue your true will in life like what are you doing with your life and what are these how are you integrating these experiences into your own source code to then live your life in the most authentic way possible through your own ventures and how you choose to spend like a commodity your time right so that's what this show is part of our way of using our time in a way to help disseminate the information just like you do with this show right and so that kind of is a that's part of our own process spiritually and alchemically of how we better ourselves through the process we're process oriented in this show we're not goal oriented we're process oriented do you have any thoughts on that last bit as well probably um he usually does i just wanted to backtrack a few a few hop skipping thoughts there so you know the great bard terence mckenna had some well there's so many quotes but he has a little riff it says plan plant planet right it's in the language right that there's a plan you know that's underway involving the plants as part of the planet right and then we're all part of it and it's even been said that you know the plants invented the humans or assisted in the biospheric sort of evolution of the plants to carry the seas to propagate the plants to breathe out the carbon dioxide which they need in the reciprocal relationship yes i mean i think we're scared to look at the the symbiosis of nature because it would mean that oh fuck we're in something we're not the dominion conquers of something yeah it's like we're in a living organism and that's totally changes the paradigm and um terence also said that basically at times of you know great societal unrest which happened in the rise and fall of civilizations like clockwork right because there are larger rhythms of time and within that it's like cultures rise and fall like in this sort of like species petri dish right there's this thing which happens there's this dissemination there's this growth phase and then there's a phase where it starts to decay and starts to die and then there's another cycle and so at times when the cycle goes the pendulum swings backward we start to fear we start to contract and we start to look back to the times when things made sense right so at the moment we're seeing that in the world is this return of authoritarian father figure leaders who are conservative and you know inshallah and withdrawing from the global cooperative sort of web but it goes back even further than that it goes back beyond patriarchy essentially to the utopian edens we had in pre-civilization it goes back to what terence called the archaic revival the archaic meaning how did we survive for potentially up to one million years in different hominid forms how did we flourish how we survived five great species extinctions which modern science says have plagued the world before and we've had global warmings before look into those great species extinctions naturally occurring global warmings which raise the carbon dioxide i think it was the fourth or the fifth extinction did that there's not always meteorites or asteroids which do it right essentially there are rhythms within the living guy an organism we're in and civilizations rise and fall and when we go back looking for stability looking for center looking for meaning it always involves nature because we remember again the real story of what we're embedded in what we're part of and niles said it before it's not just that these words i almost feel sorry that they're not enough to communicate these are maps but it's about the feeling it's like i could say to you the word i'm in love right and it sounds nice and it might trigger your you know responses energetically of your own feelings of love and all of a sudden you start to feel you start to sensitize you start to come back into the somatic experience of the spiritual being in a body in the temple as nile said in the vessel which is being created by nature to hold its divine spark right and modern humans and this is my riff from ages ago i call it they have species ptsd we you know we do because we are not just blanket we have armoring we have this um desensitized nature where we don't go out into nature we're scared of nature and we've been pillaging it for hundreds of years since the industrial revolution in the the wave of the time cycle and now it's coming back to a different thing and so the reason why these experiences whether they're psychedelics from a lab or you know plant or animal based um entheogen psychoactives um can help people at this time of great planetary emergency it's not because you see pretty pictures or visions or that it's hallucinations or escapism it's an escape hatch back to reality right to the original state of being which is feeling that there is no separation between you and the air and the sky and the sun and the lake and the fish and the animals the lakota indians call this metak we arson you know all my relations all these different cultures around the world have a concept that they feel not just think of how everything is interrelated in the unified field in the web of of life and we're starting to re-get that through modern science and quantum stuff and the understandings of biology and you know the way it all threads together but we're not feeling it yet you know and so these substances have the potential to open your hearts not just your mind that's why that's not about psychedelics entheogens mean to awaken the divine within right and i i believe that they are necessary and important and secreted by the planet herself to mediate the species consciousness and to bring us back into right relationship with the planet and so many other speakers have said too it's like it's a growing body of thought my last little riff i want to say on this little bit of the subject which is juicy yes there's a beautiful guy in the uk um sam gandhi he's a phd he works with the beckley institute that's doing a lot of the legal scientific research with psychedelics i've just done a dmt study on what's happening the brain mri zg thinking it's like neolucid dreaming all this type of stuff his speciality is ecodelics is the idea of psychedelics or entheogens these psychoactive substances as not just modulators of consciousness but of relationship of relationship with ourselves with each other and nature yeah and if you take an entheogenics a psychoactive substance in nature in the right setting preferably with a sitter or a guide you know someone's looking after you you remember the wonderment of all of creation or the potential is there for you to remember so at the moment there is this very pronounced and a lot of momentum around the medicalization of psychedelics which i support there's also a lot of commodification and capitalist interest in the profit margins around the commodification of psychedelics in modern psychotherapy which i did not necessarily support and there is very little conversation around the spiritual nature and potential of these substances so all the attention or a lot of the attention is going towards people with anxiety stress and ptsd which is probably like 70 to 80 of the general populace in western countries because it's a battery farm that's designed to drain all our energy until we die right anyway if you take these substances in an environment it's not isn't they're not just for if you have something wrong you don't have to be sick to take these substances although there is an element of spiritual disconnection that even while humans are probably not as connected in a spiritual nature as as we could be that if you do these things in nature and sam gandy's hypothesis and phd is all about reconnecting in a spiritual sense like this he's a he's a i forget the japanese term it's like shinden zoo or something it's like forest bathing where without a psychoactive you can go into nature and just be and you are getting fed the oxygen from the plants and the trees the sunlight the wind the air the insects there's energetic reciprocal exchanges happening all the time which your dna picks up on and starts to come alive to and you breathe deeply the gift of life and if you do that with a psychoactive sacrament right it's not recreational it's remembering the sacred and if you do that in nature there's been a study done on this potential of these substances to renew the sacred contract in the sense to renew or release the armory to make people whole again to remember the sacred and i would love to see more of an awareness around this potential i see that the psychedelic community has evolved from taking the substances serving the substances there is a whole movement of integration list and people that meet to share their experiences and have support networks for each other integrating afterwards go out to the forest together when the spring comes right i'm not suggesting you do anything illegal but if you were to do it on mass like a tribe like a band of brothers and sisters in a controlled setting in nature and just be with it then that is the archaic renewal right that is the potential you don't have to be sick and traumatized on ptsd and six thousand dollars for three mdma sessions with your therapist to go out in a controlled environment nature and feel the love of being alive again and in the shamanic experience in a guided setting with a facilitator or a medicine person that is what they do they hold a ceremony they resacralize and in that peak experience of the entheogenic bliss potentially there may be healing there may be trauma release but if you don't have that or the the opposite of trauma is connection it's held it's loved and that that is what is needed by so many people so i see the the shamanic resurgence as this unification of old and new east and west and of heart and mind you know of coming together into this remembrance of who and what we really are guided by the elders and guided by the connection with the tribal indigenous cultures guided by the planetary intelligence which secretes these substances which coincidentally fit our neural structure and help us to remember it's like we're meant to do this things are happening the way they are in an intended way seems like a divine plan i think we have a lot of teaching tools within nature i just was speaking about the sun and moon and the balance of the feminine and the masculine and how these are obvious teaching tools to man and nature shows us so much about racket what's rack has just illustrated you know it's such a teaching tool nature and experiences in it are endlessly priceless and especially when you get older and you realize that you much rather go out on a walk with your dog rather than watching the you know bread and circuses of the football match or something it's like these experiences with a specific sacrament whether or not you're an experience you're in nature with them or not or just kind of like another leveling up of that experience right and doing them in kind of specific ways in a sacred context with the tribe rarely helps give you insights and they can be very life-changing insights so these life-changing processes of mind heart connection i mean that's your that's your empowerment as an individual they're full spectrum human full spectrum human but you know that's what the show tries to highlight so we encourage folks to take a take a look at it and see that for us this show is a spiritual process because like all spirituality it's it's essentially water on stone so it's a slow process but whatever we output aims to always be of high quality right so spirituality is your life and it's your slow real internal life it's your inner life your real life and this show is a little bit of a glimpse into what's happened to us through our lives and our processes and it happens in a very natural way just like nature grows slowly the show grows slowly and it's very life-changing for us in the process of making it so you know thanks for allowing us to talk about it in that regard we always appreciate that we appreciate your interest and resonance and i know it's totally on your wavelength alan yeah you you you two are definitely some of my favorites and i uh i must also say that um probably in the last couple of of uh months that um most recently this idea that uh the most uh upstream or root issue um that we face is uh the remembrance of the interconnectedness the remembrance of the one and um we ask that question quite a bit now on on the show is what is the most upstream issue that we face i totally agree with you yeah i i think we can solve any problem with our ingenuity and the technology if we understand what the problem really is and you know taking a small sliver or doing geo engineering and you know sucking the thing out of here and it's it's all interconnected and until you understand the connection and in a sense the the curation of all the species and the intelligence behind that you know it's like the the the bees spreading the the pollen and the making the honey and pollinating the flowers and this interspecies symbiosis and cooperation that happens you're gonna fuck it up but if we remember the sacred if we remember our connection to the sacred and we realize we're not really in control right it's it's the egoic separation of not feeling that connection it's like my shorthand is it's like essentially we're like sailboats when you put the sail up and the wind carries you right it's like when we try to do things we're trying to cut through the water we're trying to do this stuff and it's coming from this thing which thinks it's in control but when you let yourself be carried by the force of the intelligent loving nature of reality and you still have to navigate and do things but you're guided you're supported you're you're you're part of something bigger right and there may be hardships but that's part of the path that's part of the sculpting right the things that are happening for you not to you and if we remember that then the times that are coming we can navigate from the heart and we can transform I'm not saying we're going to survive but we can transform and we can understand there's a greater ecology there's a greater meaning we come from somewhere we go from somewhere don't attach to what's here now it's always changing right yeah yeah the dream of life the beautiful dream of life that shows us so much through our process here right everything is a teaching tool and a learning tool so that's that's something to never forget and you know to take it away on yeah positive note I mean I think that so much of this is just about greater processes which again we're being shown as as we're being forced to do things in natural ways that's what I'll say and it's not it's scary in the meantime but it ultimately leads to better things there's no you don't improve unless you struggle you know your growth in life is through your struggle and your hardships so that's what we're being shown we need to do both individually and culturally and societally now it's about his p.
O.
T experience yeah you had oh because you guys did while you were yeah it's funny through each episode we tend to oh yeah it's different for me because rack is an experiential journalist part of the process for both episodes is actually you know taking the sacrament and being on camera and I'm as the director of the show you know I'm here you know helping him off camera and actually filming it but then yes when we have spare downtime after we've essentially wrapped up our responsibility shooting I have had the experiences and so both both episodes I've taken the sacraments and it's it's it's been very synchronistic it's just like we say you are supported through your processes if you find your will in life and follow it it's amazing how much things up until you it doesn't mean it's not struggle it's always struggle life is life is difficult you know the spiritual path is really tough most people don't want to do it and so to be willing to open yourself up to some of these experiences my p.
O.
T experience was beautiful and life changing and very gentle and wonderful and it's very much like an analog to ayahuasca which is apparently very feminine it's very much a masculine guy in energy of the larger ecosystem and you know you're melting into the into the larger ecology of things brings in that unity and that oneness and that esoteric inward empowerment it's empowering it's very empowering and it's it's very educationally uplifting so let me set the scene a bit so after three days of pilgrimage to we recruit of the holy of holly lands and by the way I'd really like to emphasize as well we recruit is endangered again by capitalism again by this egoic separation from understanding the sacredness of the web of life by this Canadian mining company which is like horror of horrors the most sacred land for thousands of years of these people that travel to take the peyote and take it back to their communities it's endangered already and it only grows in certain geographic regions they're mining and they made agreements with the government etc etc then they're like wow we'll just go under the ground we won't go above the ground and the whole you know interrelated being and the the it pollutes and so the the the the witch holes are fighting for the survival of their culture of their communities of their way of being because they don't just take this substance once in a peak experience they use it to mediate their energy all through the year that's why they have to have huge amounts of peyote and one of the drain on the resources so they take it back to the men women and men women and children do this ceremony so you know it's it's it's something which is culturally sanctioned and not just permissible but necessary for their indigenous way of life it helps them connect individually energetically and so we get to we're a cuda and we're doing the filming and it's you know late at night and the maracame don jose they play these violins which is so beautiful and haunting and you know like scratching and annoying at the same time but beautiful highlighted in the episode yeah and and it's again it's not random music it's a certain vibrational frequency within which great spirit speaks through and energetically the vibration is healing and cleansing and so during the day there has been the hunt for the peyote and there's prayers and rituals about how to approach that and then we go off and there's like tumbleweeds and the desert is really full around where a cuda with all the tumbleweeds and bushes and it's hard to look and find anything and so then they go on the hunt and they find the peyote and you know they they dig it up and and they start putting them in bags and they're praying and it's all very sacralized and done in a certain way with respect and they bring back these huge bags like six foot bags you know men women and children like heaps and heaps of bags of peyote and they they're preparing them and getting them ready for the ceremony at night and then you know we take them together the men the women and the children little bits little ones and for me I kept saying it was like a communal prayer it was like one of the only times you might go to a church in a building structure in the judo christianic sort of architecture but you're in nature you've got the incredible saturated starry sky beaming down to you and shooting stars and you've got the freezing coldness and the feeling of being alive you've got the fire which they've lit and we've gone through days of pilgrimage at the sacred water sites blessing the water that gives life and life blessing the land you know the open air and the fire and the fire we've done um limpias and healings and cleansings and making these little knots of their prayers to get rid of any sins especially around sexual energy or any misconduct to clean yourself to be ready enough to receive and interact with the vibrational spirit of peyote you don't just eat it right you have to approach it in a sacred way and we had the full permission of don jose and america and the tribe to do so and so then we ingest the medicine with great reverence and gratitude and um for me and then i i want niles to comment more as well because here's this a great ability we noticed in episode one coming from hollywood and special effects and the audio visual side of things with technicians to describe the interior visionary scapes with this language which makes it digestible and understandable so you know for me i only had i must say it was like third day no sleep out in the middle of nowhere trying to hold it together this was a the most demanding shoot i've ever done in my life um and i just took one medium-sized pot and i laid out with the you know around the fire and things and wanted to tune into the experience and again you know sometimes this happens to me with ayahuasca as well it's not necessarily visionary on that but it is hard opening and that bit where there are no barriers there's no armoring there's no separation my heart is open and feeling and connecting to the men women and children in the song and i felt like it was a communal prayer that we were singing what we were feeling and what we were feeling was connection to the mother and the planet and each person was like a note in the song yeah right and when you're feeling it you're riding the rhythms and the waves and it's real and you're getting it because your your aperture and your bandwidth expands and you're not thinking it you're receiving the signal and so it was like this incredibly sacred beautiful communal prayer that we did as a community for ourselves for the planet for patrima and for great spirit and it was it was just a real sacralizing game changer for me in the way i actually see shamanism beyond just even the plant medicines in the community in the relationships in the sacrifice and in the spirituality well with what you just said and the elements you know giving that to you you're not going to want to commodify them very much are you then like compared to what our culture does and to just get you know a little controversial and funny about that i was recently in alabama at a wedding at a mega church little did i know it would be at a mega church and i'm at this place thinking this is just a completely despiritualized place this is a very hierarchical political patriarchal you know very political and like something that has had essentially been despiritualized because it's just a big money-making machine versus being in somewhere like warakuta through this indigenous tribal experience of a true shamanic spiritual experience that unions you with nature's greatest ecology right so you're taking in the sacrament that then gives you an insight as to expansion of what warakuta mexico looks like from the five senses you know you can see it you can feel it you can touch it but then the peyote experience is kind of uploading you to the larger ecology of it which has a completely different fabric to it and my experience was not only yes hard opening where you melt into the all of it you see the warakuta jungle in this kind of very hyper accentuated you know trong landscape of this little these little puppet figures of the the cactuses come alive and are shimmering and moving and giving insights and each branch of them is a spirit that's melting onto you and giving you this kind of fractal holography of a bleed through of information and data right and all this stuff is coming from nature so again when you have these wonderful hard opening mind expanding consciousness expanding experiences through a true eucharist not just some cold cup that has some apparently exoteric half-truth of a body of maybe what was once a corporeal being you're actually seeing a real direct connection with nature's spiritual teachings nature is the spiritual teacher who happens to be just distributing this through a mesh network of yes plants and animals and other ways that you can do it through pranayama breathing meditation other ways that you can access it of course what's so beautiful about shamanism is the is how fast things can be experienced and how life-changing things can be in one night that's a beautiful thing and that makes you less controllable less on puppet strings more empowered which is kind of terrifying to untruth ways of doing things right so as we move from truth to untruth that's something that i highlight through an experience that is just so cherishing and all my shamanic experiences that have come through this primary primarily through the show in other ways and i think we all feel this way are you take with them and you cherish them forever and they're very life-changing and you use them in your larger spiritual journey as stepping stones along the way to better your life yeah oh you can come with us next episode yeah it'd be fun to have you man you know we'd always like to yes i would adore that and just like this just like this wow yeah i would adore that just like this show you know we would do these we would do these whether or not we were documenting them or not so i'd like to have this conversation with you whether or not it's being recorded you know same with the show it's like we do it anyway and it's nice because it obviously like i mentioned at the beginning it utilizes our skill set and we do make something that is a nice piece of our portfolio but um it's it's the experience of it it's the process of doing it that is the journey you know life's about the journey and well one last thing i'd like to say as well that global shamanic resurgence phrase you know resurgence was chosen specifically because it's not new right it's come before yeah but there is this momentum now in what we call the west or the modern world to remember the sacred connection with nature and to remember the intelligence and the love and and the what it's all about and what we're in and previous cultures have had this you know we talked a little bit at the start about indigenous tribal cultures and poor and all this stuff it's like that's what we've done to them right you know previous cultures on the earth have been shamanic cultures which used entheogens there's the the city of shavin which was a in south america which was a shamanic culture which used potentially dmt snuffs and san Pedro cactus and uh probably ayahuasca and there's every culture like great grand civilizations you know all through south america i listened to some podcast recently it was like in the 1500s when some of the first spanish explorers went through they reported cities of gold up and down the amazon and they found out with um lidar with the new um laser technology to see through the jungles they found like you know 700 cities or the remnants and they say they were up to like 70 000 people each so there have been grand civilizations that have existed that have existed in and with nature even in the city schematic with an entheogenic component that enables them to connect to nature and they we don't have to necessarily give up anything except our expectations right we don't have to give up like going back to the jungles or going back to nature and becoming cavemen no one's saying that but there's a potential through the healing of the mediation of plant medicines and the shamanic resurgence to remember who and what we really are to remember the connection to the planet and to take an organic holistic um life-affirming way to approach the world and i'm seeing this a lot of the new paradigm stuff all the you know um uh renewable technologies the solar the wind you know all the ways that we can capture the energy that's already there to fuel our civilization in healthy clean you know zero emission ways um and we can build a galactic civilization alan again as these ones used to have and and i think that this this global shamanic resurgence thing it's not it's it's it's nothing small it's a great endeavor but it's something which is being catalyzed by larger forces and it's about that unification so imagine 100 years from now we're all living in a jungle that covers the planet we're all living in in in um abundance and we're all living in love and community with a technology that's embedded into the ecology and as part of the ecology and you know it has survived the transformation of the sixth great species extinction and become something new that it was always within it to be that goes through those cycles of time and has come out the other side so that that's why i believe the resurgence is nothing new um but it has an energetic impetuous and uh catalyzation to it which is really necessary at this time in in in species evolution yeah speaking of evolution and de-evolution it seems like you know larger energetic and galactic forces forcing us to go through spiritual processes may be leading us to ways of living more authentically through consciousness expansion right and we see aspects of society which sometimes feels like most people seem to be evolving and maybe those they will eventually you know recede into the forgotten shadows of time and through cycles of time we see civilizations rise and fall that are much more conscious societies right and we look at things from the past that obviously had technologies that we don't have now such as great relics that were built in very amazing magical ways and it shows societies that were much more expanded in their ways of living and being and acting and how they found harmony within themselves and their larger ecology and connectedness with everything so that those those i look at something like you know the pyramids as as proof that society has has been around the blocks for a long time and we've done things in very interesting ways and have you had graham hancock on the show because you really should oh my god he's amazing ancient civilization we've got him and there's a lot of proof out there that's what i mentioned this is actually actually one of the things that when you mentioned it it's um it's come up a lot on on the program now is that um this species amnesia um we uh uh have we think that all of the existing um wisdom that we have from the last 500 years post enlightenment and industrial revolution today is 0.
1 of all history this 99.
9 percent um has a lot that can teach us and one of the great problems of our time is that we can't actually do the archaeology fast enough as the artifacts are disintegrating so we need to um create a massive uh global task force on archaeology in specific places especially the fertile crescent the amazon all of these uh coastal cliff regions as well around the planet to uncover i mean there's if you follow archaeology as one of your news trends instead of the conditions instead of that nastiness of the of the of the fighting of the two polarized sides that stuff's killing you but if you follow archaeology as one of your new sources the amount of discoveries that are happening every day paradigms being rewritten rewritten as as we go and so that's one of the most important things is when you you know when you look up at the cosmos the same thing is happening where we are not mapping continuously our cosmos and therefore we're not doing the cosmic archaeology where if we go through supernovas in different places through the cosmos we are not actually able to capture that moment and log it and understand it happening in that area so it's very similar with our species as well of discovering these moments of our amnesia but this entire conversation i think as well as these other most profound guests and conversations that we have on the program all point to the interconnectedness they all point to non-separation they all point to the one and they all point to that with to these wisdoms that come from this 99.
9 percent of time pre-enlightenment industrial revolution where by understanding those wisdoms that we can architect a more prosperous isn't it ironic they call it the enlightenment i mean having had enlightenment experiences i'm like you know the the mechanistic reductionist is success of rising civilization up out of poverty and all the things to a certain degree but that's not enlightenment you know that's mechanistic success uh but i think enlightenment is really coming it's still coming it comes and it goes yeah hopefully it's coming back this is the most beautiful i've never ever felt anything more beautiful than what we are all experiencing oh great it's um it's really come with us represent huh huh yeah i love you guys both so much um and i mean this reality this um this creation is just and so that is uh it's a miracle it's a gift that's why they call it the present right um but it is it's like we get desensitized we wake up here's the thing we go to work you know and i've seen you i've seen you grow over the course of many episodes and thank you for having us back and i see you on the facebook feeds and and your um your language and your perception and what you choose to give attention to has a depth to it that it didn't say two years ago when i first came on the show and so you know before we started we got a little drop in a little breathing exercise and as you said it's like savoring each moment the awareness of awareness is what we're really cultivating over many lifetimes and if we can become aware enough to not take it personally to not attach to not have a version or grasping to be the ing that is great then i think we've got it and the enlightenment will come yeah oh my gosh wow powerful adore you both thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you i love our show again i love you guys it's coming it's coming trust me it's coming also please please show these one more time so these are bead artworks they they do um let's do racks first they do little figures but they also make the armbands so here's the thing each bead is individually placed into the armband in this instance and theoretically each bead what they're doing is a meditation and a prayer so this represents some of the energy signature patterns that you can see for instance on your bead is a meditation and a prayer yeah because the process of doing it is like a meditation but it's bringing them into mindfulness yeah and it's like a prayer and it's anchoring on the outside for others to see what's going on and what's going on and it's anchoring on the outside for others to see what they see on the inside with their sacrament of the piote and it's another beautiful example of somebody making something cottage industry style from a creative standpoint right it's like you're not making this by some massive centralized hierarchical top-down structure making it from a like little woman in the village who makes beautiful art so so much of reality and the ways of getting back to authentic authenticity are from the bottom up you know from grassroots ways yes right so beautiful so i know you're asking the the show will be out in the spring episode two episode two spring 2020 again watch episode one of shams of the global village the link is in the bio below if you haven't seen it yet go watch it we are so grateful that you tuned into this conversation thank you very much everyone greatly appreciate you have more conversations with your friends families co-workers people online about the subjects that niles and rack talked about in this episode with us please please please drop into those states of interconnectedness of love drop in more together into the one and catalyze that through even the most simple things like the breath and the water and the food the most simple ones also support the work that niles and rack do you can find the links below to support them and the work as well again it's very important to support the artists the entrepreneurs the spiritual leaders and your communities and around the world that you believe in and support them support them financially even with the small cup of coffee or meal per month helps them if around the world we did that for the subscribers that tune into content we could catalyze the awakening faster so do support them financially as well support the ones also in your communities you'll find our links below to our show as well paypal patreon crypto consider all those links are below and go and build that future that our hearts all know is possible we love you very much thank you for tuning in we'll see you soon
