A Master Shaman's Guide To Ayahuasca - Hamilton Souther | Modern Wisdom Podcast 247

Hamilton Souther is a Master Ayahuasca Shaman. Psychedelics are the cool kid on the block in 2020, from plant medicine holidays to recreational DMT trips. Today we get to learn from a 20 year veteran of over 4000 ceremonies. Expect to learn what it's like to learn shamanism from the greatest masters in history, why plants have a place in a medicalised modern world, what sort of life a full time shaman lives in the jungle, Hamilton's full length description of how plant medicines work and much more... Sponsor: Get a 21 Day Free Trial to a supercharged calendar at https://woven.com/podcast/wisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Follow Hamilton on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/hamiltonsouther Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #ayahuasca #plantmedicine #hamiltonsouther - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  To someone who's never taken ayahuasca, how would you describe the experience?

• 0:04Speaker 01

  Oh, that's a really good question. I would describe it as could be literally nothing, and you have to be prepared for that and not get frustrated if it's literally nothing. And then it could be literally within minutes of having consumed it, the most intense, most visionary, fastest moving, outside of the box, out of body experience that you could possibly ever imagine. And you have to be prepared for that as well.

• 0:36Chris Williamson?

  When people ask you what you do, what's your answer?

• 0:42Speaker 01

  I tell them I do a lot of different things. Mostly, I just say that I try to help people, advise people, guide people. But really, I'm an entrepreneur and an inventor, and a leader for humanitarianism and really the good of all. We focus our work really around positivity and unconditional love for humanity. We believe in a core fundamental principle that everyone is a unique and inspired miracle created by the universe itself in a truly scientifically biological way, and also in not explainable mystical extraordinary consciousness way. And that those are converged in us ourselves. And so through the different kinds of projects that I work on,

• 1:27Speaker 01

  the goal is always to have a positive outreach and ultimate support. I'm well known for working in the space of Amazonian shamanism and Amazonian plant medicine, as well as the different consciousness arts. And so I'm most noted for that. But I'm also very interested in technology and new kinds of technology, blockchain technology, and cutting edge tech projects and things like that. So they're sort of the ancestral and what's coming into the future. And I really love the idea of a much larger timeline. I like to think of things millions and millions of years ago and the millions of years to come. And so I kind of find myself in the middle of that

• 2:10Speaker 01

  and trying to make as most positive impact as we can while we're here alive.

• 2:14Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you're crossing all of the streams there, right? Going from the Amazonian traditional shamanic medicine right up to blockchain.

• 2:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I think what people don't understand is that shamans were the original technology. Like, a lot of people don't know that the buffalo drum, you know, just the circular buffalo drum, and just dum dum dum dum dum dum, played at 210 beats per minute, creates theta binaural beats. So shamans 60,000 years ago were creating theta binaural beats, like you'll now find on YouTube. And they were sitting around just like learning how to trance. That's tech. It's not very like, it's not like crazy, complex chips and silicon chip tech. It's pretty simple tech, but it was doing the same thing to consciousness in the brain. And then I think, well, the shamans were there as like original scientists. They were eating the berries that no one else would eat, and some of them died.

• 3:04Speaker 01

  And then some of them ate them and didn't die and had this huge mind-opening experience and went, whoa, language. You know, we can communicate with so much more. So they were sort of like, you know, deep in tech before, I think, you know, whatever's happened in the last couple thousand years of civilization kind of made shamanism go underground and institutions become really, really more powerful than tribes. But the shamans have always been involved in ultimately their own kinds of technology. And I always thought of Amazonian plant shamanism as a kind of technology. They, they had this, the shamans had this amazing means of not only communicating with the plants, which is what a lot of our technology recently has been about.

• 3:47Speaker 01

  It's about tech, you know, these communicative evolutions. They had the ability to directly communicate with plants, which, you know, like, growing up, you heard of some people who hugged trees and that was kind of weird, or you heard of some people that like in their garden talked to their plants and the plants grew better and stuff. But these guys literally would say they were talking to the plants. So I was like, okay, as an anthropologist, that was like mind-blowing. Like, what do you mean you're talking to the plant and the plant can talk back? You know, so that to me seemed like a communicative technology. And then they could also heal people with that, which to me seemed like an even more amazing understanding of medicine. And in my early twenties, I was enthralled with

• 4:28Speaker 01

  Uh, this idea that there were people who still were alive, who had ancient knowledge, and that they knew of medicines that were intermixed with mysticism. And somehow that knowledge had been passed down through thousands of years without being corrupted by the expansion of Western civilization and still somehow could possibly exist in the world. Like, I was enthralled with that idea. And so I met some people in the, in deep in the Amazon forest who represented these technologies. And so I thought it's kind of natural that, uh, you know, they kind of go hand in hand. But most people don't think of it that way.

• 5:07Chris Williamson?

  No, not at all. What is the current state of the shaman and tribe world at the moment? You know, when I think about that and most people as well, I'm going to presume we think of indigenous, prehistoric times, you know, before we have the 21st century and all of the accoutrements that have come along with it. What's the current setup? Are there still many shamans around? Are there many tribes around that are doing this sort of practice?

• 5:33Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, the, all the tribes have shamans and the practices have continued. Uh, you know, I think that people in general, whether Western or indigenous, have found that, uh, the just mass production of Western industrialization makes a whole bunch of really interesting products and things that they like to have. So you see a lot of indigenous people with earbuds and stuff, you know? So, you know, it's, it's, you know, they wear Western clothes on sometimes because it's just easier than the other kind of clothes, you know, et cetera. You see that, but it hasn't changed very much inside the mind of the, the indigenous people in terms of their, their mysticism and their belief systems.

• 6:12Speaker 01

  Their, uh, you know, their deep core traditions have persevered and their understanding of medicine and shamanism. So all the tribes have shamans and then every town has different kinds of spiritual practitioners all along the Amazon River Basin. So literally thousands upon thousands upon thousands of practitioners.

• 6:31Chris Williamson?

  How would you define the culture? Or you, you mentioned about kind of the internal spiritual, uh, thread. How would you define that?

• 6:42Speaker 01

  I think the fundamental just difference is that there's there isn't a separation between life and nature, whereas it seems like in the Western mindset, there's been a really clear separation of what is this urban suburbia and then what is nature? And nature has been sort of relegated to national parks and things like that, and people think they go out to nature. And the indigenous people live in nature, so their home is made of nature. And nature is literally outside and they get their food from nature. And so they're part and parcel with nature and they live in balance with that nature and in a relative state of harmony with that nature. I wouldn't say it's totally harmonious because some aspects of it can be rather scary, you

• 7:24Speaker 01

  know, when you live in a place where you realize you still are part of the food chain. So if you know that you live in a place where there are animals that can eat you, it kind of changes your mindset a little bit, you know? But other than that, that's, I think, really the the the big difference is that they just haven't separated from nature and that they believe nature is alive. And they roughly translate the term spirit to that, although I think it has a vast difference in meaning to that of Western culture. I think when they're talking about spirit, they're talking about life force, which is a scientifically measurable concept and understanding. They say that tree has spirit and they mean that tree is alive. And they say that jaguar has spirit, that jaguar is alive.

• 8:09Speaker 01

  You have spirit, you're alive. They're not they're not creating some cartoonish imagery in their mind or some ghost story or something like that. I think it's actually much more grounded in what we would think of as like energetic physics than the way Westerners typically treat it. It's just sort of like there's a big mystery out there and it's this forest and the forest is literally filled with that mystery. And if you live out there far enough away from Western civilization long enough, you will meet that mystery. And the forest, you will realize, is alive and is listening in many different ways. And that is quite a wild experience to live.

• 8:48Chris Williamson?

  I bet it is. It's interesting to think about. The distinction you made there to do with nature and I'm right in saying that jungles are the most biodiverse places on the planet, right? Like the highest

• 9:01Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 9:01Chris Williamson?

  Volume of species of all animals, the biggest diversity you're going to get is going to be in that. So it doesn't really sound that surprising that the people who live in that environment would feel so much more immersed, so much more at one with nature and nature to be such a larger part of their life. And you're totally correct. The, you know, there's tons, millions and millions of people, some of whom will be listening, who, for whom that tree at the corner of the street is the like end point of nature that they're going to get to see perhaps for this week. They get in the car, drive to work, office block, paved street, gray skies, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, it doesn't surprise me that we have different modes of thinking when the environments that have spawned that thinking are so disparate.

• 9:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I completely agree with that, that idea, you know, the Western concepts of, of nature are just, you know, they're just different in that sense. And when you live in a place where you're hearing nature literally all the time, at night, the Amazon is alive and it is loud. It is symphonic.

• 10:05Chris Williamson?

  Is it really?

• 10:06Speaker 01

  You're hearing, oh yeah, I mean, it is literally symphonic. You hear, uh, literally tens of thousands of species of animals making different kinds of sounds collectively. And when you get into the visionary ceremonies, one of the most amazing things that can happen is that the, the shaman actually know how to sync with the nature and get the nature to start to play with them like a big band. So you'll have a shaman there with just a rattle and I'm not kidding, all of a sudden the cicadas will take on syncopated rhythms, the owls will start to hoot right at the right time, the frogs will croak, right? Like, like as part and parcel of what's going on. The shaman just looks at you like, why you don't know what's going on, right? Kind of like totally normal. Like it's just been

• 10:49Speaker 01

  completely normalized for them. And Westerners' minds are just going like, you know, like, like a brain splatter everywhere about that, you know? It's like such a funny, funny thing to see, but it's just so true. So when you live in that place where nature is just part of literally everything that you're doing. Uh, not a store, right? It's not a store that's part of everything that you're doing. It's nature that's part of everything that you're doing. Uh, it's really easy to experience it that way and its diversity and in its understanding of life. And, and it has so much energy, uh, you know, in the sense of just that much sound. And I think of like what a rock concert is and how, or like an EDM festival and how much energy is going to making that sound. And I think about the forest and I think it's making more sound.

• 11:32Speaker 01

  It's making more energy than that huge, you know, EDM festival all the time, just by itself. That is what they call the force of nature or the force of spirit. And it's, uh, it's truly palpable when you're there and you're in it, you know, you feel it, you hear it, you experience it.

• 11:48Chris Williamson?

  I wonder what it would be like for some of the people who are indigenous to that environment to come and live in the silence, the relative silence of sort of lower suburban, western society. If they're used to such noise levels and then you were to bring them into a quiet street in the, in the UK or in Midwest of the US or something like that, I, I wonder what they would make of that.

• 12:13Speaker 01

  I think it'd be scary. I think it'd be the flip opposite of what happens when you take somebody else down there. I think it literally would be scary for them. Uh, I do know a number of people who've moved from the jungle out to other areas. And then it's often that they come back and they just don't relate. Like the culture shock is so great. They're just like, nah, I think I'm going to go back to that.

• 12:34Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. I want the, I want the symphony of different insects, if that's all right, please.

• 12:38Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly. Yeah.

• 12:41Chris Williamson?

  So we've, we've talked-

• 12:42Speaker 01

  I think that's really the big difference.

• 12:43Chris Williamson?

  We've spoken about the plant medicine. We've danced around it so far. Take us through what we need to know about it. What is it?

• 12:51Speaker 01

  Uh, God, it's, it's diverse. It's unbelievably diverse. It's found all around the world. There's all different kinds of plants that have a psychoactive capacity associated with them. Some of them that are unbelievably mild. Uh, most people interact with these plants on a daily basis in the form of some kind of tea or coffee. Uh, you know, it's, it's, that's what it is. It's a plant that has an ability to affect- The psychological state or the state of consciousness that you're in. And then there are some that are just unbelievably extreme. And so the panorama that you get is just, you know, super vast. And then you get all the way to the point of what are considered sort of the master teacher plants.

• 13:32Speaker 01

  And they're the ones that most people know about, such as like ayahuasca, San Pedro, watuma, peyote, iboga, towe, which are kind of brugmansia datura. Some of them are safer, some of them are unbelievably dangerous. You know, there's all different kinds of mushrooms and things that people have heard about that create these psychedelic states or visionary states. And, um, you know, I think people around the world have been utilizing these kinds of plants since the origin of time. I think it's part of the natural evolution, which is why the brain has receptors for these chemicals in them in its own right. Otherwise, there would be no way to have an experience with these plants. But the plants have certain kinds of compounds in them that when in the brain

• 14:17Speaker 01

  and when being metabolized by the body creates a very altered state of consciousness. And then, uh, people, you know, often refer to that as like tripping, you know, or something like that. But that's very, uh, unguided and undirected. And then you get all the way to like Amazonian plant medicine, where there are people who've actually learned how to guide and direct the states of consciousness that people go through in those ceremonies when they have ingested those kinds of plants, really for the purpose of healing or for the purpose of exploration and transformation. So it's for healing or learning and the kinds of healing, uh, has been now documented over the last 20, 30 years as being unbelievably vast and, uh, really important.

• 14:59Speaker 01

  From depression to anxiety disorders, PTSD, um, all different kinds of traumatic events from the past that people have healed, uh, from as benign as just the difficulties of growing up, all the way to truly incurable, uh, diagnosed, you know, by psychologists and psychiatrists illnesses that these plant medicines have been able to ultimately treat. And, uh, in the indigenous sense, there's a person who's called a shaman or a medic. Vegetalista, which means doctor of plants. And they know how to guide that experience. And they do so through sound and through the altered state of consciousness that they've learned how to be a part of. So it's a slightly different kind of medicine than you experience

• 15:43Speaker 01

  from a Western doctor who sort of gives you a prescription and says, here, go take these pills. In this case, the doctor takes the medicine with you. So you guys sit down together and you both tip back the cup of tea or whatever it is that you guys are using to do this kind of healing ceremony. And then you go into an altered state of consciousness that has a real purpose. And the purpose of the altered state of consciousness is to ultimately take you into a personal recognition that you have transcended the illness. You have transcended whatever it is that was afflicting you and actually now has created a state of healing. And on the other side of that journey, you come out of it transformed and or healed.

• 16:23Chris Williamson?

  And you're trained as one of these plant doctors?

• 16:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, I started my training in my early twenties. I was 23 years old when I started training and now I'm 42. So I've been practicing for the last 19 years. It's been a wild ride, I have to say.

• 16:39Chris Williamson?

  But it has, yeah.

• 16:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, it wasn't what I was thinking when I was growing up in American suburbia, that this would ultimately sort of be my destiny. But I feel truly blessed to have been invited into an indigenous lineage and ultimately given the opportunity to go through apprenticeship and to learn what these medicines are and can do. Like I said, I was really drawn and really wished that there could be something more to this idea of mysticism and knowledge. And I was able to find it in the Amazon through these kinds of plant medicine experiences and then ultimately help impart that to really thousands of people from around the world. So I created a center called Blue Morpho.

• 17:23Speaker 01

  And Blue Morpho was one of the first centers in the world dedicated to Amazonian shamanism and Amazonian plant medicine in a traditional indigenous way. And we became globally recognized after a number

• 17:36Speaker 01

  A number of people were healed from what were considered incurable illnesses. And lots of publications happened about us in the mid, early 2000s. And then from there, people came from all over the world and they got to be introduced to this kind of medicine. And then also have the experiences of the ceremonies with us. And it's been an incredible joy really to be able to work with people from all over the world. We've had people from over 120 countries visit us. And you know, that was something that I never thought would happen when we first started out. And I think really the community that's formed is the most impactful part of it out of all of it for me. That people really did receive a tremendous amount of benefit from their experiences with us in the vast majority.

• 18:18Speaker 01

  And that tremendously incredible relationships were formed through that work.

• 18:22Chris Williamson?

  I know that you've gone online, you guys, like everyone this year has had to pivot. Even the plant medicine isn't free from the effects of a pandemic sadly. But where are you based when you're usually in person? Where are you guys based?

• 18:37Speaker 01

  Typically in person, we're based in the Amazon out of the city of Iquitos in northeastern part of Peru. But now we have gone online. We've been online though, interestingly enough, since 2014. So we, we beat the curve to the pandemic.

• 18:52Chris Williamson?

  Covid ready.

• 18:53Speaker 01

  Already interested in.

• 18:54Chris Williamson?

  Covid ready.

• 18:54Speaker 01

  We're covid ready. Yeah, we were interested in streaming and we had our own streaming channels before YouTube and Facebook had live streaming as part of their features. So we were really interested in tech. I got interested in tech from the side of really being asked questions by a whole bunch of tech people that were coming down to our lodge. So people would come down and spend anywhere from a week to nine days with us. And many of them came from the tech sector. And so I would ask them what they would do, they would ask me what I would do. And we'd have these incredibly in-depth conversations about technology and I found it fascinating. And so when streaming came around, I thought it was a really interesting idea about how to be able to share these practices. Where you could really reach out to people instead of them having to come to you.

• 19:37Speaker 01

  You know, it's quite a, quite a commitment and a trek to come to our part of the Amazon to be able to experience this in its native setting. And there were also lots of practices that. That weren't specifically dedicated to psychoactive plants that could also be shared that had tremendous value. And those could be shared all over the world. There was no question of legality around the plants that were being used, et cetera. And so I was really interested in being able to share that through technology and through streaming. So we've been streaming since 2014. And we made this pivot to really put the entirety of our work online during the time of COVID. The shutdown has been impressive.

• 20:12Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I bet. So you've said that you've done nineteen years of this particular practice. Have you got any idea how many ayahuasca and plant medicine ceremonies you yourself have done?

• 20:28Speaker 01

  Yes and no. It has to be sort of an approximation because I lost track, but well over four thousand.

• 20:34Chris Williamson?

  Four thousand?

• 20:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, oh, definitely over four thousand.

• 20:40Speaker 01

  But I, you know, you stop counting after the first couple thousand, you know, so.

• 20:46Chris Williamson?

  That's insane.

• 20:47Speaker 01

  I was highly dedicated and highly motivated. I really, really enjoyed the work. And by that, I mean like literally professional ceremonies, not just, you know, sitting by yourself, et cetera. This is with people where I was facilitating with other master shamans or myself facilitating alone. But over four thousand with, you know, with other people where we were performing the healing arts and the mystic arts together.

• 21:12Chris Williamson?

  Wow, that's insane. That's over a ten year, so over your full career, that would be one every, what? Three to four days? It would be a ceremony about once every three to four days?

• 21:25Speaker 01

  Correct. Yeah, we didn't really practice that way, though. I mean, it wasn't spaced out like that. We had practiced in groups of ceremonies. So we would often do nine ceremonies in a row. For instance, I've participated in eight ceremonies in the last nine nights. So I facilitated literally eight ceremonies in the last nine nights.

• 21:44Speaker 01

  Just for other people that have contacted us, you know, looking for different kinds of healing. Through the Trinity Retreats that we're doing online, we do three ceremonies in a row. So, you know, they get kind of bunched together and then you take a little time off and then you do more and then you take time off. And training was extensive, you know, I trained for thirteen years. And when I was training, we would participate anywhere from nine nights in a row up to forty nights in a row.

• 22:14Speaker 01

  So you know, you'd pack in a lot of ceremonies in a very short period of time. And then you would take a little bit of time off, let things settle. You know, sanity and groundedness is really important through that level of practice. And so you need to be really, really careful with what you're doing. In terms of that, there's a lot of restrictions. There's a lot of things you do to make sure that you're staying sane and safe during that kind of level of training. It would be no different to that of anyone else who's doing something very extreme, like extreme sports athletes or ultra-thoners, et cetera, that are, you know, pushing the envelope, but knowing how to do that and progressing. And so that's not something that you start out as.

• 22:55Speaker 01

  You know, when I started, I thought just surviving one ceremony was a really big deal. That was like unbelievably big deal. But yeah, over the years, they amassed, they amassed a number, you know, again.

• 23:07Chris Williamson?

  That number's around about 4,000, which is just terrifying. And the thing is as well, within ayahuasca ceremony, it's, you were not just talking about half an hour in and out here, we're talking about the majority of the day, right?

• 23:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's really at nighttime, so evening to night. And you could kind of just think of it as anywhere from three to eight hours. So each ceremony would be relatively within that timeframe. So the number of hours is really quite extensive that you're in that state. It's a dedication. You really dedicate to that period of time. And it's really sacred. It's also very enjoyable too, if you like it, you know, like any other kind of activity. If you really like something, it's easy to spend time in it. But it's not like your 15 minute meditation. You know, it really is kind of a bigger commitment than that. And like I said, anywhere from three to eight hours is normal.

• 24:02Speaker 01

  And then there are the kinds of ceremonies that go much, much longer than that. So I have participated in ceremonies that literally go on for days. And so that's quite another kind of experience in its own right as well.

• 24:15Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I bet it is. Can you talk about the ingredients that you put together to make ayahuasca and how those combine to actually work?

• 24:22Speaker 01

  Sure, ayahuasca is a tea. It's really basic. There's really two principal main ingredients in our part of the Amazon that gets used. One is a vine that's named ayahuasca, and I don't know, that's its name, but it's a vine. You just kind of see it growing there, like many vines in the Amazon. The vines kind of tie the whole Amazon together. You rarely see a tree without vines interconnecting it to another tree. There are just vines all over the place, and many of them have medicinal properties associated with them. There are vines for diabetes, there are vines for different kinds of arthritis, there are vines for different kinds of cold, you know, kind of like your common cold and flu and stuff like that,

• 25:05Speaker 01

  and it happens to be ayahuasca. And when you mix ayahuasca with this leaf called chakruna, it's a relative of the coffee family, comes from a kind of bushy tree that grows in the shade. You take the leaf and the vine and you put it together and you get ayahuasca. That combination is incredibly visionary, incredibly potent, and it's a mixture of a number of MAOI inhibitors that inhibit an enzyme in the stomach that allows for the digestion and the uptake of dimethyltryptamine that comes from the chakruna into the brain. Otherwise, the stomach would just break it down and you wouldn't have any experience

• 25:49Speaker 01

  at all. So, the combination of the vine plus the chakruna leaves allows for the body to absorb by inhibiting this enzyme in the stomach, and then you have a much longer experience than what people know of as like a DMT trip. It lasts, like I said, anywhere from three to eight hours, sometimes 13, 16 hours, and the longest I've seen is a few days, but those are in very rare cases, and usually very specific reasons of the person and why they would have that experience. But, most people are in and out within three to six hours of the experience, and those are the two main ingredients. And then, after that, the shaman, depending on the kinds of plants they work with, can use a number of different

• 26:31Speaker 01

  admixtures, and there is really not just one recipe of ayahuasca. So, in our lineage, we can use anywhere from seven to 14 other plants that can be added to the ayahuasca as well, and they're just added to give it more strength. Not in the sense to make it more potent. It's actually the opposite. It's to make you stronger and more capable of handling the experience. And so those are typically different kinds of tree barks that we work with that come from a whole segment of shamanism that's called palero shamanism or tree shamanism. And then also from Sanango and the Sanangeros, which is Sanango Bay shamanism. The shamanism in the Amazon is broken down based on the different kinds of medicinal plants that you're working with and what you've trained with.

• 27:16Speaker 01

  And so there are many specialties. And our lineage, we're trained in five specialties, different kinds of visionary plants. And so they kind of all get intercombined into the ayahuasca that our lineage uses so that we can then pull from those different aspects of the practice to be supportive and helpful in the ceremony for all the different variety of reasons you would you would see in an ayahuasca ceremony.

• 27:42Chris Williamson?

  Thirteen years out of nineteen years spent training-ish, you said.

• 27:46Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 27:46Chris Williamson?

  During that time, what was the majority of the training trying to cultivate? Is it focusing on your ability to physically construct the right liquid and understand how to work with the materials? Is it more the astral side where you're trying to guide the experience? Is it the music? How was your time split?

• 28:08Speaker 01

  The plant side of it is really not so focused on the visionary plants themselves, but literally hundreds of medicinal plants that are in the Amazon. And it's just kind of a sad aspect of what's happened over the years with this Western interest in just ayahuasca and those experiences, that they've kind of missed the point of really, what is this biopharmacology of the Amazon? So from sort of the botany side of it, there's literally within a couple of hectares of Amazon, hundreds of medicinal plants that have unbelievably amazing curative properties. Right? But you you learn about them not in your Western educated sort of teacher

• 28:52Speaker 01

  with a whiteboard or chalkboard way, teaching you, this is the plant, that's the plant. On the contrary, you go into trance and into vision in the ayahuasca ceremonies and the shamans. Chant the energy and the healing properties of the other kinds of plants. And then in your vision, you see where they are in the forest. And they teach you about the plants through the visions themselves, which is a completely otherworldly concept of education. Which is hard to even believe that it could be possible, that you could be entranced, that another shaman could be there next to you chanting, and that they could be through that imparting the wisdom and knowledge of lots of different kinds of plants and its uses. But literally, you could be in your vision, you know, having the ceremony take place

• 29:37Speaker 01

  at night. But in your vision, it's daytime, you're in the forest, you're standing there with, next to the shaman. The shaman is showing you a plant, it's showing you the leaves, it's showing you how to use the leaves, it's showing you how to prepare the leaves, all within the vision itself, within the ceremony. And the next day, you could walk out into the forest, literally into that location, and find that plant. And so, that's sort of the nature of apprenticeship. And you spend most of your time learning about the plants through the ceremonies themselves. So you do a process of diets, which they call dieta, which just means diets. And that's a time where you drink or consume teas or different kinds of elixirs made out of lots of different kinds of medicinal plants, most of which, like I say, are not psychoactive.

• 30:21Speaker 01

  Most of them are, just like if you made mint tea, and you're having a cup of mint tea, just simple as that. And you learn how to work with the plant that way through these diets. You follow extensive restrictions of behavior. There's sexual abstinence, abstinence from alcoholic beverages, abstinence from spicy foods, there's a very limited diet you're allowed to eat during that period of time, etc. And you go through these dietas, and then during that time, you also participate in visionary ceremonies, depending on the plants that you're training with and that you're working with. And that's really how you spend your time. And so, you do these dietas. The dietas last anywhere from six days to nine days to 15 days.

• 31:04Speaker 01

  In some traditions, it's a month long, three months long, six months long, or even a year long at a time of training. And it is literally 24 hours a day. You're said to be taught in the visionary space and in the dream time. And... That's kind of how you spend your time. In our case, training for me was spent between foraging for food and going to the agricultural plots. We lived off of the land itself. You had go out in canoes and go fishing. You would, you know, collect food during the day, or you would do other kinds of mending or building, or the creating of the tools that you needed. It was, you know, very rudimentary life. Where I lived, there were very few inhabitants.

• 31:45Speaker 01

  There were about maybe 50 to 60 people in total, and for miles and miles and miles of jungle where I lived. And so you spend a lot of time just kind of foraging and being part of nature and interacting with nature. And then the rest of the time is spent in ceremonies as part of the dietas.

• 32:03Chris Williamson?

  You mentioned that there's been this recent influx of Western tourists, I suppose, wanting to come and do, I don't know what you call it. It's kind of like a psycho holiday, psychonaut holiday of one of one kind or another. And that perhaps jaded some people's opinions and also narrowed the focus that we're aware of. Certainly, I think ayahuasca is the most famous of plant medicines. But you're right, there's magic mushrooms and LSD and other psychedelic compounds that we can get natural and obviously synthesized.

• 32:35Chris Williamson?

  How important is it for people to use the ayahuasca in the traditional sense, ceremony, guided, music at night in nature, as opposed to in a more transactional, I guess, classic Western sense, you know, someone to order, I'm going to guess, the dark web's got everything on it. I'm going to guess that someone on the dark web somewhere probably sells the ingredients, or perhaps even like a premixed dry thing, and then someone at the house could do it. How important is it to go through the full ceremony and have the guidance there with you?

• 33:06Speaker 01

  I would say that the the level of importance is the same as going to a trained surgeon or a completely untrained surgeon needing a heart transplant.

• 33:17Speaker 01

  So you need a heart transplant and you're gonna go to somebody who literally has never done it before, or you're gonna go to a trained person who is a, you know, highly trained specialist and has done many of those and knows how to actually do that. I think it's literally that severe. So you get akin to it to a life and death situation. You need your life saved. You want it saved by somebody who knows what they're doing in Western medicine. If you go down to tribal Amazonian medicine, you want somebody that knows what they're doing and that has had at least a minimum of five, if not 10, hopefully 15 years of training and experience as a minimum.

• 33:55Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I've heard, as I'm sure you will have done and many of the people listening, about experiences where shamans who are perhaps less qualified or just more careless, I suppose, have taken groups of Western tourists and I guess not given them the level of care that they should have done whilst giving them the level of drugs that they perhaps wanted.

• 34:21Speaker 01

  It's, you know, it's a very dangerous thing. Fact of the matter is, especially with Westerners who take all different other kinds of medications and don't understand the contraindications and the intermixes of mixing plants with other kinds of pharmaceuticals.

• 34:35Chris Williamson?

  So there's an interaction there as well?

• 34:38Speaker 01

  Oh, absolutely. And there's a whole list of pharmaceuticals that are contraindicated to the Amazonian medicinal plants. And in the centers that are really serious, there's medical screening before you're allowed to participate in the ceremonies. And that's just not being upheld by a lot of different people. And it adds to a tremendous amount of danger associated to the potentials of what could ultimately happen. But you really should follow a medical intake form and the people who are organizing the experience need to take it as seriously as running any other kind of clinic to understand whether or not you're a suitable candidate to participate in the ceremonies themselves.

• 35:18Speaker 01

  And then you also have to understand the, so not only the interactions with Western pharmaceuticals, you also have to understand your own sensitivity to other kinds of plants as well. And often because ayahuasca is mixed with lots of other kinds of plants, ayahuasca can be blamed for things that have happened that really are the admixtures that have been added to ayahuasca. So I know of people who have been poisoned from tobacco. And they had just so much tobacco as part of the ritual and ceremony and they had such a sensitivity to tobacco that they ended up getting tobacco poisoning, not poisoned from ayahuasca. And they ended up having severe health consequences, not at our center because luckily we don't use tobacco that way. But it just happened to be that way.

• 36:00Speaker 01

  And or things like brugmancia, which is called away or angel trumpet vine, is also unbelievably psychedelic and incredibly dangerous and people die from it all over the world from mistreating that plant. And it can also be used as an admixture in ayahuasca. And then, you know, because the name is ayahuasca, it gets misunderstood that there were these other compounds and other plants that were added to it that has literally altered what it is. And that the people that were, you know, taking the plant, they did not, there's no story about what they were taking beforehand or what their medical history was or what their family history is. And if you have a, in your family history, a history of dissociative disorders, any kind of mental disorder that's bipolar, any kind of schizophrenia,

• 36:45Speaker 01

  you should not participate in these kinds of medicines. You should not participate in these kinds of psychedelic experiences, especially if you're over the age of 30, there can be a trigger that can literally kick off out of your genetics, those states of mental illness that you might not have experienced before. And it's not talked about and it needs to be taken very seriously. And as this spreads and people are more interested in it, you're going to hear more and more stories of where there has been. A mistake that has been made. And of course, what you're going to hear is the the thunder around that mistake. You're not going to hear at the same time, the hundreds of thousands of people that were doing this within a safe way, that were all being healed at the same time. And so

• 37:28Speaker 01

  the negative gets super overplayed, but it is unbelievably dangerous. And you have to know whether or not you are an appropriate candidate to be able to participate in the ceremony.

• 37:37Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. What is it? People are perhaps, when the world reopens, thinking, I've considered it for a long time. I've done my research. I feel like this is something that I want to try. How can they assure that the particular center that they go to, or the shaman that they're working with is legit? Because presumably, even the ones that have been around for a couple of years and don't care that much about their clients, or their patients, I suppose. What do you call them?

• 38:04Speaker 01

  Guests.

• 38:04Chris Williamson?

  Guests.

• 38:05Speaker 01

  Participants.

• 38:06Chris Williamson?

  Cool. They don't care that much about their guests. They're still going to say, no, don't worry, I am this, blah, blah, blah. There's no TripAdvisor, I'm going to guess, for for different shamans. So what do you do?

• 38:18Speaker 01

  I fundamentally think you have to do your homework and your research. You need to get online, and you need to look at a variety of centers, and you need to see how long they've been around and what their track record is. You need to try to find as many comments as you can in testimonials. It's better if you can find somebody that's been there and talk with them in person, or chat with them online about it and the experience. You need to look into the shaman's eyes and see if they look like somebody you want to vibe with, because everyone's energy is very different, and no two shamans are the same. And so I think I'm always looking for someone who's not trying to, you know, occult and be hidden. They're willing to be open and sharing. They're very clear about what their intention is and what their purpose is of the work that they're doing, that they have, you know, a long history and

• 39:02Speaker 01

  track record of a lot of positive success. You'll also find, obviously, anybody who has a very long time doing anything. There are people that like them and don't like them. So you'll see that as well. I think it's also really important to see how the people treat the scenarios for the people that provide criticism against them. Are they people that lash out online? Are they people that, you know, handle themselves in a respectful, honest, and caring way? I think all of these things are important ways of being able to check out a center and see if they're viable. See whether or not they do medical screening. Very important. Do, you know, does the center do medical screening? And what is their medical screening and why? I think if you have an opportunity to be able to talk to the people that do the booking for them,

• 39:46Speaker 01

  it's really important that it's not just some online process, but that they're actually somebody to interact with, even if it's just emails and to be able to ask questions and are they willing to provide answers for you? And then I think that regardless of the investment that you make in it, if you ever arrive at a place and it doesn't feel right and it doesn't look right to you, you should just leave. It's as simple as that. Or you should just not participate in the ceremony. And then you should ask the shaman as well. Is it okay if I, if I observe the ceremony? Can I actually be here? So maybe I go to a place where there's five ceremonies and I decide I want to observe the first one. I don't want to drink. I want to get comfortable with this experience first, just to see what it's about and how do they treat that? Like at our, for instance, at our center,

• 40:29Speaker 01

  there is no experience that is mandatory. And we allow everybody to be able to observe without participating in the ingestion of any of the plants. We don't believe that the ingestion of the plants is entirely important to the nature of the experience of the healing that somebody can receive. We've had people that come from all different programs where it's no longer allowed, like 12-step programs, where it's not allowed for them to participate in psychedelics and things like that. And so they don't drink and they still have visionary experiences. We tell people that if they're not feeling comfortable or they're not feeling up to it, to take the night off. It's not about, you know, night after night after night participating. We offer the number of ceremonies we offer

• 41:12Speaker 01

  so that people have the maximum opportunity to receive what they need. And for some people, that works really well to participate in all of the ceremonies. A lot of other people need many less ceremonies in a week than what's offered, right? One or two or three is enough, even if five or six or seven is offered at the center. You want to see that the people really are caring about you and are interested in your well-being and, and your health and how they are interacting in that way. And so I think if you do your research, there is a way to be able to get some clarity on that and to check inward about that overall experience and that. It really shouldn't be offensive in any way to any center, any practitioner,

• 41:55Speaker 01

  if someone just realizes that they don't vibe with you and that it's not right for them. And that even if they need to go somewhere else instead of you, I think that that's completely fine as well. And ultimately, in that honesty and clarity, I think you can decide whether or not you want to put the well-being of your own psyche in the hands of somebody else. And then you can make that decision.

• 42:15Chris Williamson?

  Phenomenologically, how would you describe, to someone who's never taken ayahuasca, how would you describe the experience?

• 42:26Speaker 01

  Oh, that's a really good question. That's a really good question.

• 42:32Speaker 01

  I would describe it as could be literally nothing. It could be literally nothing, and you have to be prepared for that. And not get frustrated if it's literally nothing. And then it could be literally within minutes of having consumed it, the most intense, most visionary, fastest-moving,

• 43:02Speaker 01

  outside-of-the-box, out-of-body experience that you could possibly ever imagine. And you have to be prepared for that as well. And my first experience was literally like 50 to 100 strobe lights going off at the same time, where each one was a vision that needed to be dealt with. Something recapitulated, something purged, something confronted, something that was terrifying me or scaring me. And it lasted hours and hours and hours and hours and hours until I literally thought I would die of exhaustion. It was unbelievably intense. It was by far the most intense experience of my life up until that point.

• 43:46Speaker 01

  You can see and hear and understand the field of consciousness and the field of nature in a way that makes everything that seems separate look like it is interwoven in a lattice of multi-D geometry of the colors made up of the rainbow and every color you have never seen before in your life, literally like every single atom of air is exploding in an interweb of nature, consciousness, and it is all alive and within it there is the presence of supernatural voices and supernatural beings and supernatural visions

• 44:28Speaker 01

  that could come as benign as a whisper to that of anything from any mythology you have ever heard of or ever imagined and things well outside of that. In my first ceremony, I saw 30-foot wingspan hummingbirds that were having rainbows exploding out of them. A bush that was next to me had turned into a wild boar that was literally telling me what a terrible job I was doing. It criticized me the entire time about how I could not keep it together. I vomited at least 300 times, at least 300 times in that first ceremony. And I was literally trapped in a spiraling spiral galaxy where the center of it was

• 45:12Speaker 01

  a black hole of absolute insanity, taking me to a place 10 billion times worse than hell, and a huge voice that would sound like the voice of God telling me to do the work with me screaming back, "I don't understand what they're talking about," and then just purging and purging and purging and purging and purging out all ends with no ability to control the physical body whatsoever, and then ultimately purging a physical object the size of a lemon that felt like hands were squeezing it out of my stomach, up my esophagus, and then out of my mouth where my mouth unhinged like that of a snake and an actual physical ball the size of a lemon came out of me, and it represented every aspect of negativity, depression, pain, and suffering that I had ever experienced in

• 45:57Speaker 01

  my life up until that moment. That whole thing took four and a half hours. And I remember asking the hummingbirds, whose beaks were like three or four meters long, to please not kill me and spike me. I remember the bush telling the bush that it had, I finally agreed it was a boar and not a bush. I definitely realized it was not a good idea to shapeshift into a jaguar, strip myself naked and run into the forest. That was a bad idea. I realized you have good and bad ideas, some of them you should not follow. I realized there was a purpose to the purging itself. And at the end of it, I was cheered on by thousands of spirits that I had actually purged what I was looking for. And I had found my apprenticeship and that I was going to apprentice.

• 46:42Speaker 01

  And I remember thinking that that was the biggest cosmic joke because there was no way that I would ever actually be able to learn to have any sort of constitution within that space because I was dug into the ground. The amount of sweat that had poured out of me had become mud. I was covered in mud from head to toe. I could not move. And I remember getting into my hammock that night, thinking to myself, if I make it to the morning without soiling the hammock, I'll be really proud of myself. Like, just please don't soil the hammock. Like, I could barely walk. I thought people who had said it was intense had kind of overplayed it, like, oh yeah, sure. And then I realized I had underplayed it. Like, they had underplayed the intensity. It was so intense.

• 47:28Speaker 01

  And then I learned over the years that that was not the most intense experience I've ever had. That was only like a middle grade experience of total intensity over the, you know, thousand plus ceremonies that I've been in with ayahuasca. And so you gotta be ready to take a leap of faith, literally into the infinite and eternal astral and be ready for whatever. And so you want your guides to be really good. And that's my point of the idea of like the guy giving you the heart transplant. You want your guides to be really, really good. If nothing happens, your guide didn't matter. But if that happens, you better have a guide who knows how to handle you and deal with that and guide you through that and make sure that you stay in with the good spirits and

• 48:13Speaker 01

  the light spirits and the healing spirits and energies and that, you know, you don't get taken anywhere that you can't come back from, etc. You need to have somebody who knows how to guide that kind of an experience. It's possible to all of a sudden find yourself with your eyes open or closed and being able to see exactly the same thing. So you're there with your eyes open and then you close them and then you're seeing literally the same thing and you open them again and you close them and you're not in the ceremonial house where you started. You are literally somewhere else and it's not that you're out of body. You're there as body or you could be disembodied consciousness, just somewhere in outer space. All of a sudden, it could be like literally Einsteinian physics, getting sucked into a wormhole and that wormhole could literally take you anywhere in infinity.

• 48:56Speaker 01

  And then you can go from the one black hole of a spiral galaxy into another, into another, into another, until you're like six, seven, eight dimensions from where you started. Literally filled in worlds of beings that you have never heard from of any other kind of mythology. You have never seen anything like this. You can't be like, oh, that came from a movie or oh, this experience came from... No, this is totally outside the box. Like the brain has literally no reference for it and you have to be able to keep your constitution and hang on through that until you come out the other side and there is no off button. There is no off switch. There's no, hey, guys, I'd really like to just slow this down.

• 49:30Chris Williamson?

  You can't pull the ejecta cord, right?

• 49:32Speaker 01

  There is no eject. There is no eject. There's no second parachute. No, I mean, like literally all the ways humans have tried to like, you know, figure out a way to, to give themselves a second chance when things go wrong. It does not exist in this game. This is a multi-D, uh, real, real time, real played game. I equated it that, you know, every day is the World Cup. Every day you're in it is the World Cup. There's no like warm up, there's no scrimmage, there's no, there's no practice. It is the World Cup's game. You are always in the championship game every time you go in there. And no one knows, literally even the shamans, what's gonna happen. And so it's not like the shamans have like a DJ has a playlist.

• 50:16Speaker 01

  The shamans have tools and they are ready for literally whatever. And they have thousands and thousands and thousands of tools that they know how to use when they're proficient. And they are gonna be able to pull those, those tools out like Batman using his utility belt. To have a whole bunch of tools to be able to take care of whatever could possibly happen within that room. And then the bigger the ceremony gets, the more exponentially intense it is and difficult it is to manage. So in our center, we work with anywhere from 30 to 40 people at the same time. So if one person is that intense, you can imagine when now you have 30 or 40 going. And that's what it gets unbelievably fun. I mean, you gotta be up for it, but that is what it gets unbelievably fun.

• 50:58Speaker 01

  The next day, people are saying like, I saw you envision over there and this thing came out of you. And, and we were here and then the other was like, yeah, I saw you there too. And it is like a whole world. It is like you are inside the cosmic consciousness holographic video game for real. And the barriers of consciousness have been broken down and the barriers of personality and ego have been broken down. And it is literally game on and it can be unbelievably fun or it can be unbelievably scary and treacherous. And so, you know, again, that's where you want your guides to really know what they're doing. I've had a lot of experience so that they're not tossed and thrown by whatever gets brought forth within that ceremony. And that they're capable of handling whatever it brings. But, you know, that's it in a nutshell.

• 51:44Chris Williamson?

  Man, what an unbelievably beautiful explanation of that. What insights about the mind and about consciousness outside of that realm? Or what are some of the biggest realizations and insights that you've gained from all of this time that you've spent?

• 52:05Speaker 01

  I mean, first of all, I think the biggest one is that you're a miracle. And that we're not taught to think of ourselves that way. But that you're a miracle. You're an evolutionary miracle and that you are a biological miracle and you're a cosmic miracle. And the fact that you're alive, it means you've already won the biggest gift of all, which is just being alive. And most people don't see it that way. The second is that we're not separate in any kind of way and that we're already eternal and infinite. And what we are as body is something that I call being in the womb of earth. You are in the womb of your mother and you were born to the world and now we're all in the earth together.

• 52:48Speaker 01

  And people like to think that they're on the earth and we're actually within the earth. The earth is in throughout and all around us and we're made of it. We're literally made of the earth itself. And if you look at the matter of your body, that is the earth. And the earth comes from an unbelievably huge cloud of stardust and that means you're made of stardust. So you literally are a stardust starlight being that lives in outer space within the density of the earth created as a miracle. And that fundamentally is actually true, as hard it is to imagine, science can actually prove that that is a fact. And that the matter of your body is over 12 billion years old. So while we might think of ourselves as 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 years old, what makes up your body right now is over 12 billion years old, that stardust.

• 53:33Speaker 01

  And that that is a fundamental miracle in its own right. And that somehow the earth has magically organized us to be able to not only know ourselves, but know each other and be able to speak common languages that allow us to interact. And that that's a miracle. And to me, it's sad that we have used that to decide to fight each other and harm each other instead of be neutral with each other or harmonious with each other because we're all in this together. I always like to say that we need to start to learn how to get along because once the universe creates you, it doesn't know how to uncreate you. So you have been created and you will be created forever. And so we're all in this together, literally forever with all of our ancestors and all of the species that have gone and everything that has ever lived and died is still part

• 54:16Speaker 01

  of spirit and still part of the universe. And we will go from the womb of earth into the womb of the universe itself, which to me is another birth. I've learned that death is not real, that death is an illusion that we're told about, which is the shutting of the body when consciousness is ready to be born again, not reincarnated to earth itself. There are sure some people who are reincarnated to earth, but consciousness is something that is constantly growing and expanding and that what we call death is actually a transition into another state of consciousness and being and that it is really about ready to get born. And so we're just super scared about getting born, not super scared of dying. And we're not sure what we're getting born into. Those are some core, some core things I've learned along the way.

• 55:00Chris Williamson?

  There's some fantastic insights. The fascinating unifying thread that I see between all of my friends and guests who've had serious psychedelic experiences that haven't been purely recreational, should I say, and even some of the ones who have just been purely recreational kind of have this insight as well, but so few of them live a reductionist, materialist, have that viewpoint anymore. I can know all that is to be known, we can see all that there is to see, et cetera. And I've heard you speak to past Modern Wisdom guests and good buddy Aubrey about the fact

• 55:44Chris Williamson?

  that anyone who is a skeptic just needs to try and experience for themselves. Have you ever had someone who has been expressively overly skeptical arrive at one of your particular retreats and then seen a 180 polar reverse flip of their view of the world?

• 56:08Speaker 01

  Literally every single retreat. Every retreat, there's somebody who comes unbelievably skeptical. This is an experience that if you haven't had it, how could you understand it? And many people are coming to understand whether or not, if it even could be real. So could this actually be real? The story sounds so fantastic. Could it be real that there would be a way out of what seems like the prison of the finite materialistic? The spirit is asking for it, but the mind is still in a state of doubt and fear. And it just takes one ceremony where you have the experience to understand it. So I'll give you an example. Early on, I had a psychologist who came down, right?

• 56:53Speaker 01

  So this is a doctor, you know, certified doctor. I asked him to put me through every level of psychological psychiatric test he could. We did. He summed it up that I was not mentally ill and I was a mystic. So I thought that was awesome. So we got that straight between us. And he flatly refused to believe in spirits, right? Just flatly refused to say that there was a thing called a spirit. He's like, no, there's nothing called a spirit. There are archetypes, there are things that the mind creates, et cetera, et cetera. So after his fourth or fifth ceremony, I said, okay, tell me what happened last night. He said, well, a snake came to me and it talked to me. And then I became a bird and I flew through the forest. And, you know, then these things that kind of looked like extraterrestrials came and they talked to me.

• 57:37Speaker 01

  And then they told me I had something in me that wasn't healthy for me. And so then I threw it up and I threw it up into the bucket. And then these shapes came and they were emanating voices to me and I was communicating with them. And he said, so I'm willing to admit that last night I interacted with what you call a spirit. He said, I'm not going to call it a spirit, but I'm willing to admit that I interacted with what you call a spirit. I said, that's good enough for me. I said, that's all that matters. I said, how are you feeling? He said, I feel great. I feel like the best I've ever felt. I said, that's all that mattered. Like, we weren't here to fight over the idea of it to begin with, right? Like, who cares what we call it? Yeah, the experience.

• 58:17Chris Williamson?

  It's it's so funny how just how different it is, the way that you you're talking about these experiences and the kind of life that you live as well. You know, you're talking about being out on the water, hunting, fishing for your food for the evening and heading to go and live off the land. So digging up vegetables and picking berries and picking leaves and doing all this sorts of stuff. As you're talking about that, and I'm thinking about it, it just strikes me how different the lives are that we live. And it's easy to talk about over hyper normal levels of stimulus through your phone and we're eating processed foods and et cetera, et cetera. But at a much more base

• 58:55Chris Williamson?

  level than that, even if you get rid of the curses of 2020, the type of lifestyle that we're living is so, so far removed from yours, which must be more aligned with what we were typically supposed to do. And then you realize that you you mentioned it earlier on about the way that language is being used, that language is kind of now become weaponized. And you could actually see language, advanced language as a technology. And there's other technologies built on top of that language, which allows us to further distribute it frictionlessly across the world. And when you think about that, I just wonder, I wonder how much,

• 59:36Chris Williamson?

  I wonder how we can balance what is best for us as a species, you know, paleolithicly, what are we supposed to be eating, doing, how are we supposed to be communicating, what is the level of information that we're supposed to be exposed to? Because it's definitely not all of the globe's news in real time, 24 hours a day. And everything else, I wonder, as we get more and more advanced, and we move towards colonizing, we're talking about going to new planets now, what from our ancestry and our heritage as a species are we taking with us that's right? And what have we already forgotten that's wrong?

• 1:00:20Speaker 01

  What we're taking that's right is the continued evolution of the species. That's what's right. Evolution doesn't have a right and wrong about it. Evolution just means consistent and constant change. And I think where we went wrong is fearing and being stuck in an experience of inculcating fear as the means in which to interact and know each other. So instead of recognizing that we're all here for reasons that are really more common than different, we've been taught that there's more difference than commonality between us, which is just fundamentally false. And so this has created a fear paradigm that is becoming cultured. And it creates a great separation between what the brain does and what the heart does. And the heart is an organ that's much more important than just pumping blood.

• 1:01:04Speaker 01

  It is the true epicentral locus of where you have your infinite knowledge and connection to consciousness and the universe itself, which then the brain gets perplexed by through this idea of language as a technology. And so what we all we have to do is bring these two things into balance. And then we ultimately balance collectively. When your heart's open with somebody else that you know, you're not fighting them. You're not quibbling with them over the words when you're with somebody. You're just hanging out with them. And what a great thing that is. And when you're holding an infant baby in your arms, you're not saying like, hey, why aren't you telling me the right words? Or you're not using the right gender pronoun for me. You're just hanging out with the little baby. Like, it's that simple. And your heart's totally open. And it's like, it's like, hey, like the little koala bear. They're like, hey, this is a koala bear.

• 1:01:49Speaker 01

  Like, you know, you're not, you're not all freaked out in your head about things. Like getting like super neurotic about that. And so I think that that like hyper compulsive neurosis is what is where we've kind of gone wrong. And we can actually collect collectively correct that as a species by recognizing that there is a balance that's here and that it's something that we can give a little time to, and we can do it together in a way that's actually fun and worthwhile. And that we can recognize that that's the bridge to real consciousness, that the heart has consciousness, just like the brain does. And if you've fallen in love and your brain's going like, no, and your heart's going, yeah, you know, it has consciousness. You know, you've had that experience. So you just have to kind of suck it up, right? You have to be like, well, hey, brain, you don't get to be fully and only dominant here.

• 1:02:33Speaker 01

  There's also this other part of me that's equally important. And give it some time to evolve and it, I always say this on our retreats, had they part, put that in the curriculum of school, we would all be different. But you know, heart-centered learning wasn't what was in school. It was all brain-centered learning. And you know, shamanic traditions and spiritual traditions teach a lot of heart-centered learning. So if you give some time to heart-centered learning, you'll find that it is really fast and unbelievably evolutionary to you in your own life and makes you better at absolutely everything you do. So it makes you literally better at absolutely everything you do. So like literally two, three, four, five minutes a day to heart-centered learning, it ultimately improves absolutely every other aspect of your life. And so I think

• 1:03:18Speaker 01

  it's like a pretty fair trade. You'll ultimately pick different foods. You'll ultimately start to realize that certain friends don't really resonate with you like the way you thought, and the choices that you make will be better choices. You find that your fitness will increase and you'll become much fitter and much healthier. You'll find that the way that you speak and the way that you think is much more positive and much more harmonious. You'll find that the relationships, sexual relationships, loving relationships you have are way better. Your body will perform better. Your sexuality will be better. Your sex will be better. You'll find out that your family relationships will start to improve. You'll become more intelligent. Literally, you'll, you'll grow in IQ points that you never knew

• 1:03:59Speaker 01

  would be possible. Your left and right brain hemispheres will start to balance themselves simply from the heart itself, which is like a psychiatric psychological phenomenon. And it's something that is actually really easy to do. It starts in our intention to recognize the purpose of it. And then there are some basic techniques to help that along.

• 1:04:19Chris Williamson?

  Where can people?

• 1:04:19Speaker 01

  That's really like the good event.

• 1:04:21Chris Williamson?

  Where can people go to find out more about that? They think, that sounds all right. I want, I want me a bit of that, Hamilton. Where should they go?

• 1:04:28Speaker 01

  Come to our community, come to blue morpho retreats.world. We're on Telegram, we're Trinity Global, and we have the Trinity Channel, and blue morpho retreats.world has an unbelievable number of resources that are free, and some of them, like the Trinity Live Retreat, is a three-day retreat we do where we teach everything that we're talking about. We use ecstatic breathwork, if you're in a place where other kinds of plants are illegal, so you can perform a completely legal ceremony all over the world using ecstatic and trans based breathwork. We take you through dieta and teach you all about the different kinds of medicinal plants that can be healthy for you. We teach you the value of intermittent fasting, and how to be able to use all different kinds

• 1:05:11Speaker 01

  of superfoods to be able to literally super heal the body with all different kinds of nutrients and vitamins, super saturate the body with nutrients and vitamins. We teach you how to build that heart-brain balance, and then we also have a program that's called Sunday Enlightenment, which is just a $10 donation, which is an unbelievable thing to get to be a part of, where we get together on a Sunday for a couple hours, it usually goes two to three hours, and it's also recorded, and people from all over the world ask these questions, and we go through it in real time. So as the questions are coming up for the people in our community, we go through how to do this, and how to embrace it, and how to experience it on a daily level, and we

• 1:05:55Speaker 01

  do it together in a place of positivity where we foster growth. We simply believe that each person has unbelievably unique talents that need to be unveiled or uncovered, and we do so through these practices together. And then in the community, on our Telegram community, everyone shares the way that they're learning, because everyone learns differently, and so no one's right or wrong within the community. We don't fight over ideas, we share ideas, and we support each other in actually, you know, being the best human that we can be. We optimize that, and we do it together, blue morpho retreats.world and Telegram Community, Trinity Global. Come join us, it's unbelievably fun.

• 1:06:33Chris Williamson?

  I love it, man. There's two common threads that have come up today that I've been thinking about a lot, especially this year. One of them being that one of the primary jobs that our senses have, specifically our brain, is not to perceive things, but rather to narrow our field of perception, that it reduces down what we can perceive. Because if we were able to perceive absolutely everything, firstly, we would have so much stimulus that we wouldn't really be able to move forward with our day. And secondly, we'd probably lose our minds. We're not built to take in that much information. And one of the things that I'm trying to do this year is to reduce down, to take those blinkers off as much as I can, to try and live the experience of every moment as fully as possible, to feel the wind on my skin,

• 1:07:18Chris Williamson?

  to smell the smell of the leaves, to everything that I can from all of the different senses. And the other thing I've been thinking about a lot is how head dominant, how cerebral we are when we come and try and find a solution or an answer for a lot of the things that are going on within our own lives, within society at large, and the increasing popularity of embodiment practices, stuff like yoga and interpretive, impressive dance, meditation, and breathwork, and, well, you know, a guy like Wim Hof, who for really no reason should be world famous, but is because people are resonating with the sort of work that he does in cold therapy and heat therapy and intermittent fasting and plant medicines and all of this

• 1:07:59Chris Williamson?

  sort of stuff. It really does feel like there is a swelling underground movement to try and remind people that they are an embodied animal, that they are not simply just this sort of jumble. And I'm aware, even from the most utilitarian rationalist, materialist perspective of anyone that's listening, you cannot tell me phenomenologically that being in love just feels like oxytocin, because it doesn't. You can't tell me that dread, that getting a message from someone that you care about saying that they've been in an accident, just feels like a dump of adrenaline, because it doesn't. It feels like so much more than that. And I think that that really crosses the bridge that we're talking about here, that no matter what your background is, whether you come into it from a much

• 1:08:42Chris Williamson?

  more spiritual or a much more, I guess, sort of typical 21st century viewpoint. Both people phenomenologically experience life the same. And there is definitely a bifurcating in terms of how how one group of people are trying to find this solution. And increasingly, I think that that black hole is starting to suck more and more and more people in. And of the ones who are doing it, of the ones who are taking more time with embodied practices and listening to themselves in ways that are less cerebral. I know very few of them, and in fact, I know none of them who have done it and regretted it. So I think the the work that you guys are doing is really, really important. I'm very glad that you're continuing.

• 1:09:27Speaker 01

  I really appreciate that, you know, I completely agree with you. When you are saying that, what comes to my mind is the elephants. We all understand the elephants as mammals and they all care about their ancestors. And they remember and go hundreds of miles to go to the places where different elephants have passed on, where they died. Where now there's literally no traces of the elephant body anymore there on the land at all. And they'll go back and visit that site and they will mourn the grave of that animal. And so how are we any different? Literally, how are we any different than that? And so I think people have forgotten by making a materialist view, something that's not miraculous. But there's no explanation for the universe itself. So you can have an entirely materialistic view. And that's still a miracle because where did the matter come from?

• 1:10:12Speaker 01

  Just ask yourself that, like, where did you get all of these stars and galaxies? And then where'd you get a body and where'd you get eyes? And you can say evolution and you can say, yeah, a billion years of that. And then you can go back five billion years and Earth is a cloud of stardust. And you can go back 12 billion years and you can see the formation of the matter that made up this universe itself. You can go back 13 billion years plus, and then you're going to find an event horizon where you're not going to be able to tell time anymore. And at that point, at that origin, you're going to have to ask yourself, where did all this stuff come from? And that's the end of the materialistic view. And it still doesn't have an origin story that anyone can agree on.

• 1:10:47Chris Williamson?

  That's really

• 1:10:47Speaker 01

  And so I don't think it ultimately matters.

• 1:10:49Chris Williamson?

  That's, that's really interesting that actually even the most materialistic viewpoint in the world reaches a boundary. And the boundary that you you just identified there is temporal, right? That there is a time limit that we can get to with that. So time being one of the most fundamental forces, the fourth dimension that moves us, allows us to move through this existence, the way that we do. Someone who concedes that that does exist, that that is a particular limit to the utilitarian materialistic worldview, and yet discounts the spiritual, the astral,

• 1:11:29Chris Williamson?

  the cosmic, the energetic answers and potential solutions to things, does feel a little bit like there's a discontinuity in their type of thinking. How can you concede it on one hand and yet argue it on the other? That's me. There will be a lot of people who, in the comments below, do decide to argue it. But my point is that there's something going on there. And the fact that we don't have a single answer for everything yet means that the open loops that we've got, they permit us to find different answers to these questions.

• 1:12:05Speaker 01

  I completely agree. And it's a place for consciousness to continue to be explored. I think what we haven't explored yet enough is consciousness. So I would like the people who believe only in materialism to be able to describe to me the boundaries and the dimensionality of consciousness. And to do so in a codified way that fully explains the origin of consciousness, the totality of consciousness, the reach of consciousness, and the evolution of consciousness. And if we can do that together, I think then we would understand a common language without there being a disagreement. And I think people have been fighting over the words about consciousness for way too long, utilizing consciousness itself, which is still the greatest mystery of all.

• 1:12:49Chris Williamson?

  I love it, man. Hamilton, thank you so much. Everything will be linked in the show notes below, including Blue Morpho Retreat. Anything else? Any other stuff that people should check out?

• 1:12:58Speaker 01

  No, bluemorphoretreats.world, check us out. Through our community and through our social, we talk about all the other projects that we're doing. We're involved in a number of other projects that are not so much based specifically in spirituality, but about helping the world in different ways. We're interested in blockchain technology and all different kinds of crypto-based technologies. We're interested in what the future of the planet is ultimately going to look like. We're interested in green energy and permaculture and the transformation of

• 1:13:31Speaker 01

  The land and the earth as a way of being able to sustain humanity for literally tens of thousands of generations to come. And so if you're interested in not only the past and interested in spirituality or interested in, you know, your own optimization, there's also all of this other amazing space that we also cover. And so just through our community itself, we share and discuss all of these ideas. Come join us.

• 1:13:56Chris Williamson?

  Beautiful. Man, thank you so much for your time today. I've really, really enjoyed it. And hopefully at some point in the future, when the world reopens, I may, I may be able to come and see you where you are.

• 1:14:05Speaker 01

  That'd be fantastic. It'd be a pleasure. Thank you guys so much for having me on the show. It's an unbelievable pleasure. Thank you.

• 1:14:27Speaker 02

  Mr. President, my company formed me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd.

• 1:14:32Speaker 03

  Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.

• 1:14:37Speaker 02

  Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 1:14:44Speaker 04

  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You're stalled, you're freezing there, that's what.

• 1:14:48Speaker 02

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:14:51Speaker 04

  I'm not the first daddy.

• 1:14:53Speaker 02

  Digger, see the trailer online, only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R, under 17, not a middle without parent.