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>> In the course of evolution in which life on Earth passed
through stages of single-celled organisms to eukaryotes
to multicelled and complex organisms,
one ever-present force has guided all of it to where we
are now--
integration.
That underlying principle that is
seen in all arenas of intelligent life.
Individual organisms utilize anything
in their environment to ensure life and postpone death.
By far, the most advantageous way for this to happen
is for peaceful and intelligent coexistence to take place.
The flora feeds the fauna, which in turn digests and returns
the food back to the flora.
The flowers attract the bees, which in turn spreads the seeds
and plants more flowers.
The weather patterns, seasonal cycles, birds, bees, plants,
and trees all live within a greater organism
that many now call Gaia--
the living Earth.
And upon this Earth, there is no such thing as waste.
Each part feeds the next and eventually cycles back
into itself.
All these intelligent moving parts
fit together in an integrated system.
The purpose of integration is for many individuals
to work towards one higher cause that no one individual could
achieve alone.
In the world of computers, software and hardware
are upgraded perpetually for one purpose--
to better integrate the rest of the endless web of technology.
These upgrades not only add new features to the system,
but they remove disruptive or obsolete features as well.
In the world of psychedelic plants,
we find their effect on human consciousness
not only adds insights and visions,
but dismantles unproductive or harmful patterns.
But when a deep psychedelic experience has completed,
oftentimes, the seeker is left with more questions
than answers.
It is precisely these moments that
call upon us to take time in peace, silence, and reflective
contemplation in order to pick up the shattered pieces of who
we believe we were, discard what no longer serves us,
and hold on to that which may still teach us.
And to reintegrate back into the dynamic system from which we
were momentarily departed.
>> Probably just as important as the psychedelic experience is
the process of integration.
When you have a psychedelic experience, all
your preconceived notions of the world melt down--
gone.
You could develop all this new information--
floods of new information.
And with all this new information,
you have to integrate it into your life when you come back.
>> Well, the physical body has been taxed.
The brain, in some ways, has been taxed.
Our psychology has been taxed in that we
have to re-evaluate some pretty fundamental assumptions
about ourselves.
And energetically, our spiritual body has been blasted open
and is reforming, and that's what's happening energetically
with psychedelics.
And like anything, it takes time for that to happen.
It's a process.
It doesn't happen over a few hours, or even a few days.
Sometimes it can take many, many weeks or months to return
to a different baseline--
a baseline that's more holistic, maybe.
>> Overwhelming experiences often call us to take breaks
in order to process what just happened.
After the death of a loved one, there's a grieving period.
After running a marathon, a recovery phase.
And after the fabric of reality is unwoven and stitched
back together, after people's old habits are dismantled,
there is also a period in which the tissues
of the body and the patterns of the mind need to begin anew.
In the daily grind of economically-driven society
and survivalism all around, the moments
we give ourselves to reflect upon our lifestyles and choices
are few and far between.
And this happens even after psychedelic journeys
that beg for us to slow down and integrate the messages they
hold.
>> I think it's a mistake when people rush off to their job
or rush off to do something that re-establishes all the old
patterns, because there's this amazing opportunity that people
have when, after the psychedelic experience ends,
when things are fresh, when their brain is almost like
a newborn baby, and they have this ability to establish new
patterns, you want to strengthen those new patterns and this
process of integration instead of going back to the old
patterns.
>> A lot of people I hear from say that they believe
ayahuasca's going to be very damaging,
because people who come back to society find it very,
very difficult to cope after they come back to society.
Gee, I knew this guy, and he wasn't the same
after he came back.
It can be that way for people, because we live in a very, very
dysfunctional society.
That's why it's so important for people
to integrate their experience after ceremony.
You've got to sit down with the people you
had the ceremony with and talk about it,
and realize what you've experienced
and realize what the world is that you've now opened up.
And realize what you're going to be coming back into.
See, there's the problem with ayahuasca,
is that it does reconnect people to the earth
so much that when they come back to somewhere like New York,
they just go, oh, my God.
What am I swimming in?
I can't do this anymore.
>> Many of those who have traveled to the Amazon jungle
to try ayahuasca in its traditional surroundings
experience culture shock.
The language, the environment, the customs, and of course,
the medicine become a whirlwind of new experience
that can be stressful on the body and mind.
This is what is called a peak experience,
and now these experiences are so easily attainable
that people with no preparation and no context
for the life-altering journey to come
are flooding the Amazon in search of this brew.
In the 1960s, the youth were increasingly experimenting
with psychedelics and ripping apart their most
cherished belief systems, but with little education
and a lot of ambition.
So even if they were waking the sleeping mind
to new information, were they truly ready?
Just as the gut is equipped to break down complex food
into basic building blocks for energy,
the nervous system must switch from
sympathetic, or activity-based, to parasympathetic, which
is the rest and digest state.
Without this switch, without the resting state,
the food struggles to digest.
So what is the result of moving from one
peak psychedelic experience to the next
without fully digesting the previous insights that
were gained?
What happens when people do ceremony after ceremony
without time for integration?
>> If you take another medicine before the integration is done,
you start to stack those big realizations and big
understandings without fully integrating them.
And in a sense, it can create its own psychic burden.
And it shows up like anxiety.
It's like, oh, I'm just overwhelmed by the concepts
that I've received from my medicine work experiences.
So there are times when doing regular work
repeatedly is healthy and important, particularly
in healing a trauma or something like that.
You're doing some real clinical work and it's a period.
But then after that, there should
be long, extended periods of non-medicine use,
just to really, fully receive and embody
the lessons of the medicine.
>> In most ayahuasca circles, after each night of ceremony,
the group will sit together and share their experiences
or insights in order to allow the group to reflect upon what
they experienced and why.
Some speak about what they saw or felt.
Others realize that they need to be better
to the people around them, or spend more time laughing
and enjoying life.
And others find themselves still in the throes of the journey.
Many of them have similar reasons
for attending the ceremony in the first place,
and it's nearly always because the life that they were leading
seemed off-track, and now they're desperately
looking for the trail of breadcrumbs
to lead them back to the familiar world.
>> Many people say, I am here because I lost myself.
It's interesting to hear, because, hey, I'm here.
How can I lose myself?
So what they are reporting is that their spiritual awareness
knows that they're not complete.
Somewhere on their highway of life, they took the wrong exit,
and then nasty things have happened,
experiences happen, and they want to go back on the highway.
So the beauty is, when you hear 40 people share,
you lose your modesty or shyness, or even shame,
and you just share.
And so I share, and I hear myself say something
that I did not prepare.
I was going to say something different,
but because of the whole group and the sphere, the atmosphere,
the vibration, the resonance-- because it's a dynamic field
that we're all in--
I hear myself say a different thing.
And I think, where does that come from?
It's, of course, my own subconscious speaking.
>> The ability for these medicines to reveal
our subconscious mind to us might be the hallmark of how
psychedelic plants can offer us life-changing moments.
And out of all the plant medicines,
ayahuasca ceremonies in modern contexts
are held in a slightly different manner from other ceremonies.
There's usually an emphasis on the sharing circle.
Whether or not everyone speaks is
second to the priority of all being present for the sharing.
These moments highlight the need for such peak experiences
to be spoken about, listened to, and respected.
This allows for the nervous system to settle,
for the mind to evaluate the experiences,
and to integrate the lessons of the medicine
into the tissues of the body.
There are very real shifts taking place internally--
and even externally-- around those
who partake in the ceremony.
To illustrate the effects of what psychedelic plants are
truly doing to the human body and the energy field,
a professor at St. Petersburg University, Dr. Konstantin
Korotkov, has developed the technology
to measure the biofield of the human body
during ayahuasca ceremonies.
>> My main background is quantum physics and biophysics.
And at some time, I developed instruments.
Their overall name is [INAUDIBLE]..
And this instrument allows us to detect, measure, and analyze
human energy field, and we work in predictive integrative
medicine.
It is measuring so-named stimulated electrophoton
emission.
We apply very short electrical impulses to our fingers,
and we have response in the form of photons and electrons
from the skin.
So we are measuring people before, during,
after ceremonies, and this allows
to understand how people transform,
how they experience this.
And typically, of course, it takes--
ayahuasca is very energy-consuming process.
It opens up human chakras.
It opens up your energy field.
That is why people become vulnerable.
And of course, they lose energy in the process of ayahuasca.
That's why, later on, they need to be closed--
energy fields should be closed-- and they need to be re-charged.
And we see this in our measurements.
We can see that initial energy field was quite strong,
80 Joules.
And it's uniform, very good.
And after ayahuasca, it is 61 Joules, so it dropped down.
It shrinked, as we discussed.
And we need to take it down so it is practically one day
after.
Same as on level of stress.
Level of stress drop down, you see, from 07 to 91,
so it's very positive effect.
But energy dropped down as well, quite strongly.
And we see dramatic effect on chakras as well.
Chakras was very disoriented, and after ayahuasca ceremony,
they became very well-aligned.
Not ideal, of course.
This is not meditation process, this is different process.
But they're much more aligned than before.
>> Dr. Korotkov mentions that meditation puts the body
and mind into a different process than an ayahuasca
ceremony.
The greatest difference is that the meditative insights
are arrived at by an inner process of relaxing, breathing,
focusing, and observing.
By its very nature, meditation is the process of integration.
This is why every spiritual tradition uses meditation
to integrate our concepts of life with real life
at the end of each day.
Even in the Amazonian ayahuasca ceremonies,
after each icaro, or song, a moment of silence is observed.
In order to close the photon field
around the body before the ceremony,
the shaman blows mapacho smoke over the crown of the head,
and several traditions also include a flower-infused bath
after ceremony specifically to close
any rip or hole in that field after it
is weakened by the medicine.
This phenomena is also seen after receiving news.
If the news is not shocking or destructive
to the current mindframe, not much energy
is required to digest the new information.
But if the news is intense and the person is not prepared,
it can cause such an awakening, such a transformation,
that the energy field around the body
is diminished as it moves inward to digest
the earthshaking information.
So what if a psychedelic journey reveals the inadequacies
and shadow sides of the modern society we identify ourselves
with?
>> Enlightenment is a very destructive process.
Enlightenment is a breaking down of everything
you thought was real, and none of this society is real.
Becoming aware of that is key.
That's the only way we're going to heal it.
But that's why I say to people--
I suggest they do not undertake this path lightly.
The path to enlightenment and the path to spiritual awakening
is very, very uncomfortable.
You're not going to go there and drink on Sunday,
become this new age guru who's shining light
and is going to go out and be warm and fuzzy
and speak the truth everywhere.
You're going to wake up and look back at the world
and go, oh, my God.
What have I been doing for the last 30 or 40 years,
and what am I doing, and what is this world I'm living in?
And it can be very, very confrontational.
So if you're not ready for that, maybe don't do the medicine.
>> And so psychedelics can often bring up a variety of different
kinds of material that's very difficult for people to accept
and to figure out how to move forward with.
But that's also the gift of the psychedelics--
is that it forced us to deal with these issues
that we were otherwise able to bury into our unconscious.
So people often have difficult experiences,
because they don't have the support necessary to help them
move through the new information and to find
a different level of integration regarding
the traumatic experiences that they had in the past.
>> If it truly is a lack of support that keeps us from
integrating new and useful information,
what kind of support are we in need of?
By looking to the experts who have been researching
psychedelics in both modern and ancestral contexts,
we can begin to acknowledge how shamanic cultures use
psychedelic plants to strengthen and expand the community,
and even raise their youth.
>> The major problem is, how to integrate this into a larger
culture?
If you were a [? witch ?] living in Mexico
or in one of these cultures where everybody is part
of rites of passage and so on--
these experiences-- then it's actually helping the culture,
because the way of living, the life strategy, the philosophy,
the mythology, the spirituality of the culture
comes out of these experiences.
So they actually initiate the young people
into their way of living and their way of thinking.
This is very different.
We see what happened in the '60s.
Suddenly, you had a young generation
that started creating a totally different hierarchy of values.
Make love, not war-- very pacifistic feeling.
Very much concerned about the environment, and so on.
They started differentiating themselves in the way
they looked--
beards and long hair and beads and funny uniforms.
They're painting their cars with psychedelic colors
so every cop knows there's grass to be found there.
Not very skillful revolution.
>> A rite of passage is something that many traditional
cultures do value, where young people maybe go through some
rite.
It could be something like your first hunt,
or it might be something like getting your first tattoo.
It might also be your first ayahuasca ceremony,
or your first peyote ceremony.
Of course, in our modern culture,
we have ceremonies, which all too few people have nowadays--
like a confirmation, a bat mitzvah, a bar mitzvah.
But I think that we need some sort of rite of passage,
because young people-- they want to show
that they're more grown up.
I don't know how it is in various cultures,
but I do know that young people are going
to come up with some pretty--
sometimes dangerous-- rites of passage.
And very often, it also entails not being truthful
with their parents.
And wouldn't you want your teenagers
to tell you they were thinking about doing something
of this nature, they were thinking
about doing psilocybin, and that they
could talk to you about it?
That you knew where they were, who they were with, and maybe
you could even give them some guidance, like you should
have an intention, a prayer.
Be in a safe set and setting.
>> Current forms of rites of passage are seen at age 16 when
children in the US can legally drive,
at age 18 when they can vote, and 21 when they can legally
drink.
But these achievements are not earned
by bravery, intelligence, or honor,
but simply by being alive through enough solar cycles
to be considered an adult. Because it is only natural
that youth crave to perform more mature tasks in order
to prove themselves, ancestral tribes
have traditionally crafted cultural passage ways
for children to become adults.
In the small island nation of Vanuatu,
boys at the age of 7 or 8 begin bungee jumping, oftentimes
off a 98-foot tall tower with a vine tied to their ankles,
to symbolize their bravery and their ascent into adulthood.
Among the Apache of North America,
the young girls must complete the sunrise ceremony
after their first menstruation, in which they paint themselves
and reenact the Apache origin myth of the first woman.
For four days, they are not to touch their skin
and can only drink water.
The Inuit youth are brought into the harsh arctic weather
to learn to speak with animals and hunt.
At age 13, the boys of the Sateré-Mawé tribe
in the Brazilian jungle wear gloves filled with bullet ants,
which cause extreme throbbing pain.
All of these rites of passage call upon the youth
to engage with their community and perform
some sacrificial ritual in order to become
an adult in that particular tribe.
But these communities weren't simply initiating people
into adulthood.
They were integrating them into a healing tradition,
in order to serve others and the planet at large.
For the hallmark of a functional society
is peaceful and intelligent community goals.
>> One of the classic features of shamanism was that
the neophyte who was trying to develop shamanic skills would
have to go through a very arduous ritual ordeal,
often spending weeks or more alone in the wilderness,
and often with the expectation that they were going to have
to encounter and deal with the animals--
the beasts-- that came to kill them.
And I think that this reflects a primordial human concern.
Once we become conscious, we realize we're going to die.
Your dog doesn't know he's going to die.
The antelope out on the plains doesn't worry about
whether or not the tiger or lion's going to eat him--
unless it's right there.
But we have a consciousness to project into the future
and say, eventually, it's my turn.
So how do we deal with this angst,
this anxiety about death?
Well, shamanic practices had a variety
of different ways of addressing this death concern,
and one was that you acquired an understanding
of your spiritual nature--
that the body dies, but the spirit doesn't.
And so people move beyond the concern
about their physical demise to understanding this continuity
of spiritual existence.
>> The realization that someone comes to--
that one day they will die--
doesn't sink in all at once.
It takes many moments of considering the implications
of this final event to truly make an impact on that person's
daily life.
Some people, perhaps, never come to this realization.
So to fully integrate the knowledge
that one day this body will die and return to the earth,
tribes have traditionally used extreme rites of passage,
as well as psychedelic plant ceremonies.
Without dedicated moments of focusing on mortality,
we may never fully realize the importance
of living life as if we truly know it will one day end.
Those who have gone through near-death experiences
have reported much of the same phenomena
as psychedelic journeys.
Portals of light, other-worldly beings and ancestors,
timelessness, and even the total life
reviews that cause them to re-evaluate
what matters to them.
They often report that they felt every harsh word or action
that they've ever given, but from the other person's
perspective.
Another commonality between near-death experiences
and deep psychedelic ceremonies is the realization
of how we truly use the precious time
that we're given in this body, and that this fleeting moment
of life between birth and death should be devoted
to the people around us.
In fact, all of life seeks to integrate and support
each other as one living organism.
>> You couldn't develop consciousness in a vacuum.
It takes an interaction of things.
And all of life is really an interaction of things.
The body you see before you--
they say every seven years, I've completely
gone through all my cellular matter and reproduce new cells.
My old cells have died off.
Hair's fallen off.
Skin's fallen off, and I'm completely rebuilt.
Same thing with consciousness.
I was on my 30th birthday, and I was kind of depressed.
My first book hadn't been published yet,
and I was feeling like kind of a failure.
And I did some mushrooms, and I was just like--
I started out with a friend, but I was being such a bummer,
I think he just went home.
And I was lying in this bathtub, having a bath,
feeling sorry for myself.
And there was this spider plant hanging above the bath tub.
And it was just dry as dry, and I
could see its roots and tentacles
vibrating, sensing the wealth of water that I was in,
just going like this.
And I cupped my hand and I put the water up to his roots,
and it just went [WHOOSH OF AIR] limp,
and just started sucking the water right out of my hands.
And it just totally brought the whole thing to life for me
in a fascinating way that I don't
think I would have ever noticed had it not
been for the effects of the mushrooms.
And yeah, I think that it makes us realize
that we are on Mother Earth.
That's what these plants offer.
>> That's the message.
We have to re-understand that we are part of nature.
We're not in control of it.
And we are potentially capable of damaging it very severely
by upsetting and destabilizing all
of these homeostatic processes that keep Gaia--
the Gaia organism-- in equilibrium.
We need to wake up.
I think the plant teachers have been urging us
to wake up as long as we've been associated with them,
but we're not very--
we don't listen very well, and it's getting even more urgent.
First you have to wake up.
Then you have to wise up.
You have to have the realization, then
what do you do about it?
That is trickier.
But I think it's inevitable.
>> According to many conversations surrounding this
topic, the most important thing we can wake up to is the nature
of our individual egos--
the collection of beliefs and behavioral patterns
we have about ourselves.
The ego often wants to know all and control all
in order to ensure no one else can take what is ours.
But this violent cycle of fighting for our place
at the expense of others is fantasy, not reality.
The web of life is already functional without our desire
to exploit it and milk it for everything we can.
This is called scarcity mentality--
the belief that there isn't enough for everyone,
so I better get mine.
Unfortunately, when someone is in this mode,
it is difficult to wake up to its inadequacy,
especially when surrounded by others that are also
stuck in scarcity mentality.
So the process of waking up is a surrender and the letting go
of our ambition to have more than others and more
than we need.
From there, the wising up process
consists only of peacefully and intelligently integrating
with the one dynamic web of life that we are all dancing upon,
a surrender to the flowing river of life.
And the punchline at the end of this divine comedy
is that one way or another, through intention
or exhaustion, the river will win.
But why, then, does the ego seem so afraid of surrendering
to the ways of the universe?
>> The ego wants closure.
It wants a complete explanation.
The beginning of wisdom, I believe,
is the ability to accept an inherent messiness
in your explanation of what's going on,
because nowhere is it writ that human minds should
be able to give a full accounting of creation
in all dimensions and on all levels.
The universe, at this moment, is a tremendously complicated,
integrated, multi-level thing.
Perhaps what the universe is is a kind of system
in which more advanced forms of order
actually influence previous states of organization.
They are attractors.
That means that they exert influence
on less-organized states, and pull them
toward some kind of end state.
The attractor is at the bottom of a very deep pit into which
all phenomena is cascading.
>> All life is truly a lesson, and the attractor that Terence
speaks of is that invisible compelling force that calls us
to continue learning in life.
The increasing complexity of the universe
may be exactly what calls us to abandon the ambition of knowing
everything, or playing every role,
and to simply play our own role, to keep observing and engaging
reality in order to use the information that we
do have more wisely.
Perhaps the evolution of complexity in the universe
is a reflection of our capacity to understand and utilize
more complex information.
And one of the most complex and malleable instruments we use
is the mysterious and ever-evolving human brain.
>> The brain is a product of evolution,
and the brain evolved as a profound information generator.
It generates an inordinate amount of complex information,
but also to receive and process information.
And the environment is also an information generator.
The environment is full.
The external world is full of information,
and this information is always entering the brain.
But the brain needs to learn to sample information that is
useful and to learn from that.
And in a sense, sensory information sculpts the brain.
It's sculpts the connectivity-- the patterns of connectivity.
All of these neurons--
these cells in the brain--
they are connected in an extremely complex,
intricate pattern.
As sensory information enters the brain,
it changes the structure.
>> Perhaps the universe itself is one single phenomena
overflowing with information, and our brains are the part
of that phenomena that collects, processes,
and generates new combinations and patterns in service
to an ever-evolving relationship between creation itself
and that which is continually creating it.
If psychedelic plants truly break down old beliefs
and thought patterns to make way for the new, the way
a wildfire clears the debris from a forest
so new life can grow, then maybe the process
of integrating into the cosmos is not
a dilemma to be solved, but a dance to be danced.
The idea of solving problems only
allows for win, lose, or draw scenarios.
If life were viewed more as a relationship of moving parts--
a cosmic dance do engage with, learn from,
and perpetually refine--
then the outcome wouldn't be limited
by who gets what in the end, but by how deeply we've connected.
Perhaps the point of living is not
a measure of the individual puzzle
pieces, but how they integrate into the full picture of life
itself.
Up next, we will open two sides of the holy mushroom theory--
a debate that might shake the foundation
of the Christian religion and its origins.
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