Following on from part one:
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Plant medicine gaining momentum
In the afterglow of the Ayahuasca, our conversation turned to the growing interest in plant medicine throughout the world. Our facilitator stated that he has observed much more widespread adoption of Ayahuasca in recent years. This observation is reinforced by the network of facilitators known to him - throughout South East Asia in particular.
One friend mentioned Graham Hancock’s banned Ted Talk - The War on Consciousness, where he talks about Ayahuasca extensively. Having since watched the censored and discredited 18 minute segment, your researcher began to understand how fiercely the powers-that-shouldn’t-be fear the masses being able to think for themselves.
For the masses to reconnect with the spirit, with nature, and to ultimately realise that we are living in an invisible prison. We are both the prison guards and the inmates. We are choosing to live this way.
It is apparent that the war on consciousness has existed for longer than we can remember. This war is only intensifying with the rise of the technocratic state, mass surveillance, and thought crime drawing ever closer to being fully realised and enforced.
Hancock’s talk infers the knowledge that humanity has collectively lost. Gone yet not entirely forgotten. Our current trajectory leads us to the opposite of expanded consciousness. That would be total homogenous thought and approved groupthink.
Deviation from the warped societal norms being at first frowned upon, then attacked, and finally criminalised as unacceptable dissent. James Corbett elaborates on this in a brilliant post on the pathologisation of dissenters.
This is not a world that appeals to critical free thinkers.
This is a world that stifles innovation and creativity.
This is a world that punishes ideas challenging the collective, or the orthodoxy on education, commerce, medicine, and governance.
This world rewards compliance, subservience, obedience, and the intimidation or vilification of all those who would dare to think or act against the existing dominant power structures.
Hancock also talks about cocaine and heroine addicts sent to South America to partake in Ayahuasca ceremonies as therapy and healing. The results were that over 50% left completely free of their addiction and never returned to it and didn’t even have withdrawal symptoms.
He admits to his own prolonged cannabis usage, appearing to be problematic when observed during an Ayahuasca session. He describes his ‘life review’ as the plants highlighted how heavy cannabis use had become a destructive habit, leading to dysfunctional relationships, as well as hindering his work. He has since stopped consuming cannabis.
Within our group, individuals spoke of having broken free from addictions to synthetic drugs and narcotics, since facing their demons whilst under the influence of the plant medicine.
Our newcomer friend told us of Ayahuasca facilitators in the North of Thailand, helping local Thai people by using the plant medicine to guide them towards overcoming anxiety and depression. This is taking place in traditional Thai huts, in the Chiang Dao Mountains; a beautiful and spiritual place.
It is worth mentioning that our facilitator stresses a maximum of four participants, and encourages the session to be done with friends that are well known to each other. This reduces the level of apprehension and offers comfort throughout the experience. Large mixed group ceremonies with strangers is an intense concept - from the stories we have heard - almost cultish, with the wearing of white robes for all, and other strange practices.
Each to their own.
Returning to reality
Upon returning to Bangkok, the sight of face mask wearers pervading public and private areas was highly noticeable, yet not anxiety inducing or bothersome - like it was before. Nor was there any feeling of pity or resentment. All that could be observed was a clearer understanding.
These self-subjugating-drones can only help themselves. Their current path leads to further social isolation, poorer mental health, and eventually embracing transhumanism in all its forms - that we have yet to see play out across the most vulnerable and suggestible minds in our society.
In the days following the ayahuasca sessions, the three of us discussed our relationships with our respective significant others. We felt as if we had become acutely aware of whatever minor or major grievances existed in our love lives. We were able to see clearly and honestly, our own shortcomings, along with compromises needed from both sides of each given relationship.
After enjoying wonderful reunions with our partners, we each felt closer to them. Open communication came easily, with us sharing our concerns, in some instances apologising for having acted selfishly or having been distant or distracted from giving them our full attention.
Work-wise we have all been more productive and clearer headed. We found ourselves working more effectively and creatively. We have also noticed that we are more present, both when alone or in conversations and meetings. For example, completing a daily workload of tasks much quicker than usual - owing to zero procrastination.
We have been able to better listen to others, without interrupting or talking over them. The mind is rested, patient, and attentive.
Expanding human consciousness
Let us consider our current global predicament. What is the most powerful weapon in the world today? Could it be bioweapons? Or perhaps nuclear bombs? It is neither.
The most powerful weapon is narrative.
The most powerful weapon is story.
Control the narrative, control the world.
Therefore, the best defense is the mind. An expanded consciousness is a resilient state. Expanded consciousness leads to becoming more resistant to suggestion, to propaganda, to manipulation, and to groupthink.
Ayahuasca is merely a vehicle to facilitate this transformation. Others may attain similar results through their faith or religion, through deep meditation, or via other means to reflect and observe the mind.
Terrence McKenna wrote about the benefits of entheogenic plants and psychedelics - namely psilocybin - in his book entitled Food of the Gods.
Ayahuasca frees the mind, leading those who consume the plants to doubt or reject a particular doctrine, system, or principle. This is the definition of an ‘infidel’.
Ayahuasca is Food of the Infidels.
In closing, let us consider this excerpt from Graham Hancock’s banned Ted Talk “The War on Consciousness.”
After 6 million years of boredom, the evolutionary ascent of our species from the last common ancestor with the chimpanzee, something extraordinary happened to us less than 100,000 years ago, which, by the way, is long after we’d become anatomically modern.
It was a kind of emergence into consciousness less than 100,000 years ago, really less than 40,000 years ago, when we became fully symbolic creatures. And this great change has been defined as the single most important step forward in the evolution of human behavior, is intimately associated with the emergence of the great and transcendent rock and cave art all around the world.
Over the last 30 years, researches led by professor David Lewis-Williams at the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa, and many others, have suggested an intriguing and radical possibility, which is that this emergence into consciousness was triggered by our ancestors’ encounters with visionary plants and the beginning of shamanism.
If you analyze the cave art — there’s no time to go into the details here — but there are so many details that make it clear that this was an art of altered states of consciousness, of visions. And plants like the amanita muscaria mushroom and psilocybin mushrooms appear to have been directly connected with this sudden and radical change.
So to investigate this possibility when I got interested in this mystery, I went down to the Amazon where there are still surviving shamanistic cultures today, and where they drink the powerful visionary brew: ayahuasca, of which the active ingredient is dimethyltryptamine (DMT) which is actually closely related at the molecular level to psilocybin.
Now, normally DMT cannot be activated orally — when we encounter it in the west it’s generally smoked. There’s an enzyme in our stomachs called Monoaminoxydase which switches off DMT on contact. But in the Amazon they’ve got around this problem, they say it was the spirits that taught them how to do it.
The DMT in the ayahuasca brew is contained in these leaves from a plant that they call chacruna in the Amazon, and there they mix it together with this vine. And out of the 150,000 different species of plants and trees in the Amazon, this is the one that contains a Monoaminoxydase inhibitor, which switches off that enzyme in our stomachs, and allows the DMT in the leaves — when the two are married together and cooked in water — to be absorbed orally and takes us on a four-hour journey into extraordinary realms.
Now, it’s no joke to drink ayahuasca. The ayahuasca brew has a foul, foul taste — really, really hideous and a dreadful, dreadful smell, and after you’ve drunk your cup you’ll find within 45 minutes or so that you’re sweating, that you’re feeling nauseous. Pretty soon you may well be vomiting, you may have diarrhoea, so, you know, nobody’s doing this for recreation.
And I’d like to add that I don’t think any of the psychedelics should be used for recreation. They have a much more serious and important mission with humanity. So, we’re not doing this for fun, but what draws people to ayahuasca again and again to brace themselves for this experience? And you do have to brace yourself is its extraordinary effects at the level of consciousness.
And one of those effects has to do with creativity, and we can see the creative cosmogenic impulse of ayahuasca in the paintings of Ayahuasca Shamans from Peru, like the paintings of Pablo Amaringo here those richly saturated colors, they’re amazing visions that they reproduce. And this creative impulse has also spread to western artists — many western artists now have been deeply influenced by ayahuasca and are also painting their visions.
And as these paintings show, another universal experience of ayahuasca is the encounter with seemingly intelligent entities which communicate with us telepathically. Now, I’m making no claim one way or another as to the reality status of these entities we encounter, simply that phenomenologically, in the ayahuasca experience they are encountered by people all over the world.
Nicholas Creed is a Bangkok-based journalistic dissident. If you liked this content and wish to support the work, buy him a coffee or consider a crypto donation:
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That Hancock Ted talk is legit
am not experienced, but this stuff inspired plenty of entertaining songs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2lhU5It2TM