What a Shaman Sees in a Mental Hospital

What a Shaman Sees in a Mental Hospital | Third Monk

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The Shamanic View of Mental Illness

In the shamanic view, mental illness signals “the birth of a healer,” explains Malidoma Patrice Somé. Thus, mental disorders are spiritual emergencies, spiritual crises, and need to be regarded as such to aid the healer in being born.

What those in the West view as mental illness, the Dagara people regard as “good news from the other world.” The person going through the crisis has been chosen as a medium for a message to the community that needs to be communicated from the spirit realm.

Mental disorder, behavioral disorder of all kinds, signal the fact that two obviously incompatible energies have merged into the same field. – Dr. Somé

These disturbances result when the person does not get assistance in dealing with the presence of the energy from the spirit realm.

One of the things Dr. Somé encountered when he first came to the United States in 1980 for graduate study was how this country deals with mental illness. When a fellow student was sent to a mental institute due to “nervous depression,” Dr. Somé went to visit him.

I was so shocked. That was the first time I was brought face to face with what is done here to people exhibiting the same symptoms I’ve seen in my village. – Dr. Somé

What struck Dr. Somé was that the attention given to such symptoms was based on pathology, on the idea that the condition is something that needs to stop. This was in complete opposition to the way his culture views such a situation. As he looked around the stark ward at the patients, some in straitjackets, some zoned out on medications, others screaming, he observed to himself…

So this is how the healers who are attempting to be born are treated in this culture. What a loss! What a loss that a person who is finally being aligned with a power from the other world is just being wasted.

Another way to say this, which may make more sense to the Western mind, is that we in the West are not trained in how to deal or even taught to acknowledge the existence of psychic phenomena, the spiritual world. In fact, psychic abilities are denigrated. When energies from the spiritual world emerge in a Western psyche, that individual is completely unequipped to integrate them or even recognize what is happening. The result can be terrifying. Without the proper context for and assistance in dealing with the breakthrough from another level of reality, for all practical purposes, the person is insane. Heavy dosing with anti-psychotic drugs compounds the problem and prevents the integration that could lead to soul development and growth in the individual who has received these energies.

On the mental ward, Dr Somé saw a lot of “beings” hanging around the patients, “entities” that are invisible to most people but that shamans and psychics are able to see. “They were causing the crisis in these people,” he says. It appeared to him that these beings were trying to get the medications and their effects out of the bodies of the people the beings were trying to merge with, and were increasing the patients’ pain in the process. “The beings were acting almost like some kind of excavator in the energy field of people. They were really fierce about that. The people they were doing that to were just screaming and yelling,” he said. He couldn’t stay in that environment and had to leave.

In the Dagara tradition, the community helps the person reconcile the energies of both worlds–”the world of the spirit that he or she is merged with, and the village and community.” That person is able then to serve as a bridge between the worlds and help the living with information and healing they need. Thus, the spiritual crisis ends with the birth of another healer.

The other world’s relationship with our world is one of sponsorship.More often than not, the knowledge and skills that arise from this kind of merger are a knowledge or a skill that is provided directly from the other world. – Dr. Somé

The beings who were increasing the pain of the inmates on the mental hospital ward were actually attempting to merge with the inmates in order to get messages through to this world. The people they had chosen to merge with were getting no assistance in learning how to be a bridge between the worlds and the beings’ attempts to merge were thwarted. The result was the sustaining of the initial disorder of energy and the aborting of the birth of a healer.

“The Western culture has consistently ignored the birth of the healer,” states Dr. Somé. “Consequently, there will be a tendency from the other world to keep trying as many people as possible in an attempt to get somebody’s attention. They have to try harder.” The spirits are drawn to people whose senses have not been anesthetized. “The sensitivity is pretty much read as an invitation to come in,” he notes.

Those who develop so-called mental disorders are those who are sensitive, which is viewed in Western culture as oversensitivity. Indigenous cultures don’t see it that way and, as a result, sensitive people don’t experience themselves as overly sensitive. In the West, “it is the overload of the culture they’re in that is just wrecking them,” observes Dr. Somé. The frenetic pace, the bombardment of the senses, and the violent energy that characterize Western culture can overwhelm sensitive people.

Schizophrenia and Foreign Energy

With schizophrenia, there is a special “receptivity to a flow of images and information, which cannot be controlled,” stated Dr. Somé. “When this kind of rush occurs at a time that is not personally chosen, and particularly when it comes with images that are scary and contradictory, the person goes into a frenzy.”

What is required in this situation is first to separate the person’s energy from the extraneous foreign energies, by using shamanic practice (what is known as a “sweep”) to clear the latter out of the individual’s aura. With the clearing of their energy field, the person no longer picks up a flood of information and so no longer has a reason to be scared and disturbed, explains Dr. Somé.

Then it is possible to help the person align with the energy of the spirit being attempting to come through from the other world and give birth to the healer. The blockage of that emergence is what creates problems. “The energy of the healer is a high-voltage energy,” he observes. “When it is blocked, it just burns up the person. It’s like a short-circuit. Fuses are blowing. This is why it can be really scary, and I understand why this culture prefers to confine these people. Here they are yelling and screaming, and they’re put into a straitjacket. That’s a sad image.” Again, the shamanic approach is to work on aligning the energies so there is no blockage, “fuses” aren’t blowing, and the person can become the healer they are meant to be.

It needs to be noted at this point, however, that not all of the spirit beings that enter a person’s energetic field are there for the purposes of promoting healing. There are negative energies as well, which are undesirable presences in the aura. In those cases, the shamanic approach is to remove them from the aura, rather than work to align the discordant energies

Alex: Crazy in the USA, Healer in Africa

To test his belief that the shamanic view of mental illness holds true in the Western world as well as in indigenous cultures, Dr. Somé took a mental patient back to Africa with him, to his village. I was prompted by my own curiosity to find out whether there’s truth in the universality that

I was prompted by my own curiosity to find out whether there’s truth in the universality that mental illness could be connected with an alignment with a being from another world. – Dr. Somé

Alex was an 18-year-old American who had suffered a psychotic break when he was 14. He had hallucinations, was suicidal, and went through cycles of dangerously severe depression. He was in a mental hospital and had been given a lot of drugs, but nothing was helping. “The parents had done everything–unsuccessfully,” says Dr. Somé. “They didn’t know what else to do.”

With their permission, Dr. Somé took their son to Africa. “After eight months there, Alex had become quite normal, Dr. Somé reports. He was even able to participate with healers in the business of healing; sitting with them all day long and helping them, assisting them in what they were doing with their clients . . . . He spent about four years in my village.” Alex stayed by choice, not because he needed more healing. He felt, “much safer in the village than in America.”

To bring his energy and that of the being from the spiritual realm into alignment, Alex went through a shamanic ritual designed for that purpose, although it was slightly different from the one used with the Dagara people. “He wasn’t born in the village, so something else applied. But the result was similar, even though the ritual was not literally the same,” explains Dr. Somé. The fact that aligning the energy worked to heal Alex demonstrated to Dr. Somé that the connection between other beings and mental illness is indeed universal.

After the ritual, Alex began to share the messages that the spirit being had for this world. Unfortunately, the people he was talking to didn’t speak English (Dr. Somé was away at that point). The whole experience led, however, to Alex’s going to college to study psychology. He returned to the United States after four years because “he discovered that all the things that he needed to do had been done, and he could then move on with his life.”

The last that Dr. Somé heard was that Alex was in graduate school in psychology at Harvard. No one had thought he would ever be able to complete undergraduate studies, much less get an advanced degree.

Dr. Somé sums up what Alex’s mental illness was all about: “He was reaching out. It was an emergency call. His job and his purpose

He was reaching out. It was an emergency call. His job and his purpose was to be a healer. He said no one was paying attention to that.

After seeing how well the shamanic approach worked for Alex, Dr. Somé concluded that spirit beings are just as much an issue in the West as in his community in Africa. “Yet the question still remains, the answer to this problem must be found here, instead of having to go all the way overseas to seek the answer. There has to be a way in which a little bit of attention beyond the pathology of this whole experience leads to the possibility of coming up with the proper ritual to help people.

Longing for Spiritual Connection

A common thread that Dr. Somé has noticed in “mental” disorders in the West is “a very ancient ancestral energy that has been placed in stasis, that finally is coming out in the person.” His job then is to trace it back, to go back in time to discover what that spirit is. In most cases, the spirit is connected to nature, especially with mountains or big rivers, he says.

In the case of mountains, as an example to explain the phenomenon, “it’s a spirit of the mountain that is walking side by side with the person and, as a result, creating a time-space distortion that is affecting the person caught in it.” What is needed is a merger or alignment of the two energies, “so the person and the mountain spirit become one.” Again, the shaman conducts a specific ritual to bring about this alignment.

Dr. Somé believes that he encounters this situation so often in the United States because “most of the fabric of this country is made up of the energy of the machine, and the result of that is the disconnection and the severing of the past. You can run from the past, but you can’t hide from it.” The ancestral spirit of the natural world comes visiting.

It’s not so much what the spirit wants as it is what the person wants. The spirit sees in us a call for something grand, something that will make life meaningful, and so the spirit is responding to that. – Dr. Somé

That call, which we don’t even know we are making, reflects “a strong longing for a profound connection, a connection that transcends materialism and possession of things and moves into a tangible cosmic dimension. Most of this longing is unconscious, but for spirits, conscious or unconscious doesn’t make any difference.” They respond to either.

As part of the ritual to merge the mountain and human energy, those who are receiving the “mountain energy” are sent to a mountain area of their choice, where they pick up a stone that calls to them. They bring that stone back for the rest of the ritual and then keep it as a companion; some even carry it around with them. “The presence of the stone does a lot in tuning the perceptive ability of the person,” notes Dr. Somé. “They receive all kinds of information that they can make use of, so it’s like they get some tangible guidance from the other world as to how to live their life.”

When it is the “river energy,” those being called go to the river and, after speaking to the river spirit, find a water stone to bring back for the same kind of ritual as with the mountain spirit.

“People think something extraordinary must be done in an extraordinary situation like this,” he says. That’s not usually the case. Sometimes it is as simple as carrying a stone.

A Sacred Ritual Approach to Mental Illness

One of the gifts a shaman can bring to the Western world is to help people rediscover ritual, which is so sadly lacking.

The abandonment of ritual can be devastating. From the spiritual view, ritual is inevitable and necessary if one is to live. To say that ritual is needed in the industrialized world is an understatement. We have seen in my own people that it is probably impossible to live a sane life without it. – Dr. Somé in Ritual: Power, Healing, and Community.

Dr. Somé did not feel that the rituals from his traditional village could simply be transferred to the West, so over his years of shamanic work here, he has designed rituals that meet the very different needs of this culture. Although the rituals change according to the individual or the group involved, he finds that there is a need for certain rituals in general.

One of these involves helping people discover that their distress is coming from the fact that they are “called by beings from the other world to cooperate with them in doing healing work.” Ritual allows them to move out of the distress and accept that calling.

Another ritual need relates to initiation. In indigenous cultures all over the world, young people are initiated into adulthood when they reach a certain age. The lack of such initiation in the West is part of the crisis that people are in here, says Dr. Somé.

He urges communities to bring together “the creative juices of people who have had this kind of experience, in an attempt to come up with some kind of an alternative ritual that would at least begin to put a dent in this kind of crisis.”

Another ritual that repeatedly speaks to the needs of those coming to him for help entails making a bonfire, and then putting into the bonfire “items that are symbolic of issues carried inside the individuals . . . It might be the issues of anger and frustration against an ancestor who has left a legacy of murder and enslavement or anything, things that the descendant has to live with,” he explains.

If these are approached as things that are blocking the human imagination, the person’s life purpose, and even the person’s view of life as something that can improve, then it makes sense to begin thinking in terms of how to turn that blockage into a roadway that can lead to something more creative and more fulfilling. – Dr. Somé

The example of issues with an ancestors touches on rituals designed by Dr. Somé that address a serious dysfunction in Western society and in the process “trigger enlightenment” in participants. These are ancestral rituals, and the dysfunction they are aimed at is the mass turning-of-the-back on ancestors. Some of the spirits trying to come through, as described earlier, may be “ancestors who want to merge with a descendant in an attempt to heal what they weren’t able to do while in their physical body.”

“Unless the relationship between the living and the dead is in balance, chaos ensues,” he says. “The Dagara believe that, if such an imbalance exists, it is the duty of the living to heal their ancestors. If these ancestors are not healed, their sick energy will haunt the souls and psyches of those who are responsible for helping them.” The rituals focus on healing the relationship with our ancestors, both specific issues of an individual ancestor and the larger cultural issues contained in our past. Dr. Somé has seen extraordinary healing occur at these rituals.

Taking a sacred ritual approach to mental illness rather than regarding the person as a pathological case gives the person affected–and indeed the community at large–the opportunity to begin looking at it from that vantage point too, which leads to “a whole plethora of opportunities and ritual initiative that can be very, very beneficial to everyone present,” states. Dr. Somé.

Excerpted from: The Natural Medicine Guide to Schizophrenia, or The Natural Medicine Guide to Bi-polar Disorder, pages 178-189, Stephanie Marohn (featuring Malidoma Patrice Somé).

> Shamanic View of Mental Illness | Waking Times

Ayahuasca Is Helping Western Minds Align with the Earth’s Vibrations

Ayahuasca Is Helping Western Minds Align with the Earth's Vibrations | Third Monk image 1

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Rak Razam is an Australian journalist whose gonzo-style coverage of ayahuasca tourism explores how the ancient Amazonian spiritual healing tradition is impacting the lives of more and more Westerners—and vice versa.

Q: What are the healing benefits of psychedelics, and ayahuasca in particular?

Rak Razam: This is the thing, which has been missing on a core level: trying to look at the root causes of issues, not just the symptoms. The entire world is, at the moment, out of balance.

Our relationship with the planet is out of balance. The ecology is out of balance. The politics are out of balance. The monetary system is out of balance. You name it. It seems to be unsustainable “isms” that we’re living in that are not in right relationship with the planet.…

It’s very strategic and very serendipitous, really, that many, many tribal peoples all across the world still are caretakers for, and have the knowledge and the heritage of, ayahuasca and this entheogenic revival of looking at what the planet gives us with these plants and their substances.

They have held the flame, while, basically western culture—the dominating culture, which has subjugated so many of these cultures—is now getting ready again to come back into balance. Ayahuasca is going out into the world.

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Q: What makes it important to you to educate people about these substances? What drives you to talk about and to share what you’ve experienced with other people?

Rak Razam: I’m a writer and I’m a journalist and I’m communicating and documenting what used to be called the counter culture and I call the alter culture now: this multiplicity of communities which are engaging in archaic practices or ways of being which bring them closer back to the planet and its rhythms—whether that’s altered states or counter culture or sovereignty movements or using technology.

I guess ultimately I’m more of a mystic, or as much a mystic as I am a writer. … Things like ayahuasca or psychedelics, they’re only the tip of the iceberg. They’re the finger which points at the moon; they’re not the moon itself. What these things have revealed to me is that there’s a deeper pattern and a deeper game afoot, I guess. I really feel that in the planetary organism of the Earth itself, and then the larger, deeper cosmic ecology, there are rhythms within rhythms. We’re one species among many on the planet and we’ve thrown the world out of balance.

I feel with these psychoactives or these entheogens, which the planet itself secretes—which basically only the higher mammals get high off—there’s a reason. There’s a synergy between the planet and these creations and there’s a larger pattern unfolding, despite all the war and heartache and seeming evil in the world. … Things are changing. There’s a new cycle beginning and I can really feel that. I think many people around the world feel that. I’m hoping to help give language to that and give perspective to that. It’s deeper than ayahuasca. It’s deeper than the psychedelics. It’s a return to I guess what Terrence McKenna called this archaic revival….

It’s like John Lennon [said]. Peace is there if you want it. Utopia is there if we want it, but it’s all about consciousness. I’m not pushing my agenda here, or saying that we should all elevate our consciousness.

What I’m saying is I think the Earth is in cahoots with with our subconscious here. It’s bringing us back into the garden, into this sustainable frequency of being with it, and that is elevating our consciousness.

> Life-Altering Lessons of the Psychedelic Ayahuasca Plant | AlterNet

Psychedelic Watercolor Paintings, Guillem Mari Art Gallery

Psychedelic Watercolor Paintings, Guillem Mari Art Gallery | Third Monk image 8

Guillem Mari is an illustrator whose distinct watercolor style has gotten a lot of attention.

After working in the animation industry, Guillem became a freelancer in comics and illustration, working for Marvel and Image Comics.

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A New Path

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Manifest

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Eye Contact Permitted

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Utopia

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One Conscious Breath

One Conscious Breath

Dancer

Dancer

Rust Cohle

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Sonic Hues

Sonic Hues

Sonic Hues II

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The Human Drama

The Human Drama

Shaman

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The Healing Shroom Tea of Mexico (Video)

The Healing Shroom Tea of Mexico (Video) | Third Monk

Deep in the mountains of Oaxaca, Mexico natives have been using psilocybin mushrooms, or ‘shrooms’ for thousands of years not as a drug, but as a medicine to heal both physical and mental disorders.

Amber Lyon travels to San Jose Pacifico, Mexico to meet with a mushroom guide who shows us how he makes his famous shroom tea which he serves to tourists from all over the world in seek of the sacred mushroom.

Psilocybin Mushroom Ceremony, Mexico

Journalist Amber Lyon joins native Mazatec healers for a mushroom ceremony. The psilocybin mushrooms are part of Lyon’s therapy to treat Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

The Curanderas in this area of the world have been using magic mushrooms medicinally to treat illness for thousands of years.

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Exploring Consciousness with Psychedelics – Graham Hancock Ted Talk (Video)

Exploring Consciousness with Psychedelics - Graham Hancock Ted Talk (Video) | Third Monk

Graham Hancock explores the shamanistic use of psychedelics that create a state of being which brings us a greater understanding of our true nature and the nature of consciousness; in order to harmoniously balance our Earthly existence within the universe.

The War on Consciousness – Graham Hancock Notable Excerpts

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 and most frequently of all, the spirit of Ayahuasca herself; Mother Ayahuasca, who is a healer. And although she’s kinda the mother goddess of the planet. She seems to take a direct personal interest in us as individuals. To heal our ills, to want us to be the best we can possibly be, to correct errors and mistakes in our behaviors that may be leading us down the wrong path.

Ayahuasca has been fantastically successful at getting people off harmful addictions to hard drugs such as heroin and cocaine. Jacques Mabbit at the Takiwasi Clinic a in Peru brings heroin and cocaine addicts out there for a month. Gives them 12 Ayahuasca sessions and they have encounters with Mother Ayahuasca during those sessions that lead them not to wish to take heroin up again anymore and more than half of them leave completely free of their addiction never return to it and don’t even have withdrawal symptoms. And the same incredible healing work was being done in Canada by Dr. Gabor Maté until the Canadian government stopped and intervened his healing practice on the grounds that Ayahuasca itself was an illegal drug.

What is death? Our materialist science reduces everything to matter. Materialist science in the West says that we are just meat. We’re just our bodies. When the brain is dead that’s the end of consciousness there is no life after death, there is no soul, we just rot and are gone. But actually many honest scientists should admit that consciousness is the greatest mystery of science.

This is the paradigm of all spiritual traditions; that we are immortal souls, temporarily incarnated in these physical forms to learn and to grow and to develop.

Let’s not forget that Ayahuasca is not alone. That it’s part of an ancient worldwide system of the targeted, careful, responsible alteration of consciousness. It’s recently been shown by scholars that the Kykeon used in the Eleusian Mysteries in Ancient Greece was almost certainly a psychedelic brew. The Soma of the Vedas may have been a brew based off of the amanita muscaria mushroom. We have the DMT in The ancient Egyptian Tree of Life. We have the whole global cultures of surviving shamanism and what it’s all about is a state of consciousness that’s designed to help us find balance harmony, the Ancient Egyptians would have called it Ma’at, with the universe and to remain mindful that what we’re here to undertake on Earth while immersed in matter is fundamentally a spiritual journey aimed at the growth and perfection of the soul. A journey that may go back to the very origin to what made us human in the first place.

If we as adults are not allowed to make sovereign decisions about what to experience with our own consciousness, while doing no harm to others. Including the decision to use, responsibly, ancient and sacred visionary plants then we cannot claim to be free in any way.

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Eye of the Needle: An Ayahuasca Journey, Short Film (Video)

Eye of the Needle: An Ayahuasca Journey, Short Film (Video) | Third Monk

Uncover an ancient South American ritualized medicine and mysterious hallucinogenic substance known as ayahuasca. Director, Daniel LeMunyan leads the viewer through a visually striking exploration into the Peruvian Amazon rainforest and the hidden depths of human consciousness in this short documentary.

Ayahuasca’s active ingredient is DMT or Dimethyltryptamine which causes intense hallucinations lasting for up to 8 hours. Blended and cooked slowly, this brew is a mixture of 2 plants found only in the Amazon and is used by locals to enter a deep trance that is said to heal the body and unlock the subconscious mind. Guided by shamans, a person enters the eye of the needle and must face his own truths and deepest fears.

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Terence Mckenna – Culture is Your Operating System, Reset it with Shrooms (Video)

Terence Mckenna - Culture is Your Operating System, Reset it with Shrooms (Video) | Third Monk

The late, great Terence McKenna explains how the psychedelic experience clears all preconceived notions and prejudices and leaves the psyche with a clean, pure view of the self and the universe.

Psychedelics Resets Your Operating System

Data has been arriving about the practices of aboriginal cultures all over the planet that they dissolve ordinary realities, ordinary cultural values, through an interaction and symbioses. A relationship to local plants that perturb brain chemistry. And in this domain of perturbed brain chemistry, the cultural operating system is wiped clean and some thing older – even for these people , something older, more vitalistic, more in touch with the animal soul, replaces it.

Replaces the cultural operating system with some thing not determined by history and geography, but some thing writ in the language of the flesh it’s self. This is who you are, this is truly nakedness, you are not naked when you take of your clothes. You still wear your religious assumptions, your prejudices, your fears, your illusions, your delusions.

When you shed the cultural operating system, then essentially you stand naked before the inspection of you own psyche.

Shamans Can Repair Our Corrupt System

The Shaman is in possession of certain facts about plants about, about animals, about healing, about human psychology, about local geography, about mojo of many different sorts that the client is not aware of, the client is running culture light, the shaman pays for the registered and licensed version of the software and is running a much heavier version of the software than the client.

I think we should all aspire to make this upgrade.

It’s very important that you have all the bells and whistles on your operating system, otherwise some bodies going to get a leg up on you. Well, what’s wrong with the operating system we have consumer capitalism 5.0 or whatever it is… well… its dumb, its retro, its very non competitive, its messy, it waste the environment, it waste human resources, its inefficient, it runs on stereotypes, it runs on a low sampling rate which is what creates stereotypes.

Low sample rates make everybody appear alike when the glory is in every ones differences, and the current operating system is flawed. It actually has bugs in it that generate contradictions. Contradictions such as we’re cutting the earth from beneath our own feet, we’re poisonings the atmosphere we breath. This is not intelligent behavior, this is a culture with a bug in its operating system that’s making it produce erratic, dysfunctional, malfunctional behavior.

Time to call a tech, and who are the techs?

The Shamans are the techs!

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Joe Rogan – How Hemp Became Illegal, DMT Reset Button (Video)

Joe Rogan - How Hemp Became Illegal, DMT Reset Button (Video) | Third Monk

Cannabis is illegal because of the economical effects it would have on cigarette sales, alcohol sales and as a viable alternative for many pharmaceutical drugs. Hemp is also useful for paper production and in the textile industry. Joe Rogan also explains the purpose of DMT, “the spirit molecule” that acts as a gateway to other realms of reality.

Hemp Became an Economic Threat to Various Industries

William Randolph Hearst who owned all these newspapers and paper mills, it was going to cost him millions of dollars to convert over to hemp. So instead he started printing stories in his paper about some new drug called “marijuana”. Marijuana wasn’t even a slang term for cannabis yet, it was used to describe a Mexican wild tobacco, completely unrelated. They got it illegal by saying people are smoking it, blacks and Mexicans are raping white women. Congress outlawed this new drug “Marijuana”, with no idea that they were outlawing hemp, which had been in use for thousands of years.

DMT, Psychedelics Isolates the Mind From Cultural Conditioning

It’s not about something that kills you. You won’t be able to absorb propaganda the way you do now. You won’t be able to look at the news the way you do now. You won’t be able to look at common cultural conditioning and predetermined patterns of behavior. None of that no longer makes sense after you’ve gone through a psychedelic experience. Any psychedelic experience is like pressing CTRL ALT DELETE on your brain.

Terence McKenna – DMT Revelations, Hypothesis, and Experiences (Video)

Terence McKenna - DMT Revelations, Hypothesis, and Experiences (Video) | Third Monk image 1

Terence Mckenna – DMT Revelations, Usage and Experiences


Terence McKenna describes a method to getting the most out of your DMT experience along with an anecdotal composite of over 40 of his DMT trips.

 

Terence Mckenna – DMT Hypothesis

Okay hypothesis one, DMT is not a drug, it is an extraterrestrial communication device. These are creatures somewhere in the universe who are so different from us that they come to us not in starships the size of Manhattan but in drug molecules that are dinky. So we are in contact here with some kind of extraterrestrial technology and these are true aliens of some sort. And God knows the weirdness of the situation supports the hypothesis.

Okay second hypothesis. There is a parallel universe, unsuspected by most human beings. It’s right here, all the time. It’s inhabited. These things have their own hopes, fears, problems, so forth. And somehow this drug just erases this boundary and then you find yourself in the elf nest.

Next hypothesis. These things, because they have great affection for me, because they seem intent on the task of communicating, perhaps they are human beings from the distant future. Perhaps this is what we are fated to become. You know, there’s always, since we were kids, the cliché ‘beings of pure energy’. Well it’s always been a little hard to wrap your mind around what that would look like, but, low and behold here appear to be creatures of pure energy. But there are a lot of problems with hypothesizing a future human technological breakthrough which would allow them to actually manipulate the past. Logical paradoxes and that sort of thing.

Well so then here’s another possibility. They are human beings. But they are not in the future in the ordinary sense or in the past. They are in the pre-natal and post-life phase. In other words these are either the unborn waiting in some limbo like dimension to descend into matter. Or they are in fact people who have had a sojourn in the domain of organic existence, and now have moved on. Let me not kid you, we’re talking about dead people here in that case. Well if you go to the shamans who access these places through Ayahuasca or the Virola snuffs or something like that. They will say ‘Well these are our ancestors. Didn’t you read Mircea Eliade. Don’t you know that shamanism works through ancestor magic?’ Well “ancestor” is a tremendously sanitized term for “dead people”. And if what is actually happening here, is that the much argued about soul is actually made visible by this pharmacological strategy… I mean god knows why, but god knows why anything else is the way it is…. Then this is truly big new. This is the confounding of rationalism. If what is happening is that by pushing the frontiers of pharmacology we discover a way to even momentarily and temporarily erase the boundary between the living and the dead, then this is a 180 degree turn on the evolution of culture that not even the most technically infatuated among us are prepared to assimilate. And over time, I’ve sort of come to incline to the idea that this is what is in fact going on. And the reason it’s so hard to bring anything out of the DMT flash is because at the center of the flash you find out something so unexpected, so appalling, and so existentially convincing in the moment of confronting it, that you simply immediately block it out and obliterate it.

Terence McKenna – DMT Vs. 5-MEO-DMT

This clip is taken from a talk titled “The Ethnobotany of Shamanism -Part 5” Podcast 191. In this clip Terence gives us his take on the difference between 5-MeO-DMT and nnDMT and his preference for nnDMT.

Some people do not prefer 5-MeO-DMT, I imagine this has to do with the ego death aspect of it…but the potential of both in a spiritual symbiosis may be exactly what the shaman ordered.

From Terence Mckenna Food of The Gods

“The DMT Experience”


What can be said of DMT as an experience and in relation to our own spiritual emptiness? Does it offer us answers? Do the short-acting tryptamines offer an analogy to the ecstasy of the partnership society before Eden became a memory? And if they do, then what can we say about it?

What has impressed me repeatedly during my many glimpses into the world of the hallucinogenic indoles, and what seems generally to have escaped comment, is the transformation of narrative and language. The experience that engulfs one’s entire being as one slips beneath the surface of the DMT ecstasy feels like the penetration of a membrane. The mind and the self literally unfold before one’s eyes. There is a sense that one is made new, yet unchanged, as if one were made of gold and had just been recast in the furnace of one’s birth. Breathing is normal, heartbeat steady, the mind clear and observing. But what of the world? What of incoming sensory data?

Under the influence of DMT, the world becomes an Arabian labyrinth, a palace, a more than possible Martian jewel, vast with motifs that flood the gaping mind with complex and wordless awe. Color and the sense of a reality-unlocking secret nearby pervade the experience. There is a sense of other times, and of one’s own infancy, and of wonder, wonder and more wonder. It is an audience with the alien nuncio. In the midst of this experience, apparently at the end of human history, guarding gates that seem surely to open on the howling maelstrom of the unspeakable emptiness between the stars, is the Aeon.

The Aeon, as Heraclitus presciently observed, is a child at play with colored balls. Many diminutive beings are present there — the tykes, the self-transforming machine elves of hyperspace. Are they the children destined to be father to the man? One has the impression of entering into an ecology of souls that lies beyond the portals of what we naively call death. I do not know. Are they the synesthetic embodiment of ourselves as the Other, or of the Other as ourselves? Are they the elves lost to us since the fading of the magic light of childhood? Here is a tremendum barely to be told, an epiphany beyond our wildest dreams. Here is the realm of that which is stranger than we can suppose. Here is the mystery, alive, unscathed, still as new for us as when our ancestors lived it fifteen thousand summers ago. The tryptamine entities offer the gift of new language, they sing in pearly voices that rain down as colored petals and flow through the air like hot metal to become toys and such gifts as gods would give their children. The sense of emotional connection is terrifying and intense. The Mysteries revealed are real and if ever fully told will leave no stone upon another in the small world we have gone so ill in.

This is not the mercurial world of the UFO, to be invoked from lonely hilltops; this is not the siren song of lost Atlantis wailing through the trailer courts of crack-crazed America. DMT is not one of our irrational illusions. What we experience in the presence of DMT is real news. It is a nearby dimension — frightening, transformative, and beyond our powers to imagine, and yet to be explored in the usual way. We must send fearless experts, whatever that may come to mean, to explore and to report on what they find.

Terence McKenna – Return to Our Stoned Shaman Core of Mystery and Imagination (Video)

Terence McKenna - Return to Our Stoned Shaman Core of Mystery and Imagination (Video) | Third Monk

Terence McKenna talks about the diseases of modern society, the archaic revival, the psychedelic mystery, culture and transformation from the question and answer session of his lecture entitled ‘Eros And The Eschaton’.

The idea there is that we have gone sick by following a path of untrammelled rationalism, male dominance, attention to the visible surface of things, practicality, bottom-line-ism. We have gone very, very sick. And the body politic, like any body, when it feels itself to be sick, it begins to produce antibodies, or strategies for overcoming the condition of disease. And the 20th century is an enormous effort at self-healing. Phenomena as diverse as surrealism, body piercing, psychedelic drug use, sexual permissiveness, jazz, experimental dance, rave culture, tattooing, the list is endless.

I applaud all of this; because it’s an impulse to return to what is felt by the body – what is authentic, what is archaic – and when you tease apart these archaic impulses, at the very centre of all these impulses is the desire to return to a world of magical empowerment of feeling. And at the centre of that impulse is the shaman: stoned, intoxicated on plants, speaking with the spirit helpers, dancing in the moonlight, and vivifying and invoking a world of conscious, living mystery. That’s what the world is.