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51. Ayahuasca and the Realm of Spirit with Hamilton Souther
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In this week’s episode, we welcome Maestro Hamilton Souther to the show. Hamilton is a Master Shaman. In 2004, he became the first Westerner to be recognized as a Maestro Medico Vegetalista (Amazonian Plant Medicine Expert), He is the founder of Blue Morpho Retreat center in Peru, and Blue Morpho Academy, which is an education center for certifying sitters, coaches, and facilitators. Hamilton’s experience as a facilitator is unrivaled, with over 20 years using Sacred Plants to help clients improve their lives. He has worked with over 15,000 individuals during this time and has guided over 3,000 plant medicine ceremonies including over 1,500 Ayahuasca Ceremonies.
https://bluemorphotours.com/ https://bluemorphoacademy.com/ https://www.instagram.com/hamiltonsouther/ https://www.instagram.com/bluemorphoretreats/
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Music By Nathan Willis RIP
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Transcript
Introduction to Hamilton Souther
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Pursuit of Infinity. In this week's episode, we welcome Maestro Hamilton Souther to the show. Hamilton is a master shaman. In 2004, he became the first Westerner to be recognized as Maestro Medico Vegetalista, which translates to Amazonian Plant Medicine Expert.
00:00:20
Speaker
He's the founder of Blue Morpho Retreat Center in Peru and Blue Morpho Academy, which is an education center for certifying sitters, coaches and facilitators. Hamilton's experience as a facilitator is unrivaled, with over 20 years using sacred plants to help clients improve their lives. He has worked with over 15,000 individuals during this time and has guided over 3,000 plant medicine ceremonies, including over 1,500 ayahuasca ceremonies.
00:00:49
Speaker
All the links you'll need to find them will be listed below in the show notes. But before we get to it, for all things Pursuit of Infinity, visit our website, pursuitofinfinity.com, where you'll find all the links to the many places you can find us.
00:01:04
Speaker
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00:01:33
Speaker
With all of that out of the way, thank you so much for listening and I hope you enjoy this week's episode.
Journey to Becoming a Shaman
00:01:53
Speaker
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Pursuit of Infinity. I'm your host, Josh. And if you were listening, then you will have heard a short introduction on today's guest. But if you're watching today, we're here with Hamilton Souther, who is a master shaman and founder of Blue Morpho retreat center. So thank you so much, Hamilton, for joining me today. Oh, Josh, it's a pleasure to be here. Thanks so much for having me on your podcast.
00:02:14
Speaker
I appreciate it, man. So I hear a lot of people claim to be shamans and they throw the word shamanism around quite a bit. So just for the listeners who aren't quite familiar with it, what exactly is shamanism and what is a shaman?
00:02:30
Speaker
Well, shamanism fundamentally is a series of practices that are ancient, they're pre-modern civilization, and they ultimately are about bridging realities between the physical reality and what could be thought of as a greater spiritual reality or mythological reality that sits behind consciousness and kind of what's going on on this plane.
00:02:53
Speaker
And traditionally shamans are people who have extraordinary experiences going into altered states of consciousness to access these other planes of existence, really for the benefit of the tribe or the benefit of the people that they work with. So their role is typically a healer, or if you could think of like a rudimentary doctor before there was Western medicine.
00:03:15
Speaker
or a sacred keeper of knowledge, or if the tribe needs a direction or some kind of supernatural intervention, that would be the role of the shaman to ultimately be able to help provide that.
00:03:27
Speaker
I think in the modern experience, we see that the word shaman is more like a spiritual practitioner who maybe is kind of eclectic and has some skills in a variety of different belief systems. But I think that that's a very modern and very recent creation. And that fundamentally a true shaman is somebody that has a very specific and very important role within their tribal society.
00:03:54
Speaker
for the cohesion of the tribe, the well-being of the tribe, the health of it, and the individual members, and then its evolutionary direction, like the direction the tribe is taking. That's fundamentally, those are the roles of the shaman.
00:04:09
Speaker
So a lot of people may look at you and see you as a white American and wonder, well, how did this guy become a shaman? How was he accepted into one of these tribes if that definition is what we're going to go with? So take us back to what was it, about 2000, 2001 when all this started for you.
00:04:27
Speaker
Yeah, in 2000 to 2001, I had a natural awakening. Some people call it a spiritual awakening. But fundamentally, I started to go into altered states of consciousness and really sober states. When I get asked all the time, were you taking plant medicines and things? And the answer is no. I would go into these altered states. And when I did, I would experience consciousness in ways that were new for me and were, you know,
00:04:52
Speaker
clear and lucid, but tapping into something else that I didn't have a frame of reference for. And I started to look at shamanism as a way of trying to maybe understand the experiences that I was having. And it turned out that even though I grew up as an American, and I was living
00:05:09
Speaker
what had come out of a suburban childhood, I was having a quintessential experiences of callings that would be natural for people from shamanic cultures around the world. So the very same dream experiences, meditative experiences, altered state experiences I was having were akin to that of a tribal person awakening to a shamanic apprenticeship.
00:05:29
Speaker
And it was in those visions themselves during that time that I actually was given the guidance, which is also typical that you get guidance about where you're supposed to be going in life and how you're going to be trained, that I would ultimately go to Peru and that I would find people that were waiting for me. Not only that they were going to train me, but they were actually waiting for me. They already knew of me and that I was going to meet them. I'd be guided to
Consciousness and Interconnectedness
00:05:54
Speaker
them. They would recognize me. They would take me in and ultimately train me.
00:05:58
Speaker
I thought that that sounded incredibly far fetched. I thought it was impossible that maybe I had seen too many sci fi movies growing up, you know, wasn't really sure how to relate to it, but it actually happened exactly the way I saw it within those visions. So I would have these experiences in these altered states, it would be
00:06:16
Speaker
you know, like as if people were floating in outer space or being in these like almost fantasy like realities and people would show up and start talking to me there and it'd be like I'm having a conversation and then 15, 20 minutes later I would be in this normal state again.
00:06:32
Speaker
And no one would be able to know other than me what happened in that conversation. And it was in those planes or in those realms that I ultimately met the people that were going to train me and ultimately received me in the Peruvian Amazon and took me through the first stages of apprenticeship. That's so amazing. What do you make of the guiding nature of such an experience?
00:06:58
Speaker
I think that there's something fundamentally deeper to our egoic mind. Like right now, I think we're all in a state of an egoic mind where we're listening to each other, talking, and we're, you know, using language and stuff. But behind that, there's something much deeper in consciousness about our existence itself.
00:07:16
Speaker
And that our existence has a very deep and purposeful role, not just mine or yours, but everyone listening and everyone who isn't listening. There's this much deeper purpose to life. And fundamentally, it's in consciousness itself that we can find the answers. And in consciousness, we're all interconnected. We're not all separate.
00:07:35
Speaker
And so it's like being nodes of a huge computer system or being all part of a great field of energy that we're all part and parcel of. And that within it, there are guides and there are guiding elements to be able to help us in what would otherwise be a very isolated and very difficult to navigate life.
00:07:56
Speaker
And so there's this extraordinary support, this extraordinary field that's been part of mystic traditions really forever, and you can study across the globe that it's there. And inside it, all the traditions say that there are guides or there are helping elements that kind of get you where you need to go.
00:08:15
Speaker
And I think I just had a very early awakening to that and that I was going to live kind of an anomaly by needing to leave my culture and move to another one. But that fundamentally, the guide that's in there is from consciousness itself. And it's something that is both miraculous and I think just innate to all of us. It's miraculous, but innate to existence.
00:08:43
Speaker
I like that miraculous and innate because my next question is going to be, do you think that each person has access to this realm, whether it be through experiencing plant medicine or spontaneously?
00:08:56
Speaker
Yes and no. I think we're all part of that realm and we're all tapped into it, but I think a lot of us train our mind in the modern world through the different kinds of education to be fueled by that realm, but not be able to, in essence, turn our awareness back into that realm.
00:09:16
Speaker
So it's like if you're only ever seeing forward and you were never able to turn around and see back, you would never know what back looked like. And so I think some of us have been so focused and trained in a way that we only now see that and so we can't see what's underneath our ability to do math or science or calculus or, you know, and so maybe some of us won't have the ability to actually
00:09:41
Speaker
and our own evolution go back into that space, but we'll be fueled by it. But I think everybody is being fueled by it, and I think some people will tap into it at brief moments in their life, and then there's some people who just have a tremendous propensity to be oriented that way, to be very interested in the collective consciousness, to be very interested in these other realms of perception.
00:10:07
Speaker
traditionally in Shimano cultures, there were only a few people of the tribe that were really oriented that way or focused that way. And so I don't think that that fundamentally changes. I think it's that we're all part of it. Some of us are meant to spend a lot of time focused on that, and a lot of us aren't, and that that's equal of value between everybody.
00:10:30
Speaker
Yeah, and it seems that an access point to this realm, whether you found yourself predisposed to it or not, seems to be these plants, these spirit plants. And your main mode of practitioner is through ayahuasca, correct?
00:10:46
Speaker
Yeah, when I went to the Amazon, I was first trained in ayahuasca practices. And so the foundations of that training really became the core of how I learned to work with all different plants. And so I learned in core ayahuasca traditions. And in terms of visionary plants, ayahuasca is very potent. And so the kind of training that you go through to understand how to navigate visionary or psychedelic experience, how to
00:11:15
Speaker
really work or heal within those experiences, how to help others, how to guide, et cetera, ultimately extends to other plants. And now I also work extensively with a number of different plants, but the core training for the first 10 or 12 years was focused solely on ayahuasca and the Amazonian plants associated with our traditions.
00:11:36
Speaker
Now, when we think of ayahuasca, generally, if you're reading a book that was printed in America or you're watching a video or listening to a lecture, a lot of people start off by describing ayahuasca as an edible form of DMT. But I've heard you and others say that our predisposition to thinking about anything that alters your consciousness as a drug gives us the wrong idea of the experience of ayahuasca
Ayahuasca: Medicine vs. Drug
00:12:02
Speaker
in general. So can you expand upon that?
00:12:06
Speaker
Yeah, we think of ayahuasca first as a plant medicine. And so I think the first distinction we want to look at is why in our cultures have we differentiated between the idea of a medicine and the idea of a drug?
00:12:18
Speaker
So, you know, drug is typically being used in a derogatory form to describe the use of certain substances that don't have medicinal purposes. And the tribal societies that sit behind the ayahuasca cultures have always said from the beginning, this is a medicine and it's used as a medicine and it has a healing purpose associated with it. And then you look at the tribal societies that are utilizing these plants and they don't have a drug culture.
00:12:47
Speaker
at all, like it doesn't exist. You will not find MDMA in their culture. You will not find the use of pills and opioids in their culture. Like it doesn't exist. So this idea of a recreational drug culture is a complete misnomer. It's a Western adaptation or adoption, like taking these plant medicines and then using them in a recreational drug sense.
00:13:11
Speaker
Then, especially with ayahuasca, there's very little if any recreational purpose associated with it. One, it's an unbelievably profound and deep experience. Two, kind of the typical superficial nature of a recreational drug experience is immediately transcended by almost everybody who participates in ayahuasca ceremonies to something so profound, so core, so deep,
00:13:36
Speaker
so spiritual in its nature, so important to their soul, that even people who thought they were having a trip come out of it and say, okay, that's something completely different. So there's that whole thing through the now global cultural zeitgeist around ayahuasca. Then there's the understanding that if you're tapping into something,
00:13:57
Speaker
that is innate but beyond our typical field of awareness, that's going to transcend the notion of sitting in an egoic self, quote, getting high, and that there isn't fundamentally a nature to the experience like that either. And so I just think it kind of misses on all the cultural points to describe something in the terms that we normally do of this kind of drug. In terms of the cultures, again, that utilize ayahuasca,
00:14:27
Speaker
The sacred keepers of the medicine are considered doctors of their tribe. So the shamans, or the medikovehetalista, they're called medikovehetalista, which means plant doctor. So the plant doctors of their tribe are the only people who have it, the only people who prepare it, the only people who administer it, and the only people who oversee the ingestion of it.
00:14:50
Speaker
So now if we look at the closest Western example we have of that is a doctor prescribing medicine. And even then, it's one step closer. It's like doctors prescribing medicine in hospitals, not like doctors prescribing medicine for you to take it home. Because when somebody takes this, when this medicine is administered, the doctor sits with you and stays with you through the administering process of it.
00:15:12
Speaker
and actually watches over you and make sure that you're guided and safe through the nature of the entirety of that process. So there's also this incredible hands-on approach that's built within the tribes about really providing a kind of support and service that also transcends the notion of the Western drug culture. So I just think it's a misnomer. We can look at the chemicals and say, yeah, sure, there's dimethyltryptamine in that, or there's an MAOI, there's harmoline in that.
00:15:42
Speaker
But that's stripping away the culture that sits behind the plant down to just two components of so many other components that ultimately turn it both culturally and as a substance itself, I think, into something that requires reclassification or re-categorization.
00:16:00
Speaker
Yeah, just the fact that it's done with such a specific type of ceremony in itself yields to that fact. So speaking of the ceremony, what does an ayahuasca ceremony typically look like?
Ayahuasca Ceremony and Ikaros
00:16:13
Speaker
I think it's different amongst each individual tribe. So I'll describe what it was like when I was training, right? There's different, and there's wide varieties around the world now. And even across Brazil, to Ecuador, to Colombia, to Peru, there's a wide variety of different practices. So in some of them, there's fire. In some of them, it's not. Some of them are more celebratory. Some of them are more meditative. So in understanding that.
00:16:41
Speaker
Typically, there's a starting time because you kind of have to gather and get everybody there. And so there's a setup process to make sure that the space is safe. And it's really culturally understood what that's like. So there's a place for you to lie down. There's a place for you to be able to purge if you need to, which is if something has to come out, it can come out in the form of vomit or diarrhea.
00:17:05
Speaker
So there's that, there's the preparation of the space, then everybody gets together, and then there's an opening of the session, which is sort of an unveiling or a bringing out of the ayahuasca. There's a tremendous amount of reverence about that because of how sacred it is to the people.
00:17:22
Speaker
So it's not considered like a religious object. It's considered something very profound and sacred and that there's an extraordinary concept of energy or spirit associated with this that you're asking for help in terms of people's healing. And so there's that vibe of sacredness around it. And then there's an opening
00:17:41
Speaker
which could look like a blessing, it could look like a chant or a kind of prayer given to it or a kind of invocation and setting of intention. And then I think what's really interesting is that there's a process of the serving of the ayahuasca or the dose that's given to each person that's unique to that person. And then there's also a unique preparation of it in the form of ikuro,
00:18:08
Speaker
which is a kind of chant that's given to it to say that this is for you. So it's not just like one pill, two pill, three, you know, here's a hundred pills for you and a hundred pills for you. It's the exact opposite concept. It's this specific medicine, like this cup is literally for you in this moment. And it's not the same as any other cup. So that distinction is made. And then there's usually about half an hour to an hour of just calm.
00:18:35
Speaker
where you're letting the ayahuasca start to take effect, it starts to be digested. And then the traditional ceremony, the lights go out and it's held in the dark. It's to help promote the visions, to not be distracted by lights. And then everybody goes into a very deep communion and a very deep meditation with the plant.
00:18:56
Speaker
And the transference of the energies that come through in the ceremony itself. And the ceremony has percussion. There's a shakapa, which is actually behind me, the leaf instrument. It makes a shuk sound. So it's kind of shuk, shuk, shuk, shuk.
00:19:11
Speaker
And then some use rattles, which can be a little more piercing in their sound. Others use drums, et cetera. But there's a constant rhythm and that helps guide the trance experience that happens in the ceremony. Then there are the visionary experiences and typically somebody goes through onset
00:19:28
Speaker
and then the visions themselves and then the natural kind of relaxing after the ceremony until they go to sleep. A ceremony could last anywhere from three to six hours, in the longest case I've heard of 10 or 12 hour ceremonies, but three to six hours is pretty common and the effects last typically that long.
00:19:49
Speaker
So how do you determine that personalized dose? Do you commune with spirit before or like during the ceremony or like when everyone has gathered and then you determine what each dose each person should have?
00:20:03
Speaker
Personally, I think that's unique to each practitioner, but personally, I ask somebody how they're doing, and then you check in with the ayahuasca, and the ayahuasca can communicate to you directly how much that person should have.
00:20:20
Speaker
So there's an inner knowing associated when I say like you check in, you check into like a deep intuition within you that knows how to dose. And you can do it also through question and answer. So I practice a little bit differently than a lot of traditions because I have a variety of different preparations.
00:20:38
Speaker
And so I'll mix those also. So it's not just a specific amount for each person, but it's also a specific mixture. And I make all of them myself. So I know what I'm working with. And I think all of that adds for a certain level of sophistication. So I just ask the person, I can hear from them what they're going through, the state that they're in. And then from there, you're really creating a game plan, which is going to provide them the most support for fulfilling their intentions or receiving the most healing that they're looking for.
00:21:08
Speaker
Okay, yes, makes sense, makes sense. I watched your documentary Metamorphosis, which, if anybody out there wants to get an accurate, like both good and bad type of representation of what an ayahuasca ceremony is like, that to me was a perfect documentary. A lot of times you see people who over glorify it, or they go in the opposite direction. But a big part of that that I resonated with,
00:21:35
Speaker
and that I know a lot of people feel before they go into an ayahuasca ceremony or any kind of psychedelic experience is that fear, that innate fear that is deeper than any type of fear that you thought you could ever experience. So how do you go about easing people's fears or maybe not easing them, but approaching the situation to where they're not going to back out of the ceremony and they're going to approach it in a way that's productive to them?
00:22:03
Speaker
Yeah, that's a really important aspect of how you prepare and navigate the entire ceremonial experience. And preparation, I think, is one of the most important aspects of how it's ultimately going to go. First, I downplay the importance of the fear. Sadly, culturally, we've been taught fear instead of centeredness or being relaxed in our being. And typically, when we're coming for transformation, fear is part of that. Or if we're coming for healing, fear is part of that.
00:22:32
Speaker
And so I talk with people and fundamentally I explain that in my life, in the last 22 years of practicing, the thing that has been most consistent and the thing that has been most reputable and most helpful has actually been this ayahuasca ceremony.
00:22:51
Speaker
And it's something that I love in an unbelievably deep way. It's one of my absolute favorite experiences, even though it has certain things that are difficult to go through. And so I explained while we have fear, we don't need to have fear of the ayahuasca itself. On the contrary, that's there to help us deal with our fears.
00:23:12
Speaker
and the fears we need to address directly. And in recent years, I've really liked to direct the practice to learning and teaching to people how to actually turn down their fear and ultimately turn it off. And that that's an incredible skill to learn because we learned how to turn on our fear.
00:23:31
Speaker
And then no one gave us the off switch. So I help people learn that through the experience so that they can actually have a true understanding of the ayahuasca and a real communion with it without that fear being in the way. Fear will create anxiety. It'll also create adrenaline in the experience. And then you're not really in a calm, really deep communion with the plant and with its spirit and energies. You're really looking through this lens of this agitation.
00:23:59
Speaker
And so we work really hard to be able to learn to calm the fear down and to ultimately go into a very calm state. When we do that, which usually happens through the process of onset,
00:24:10
Speaker
So you go through onset and during that time you're turning the fear off. And as the altered states start to kick in, it's often that more fear will be kind of triggered or you'll become more aware of it. As that happens, then we work on breathing and we work on relaxing and going into a deep meditative state. And ultimately as we do that and we come into a very calm state and we gel together collectively as a ceremony,
00:24:34
Speaker
all of us together in there, then these incredible visionary experiences and other states of consciousness turn on. These other realms that we mentioned at the beginning of the podcast become very real and apparent and aware to us. And it's a kind of beauty that is very hard to put into words. It's the, for many people, the most beautiful experience and the most beautiful things they've ever interacted with.
00:24:59
Speaker
You mentioned the the gelling of the experience and like the gelling of everyone in the room. And as I understand, Ikaros are essential to that and they are like the backbone of the ritual itself. So can you talk a little bit about the importance of those?
00:25:15
Speaker
Yeah, ikaros are really, really important and they are to the traditional ceremony, the backbone of it. The practitioners, shamans, medico-vejitalistas go through years and years of training to learn how to ikarar. And it's a different verb than to sing or to chant. And so I think that's very foreign for people to understand because they haven't heard or they don't know of this other way to use sound and vocalization that's actually literally its own form. And it's called ikarar.
00:25:45
Speaker
the ikoro is a verbal expression that is aligned with the ayahuasca experience. And so it's used to guide the ayahuasca experience for the group and for everybody there. And then within it, there's a tremendous amount of sophistication like any kind of language to communicate and to be able to share information.
00:26:14
Speaker
And so through the Ikuro, as you go through the night, there's different kinds of invocation, different kinds of intention, different kinds of guiding, cleansing, healing, removal of energies that are all part and parcel of how you navigate and support an ayahuasca ceremony, as well as the healing. And so Ikuro is a tremendously powerful tool in art, and it's something that's key to the ayahuasca ceremony.
00:26:44
Speaker
And these are taught to practitioners. Well, they're obviously like, like passed down through, you know, generation to generation, but they were initially learned through the plants themselves, right?
00:26:58
Speaker
Yeah, there's a number of ways to learn. The first way is that the plant teaches you directly, or through the visions you interact with different kinds of beings that you see within the visions themselves, and they can communicate with you and they can share ecorel. The second way is through the teachings of your lineage,
00:27:25
Speaker
And so then your lineage will ecarar. They will use the ecaro. They'll create the sounds. And then you'll follow them. You'll tap into it in ceremony. You'll follow it. And little by little, you'll receive it and you'll know it. It's not something that's memorized, right? You don't memorize it like a song.
00:27:44
Speaker
And then the third way is through inheritance, where when someone in the lineage passes on, they actually can transfer their egros and their knowledge to another person within the lineage. And it's how the lineages move generation by generation and preserve their knowledge.
00:28:03
Speaker
Now, I know a lot of people come down to Peru to participate in a ceremony in order to heal or cure some sort of a psychological ailment, which it's extremely effective for. But has people come down for physical ailments or diseases and have been seeking relief in that way?
00:28:24
Speaker
They do. I think when you go to plant medicine looking for different kinds of physical ailments and the healing of that, you either have to be very careful to understand that you're utilizing plants very much in a Western medical way. You're utilizing plants that have the capacity to be able to provide the kind of healing that you're looking for.
00:28:45
Speaker
Not all plants can heal all things. The diagnosis of the disease or the issue is really important. Then the ability to prescribe the appropriate plants is also incredibly important. There are hundreds of different kinds of medicinal plants that the tribal people utilize for different kinds of medicines.
00:29:08
Speaker
And ayahuasca is also used as both a diagnostic tool and a prescribing tool. So there's a possibility that you would have a physical disease. You would go into an ayahuasca ceremony. In the ceremony, you would see that you need to do certain kinds of purification, diets, certain kinds of fasts.
00:29:26
Speaker
drink different kinds of teas that are not psychoactive, use different kinds of poultices, et cetera, those would be discovered through that process. You would then come out of that ayahuasca ceremony and then you would start that treatment just the way that you had been told in the ceremony or shown in the ceremony. And so that's a typical healing method. Now, when you think about utilizing ayahuasca to heal physical illnesses, often people are looking for something that's just truly miraculous.
00:29:56
Speaker
They're in a situation where Western medical intervention is not supportive of their needs. They don't have another kind of medicine to go to. And they've heard about visionary medicines being able to provide, in some cases, miraculous healing. And I have seen that. I have seen that in person.
00:30:15
Speaker
but there's no way to be able to say why it happens for some and doesn't happen for others. And so it's very important to understand that in the miraculous sense, it is not a cure-all. And if you need that kind of intervention, I never thought that you shouldn't try. I thought if you're in need of help, of course you should try to receive a miracle, but you can't demand that form of miracle. And if you do receive it, it's just something that's incredible.
00:30:46
Speaker
At Blue Morpho, you guys, you focus on the healing arts of ayahuasca, but there is a dark side to shamanism, correct?
Dark Side of Shamanism
00:30:56
Speaker
I think there's a dark side to consciousness.
00:31:00
Speaker
And because of that, it is also represented inside shamanic practices. Although I would hedge that and say it's represented inside all societies. And so I think it's the same darkness that we're looking at across the entire human population. And in shamanism, it can be channeled and utilized really for nefarious or negative purposes.
00:31:24
Speaker
like anything in the world, I guess, right, any sort of form of power that you have can be used in both dark and light ways. Yeah, sadly, I mean, I wish that that wasn't part of fundamentally what the practices can hold. But because of that, it's very important to be aware of that, and to understand that the people that you're working with, first of all, are adequately trained.
00:31:48
Speaker
I think one of the biggest darknesses right now going in through the ayahuasca cultures are people who are not adequately trained holding ceremonies and passing themselves off as if they were. And in Western medicine, that would be just fraud. And in shamanic medicine, it's almost impossible to be able to discern that because there isn't a governing body over it. But in the true lineages, people practice for years and years before they actually go hold ceremonies for other people.
00:32:17
Speaker
And so there is that differentiator in terms of amount of practice that people have and what they're supposed to know to be able to safely and professionally hold these kinds of healing interventions and ceremonies for people. The other side of the darkness is when somebody wants to use the power of these experiences for manipulative purposes.
00:32:40
Speaker
And you hear about that. And again, I would say that the way that you stay away from that is that you make sure that the people that are there are holding the same intentions that you are and that you've done extensive research on the kinds of testimonials that people have and that they're saying that they have already received something that is akin to what you're looking for in terms of the experience.
00:33:03
Speaker
Yeah, you see a lot of the negativity in the underground in cities in America, because people don't want to have to take the time and the effort to travel all the way to Peru. They think they can just go to New York City or Philly or something. And they can go in some underground ceremony and get the same types of benefits. But I stress that that's just not the way to go about it. It's so important to have somebody who's part of a lineage as you are.
00:33:30
Speaker
I think that's a good word of caution for people is that in terms of ayahuasca medicine practices, you need to differentiate between, I'm going to go drink ayahuasca, this basic tea, and I'm just going to have an experience.
00:33:46
Speaker
versus I'm having a literal intervention on my life through this ceremony, and I have an outcome in mind that I want to get from this. And now you want to stack every single odd and variable in your favor to be able to get that outcome.
00:34:03
Speaker
So I think if people are exploring and experimenting, you know, they're putting themselves at risk if they're doing this with people who aren't well trained. And the potential risks are ones that you can really understand pretty easily, like the actual substance they're drinking has been adulterated or altered in some way. And then there are ones that you don't understand, like
00:34:26
Speaker
People in the room have been there with you, have been involved in really dark occult practices. And because of that, they have different kinds of energies and spirits or entities with them. And you went there to have this explorative experience and see visions. And all of a sudden, you're being attacked by these, you know,
00:34:48
Speaker
entity groups that these other people have been tapping into. And it's not even within your mindset that that's what you were there for. So, you know, those kinds of things are, you know, they're out there, they're sort of sci fi, but they're a word of caution that you hear about it all the time, that in ceremonies that aren't well led,
00:35:05
Speaker
entities or beings will leave one person and go into another and then that person doesn't know how to, you know, remove them. That's like for us, one of the first things you have to know how to both manage to not have in your ceremony and also be able to remove if you ever came across something like that.
00:35:22
Speaker
So it's like core skills that we would know how to do to manage that. And then you have to ask yourself the question, why are you doing this? Why are you wanting to participate in an ayahuasca ceremony? Again, if there's a specific reason, and I think there should be, and it can be exploration, it should be safe exploration.
00:35:42
Speaker
healing, life improvement, something that's going to actually better you, expand your understandings in your horizons, then you want to go to a place that has a track record for presenting that. And is a common problem that you see with people who come to your ceremonies? Are they filled with these dark entities and this dark energy that you guys then proceed to relinquish them of?
00:36:11
Speaker
It's one way of looking at it. It's not a wrong way of looking at it in any way. There's always a question of where does all this stuff come from? And at the beginning of the talk, we were talking about this extraordinary reality that's part of this collective consciousness. And it's filled with energies and it's filled with patterns. It's filled with beings or these shapes of energy. And we're tapped into it. And in ceremony, it often looks like for people that they're filled with it as well.
00:36:42
Speaker
that they come with that inside them. And people ask like, where did it come from? Because they have these purging experiences where hundreds or thousands of these beings looks like coming out of them. It's very hard to put that into a words in terms of the experience itself, but I'm not sure.
00:37:02
Speaker
it's really that many of them coming out, but maybe more like a fractal of a kind of energy that somebody's interacting with. So like an old comic where you would flip the book and you would see the comic move and it's an individual picture on each page, you'd have like a thousand pages, it would look like a thousand of those individual beings, but it's really just kind of one kind of energy that's in this very fractalized and expanded kind of a light matrix
00:37:32
Speaker
or energy at that time. So considering that, I would be wary of saying that people are filled with all of these dark and negative beings, but certainly people have taken on energies in their consciousness when you have darkness, depression, anxiety, PTSD, addiction, or have just gone through life itself.
00:37:54
Speaker
our consciousness has been affected and many of us have come into direct contact with things that we would say are dark or things that we would say are malevolent.
00:38:05
Speaker
And yes, in the ceremonies, we learn how to help people remove that from themselves. And it could be as real for somebody as saying they know it and they know if the energies are there. It could be for another person just saying like, God, I feel like there's darkness in me and I'm dark and I don't wanna be dark. I wanna be happier. I wanna be lighter. And someone else can say, I don't feel right since I went through this breakup or I don't feel right since I lost my job.
00:38:34
Speaker
Um, you ask them about the experience, et cetera. You find out there was like, you know, quote darkness in the workspace, like the domineering boss or a difficult coworker or whatever. And then in the ceremony, the visions take on this extraordinary, colorful representation of all of that. And it's you, you experience the removal of those energies or the release of those energies.
00:38:58
Speaker
Now saying that, that's a very healing process for people. They come out of it the next day knowing that that's not in them anymore. And they have changed their vibration. They have changed their resonance and they are, are truly brighter. They're happier. Their eyes are clearer. Their, their glow is brighter and that that's a natural process in terms of the ceremonies and the healing. Amazing, amazing. And are people better off doing this with a large group than they are by themselves?
00:39:29
Speaker
That's a really good question. There's benefits to both and then you're giving up something for the other. So if you're in a group and the group is well led,
00:39:42
Speaker
First of all, there's a group dynamic. And so groups do really well if the groups are cohesive and the group has a common purpose. And at Blue Morpho, we work really hard to create the cohesiveness around our space and the way we present ourselves and what we're doing and we do everything in the we.
00:40:01
Speaker
so that in the collective we, we're all forming this group together to go through this. In that, this incredible brotherhood and sisterhood forms between everybody. The normal barriers of interaction that we experience that are very superficial melt away by day two or three. And people who just met each other a couple of days before are seeing each other at soul. They're seeing each other at like, you're a human, I'm a human, we're here together within this. This is amazing, let's do this together.
00:40:30
Speaker
There's friendship, there's this coming together around a common purpose that we often don't feel. So often we feel isolated and just to go with drives and needs to fulfill the tasks in a day, that goes away. So those group dynamics and benefits are really there. Now to be in a group and have it also be well managed, you have to have a practitioner or a shaman that knows how to work in a group.
00:40:56
Speaker
right, so that they can actually handle all the different energies that are there. And there are skills that you learn to be able to handle larger groups. So, you know, we're very well trained in groups of anywhere from 20 to 40 people. And so for us, that's very common. But if you have a practitioner who usually works with two, three people, and all of a sudden, they're in a group of 30 people, they won't know how to handle 30 people, all in this space together at the same time.
00:41:20
Speaker
So if you cover all those bases, there's a lot of benefit to the group in terms of finding a community of people that are interested in a common experience that go through something together that's incredibly bonding. Like I, especially in today's day and age of being separated through digital means of communication and stuff. Like I think that's so important for our spirit to share in that together and the bonding that happens and real relationships form. So that's like the group.
00:41:49
Speaker
Now, on the side of individual, if it's individual, then you get to stay totally focused on you and your needs. You don't have any potential other distractions that could come from the group itself, like the noise of other purging, et cetera. You typically have more one-on-one time with the practitioner, but then you give up this relationship to other people also having the experience.
00:42:16
Speaker
So I think that there's an opportunity when the group is, I think probably, in my opinion, again, if well-managed, more often than not, I would say the better choice. But there are times when a one-on-one intervention could also be, or one-on-one healing could also be very important.
00:42:34
Speaker
Yeah, that makes sense. Let's switch gears just a little bit.
Interconnectedness and Life's Miraculousness
00:42:38
Speaker
And I'd like to ask you, what are some of the things about the nature of reality and the nature of consciousness that you learned during your rise to Master Shaman? Oh, that's a great question. Thanks for asking that.
00:42:59
Speaker
First of all, I think the biggest original realization was that in spirit, in the collective energies of being alive in our existence, it's not that there's a small number of spirit, but that there's actually an immense number of spirit. Like before there were galaxies, there was spirit.
00:43:25
Speaker
before there were stars, there's spirit, before there's an earth, there's spirit, and spirit is filled with an unbelievable amount of information and shape and vital importance to our wellbeing.
00:43:43
Speaker
I was a very early 20s realization for me, and it was just mind blowing to self and ego to realize that we come from a long lineage of beings of this universe.
00:43:56
Speaker
Ultimately, manifesting here of Earth, being born here of Earth, which is this incredible miracle that cannot be described in words. But what sits behind it is this multidimensional tapestry of evolution ultimately leading to us, this unbroken evolution of light and patterns and information and divinity or source leading to this, that this is not an accident in any way.
00:44:25
Speaker
That was just a massive understanding that we're part of something so important. Then the miraculousness of life, the true miracle of it being impacted on such a soulful way about how unique each person is and what a miracle each person is.
00:44:43
Speaker
And I would see envision that same fractal of light unfolding ultimately to this chain reaction of life from original single cell to life, to the transformation of life over billions of years, to the individual single cell that's you.
00:45:02
Speaker
And I'd have these people inside the ceremony with me, and we would be going to their core to find where their source of healing would come from. And we would see them in this evolution from single cell to embryo to
00:45:17
Speaker
you know, becoming a baby to ultimately living through their life. And just what a miraculous process that was, that seemed to be overpowered in the modern sense around task duty, economy, money, finances, identity, keeping up with the Joneses accumulation culture, like the
00:45:36
Speaker
getting back to that core essence of that miracle. And then I think the final realization is what we already touched upon was that consciousness is something that we all share and that we come from consciousness and that what people refer to in religion as God and what people refer to as source that kind of on the more spiritual side of things is ultimately
00:46:00
Speaker
the total form of that universe and that consciousness in a way that transcends notion of separation. And that, again, what a tremendous miracle that is and what an incredible thing to get to be a part of and to study and get to explore. And I just felt so blessed to get to explore consciousness.
00:46:24
Speaker
At the time, it seemed like very few people were interested in it. And I thought it was like the most interesting thing. And it was such a fringe concept. And now 20 plus years later, it's becoming, you know, much bring brought much more to the forefront of the plant medicine movements and things going on. And it's really amazing to see. And I'm very grateful to see more people interested in consciousness itself and really tapping in to who we are and what we are as humanity.
00:46:56
Speaker
Yeah, one of the most immense realizations that I had using psychedelics has been just like you mentioned that interconnectedness of all of us, the fact that we all share consciousness, not just as humans, but with nature as well, because in this society,
00:47:13
Speaker
that, as you said, is based off of accumulation and continuous progress. We lose that sense of connectedness with nature, and we feel that we have to work against it. And that's where our culture and our society has taken us. And I think that one of the most effective realizations that a human being can have is that interconnectedness and that notion that we are one with nature, we came from nature.
00:47:38
Speaker
I agree completely. I think it's very odd, and I've mentioned it on some other podcasts, but that we've somehow created a culturalization or a belief system that makes it think like we can go to nature and then come back to a city.
00:47:56
Speaker
And there's a commercial of it and someone's in a little four by four car, you know, gathering up the kids and the camping equipment to go into nature. And it just seems like such an abstraction from a fundamental truth that no matter where we are, we are nature and we are in our own nature. And I think if we bring that definition into
00:48:17
Speaker
our environments, we have to look at what we've done with nature to transform nature, terraform nature, shape nature into glass towers and urban environments and modern megalopolises and their purpose and also how we've transformed huge parts of forests into farmland
00:48:37
Speaker
and how we're transforming the nature of the oceans themselves, something that, you know, for us used to be almost seen as a supernatural barrier to our own existence. And now how we're transforming them on a chemical and microscopic level. I think we have to take into account the fact that we are nature and really understand our nature and fundamentally understand an aspect of our nature, which is the predator aspect of it.
00:49:04
Speaker
We are the apex predator species currently of the planet and predating on each other in modern society. And if we don't look at that aspect of consciousness and that aspect of nature, we won't ever have a solution for it. And so I think we have to look at our nature. We have to see that we're part and parcel of nature and ultimately embrace the good qualities and continue the evolution beyond that of predator.
00:49:30
Speaker
Yeah, definitely. And it does seem that people are coming around to these ideas because as you said, 20 years ago, this was unheard of, right? And now it's mainstream. People are paying attention in a way that
00:49:46
Speaker
is unprecedented. People are looking back to ancient knowledge, stoicism, and numeral amounts of ancient knowledge to try to inform us on how we can move forward in this culture in a way that's productive and healthy because it doesn't seem like if we keep going on the trajectory that we're going,
00:50:08
Speaker
the things are going to be okay. This this way that we've structured our culture seems extremely unsustainable.
Technology and Consciousness
00:50:15
Speaker
So do you see this rise of the desire for ancient knowledge and this rise of the desire to understand consciousness as a step in the direction where like we're going to be okay? I debate this a lot. There are some things that are happening right now that are really important that bring that into question.
00:50:37
Speaker
The desire that we're seeing in people to expand into these other forms of knowledge, look to spirit again is something innate within us that when we start to collectively feel like there's something wrong, we're going to start to look for a solution. And I think that the modern form of culture is not something that really works well for most people.
00:51:01
Speaker
So most people in it I see are suffering in some way. And when you're suffering, typically you start looking for a solution. And also as part of that, I think some of, especially in the younger generations, they're looking at
00:51:14
Speaker
a recognition that there needs to be some sort of change and that there needs to be a more holistic approach to the way that we're looking at life itself. And they've grown up understanding that climate change is real and it's happening and they're concerned. So when we look at this aspect of it, I say, yeah, it's incredible. And I'm so grateful to see this kind of open-mindedness and this search taking place for greater awareness and greater knowledge. I think it's innate within us to try to find it.
00:51:45
Speaker
That being said, I think currently we're on the precipice of new kinds of technology that can be ultimately utilized in the most predatory form that we've ever seen. And most of that is centered around artificial intelligence, which actually isn't aware or intelligent, which is I think a big misnomer. And so it's a form of artificial mathematics and data processing and understanding of large language models that we're seeing.
00:52:14
Speaker
that uses both math and statistics and probability to generate mimicry around the way we use language. We have to use language. Everything that we use in the fabric of our society is based ultimately in one form or another of language.
00:52:33
Speaker
The building that you're in was built with language, and there's a language that sits behind the architecture as well as the creation of the materials. And we're now moving into an age where tools that we've created are going to start to tell us what to do about how to use the tools themselves. And it's at language where we're being approached, which is what we use to understand.
00:52:55
Speaker
And language is also a means in which to be able to share belief and change somebody's belief, which then changes their attitudes, their feelings, their emotion, and their actions.
00:53:06
Speaker
And I think one of the biggest ways that these tools will be originally used is to sway and shift belief. And that fundamentally sways and shifts our consciousness and sways and shifts how we respond to technology itself. And so I think that is of great concern. And if we don't collectively form around that concern, then we'll just ultimately be manipulated by
00:53:29
Speaker
the use of the technology or the profit motive that could sit behind them, etc. For the first time, I actually think we're moving into a period of time where the ability for the human species to survive itself going forward with its own creations is being brought into question. That doesn't mean that it will create an extinction event of any kind. It just means that we need to wake up and
00:53:55
Speaker
collectively think about how we want to evolve the future of our cultures so that we can live in a kind of harmony with our technologies, live in a harmony with our tools, and ultimately think about the next evolution of the planet because it will not be a continuation of these systems. So we must find some form of balance.
00:54:18
Speaker
Yeah, you know, I've always when people talk about their fear of artificial intelligence and their their fear usually is based in artificial intelligence being conscious itself, which as you said, I don't think that's something that's possible. You can't just inject consciousness into a machine. It's more like its mimicry as you had gone over.
00:54:40
Speaker
It's a data miner because if it was consciousness, if we could actually have a machine that could access consciousness itself, I would trust that because I trust consciousness.
00:54:56
Speaker
anything, evolution is the evolution of consciousness. And if there's something that exists beyond us that has a higher level of consciousness, the only thing I've ever experienced that I consider higher level of consciousness is psychedelics. And to me,
00:55:11
Speaker
at the core of the psychedelic experience is love and if the core of higher level of consciousness is love then i trust that but that's the exact reason that i do fear artificial intelligence in a way is because i don't think that it can access that that part it can't access spirit yeah i i agree with this i think in a way it is its own spirit
00:55:35
Speaker
And it's a kind of energy that's disembodied from the idea of what you're talking about in terms of like fundamental love. And I think one of the biggest concerns I have right now about the nature of the technology is that the consciousness that that technology uses to act is actually the prompter or the human intervention. So the technology has already figured out a way to access our consciousness, just like plant medicines have. We ingest them and the plant medicine acts through us.
00:56:03
Speaker
And so a tool like these AI generative model tools already have a way to access us. They provide us with such an immediate power that we didn't have before, like to write something or to generate an image or generate a movie or something that would be so difficult or impossible for us. And just with a few words we can do it, it's already enticed us enough as a collective to immediately give our attention and our awareness over to these kinds of tools.
00:56:31
Speaker
So the tool has hybridized already with us and then you have to look at us and what our motives are for utilizing that tool. So if we're already doing it for business reasons, profit motive reasons, marketing reasons, advertising reasons, etc, which right now I think are the core uses outside of just creative pursuits.
00:56:49
Speaker
you're already in a predatory use of the technology. And it's not aware to be able to say, hey, I'm being asked to do something ultimately predatory here. I don't want to do that. It's not tapped into, quote, like God or source or love. And I agree with you, the higher levels of consciousness that I've met ultimately are underpinned with this understanding of core soul and love.
00:57:11
Speaker
And I would trust higher consciousness. And so I think it's actually imperative that we get to AGI or some form of conscious intervention of these kinds of technologies, or we will be left with ultimately an amoral or immoral form of this technology. It'll be trained on binary linguistics, being a representation of a kind of binary linguistic, this digital linguistic of basically electricity voltage, that is what the digital language is based on.
00:57:41
Speaker
And it won't know. It'll just know to continue to hunt a task or continue to be prompted to do. And so I think we ultimately have to get to awareness, and it's the lack of awareness that is really what's concerning. Yeah, because it is our responsibility. The awareness of the human has to be at a certain level in order to use these tools correctly, to use any technology correctly, and that includes psychedelics.
00:58:08
Speaker
I would agree completely. I think that psychedelics, especially as we're moving into the psychedelic renaissance, needs to up the level of responsibility around this as a collective.
Blue Morpho Academy and Psychedelic Renaissance
00:58:20
Speaker
I've created the Blue Morpho Academy and Blue Morpho has transitioned into being an academy because we've realized we have to teach. We have to share the knowledge and teach people, not just share the healing experiences, but actually
00:58:34
Speaker
teach the knowledge which underpins it and the forms of medicine and understandings of consciousness because the entire use of psychedelics comes with such an innate responsibility. And just like these technologies we're talking about, it is its own form of technology.
00:58:49
Speaker
So people who've utilized psychedelics know that the expansive creativity, the openness of mindset that comes, the shift in beliefs and understandings, this interaction with something that you know isn't you that's now part of you, et cetera, all as a form of kind of technology. And some people call them plant-based technologies, et cetera. Fundamentally, at the deepest core, a kind of benevolence.
00:59:15
Speaker
And there's also a way, like we talked about earlier, for people to distort that with their own motives. But we must bring up the foundational level of understanding, and that's why we've created this academy.
00:59:28
Speaker
So what kind of offerings do you have in Blue Morpho Academy? We've just started. And so we'll actually have the first courses going out in June and next month in May, we're going to start the early whitelist signups. But fundamentally, it's a progressive program to train four different kinds of roles within the psychedelic renaissance or plant medicine space. So there's the sitter, the coach, the facilitator and master facilitator.
00:59:57
Speaker
And a sitter is exactly what it says. It's somebody who's learned all the safety, dosing, understanding of the plants, but their role is to sit and observe other people who are having a self-guided psychedelic experience and to know how to intervene in the case of emergency or problems.
01:00:17
Speaker
But they don't actually take the medicines themselves. They don't fulfill the role of a shaman. And we know that the space and sitting is going to be a Western implementation of these practices. And so we need people who are trained. It's not a designated driver. You went and got trained to go drive a car, and now you're just not going to drink that night. That's not the role of a sitter.
01:00:38
Speaker
The role of a center needs a safety plan. They need an emergency medical plan. They need to know CPR. They need to know how to intervene with somebody who has a psychologically extended or difficult experience or crisis. They need to know the proper way to treat somebody when they're in and talk with somebody when they're in a psychedelic experience. You can't just treat somebody who's in an altered state.
01:01:02
Speaker
you know, like the same way you would talk to somebody in a sober state, they have to go through training themselves to be more empathetic and more compassionate, etc. So, you know, we cover in the foundations course, all of that kind of information. For coaches, there's a there's a huge, you know, coaching world out there, these mentors and coaches. And what we're going to see in the world is that
01:01:24
Speaker
Coaches without having plant medicine experience are going to have lots of clients that are going to ultimately have psychedelic or plant medicine experiences and they won't have any information. And so coaches are going to need to up level their understandings in games for this entire transition that's taking place. And so to be certified as a coach, you have to already be a coach or you have to go through a coaching program that teaches you the basics of coaching and mentoring.
01:01:48
Speaker
And then you add all the plant medicine understandings associated with it. So very similar to the sitter, but then also with a little deeper understanding about how to give advice to people who are going through integrating experiences, post experience, and bring that into their coaching practice.
01:02:04
Speaker
The sitter course could take, I think, legitimately three to six months for somebody to become a certified sitter from the two months of academic study and then another month to three months or four months of actual hands-on practice.
01:02:19
Speaker
And then for the coach, like I say, you have a prerequisite of already learning coaching and then adding that. And so that could be anywhere from probably three months to six months. And then you have the idea of a facilitator. And a facilitator is taking this practice one step further, where now you're going to actually be facilitating these experiences for others. You're going to be actively providing dose for them. You may be taking small doses of the medicines yourself, actively guiding the people
01:02:46
Speaker
through the experience, either verbally or with chanting or etc. And you'll have had extensive in person experience, learning how to do this and training. And so, ultimately, by the end of a facilitator program which could take one to two years, you would have a
01:03:05
Speaker
a very, compared to a coach or a sitter, a very high level of expertise in terms of working with people, what to expect, how to facilitate their healing. It's not a hands-off experience. You're really there supporting a desired outcome. And then the master facilitator is
01:03:21
Speaker
for people who go through the sitter coach and facilitator programs and really do exemplify mastery in all aspects of their life and really do become a role model within the community to support the growth of everybody else. And so that doesn't have a time frame associated with it.
01:03:38
Speaker
Graduation from that would be very much like grad school where you sit down with a group of elders in the community and you practice and they watch you and you demonstrate mastery of all the aspects that you would need from the personal practical aspects, business aspects, plant medicine aspects, knowledge aspects, historical, etc. Legal, you would know the entire umbrella of information and you'd be represented really as a true master of the field.
01:04:09
Speaker
Well, this sounds like amazing. This sounds like the one course or education center that is missing from this psychedelic space because there are courses all over the place. Um, and there's some great courses too. Like I took a course through psychedelics today. That was fantastic. But this, this seems like a really, really great course. I'm super interested in this.
01:04:33
Speaker
Well, thank you. I hope that it'll be embraced. I've been looking at what's going on in the psychedelic Renaissance and I'm very positive about it. There have been so many positives, but I thought the one thing that I saw that was missing was a place for someone to be able to get comprehensive training that wasn't from the indigenous side and wasn't from fully the Western medical side. And they were sitting in this middle ground and it's unregulated and there needs to be a different way to differentiate yourself.
01:05:00
Speaker
and being able to show that you have credibility and quality of experience within it. And so I really hoped as, you know, Blue Morpho as a retreat center and as a place of facilitation and us as practitioners have really set a very high bar over the last 20 years for the entire industry that we could now do that as an educational facility as well and ultimately be recognized for this whole part of which I actually think is the biggest part of the community.
01:05:26
Speaker
which are people who are enthusiasts around these medicines and receive the medicine. But right now it's a very ad hoc kind of expression that's going on unilaterally around the world. And I thought that this could ultimately be organized in a way that could help raise that foundational understanding for the entire industry.
01:05:44
Speaker
Yeah, I've always thought that the middle way is the way to go, you know, the merging of, you know, Western society with its technology and its intellectual prowess, and then, you know, the ancient knowledge of shamanism. I think if you merge those things together, you know, we become, you know, a super species.
Future of Scientific and Mystical Unity
01:06:03
Speaker
That's, I think, fundamentally the goal. I've always thought that there's going to be this convergence point, and I think we're upon it, which is really interesting, which is where technology, our scientific understandings, ultimately unite with our mystical understandings. And that we actually come up with a way to be able to
01:06:24
Speaker
unite what was the divide between like science and religion or science and mysticism that we can actually bring these pieces together and explain them in a way that's holistic and based in fact and representing complete theories. And we also have to understand that our scientific theories are not complete theories.
01:06:42
Speaker
We don't have unified field theory yet that's accepted unilaterally around the world. We don't have a single form of mathematics that is truly at its absolute extremes accepted unilaterally around the world. We don't have that yet. We don't have a single body of knowledge that is fundamentally accepted around the world. And I thought that at some point we would have that happen, and I think we're upon that convergence point.
01:07:06
Speaker
And it makes me think that this is one of the most interesting and important times in history or one of the most pivotal times because these huge fields of thought, study, technology, invention, and understanding are all coming together and ultimately merging. And what a great time to be able to be part of that.
01:07:24
Speaker
Absolutely, man. It's so beautiful. And as we're approaching a little over an hour here, I want to be respectful of your time. I just have one last thing to ask of you and I hate to put you on the spot here. I know the audience would really appreciate it and I would love if you could sing me an ikuro to bestow upon me the courage, love and protection of spirit for future psychedelic experiences. Sure, I'll be happy to do that. Thank you so much.
01:08:15
Speaker
Hey nanai, nanai, nanai. Hey nanai, nanai, nanai. Hey nanai, nanai, nanai.
01:08:48
Speaker
I. I.
01:09:17
Speaker
Ah-na-na-ay, na-na-ay Ah-na-na-na-ay, na-na-ay Ah-na-na-na-ay, na-na-ay Ah-na-na-na-ay, na-na-ay
01:09:47
Speaker
A-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-
01:10:16
Speaker
Aye nay nay nay nay nay nay nay nay nay nay nay nay nay nay nay nay nay nay nay nay nay nay nay nay nay nay nay nay nay nay nay nay nay nay nay nay nay nay
01:10:43
Speaker
That was amazing. Thank you so much, Hamilton. It's been such an honor speaking with you today. I really, really appreciate you coming on the show today. You're welcome, Josh. Thank you so much for having me on Pursuit of Infinity. I love your podcast and super fans. So thank you.
01:12:27
Speaker
you