A note here to address a pattern we’ve seen in our discussion with some others regarding self development. The pattern is the judgement or criticism by those who say they don’t consider using mood altering substances helpful for spiritual advancement. In this case the catalyzation of this essay comes from a recent comment to this effect from someone we very much like and has supported our work, so thank you for that amazing and wonderful individual.
One certainly doesn't need to take a psychedelic or entheogen ever in their life. If the opportunity has never presented itself, and we certainly believe these things will present themselves if steps are catalyzed to make it happen, then that’s fine. It’s common for many to feel like they might lose something from taking an entheogen. A wall of uncertainty or more often really of course fear oftentime is never penetrated through or climbed over. So it never happens. Or maybe it just happens later on. We never did any drugs, outside of one of the worst drugs, alcohol, until we were in our early 30’s. Which entailed smoking pot with our dad, who, as a product of the 60’s, loves his cannabis to this day.
There are certainly Buddist monks in Tibet, Yogi’s in India, Dervishes in Turkey, or anyone deeply interested in meditation or mindfulness in the West who have reached very profound states of bliss and elation through 30 years of meditation practice. But the problem is that it takes 30 years. Within a half a dozen emails, two phone calls, and 7 text messages and a car road trip later, we can have you sitting in a very honorable and reputable shamanic situation in which if willing to pierce through the membrane, you can have a life changing experience in one evening which you very well may BC/AD your entire life around in which nothing after will ever be the same - in a good way.
So questions, if these things are not helpful, why have the body of external mood altering substances we’ve taken, which make up about half a dozen teacher plants and animal extracts - mescaline, LSD, psilocybin, cannabis, and DMT, helped us so much? Why have they given us so much inspiration, and alleviated suffering by concretizing that spirituality is not some airy fairy thing? They’ve made us care not solely about career advancement, which we used to, and have instead given us gnosis that the material is just one card in the multi layered deck of physical and the extraphysical. The Kaabblistic tree down to the qlippoth. The Yggdrasil tree of both the roots below, trunks are our level, and branches above.
How can one who doesn’t think these things have their place in spiritual self development be so sure when they themselves have never tried them? For over half the time these anti “ingestion from the external” statements are said, in the previous or next sentence, those saying them also say they’ve never taken any. And we say this as a neutral observation. Not as criticism. For us it’s like saying,
“I don’t like beats!”
“Well, have you ever tried beats? They’re very healthy and perhaps even improve your sexual endurance.”
“No, but I just know I don’t like beats. I’ve heard they taste like soil.”
We can only speak to our own path, but our psychedelic experiences have been the most life changing, helpful, and profound in our whole life. Our first smoking of 5-MeO-DMT, the currently known top of the mountain peak of entheogenic medicine, which was given to us by Octavio Rettig in a ceremony in Mexico, was so staggeringly profound it was more memorable than the birth of our daughter, and we think about it almost every single day. As I’ll be processing the data from that experience, and the avalanche of ideas and inspiration it has given us, for the next 30 years.
We had our very first psychedelic experiences ever with Cannabis, which contains Tetrahydrocannabinol, otherwise known as THC, in our mid 30’s in a high rise apartment building with Hamilton Souther overlooking the UCLA campus in Los Angeles. So in that regard, it was our gateway drug. In our early 40’s we also had a mole on our face which over a couple California summers had been changing size, growing if you will, and acting otherwise a bit scary and weird. After brewing up a batch of Rick Simpson oil, which we documented on camera, and is a very potent and condensed version of THC cannabis oil, we applied a drop of the oil for about a week and a half to our face under a small band aid. And not only did the weird spreading mole shrink it’s all but disappeared. So we can’t say for sure but perhaps it even alleviated a cancerous something that may have been beginning.
A lot of people that smoke pot are lazy as shit yes. But they would be lazy without the pot. And if someone is a criminal, like Charles Manson, taking LSD may likely only make them more crazy. For if the individual taking any substance, even a potentially expansive one, has no intention of healing themselves, so when useds as a trip fad, not medicinally these things can be very contractive and not expansive. A lot of psychedelic experiences, which are done in a party context and not in a shamnic context we consider mostly disrespectful to the substance itself. Yet, when used in the proper context with proper respect by individuals with maturation, if animal and plant entheogens don’t have any place medicinally, why are they evolutionarily designed to work perfectly with our hardware? Why do we have the same chemicals such as tryptamines, in smaller doses, created endogenously within our own brains? The ingestion of which from the external just amplifies those volumes internally. So like Dennis McKenna says, everyone’s holding.
The other thing that we find really strange is that in the occult community, even in the alchemical community, which is another spiritual practice based in nature, there is often a denigration of shamanism of all things. It sometimes seems to be target number one. Why not target religion which is very easy for the lower functions, thus requires little to no work, allows one to outsource their thinking, and thus has mass appeal and is really just politics in disguise? Not to mention the prosperity gospel which advocates that God put the oil in the ground for us to extract or the rainforest there for us to cut down which gives a giant middle finger to nature. Or why not rip on the sci-fi cult of scientology and other obvious fraudulent targets?
To us, the shamanic and the alchemical should in no way be at odds but instead are intertwined in their relationships to the natural, the divine, and higher intelligences - through their union with nature both outside and inside. And by inside I mean that literally, down the throat. The brewing of a batch of ayahuasca for example is an alchemical process as the person who makes it has energetic importance on the quality of the recipe. And advanced lab alchemy is not something you can outsource, you must do it yourself, in order to create substances in the lab which in advanced alchemical work, are made so that they can be ingested. Physical alchemy, which is real, which very few know how to do, yet is very much what legend describes. Within hardware in your lab you are speeding up natural evolutionary processes in order to transmute base metals into noble metals not for commercial purposes, but for ingestion internally. For the psychological process, the transmutation and initiation of self, must be there to succeed in the creation of the physical preparations which are then designed to be ingested, to then continue the later psychological self development. The two compliment each other.
Both shamanism and alchemy are psychological and physical processes. Both of which can greatly aid personal improvement and spiritual self development. Or if disrespected or mis-used greatly damage or kill both the mind and body. For this is incredibly powerful and thus serious stuff. And as we said in our feature film Transmutation, the secret is the transmutation of oneself.
So also ponder that in advanced alchemy, one can only get so far until they ingest an alchemical agent. Such as the “Elixir of Life” or “The Philosopher's Stone”. We've never said this publicly anywhere, but that's why our philosophical cosmology, which comprises many things, is primarily made of both the shamanic and the alchemical. Because those are the two spiritual practices that are based in nature which also require the ingestion of external substances from nature. Spiritual rocket fuel.
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