Part 3: Emergence from Emergency…

Seri village shaman Don Alberto sings to Jewelli during her part of the ceremony. Since each individual is different, each individual’s experience during ceremony is different.

Niles: Great, that leads me into the next question, which is: why is all this so important? I’ll preemptively give my blurb on that by saying that the Western world or the industrialized first world is very stigmatized in terms of the word “drug”. It seems funny because in a “backward society” of that culture, so many things that are contractive are very legal in terms of drugs and anything that is pretty much expansive in terms of human consciousness is illegal.

So a lot of these plants which are to be used as medicines are in fact psychedelic drugs per se in terms of the way that you label things in the industrialized first world. But what they really are is medicine, because I’ll use a metaphor from John Carpenters’ film, They Live, and quote they’re able to wake you from your “artificially induced state of consciousness, which resemble sleep”. That requires a lot of devolvement in terms of the individual.

The US / Mexico border deals with trafficking of illegal narcotics that are not only commoditized but contract consciousness . While natural plant and animal medicines such, as the toad medicine, are mis-understood, stigmatized, and mis-scheduled in the United States.

However, these medicines have a huge capability to “stair step” you and move you forward in terms of your consciousness when you have been doing some internal development prior to taking them. Which the species as a whole with all our societal and ecological problems, is desperately in need of because we can’t solve any of our old problems with the same level of consciousness that we were at when they we’re initially created.

Rak: It’s true. I’ll take you back. Ten years ago I went down to the Amazon and I had one of my first ayahuasca experiences in the jungle, or the “lungs of the earth”, in the Amazon. One of the most beautiful things that happened to me was not just any personal healing, but it was this reconnection to the planet and to the jungle and to the web of life. I could hear the animals and the monkeys and the birds, and feel the wind and the trees. I wasn’t just using my five senses, something opened within me and I was what I heard.

There was no separation between me and the earth and I became one with it. When we come back into this awareness of our relationship with the earth and know that it’s not separate, it is like saying, “I’m just one finger on a hand and there’s a whole body and we’re all connected. We’re all one organism.” That awareness is what we used to have on the earth. It’s what many indigenous cultures that lived sustainably used as the compass to navigate how they worked on the earth, how they lived on the earth, how they loved on the Earth.

That’s what we have lost in modern culture around the world and it’s what is needed because we are currently in an ecological catastrophe. We are at a crisis point. We are undergoing the sixth great species extinction across the world at this moment which we are largely, as humans, responsible for.

I do believe that there are larger “seasons” of consciousness and the reason we have fallen out of this unity state, like the fall of consciousness, is because we’ve basically gone down to a “one bar signal” of this awareness. This signal of our relationship and our place in the universe. And that in the seasons of consciousness, it’s coming full circle and now we are seeing an incredible global shamanic resurgence of working with the plants to heal individuals and to reconnect them to the web of life and to the awareness of who they really are and what our relationship is.

When asked what happened the first time he smoked the toad medicine, Dr. Rettig described it as “pure consciousness, pure love, pure energy, pure sound, pure vibration, pure sacred space.”

This reclamation of our consciousness which is being mediated by medicine people and shamans is not just for the shamans, it’s for everyone. It’s for everyone to have this capacity to remember this within themselves and to be plugged into the mother, or Gaia, or mother earth.

That essentially, is the emergence which is the opportunity of the emergency. The planetary crisis we are undergoing, is said by many commentators, that it is the opportunity for a species evolution and it happens regularly over large tracts of time.

This is the cresting of a wave and we are living through this transformation of times and this whole keyword of “awakening”, what does that really mean? It means we remember who and what we really are. That we are embedded in the web of life and the love of being in that connection and of having relationship and vision, and right steps forward, is that we can basically be, I’m going to use the words, “galactic citizens.”

It’s woo woo, it’s out there, but in the sense of we are alive, the planet is alive, the stars are alive, the entire universe is full of life and love. There is light and dark in there, we can’t be naïve, but we’re coming to a greater level of awareness which many indigenous cultures have already had with their place in the cosmos and we are coming full circle. We are coming home.

Niles: Right, and to add to why this is so important, the indigenous cultures, because of their relationship with the plants and because of the biosphere and their shamanistic practices, they were much less materialistic. Thereby the industrialized first world that severed their relationship to this practice, is completely off balance in terms of their materialism. Thus, creating all this ecological destruction. So that’s a huge component of that as well.

………..

JOIN US next week for Part 4: Planet, plants, people…

Catch up on the Article Series: Part 1 • Part 2

………..

Connect With US: Facebook • Twitter • Instagram

Get our updates DIRECT to your INBOX