Part 5: Awakening to the Dreamtime
Series Pilot Out Now • WATCH HERE
. . . . . . . . . . .
Niles: So in terms of the actual title, the “global village” is a term that Marshall McLuhan coined, correct?
Rak: Yeah, Marshall McLuhan was a media commentator and analyst. I’ll take a step back and give you a historical context. The Western tradition of altered states, essentially in the 20th century, was the psychedelic movement that was birthed by Albert Hofmann in 1943.
Hofmann was himself not just a chemist, but part of the mystic traditions of Switzerland and the ergot derivatives of LSD, which was only one molecule different from LSA, or the “morning glory” seeds used by indigenous Mesoamerican cultures.
It was almost like there was this psychic build up in the whole system of the earth because for so many centuries we had this industrialization or mechanization along with the raping and pillaging of the earth. This disconnect from spirituality created this pressure cooker that had to come out somewhere. So this equilibrium was reset through Albert Hofmann in the laboratory to mass produce a substance which got out there.
From the many different faceted things that the psychedelic revolution did– and it was for a time centered around Palo Alto, which became Silicon Valley–came the computer revolution. Now I’m not saying that LSD created the internet or the computer revolution but all through the late 50’s and the early 60’s before it was banned, all the intelligentsia and many of the corporate leaders and many of the people in these positions working with things like cybernetics and computers, were using these substances as a “psychic lubricant” to stretch what was essentially a post-World War II consciousness, which had to become multidimensional. It had to become non-linear.
Nowadays we log on in the mornings and we go on social media. We’re connected with up to five thousand friends at once in a feed. We’ve got a cloud computing upload where data is transferred up and down. We understand the language and terminology. Essentially, all of that is a fragmentation of linear consciousness which had to be eased in somehow.
I believe that LSD succeeded in helping to stretch the boundaries of consciousness of “white picket fence America” to prepare us for the deeper connection of entheogenic consciousness and shamanic consciousness which was not available at that time through the plants.
There’s been a gradation, or a stepping stone happening here. We weren’t ready for the plants and for the shamans back in the 1950s or 60s. We had to go through this “initiation”. And now we’re seeing this global shamanic resurgence and this stepping up and this evolution.
So the global village itself, a term that Marshall McLuhan coined, is incredibly apt (see: http://www.cbc.ca/archives/entry/marshall-mcluhan-the-global-village). We are an interlocking network of small localized communities. In a “village sense”, we are nodes within a network and the network is what we are all about.
The interconnectedness of everyone is essentially what the psychedelic or entheogenic experience can reveal. It reveals the unity of all things that other cultures in the world like the Hindus, might have called the “Indra’s Net” or what Pierre de Chardin called the “Noosphere.” There’s been these concepts before but the global village is what we are on the physical level. A village is essentially bound together by an experience.
Indigenous cultures are born onto the land. Their commonality is they live and die on the land together in unity and they rely on each other. They rely on the earth and the land that they are in partnership with it. So if we truly are a global village, as Marshall McLuhan said, we have to come back to the earth and we have to come back to our spirit.
We have to be a spiritual global village that embodies what it really means to be custodians of the land. We have to be the gatekeepers for these higher dimensional realms which are part of the earth. To me, a shamanic global village is what we are really becoming.
Niles: Right, and those higher realms are a key component to understanding what reality really is. Because nothing just comes up from this material reality. A shaman understands there is more to reality in terms of the earth than just “what you see is what you get.”
It’s like you are seeing a window into more truth by having that kind of relationship. In terms of the global village, and as we hint this concept in the first episode, we used to be a global shamanic culture. So the show highlighting the resurgence of this in the West–it’s not like this is a new thing.
This is something that at one point was global. Now it’s just coming back to this former imperial first world that severed its connection with shamanism. Those nodes on the network that you described “switch people on” and they become interested in these things because of the truth and the power they hold and they reconnect to that lineage in them.
Rak: I’ve been in contact with some people here in Australia that have been initiated into aboriginal communities and there is public knowledge and private knowledge in this, men’s business and women’s business.
The gist of some of these very important questions which have been relayed to me, is that Australian aboriginal custodians of the land, which are some of the oldest existing tribal communities which have unbroken lineages on the earth, back 80 thousand or more years, they understand large tracks of time. They understand cycles of time in world ages. Many other cultures have also said this: like in the Kali Yuga, the Iron Age, the World Age, the Golden Age, or in the wheel of time as it turns.
And what has been relayed to me, is that the Dreamtime is coming back and the dreamtime is a frequency or a state of consciousness, probably akin to unity state, which these entheogenic or psychedelic experiences mirror.
They’ve done ongoing tests very recently in the last decade with all the different entheogens or psychedelics, including LSD, psilocybin mushrooms, and ayahuasca. Essentially, they’ve proven on a scientific level that what these substances do is they switch off different areas of the brain called the “default mode network.”
When those areas are switched off, the ego or this identity construct that we think we really are, is relaxed and this permeability of consciousness comes through and starts to switch on.
They’ve done tests even back in the 60’s which document and prove that LSD is metabolized by the body within 19 minutes and the actual psychic effect starts to come on about half an hour in. So it is not these substances which are having this effect on our bodies or consciousness. These things are just like switches which are switching off different regions of the brain to reveal within ourselves the capacity for these states of mind; for this potential dreamtime consciousness.
What I see happening now is a journey that we are all going on as members of this global village. This journey is, in one sense, to invoke the “Buddha nature” within, or the “Christ consciousness” within, or the “dreamtime consciousness” within.
Certain aspects of the communities of our villages are the shamans or the medicine people who are like captains of the ship steering the wheel. But the ship is what it’s all about. The collective is what it’s all about. We are all awakening according to the impeccability of divine timing and of when we need to awaken and at what our capacity to awaken is.
Because you cannot wake someone up from a dream. They say you’ve got to let them wake up on their own timing depending on their unique relationship with the energy coming in. But when enough of this critical mass does awaken and one does claim their relationship both with divinity and the earth and the shamanic realms, I think it will be a global shamanic culture.
It’s a shift in consciousness that we have gone through as a species before, and it is coming full circle again. It’s a reclamation of a unity state of knowing our relationship with the Earth on an energetic level and an astral level. And with our relationship with the animals we might hunt or not hunt or preserve, it’s an expanded consciousness that we’re being asked to step into and we’ve been there before as a species and it is time for us to go into it again.
This is a transitional step for these Shamans of the Global Village, because essentially, everyone is their own shaman. Everyone is their own healer, everyone is their own medicine, everyone is an extension of the Great Spirit walking the earth and that’s where it’s going to go.
To be continued…
WATCH Episode 1: Dr. Octavio Rettig and the Sonoran Desert Toad
JOIN US next week for Part 6: Join the Tribe…
Catch up on the Article Series: Part 1 • Part 2 • Part 3 • Part 4
