Part 7: The Dawn of the Toad…
Niles: Let’s talk about how we got the initial beginnings of the first episode going.
Rak: Episode one of Shamans of the Global Village is focusing not just on the medicine, but on the practitioners. So what you and I have been interested in doing is documenting the role of the shaman in the 21st century. People that work with psychoactive materials or sacred medicines which connect them to the earth and connect them to the shamanic realms.
I have been initiated by Dr. Octavio Rettig, a Mexican physician, who is authorized to work with the medicine of the Sonoran Desert toad, the Bufo Alvarius or Bufo Incilius toad. The parotid glands of the toad, when squeezed, dried, and smoked, contain the incredibly potent medicine 5-MeO-DMT.
Anyone who has actually looked at my book, Aya Awakenings, or seen the film Aya Awakenings, there is a scene in that where I use the 5-MeO-DMT as well. It has been described to me that all the entheogens are like balls on a Christmas tree, or maybe the tree of life, and that the star or the light at the top is 5-MeO-DMT.
It is, as far as I know, the most potent psychedelic or entheogenic substance available in nature and it incurs endogenously in our own brains.
The tryptamines are very interesting, they work on the serotonin pathways. They’re almost a neuro transmitter and they’re all throughout nature and seem to be the backdoor access that nature has put into us to connect to the divine realms.
Dr. Octavio legally visited Australia and initiated myself and many other members of my community last April, 2015 and everything changed. I’d had a 5-MeO experience only once before–because it was such an incredibly powerful direct connection with the Source. Like the Sufis would say, the drop rejoins the ocean. It totally melts the ego and it really can’t be captured in words, although I do give it a good shot. In the sense that it is just all so encompassing, and holy and sacred, and loving and immense, that my path changed at that moment.
Essentially, it has taken a bit of integration to move forward, but I’ve become enmeshed into working with many NGOs and practitioners legally around the world. We formed the Terra Incognita Project [http://www.terra-incognita-project.org] which is a 501c3 organization in the States to work with this medicine and explore the science behind what we call “neuroshamanism”.
I’ve kept in contact with Dr. Rettig and in a very short amount of time things just came together like they were ordained or orchestrated. Between April 2015, and being initiated and July 2015, when we did the documentary shoot, it was boom boom boom and we formed a team. We raised the resources to shoot this episode and to really examine what Dr. Octavio Rettig was doing in Mexico with the Sonoran Desert toad and with the medicine of 5-MeO-DMT. And now we’re sharing all of that with the world and the global village. So, after a ton of hard work, primarily by you and I, we have a complete pilot episode of the series, with the goal to continue making more of them.
Energetically what I’ve realized is, I actually thought it was something to work up towards 5-MeO-DMT in a shamanic sense. But the more I worked with it the more I realized that it is the strongest entheogen. It’s the one at the top and then it’s about working your way down. I really feel shamanically, or energetically guided, that this has been our responsibility and our privilege to work with Octavio and with the Sonoran Desert toad and to document his work with 5-MeO-DMT and to share this with the world.
I can really say that the “dawn of the toad” is upon us and it’s such a profound experience that it needs to be understood. We are now going to be working with future episodes with different shamans and other entheogens to document the diversity of these substances and the sacred approaches to them in the world.
Niles: Yeah, why not start a pilot episode with the strongest of all the earth’s most incredible natural medicines? The result has become what is possibly the most powerful pilot episode of a documentary series ever to date.
WATCH Episode 1: Dr. Octavio Rettig and the Sonoran Desert Toad
To be continued…
JOIN US next week for Part 8: It Takes A Village To Make This Show…
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