We shall show them Our signs on the horizons and within themselves until it will be manifest unto them that it is the Truth.  Qur’an 41:53

Horizons are apparent boundaries that constantly shift and eventually disappear entirely through an enlightening vantage point.  What the sacred visionary plants do is they show the culturally conditioned boundaries that we have constructed to be pretty flimsy, arbitrary, manipulated and as always sold to the highest bidder.  It is a mass consensual hallucination that if not maintained with sufficient attention and participation falls apart like a stock market crash or a bank run.  This is the reason that corporations and governments are afraid of the teacher plant.   It is the red pill.  Once you take it you can still go back to the Matrix, but you can not ever unsee the Truth that you saw while under the effects of the medicine.

 

Approximately one quarter of the Qur’an is composed of signs. Natural signs in the universe, on the earth, astronomically, in humans, animals and plants and of course specifically in human nature.  Which is really Nature because we are the expression of the evolution of the planet and the universe.  So engaging with nature and seeing and experiencing the signs is a continually sacred act both inside and outside the body.

Ali, the son in law of Muhammad once said “You think you are very small, but there is an entire universe within you that you do not see. The source of your own healing is already within you.”  God says in the Islamic tradition that “The universe cannot contain me, but the heart of a believer contains me.”  Notice God does not say that the universe does not contain him, just that it cannot completely contain him.  God’s immanence and transcendence in the universe is the ultimate human spiritual conundrum but the debate is ultimately fruitless because it is an argument about boundaries that is not able to be solved for in this material reality from our limited perspective.

The western world’s biggest throwaway on our trash heap of history might just end up being this thing that we call the placebo effect.  WTF?!  Talk about the power of language for cultural propaganda programming.  The most important healing power on the planet is the mind tricking itself in to feeling better?!  Maybe there is an alternative explanation.

We need to rebrand the placebo effect or recontextualize it if you prefer.  This is the holy grail we have been searching for to treat our worldwide sickness.  It is the self-healing phenomenon.  It is Love.  God is Love.  God says outside of the Qur’an, “I was a hidden treasure and I wished to be known, so I created creation.”  God created the universe to have other creatures with which to share this infinite Love.  This self-healing begins in your heart and the first step required to generate it is to love yourself.  This is what the medicine taught me the last time in class.

The shaman told us that he doesn’t heal, that the plants heal.  He was telling the truth.  The plant maestro moves the energy around that the plants bring in to activate, manipulate and support your built in healing mechanism.  You ask the shaman who is the healer, he says it is the plants.  You “ask the plants of the earth and they will teach you that this is the handiwork of God.” Job 12:8  You ask God who is healing you and God will tell you to look in to your heart and you will see who is healing whom.   The circle is complete and never ending.

 

Once you love yourself then the medicine can help you see yourself and your memories and your relationships and the cosmos in a loving but intensely honest way.  It is like a super intense truth/love/beauty ray.  Once activated it shines continuously on your being and you have to have something in that light.  Believe me there is no hiding.  I try to regularly and continuously have a dialog with God inside myself and be constantly reintegrating what I’m learning and experiencing in life.  The last time taking medicine this light was focused either on relationships in my life or big picture universal stuff.  I found I could control that light like a fire fighter holding a water hose but that I could not turn the hose off until the medicine stopped working.  So I was able to focus on myself and other people in my life or other things by directly choosing them.

 

The lesson is that if you are not constantly integrating your subconscious mind and have not shone your flashlight down there regularly or taken out your rug to beat it recently you will go there when you take the medicine.  We know that it is a lot easier to keep your house clean if you do it regularly rather than continuously postponing it and then trying to do it all at once.  Doing the integration work outside of medicine space accelerates and promotes and sustains the self-healing process both before and after the medicine work.

I understood that your entire digestive system from your mouth to your anus is a river.  Another way to think about it is a snake with its brain being your gut brain.  It is your primary connection to the outside world since you sustain yourself with what you put through it.  It is also a sensory organ.  You have a cat’s brain worth of neurons in your gut along with more serotonin than in your brain.  So would it be any surprise that the orally active DMT in ayahuasca would be felt in the lower reaches of your body’s river system after the lake in the middle which comes after the falls?

This is your primary sense organ where you physically experience feelings.  You process these gut feelings in the brain and receive physical sensations on your skin and in your body but the feeling part is biolocated in your stomach.  I understood that if you corrupted this river with trash or always had too much cargo flowing through it you would be missing out on the sensory organ part.  The sensory part is the actual gut intuition that we have sacrificed on the altar of rationality.

On the medicine I thought about my car accident where I almost killed myself and three of my children or worse crippled any of us.  The child who was spared the car accident by staying behind with his grandparents had already successfully overcome being born with severe club foot through surgery so he knew in the story to opt himself out.

A few days later in the process of reintegrating the medicine experiences I thought about that car accident and accepted its reality and said out loud that it was a hard thing to experience.  Verbalizing those things made me cry tears of release.  That release initiated a re-access and re-assemblage of the memory in a non-fearing way that allowed me to go much deeper.  Then I realized that maybe the purpose of DMT was to be able to allow you to instantly transition between every day normal profane mundane reality in to the ultimate reality.  Just like an adrenaline dump allows your body to enter the fight or flight modality, maybe the DMT dump allows you to enter full data sensory reality rather than the tiniest pinhole that we are normally looking through while cruising along on autopilot.

I was traveling west along I-20 east of Jackson Mississippi in the left lane.  A light rain had been falling all morning.  I turned around to look at three of my four children that were in the car and when I turned back I was hydroplaning at 75 miles per hour on the grass in the median of the interstate.  Just like that.  Definitely faster than you could take that third toke of DMT.   Time slowed way down.  The aesthetic intensity of the entire physical environment was on maximum overdrive.  Even though I was moving that fast I could see and experience everything.  All I could say over and over again was the only icaro that came to me at the moment, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, until impact.

As an experienced pilot I did not freak out and there was nothing to do other than ride out the experience.  Any attempt to control the steering or braking was certain death.  I had to mentally let go of the controls of which any Blackhawk helicopter pilot will tell you, or I swear to God I just realize right now writing this, X-Wing fighter pilot will tell you, your first instinct is to never ever let go of the controls.  Total surrender.  Zero control.  I really had no choice.  We crossed back over the highway I’m thinking maybe at 70 mph by now and we start knocking down all sizes of pine trees like sticks until we meet our first oak tree straight in to the front bumper right down the middle.  It dented in the front bumper two feet.  That tree stopped us.

Then all that kinetic energy stored in the car started to rotate the vehicle around its center of gravity which in this case was on the right side of the car so we started to rotate counter clockwise.  That energy when stopped by the tree still needed to move and what saved us was the other oak tree right at the right corner of the rear of the vehicle.  It caught us like a hand.  Then that 70 mph energy immediately tore through us once the car stopped moving and broke my ribs, two of my daughter’s vertebrae, my son’s pelvis in three places along with some whiplash and my other son well he did have a few scratches.  Under the circumstances survival was a complete miracle and a full recovery was pure gratitude and ultimate grace.

I was thinking that maybe DMT helps you immediately experience the full reality of these intense experiences that we eventually call trauma so that we as spirit creatures can experience and re-experience them without total destruction of our mental integrity.  Then I realized that the DMT dump had been simultaneously preparing me for death because I was in a space where that was a very real potential outcome and my body wanted me to have that hormone in my blood stream to be prepared.   That made me cry because if I had to transition at that moment I would have been in total bliss in the center of the storm saying the mantra OMG over and over while the DMT in my third eye was helping me prepare for the final migration of my soul to the next plane of existence.  Divine Moment of Truth for sure.

So it occurred to me that maybe one purpose of DMT is to help you instantly transition to life or death mode just like adrenaline helps you immediately transition to fight or flight mode.  What system helps you recover from flight or fight mode?  The endocannabinoid system (ECS).  In addition to modulating the body’s own immune response, the ECS produces the hormones to normalize the stress and anxiety response. When the system is constantly overstressed it fails and needs to be supported by an external source of bioavailable plant hormones.  Cannabis supports and restores the body’s own ECS through activation of the self-healing response.

The same corollary model for DMT made perfect sense.  Endogenous DMT in the body and exogenous DMT from the plant, fungi and animal world orally activated by the beta-carbolines found in the ayahuasca vine, passionflower and Syria rue plants.  Maybe the shaman tunes the DMT through the beta-carboline interface because the energy that this healer brought in had me experiencing the medicine continuously for nine hours which otherwise might normally take at least two cups.

It made perfect sense then that nature was ingenious enough to use DMT to both store the memories and then go back and safely unlock them for reprocessing.  A useful comparison would be that the when you take a picture with your smart phone it uses codecs (compression decoder algorithms) to store the representational information about the picture on your phone in a compressed format.  When you open the picture you use the same codec to uncompress or decode the data in to representing the actual picture.

The way we can think about memories is that this codec that we use is constantly changing in us unlike in the machines where it is fixed unless you upgrade it.  When you access a memory your subconscious runs it through your current codec in effect to create a brand new memory using your current emotional filter.  So the picture of the memory looks different every time based on the intensity of the DMT flash you used on your camera and the what version codec your subconscious mind is running and remember you always save on top of your last version.

Since the DMT codec was utilized in capturing an episodic memory, to properly reset the memory and have release of the trauma you needed a DMT saturation event.  With a subconscious mind prepared for the medicine and a heart committed to self-healing, orally activated DMT in ayahuasca could safely allow you to go back and literally in a shamanic way re-member yourself.  Put your body back together.  Not the bionic man but the biologic man.  You can make your previously traumatic memory the beautiful piece of art it was worthy of becoming.  Turning your trauma in the most beautiful ayahuasca painting through love and gratitude and of course doing the work.  Taking out the trash.  You know the quotidian mysteries.  The only way in life is through.  Making your entire life in to one big piece of art.

After the 14^th annual Emerald Cup in Santa Rosa I drove up the five hours to Petrolia in Humboldt county.   When you take the three counties that make up the Emerald Triangle together they are larger than ten states in our union.  This is where the champagne of cannabis is grown.  My friend’s house that we were christening overlooks the Pacific Ocean in 105 acres of virgin temperate rain forest.  You have to drive through a state redwood forest to get there.  To say it was magical would be an understatement.

If you do not believe in nature and that we have coevolved in that biological matrix explain this next thing to me.  As a mushroom hunter I was excited to be in a position to forage for the visionary mushrooms in the Pacific Northwest in the winter.  His property was a buffet of mushrooms.  I must have seen over thirty different species in the small amount of walking we did around the property in the virgin rain forest.  However, I found no Psilocybe species.  I knew to expect this.  This might appear counterintuitive but these mushrooms do not live in the wild unless they are temporarily feral.  They live only in habitats that man has manipulated.  So I looked in the place where I expected to find them and where they were most likely to be, in the mulch around walkways and flower beds around his house.  Sure enough I looked down under the shrubs and the big outdoor propane tank and there they were growing right out of the mulch.

Nature is hiding in plain sight and all we need to do learn how to see the signs.  As if to Job me to death with signs later I was walking along the beach with my friend and the first piece of driftwood that I picked up was an anatomically correct human heart.  Listen I will take all the positive reinforcement that I can get.

I understood that in our planet’s evolution that the plankton in the ocean and plants on the land that did not break down with aerobic bacteria and were instead heated under pressure in to so called fossil fuels.  They are fossils and they are dead.  We need to come in to a living relationship with the plants.  This temporary hydrocarbon economy that we built on the gift from the plants allowed us to launch the industrial age and propel us to a postmodern high tech society.

However, to be permanently sustainable, we must use the gift to complete the circle back to the plant based fuel and other living renewable energy technologies.  This is why we are in a constant state of war is that we have built a war machine to protect our dead and finite supply of this liquid resource and the pharmaceuticals made from these same fossil fuels cannot be the medicines to help us see the higher level energy transfer possibilities.  The biointerchangeable plant/animal/fungus hormones can help humans see the visions for future.  So it really is just all about moving energy around.  So hippie after all.

It is the same gift that the animals gave us.  Our big brains evolved from eating meat which concentrated food density and protein significantly over available plants.  However, we must use the gift to complete the circle back to a living relationship with the animals where their destruction is not dependent upon our further evolution.  The plants with their vegetal abundance can even pick up the slack since we are on the cusp of plant based meats as a complete alternative to meat based factory farming.  Since more fuel is consumed in the world economy for this meat based agriculture than for transportation readjusting this balance is significant, not to mention the animal generated methane that is a potent greenhouse gas being reduced.

My friend wanted to check out his new part time hometown of Petrolia and we went to visit the post office general store gas refilling station complex.  On the drive in from his place he pointed out the one nursery in town and I said that we should go in there on our way back.  When we met the owner of the nursery and established some quality rapport she shared that she was planning to sell their place and open a horticultural retreat center much further north to heal vets with PTSD and when I told her my involvement she then shared that this came to her in a vision while she was meditating.

Pretty soon she went and got her husband, a doctor, who joined right in.  He was into alternative healing, medicinal mushrooms, variant culture kombuchas and all the traditional herbs and plants they were growing in their nursery.  He said that he didn’t know a ton about psychedelic plants specifically but that he knew enough to know that for the vets that a good ole dose of ayahuasca would fix that stubborn and hard to reach PTSD.  We all laughed in gleeful agreement and acknowledgement.

As we joyfully shared their vision of horticultural therapy veteran healing retreat center she told us about an article she read in 2013 in Organic Gardening magazine about filling the need for the entire generation of farmers about to retire with veterans who could heal themselves and feed the nation from within this living agri-culture.  Reintegrate in to the bio matrix.  Yo Plant Life!  Like a flash I thought to myself if that is not the ultimate definition of beating your swords in to plowshares I do not know what is.

She gave me the magazine the next morning on my departure back to San Francisco.  On the drive down I stopped at the local coffee shop in Ukiah.  It was amazing and smelled awesome and had a huge Rubiaceae family tree poster which is the family that coffee is in up on the wall.  I got my coffee and took a huge sniff and then drink and I realized why I had been smelling ayahuasca all week long.  The boiled down chacruna leaves are in the same coffee family tree and having grown one for over ten years I knew that the leaves and berries looked identical.

 

I thought a lot during the ceremonies about how all the different faith traditions that believe that the earth is alive and will be given the power to speak to us directly at the end of this phase of existence.  I am calling you out Abrahamic faiths.  I would be really afraid to hear a creature so ancient and powerful and giving and compassionate complain to God of her injury and would never want to hear her utter my name in vain to the Most High.  So I do love Mother Earth and want her to sing my praises instead of curse my name.

I met a woman on the plane whose husband is a Blackhawk helicopter crew chief who has been deployed to Afghanistan twice and Iraq once.  He is still in the military and has PTSD.  She has secondary PTSD really bad.  She got up to over 300 pounds before she had gastric bypass surgery.  She is on a scary cocktail of psych meds and anti-depressants and you name it.

Like Julie Holland MD and Psychiatrist said at the Drug Policy Reform conference at the closing session the entire world has PTSD and that it is a natural response to what is going on in the world if you are actually paying attention.  One out of four women in the US is taking an antidepressant.  What really cries out for help though is her next warning that we are moving our national diagnosis of neurotic to psychotic with all these psych meds which are increasingly being given to children.

I have spent a lot of time on the medicine thinking about Jesus and Syria and our various escapades in the Middle East.  In the Islamic eschatological outline Jesus returns to the earth in Syria during Friday prayers in Damascus.  In the past that represented to me a Middle Eastern map point as a mental place holder for the Middle East being central to the destiny of the world and the climax of this story line.

On continued reflection and contemplation that idea has shown me that when you look at the life of Jesus and evaluate his actions through his contact with other people you would naturally identify him as a healer.  I did not previously understand why of all the prophets the one who needed to come back would be a healer but now I see that he is coming back to allow us to see in ourselves that there are no horizons and no boundaries in us that we are all truly connected.  He is the one who definitely told us that the kingdom of God is in each and everyone one of us and that if we looked for it outside of ourselves we would fail to discover it.

There is no part of humanity or the planet that we can be separate from.  That is the healing that is coming and that we need to make this evolutionary jump and quantum leap to the next level of the game if we hope to transition from Homo Sapiens to Homo Naturalis.

Let your true nature shine. There is enough love for everyone.  All we have to do is re-source the unlimited supply that God has put in our hearts.  It is the ultimate renewable energy source.