Ian Benouis, formerly a Blackhawk pilot in the War on Drugs, and currently a plant medicine activist, talks with an audience about his experiences of war and the pharmaceutical industry, and using natural psychedelics to heal trauma.
Category: Nature
Former Blackhawk pilot Ian Benouis will share his experiences of war, the pharmaceutical industry, using natural medicine and psychedelics to heal trauma, and his advocacy for more sensible drug policy.
botany, chemistry and cultivation of major and obscure psychoactive plants
history of modern ethnopharmacology and ethnomycology
peyote & solandra amoung the Huichol and the role of women in shamanism
ancient & contemporary Anadenanthera snuffs of the Atacama Desert
plant teachers of Amazonian shamanism and modern ayahuasca cults in Brazil
iboga ethnobotany and ibogaine in experimental research
training in field techniques used for ethnobotanical specimen collecting
native uses and preparations of entheogenic plants, past and present
practical methods for extraction, isolation and assay of active plant compounds
ayahuasca and admixture plants and novel ayahuasca analogs
ethnobotany, chemistry and cultivation of entheogenic mushrooms and fungi
Earth based medication advocate and activist, Ian Benouis joined me to discuss his work with veterans suffering from PTSD, earth based medication, etc.
“On a balmy Texas Saturday, I sat among a motley crew of people watching three very disturbing facts show across the screen in front of us.
Veterans commit suicide at a rate two times higher than the general population. More U.S. Veterans have killed themselves than have died in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Twenty-two U.S. veterans take their own lives every day.
We were watching the short film Soldiers of the Vine: Healing War Trauma with Plant Medicine. This documentary is a journey into the hearts and minds of six veterans as they travel to Peru seeking sacred plant medicine to heal their Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.”
Surrender to being. Your true nature is pure energy and that energy is infinite love. You can not die. Your energy can only be transformed and transmuted. You are the wave having a particle experience. You do not know where and when you will pop up next. You live in the dance of infinite superposition which is full possibility until an observer observes. The multiplicity is in the unity. This is the mystical level where all is connected in one wave. Observe yourself as the One who observes All. The observing One, the one being observed, the observation, are all ONE!
In this episode my guest is Ian Benouis who is a West Point graduate, former Blackhawk helicopter pilot, US Army officer and combat veteran who participated in Operation Just Cause in the Republic of Panama. He is an activist for the beneficial use of plant medicine, especially for veterans with PTSD. Ian is also a Muslim and a psychonaut.
Down that Rabbit Hole with Ian Benouis, West Point Graduate, former Blackhawk helicopter pilot, Army Officer involved with Operation Just Cause – the largest effort focused directly on the war on drugs, and most recently a sacred plant medicine advocate for veterans suffering from PTSD.
Finding healing for his own traumas through working with plant medicines, such as Cannabis, Ayahuasca, Ibogaine, and 5MEO-DMT, Ian now spends much of his time advocating for the rights of veterans to heal from PTSD through the use of these natural remedies.
“Yeah, let’s transition from the bullet war to the meme war. I’ve been really moved by the responses from the Soldiers of the Vine screenings. I’m like “Wow, I built a field of dreams, and people actually showed up!” People are getting whatever they need out of it, versus our own self criticisms about what could have been better. That’s the real amazing thing about it. Share the message with people, and people will self-organize and self-activate. There’s no cult, there’s no dogma, it’s just spreading the love of healing and then people will naturally do whatever it is they feel they were created to do.
I think ultimately these plant medicines are psychic mirrors: they give the opportunity for greater self-reflection. Used ceremonially together, you get an intensification from all those spheres online together, mirroring each other. We all need to shut up and take our medicine and do our work. My personal belief is that the universe is a superorganism that makes up a mirror for the divine, where the ego is a construct that creates the illusion of separateness so that we have a game to play, and it’s the best game ever.
And that’s our potential salvation, and how our planet is getting hooked up into an electronically supported superorganism platform for communication. I think we’re trying to all connect each other up to heal ourselves, to unify as a planet, and then on to whatever’s supposed to be next. I don’t know what that is any more than the next person, but I have an open heart and open arms and trust that the universe knows what it’s doing.”
Ian Benouis 