Modern WisdomA Master Shaman's Guide To Ayahuasca - Hamilton Souther | Modern Wisdom Podcast 247
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
140 min read · 28,410 words- 0:00 – 15:00
To someone who's never…
- CWChris Williamson
To someone who's never taken ayahuasca, how would you describe the experience?
- HSHamilton Souther
Uh, (sighs) that's a really good question. I would describe it as could be literally nothing, and you have to be prepared for that and not get frustrated if it's literally nothing. And then it could be literally within minutes of having consumed it, the most intense, most visionary, fastest moving, outside of the box, out of body experience that you could possibly ever imagine. And you have to be prepared for that as well. (wind blows)
- CWChris Williamson
When people ask you what you do, what's your answer?
- HSHamilton Souther
I tell them I do a lot of different things. Uh, you know, mostly I just say that, uh, I try to help people, uh, advise people, guide people. Um, but really I'm an entrepreneur and an inventor and a leader for humanitarianism and really the good of all. We focus our work really around positivity and unconditional love for humanity. Uh, we believe in a core fundamental principle that everyone is a unique and inspired miracle created by the universe itself in a truly scientifically biological way, and also an not explainable mystical, extraordinary consciousness way. And that, uh, those are converged in, in us ourselves. And so, uh, through the different kinds of projects that I work on, the goal is always to have a positive outreach and ultimate support. I'm well known for working in, uh, you know, the space of Amazonian shamanism and Amazonian plant medicine, as well as the different consciousness arts. And so, um, I'm mo- most noted for that, but I'm also very interested in technology and, uh, new kinds of technology, blockchain technology, and, uh, cutting edge tech projects and things like that. So there's sort of the ancestral and what's coming into the future. And I really love the idea of a much larger timeline. I like to think of things, uh, you know, millions and millions of years ago and the millions of years to come. And so, I kind of find myself in the middle of, of that and, uh, trying to make as most pos- as positive impact as we can while we're here alive.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, you're crossing all of the streams there, right? Going from the Amazonian traditional shamanic medicine, right up to blockchain.
- HSHamilton Souther
Yeah. But I think what people don't understand is that shamans were the original technology. Like a lot of people don't know that the buffalo drum, you know, just the circular buffalo drum and just doom, doom, doom, doom, doom, doom played at 210 beats per minute creates theta binaural beats. So shamans 60,000 years ago were creating theta binaural beats like you'll now find on YouTube.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- HSHamilton Souther
And they were sitting around just like learning how to trance. That's tech.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- HSHamilton Souther
It's not very like, it's not like crazy complex chips and silicon chip tech. It's pretty simple tech, but it was doing the same thing to consciousness in the brain. And then I think, well, the shamans were there as like original scientists. They were eating the berries that no one else would eat, and some of them died. And then some of them ate them and didn't die and had this huge mind-opening experience and went, "Whoa, language." Uh, you know, we can communicate with so much more. So they were sort of like, you know, deep in tech before I think, uh, you know, whatever's happened in the last couple thousand years of civilization kind of made shamanism go underground and institutions become really, really more powerful than tribes. But the shamans have always been involved in, uh, ultimately their own kinds of technology. And I always thought of Amazonian plant shamanism as a kind of technology. They, uh, they had this, um, uh, the shamans had this amazing means of not only communicating with the plants, which is what a lot of our technology recently has been about. It's about tech-, you know, these communicative evolutions. They had the ability to directly communicate with plants, which, you know, growing up you, you heard of some people who hugged trees and that was kind of weird. Or you heard of some people that like in their garden talked to their plants and the plants grew better and stuff, but these guys literally would say they were talking to the plants. So I was like, okay, as an anthropologist that was like mind blowing. Like, what do you mean you're talking to the plant and the plant can talk back, you know? So that to me seemed like a communicative technology. And then they could also heal people with that, which to me seemed like an even more amazing understanding of medicine. And, uh, in my early 20s, I was enthralled with, uh, this idea that there were people who still were alive who had ancient knowledge and that they knew of medicines that were intermixed with mysticism. And, uh, somehow that knowledge had been passed down through thousands of years without being corrupted by the expansion of western civilization and still somehow could possibly exist in the world. Like I was enthralled with that idea. And so, uh, I met some people in the, in deep in the Amazon forest who represented these technologies. And so I thought it was kind of natural that, uh, you know, they kind of go hand in hand, but most people don't think of it that way.
- CWChris Williamson
No, not at all. What is the current state of the shaman and tribe world at the moment? You know, when I think about that, and most people as well I'm going to presume, we think of indigenous prehistoric times, you know, before we have the 21st century and all of the accoutrements that have come along with it. What's the current setup? Are there still many shamans around? Are there many tribes around that are doing this sort of practice?
- HSHamilton Souther
Oh, yeah. The, all the tribes have shamans and the practices have continued. Uh, you know, I think that people in general, whether western or indigenous, have found that, uh, the just mass production of Western industrialization makes a whole bunch of really interesting products and things that they like to have. So you see a lot of indigenous people with earbuds and stuff-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm. (laughs)
- HSHamilton Souther
... you know, so, you know, it's, uh, it-... you know, though they wear western clothes ʋʌtɪsɑɹɑ sometimes 'cause it's just easier than the other kind of clothes, you know, et cetera. You see that, but it hasn't changed very much inside the mind of the, the indigenous people in terms of their, their mysticism and their belief systems, their, uh, you know, their deep core traditions have, uh, persevered and their understanding of medicine and shamanism. So all the tribes have shamans and then every town has different kinds of spiritual practitioners all along the Amazon River basin, so literally thousands upon thousands upon thousands of practitioners.
- CWChris Williamson
How would you define the culture or you, you mentioned about kind of the internal spiritual, uh, thread. How would you define that?
- HSHamilton Souther
I think the fundamental, uh, just difference is that there's, there isn't a separation between life and nature, whereas it seems like in the western mindset, there's been a really clear separation of what is this urban suburbia and then what is nature. And nature's been sort of relegated to national parks and things like that, and people think they go out to nature. And the indigenous people live in nature, so their home is made of nature and nature is literally o- outside and they get their food from nature. And so they're part and parcel with nature and they live in balance with that nature and in a relative state of harmony with that nature. Uh, I wouldn't say it's totally harmonious 'cause some aspects of it can be rather scary, you know, when you live in a place where you realize you still are part of the food chain.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- HSHamilton Souther
So if you know that you live in a place where there are animals that can eat you, it's- kind of changes your mindset a little bit, you know? But other than that, um, that's, I think, really the, the, like the big difference is that they just haven't separated from nature and that they believe nature is alive. And, uh, they roughly translate the term spirit to that. Although I think it has a v- vast difference in meaning to that of western culture. I think what, when they're talking about spirit, they're talking about life force, which is a scientifically measurable concept and understanding. They say that tree has spirit and they mean that tree's alive. And they say that jaguar has spirit, that jaguar's alive. You have spirit, you're alive. They're not, um, they're not creating some cartoonish imagery in their mind or some ghost story or something like that. I think it's actually much more grounded in what we would think of as, like energetic physics than, uh, the way westerners typically treat it. It's just sort of like there's a big mystery out there and it's this forest and the forest is literally filled with that mystery. And, uh, if you live out there far enough away from western civilization long enough, you will meet that mystery, and, uh, the forest you will realize is alive and is listening in many different ways and that is quite a wild experience to live.
- CWChris Williamson
I bet it is. It's interesting to think about the distinction you made there to do with nature. And I'm right in saying that jungles are the most biodiverse places on the planet, right? Like the highest, um-
- HSHamilton Souther
Correct.
- CWChris Williamson
... volume of species of all animals, the biggest diversity you're gonna get is going to be in that. So it doesn't really sound that surprising that the people who live in that environment would feel so much more immersed, so much more at one with nature and nature to be su- such a larger part of their life. And you're totally correct, the, you know, there's tons, millions and millions of people, some of whom will be listening who, for whom that tree at the corner of the street is the, like, end point of nature that they're going to get to see perhaps for this week. You know, you get in the car, drive to work, office block, paved street, gray skies, et cetera, et cetera. Um, yeah, it doesn't surprise me that we have different modes of thinking when the environments that have spawned that thinking are so disparate.
- HSHamilton Souther
Yeah, no, I completely agree with that, that idea. You know, the western concepts of, of nature are just, you know, they're just different in that sense. And when you live in a place where you're hearing nature literally all the time... At night, the Amazon is alive and it is loud, it is symphonic.
- CWChris Williamson
Is it really?
- HSHamilton Souther
And so you're hearing... Oh yeah, I mean it is literally symphonic. You hear, uh, literally tens of thousands of species of animals making different kinds of sounds collectively. And when you get into the visionary ceremonies, one of the most amazing things that can happen is that the, the shaman actually know how to sync with the nature and get the nature to start to play with them like a big band. So you'll have a shaman there with just a rattle and I'm n- not kidding, all of a sudden the cicadas will take on syncopated rhythms. The owls will start to hoot right at the right time. The frogs will croak right like, like a- as part and parcel of what's going on. Uh, the shaman just looks at you like, "Why, you don't know what's going on." Right? Kind of like totally normal, like it's just been completely normalized for them and westerners' minds are just going like ʻkɑʷ ʻkɑʷ ʻkɑʷʻ, you know like, like b- brain splatter everywhere about that, you know? It's like such a funny, funny thing to see but it's just so true. So when you live in that place where nature is just part of literally everything that you're doing, uh, not a store, right? It's not a store that's part of everything that you're doing, it's nature that's part of everything that you're doing. Uh, it's really easy to experience it that way in its diversity and in its understanding of life. And, and it has so much energy, uh, you know in the sense of just that much sound. You know I think of like what a rock concert is and how p- how it, or like an EDM festival and how much energy is going to making that sound and I think about the forest and I think it's making more sound. It's making more energy than that huge, you know, EDM festival a- all the time just by itself. That is what they call the force of nature or the force of spirit and it's, uh, it's truly palpable when you're there and you're in it, you know. You feel it, you hear it, you experience it.
- CWChris Williamson
I wonder what it would be like for some of the people who are indigenous to that environment to come and live in the silence, the relative silence of sort of lower suburban-... Western society. If they're used to such noise levels, and then you were to bring them into, you know, a quiet street in the, in the UK or in Midwest of the US or something like that, uh, I wonder what they would make of that.
- HSHamilton Souther
I think it'd be scary. I think it'd be the flip opposite of what happens when you take somebody else down there. I think it literally would be scary for them. Uh, I do know a number of people who've moved from the jungle out to other areas, and then it's often that they come back and they just don't relate. Like, the c- culture shock is so great-
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- HSHamilton Souther
... they're just like, "Nah, I think I'm gonna go back to that." You know? All the-
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, I want the, I want the symphony of different insects, if that's all right, please.
- HSHamilton Souther
Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, I-
- 15:00 – 30:00
And you're trained as…
- HSHamilton Souther
to anxiety disorders, PTSD, um, all different kinds of, uh, traumatic events from the past that people have healed, uh, from as benign as just the difficulties of growing up all the way to truly incurable, uh, diagnosed, you know, by psychologists and psychiatrists illnesses that these plant medicines have been able to ultimately treat. And, uh, in the indigenous sense, there's a, a person who's called a shaman that, or a médico vegetalista, which means doctor of plants. And they know how to guide that experience, and they do so through sound and through the altered state of consciousness that they've learned how to be a part of. So it's a, it's a slightly different kind of medicine than you experience from a Western doctor who sort of gives you a prescription and says, "Here, go take these pills." In this case the doctor takes the medicine with you, so you guys sit down together and you, you both, uh, tip back the cup of tea or whatever it is that you guys are using to, to do this kind of healing ceremony. And then you go into an altered state of consciousness that has a real purpose. And the purpose of the altered state of consciousness is to ultimately take you into a personal recognition that you have transcended, eh, the illness. You have transcended whatever it is that was afflicting you and actually now has created a state of healing. And on the other side of that journey, you come out of it transformed and/or healed.
- CWChris Williamson
And you're trained as one of these plant doctors.
- HSHamilton Souther
Yeah, I started my training in my early 20s. I was 23 years old when I started training, and now I'm 42. So I've been practicing for the last 19 years. Uh, it's been a wild ride, I have to say.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs) I bet it has, yeah. Have-
- HSHamilton Souther
Yeah, it wasn't, wasn't what I was thinking when I was growing up in American suburbia that this would ultimately sort of be my destiny. But, uh, I feel truly blessed to have been, um, invited into an in- uh, indigenous lineage and ultimately given the opportunity to go through apprenticeship and to learn what these medicines are and can do. Like I said, I was really drawn and really wished that c- there could be something more to this idea of mysticism and, uh, knowledge. And I was able to find it in the Amazon through these kinds of plant medicine experiences and then ultimately help impart that to really thousands of people from around the world. So I created a center called Blue Morpho, and, uh, Blue Morpho was one of the first centers in the world dedicated to Amazonian shamanism and Amazonian plant medicine in a traditional indigenous way. And, uh, we became globally recognized, uh, after a number of people were healed from what were considered incurable illnesses, and lots of publications happened about us in the er- uh, mid- uh, early 2000s. And then, and from there, people came from all over the world and they got to be introduced to this kind of, uh, medicine and then also have the experiences of the ceremonies with us. And it's been a incredible joy, really, to be able to work with people from all over the world. We've had people from over 120 countries visit us, and, uh, you know, that was something that I never thought would happen when we first started out, and I think really the community that's formed is, uh, the most impactful part of it out of all of it for me, that people really did receive a tr- tremendous amount of benefit from their experiences with us in the vast majority and that, uh, tremendously incredible relationships were formed through that work.
- CWChris Williamson
I know that you've gone online. You guys, like everyone this year, has had to pivot. Even the plant medicine isn't, uh, free from the effects of a pandemic sadly. But, um, where are you based when you're usually in person? Where are you guys based?
- HSHamilton Souther
Uh, typically in person. We're based in the Amazon, out of the city of Iquitos in northeastern part of Peru. But now we have gone online. Uh, we've been online though, interestingly enough, since 2014. So we, we beat the c- the curve to the pandemic.
- CWChris Williamson
COVID-ready.
- HSHamilton Souther
We were already interested in-
- CWChris Williamson
COVID-ready.
- HSHamilton Souther
We were COVID-ready. Yeah. We were interested in streaming and, uh, we had our own streaming channels before YouTube and Facebook had live streaming as part of their features. So we were really interested in tech. I got interested in tech, uh, from the side of really being asked questions by a whole bunch of tech people that were coming down to our lodge. So people would come down and spend anywhere from a week to nine days with us. And many of them came from the tech sector, and so I would ask them what they would do, they would ask me what I would do, and we would have these incredibly in-depth conversations about technology. And I found it fascinating. And so when streaming came around, I thought it was a really interesting idea about how to be able to share these practices, um, where you could really reach out to people instead of them having to come to you. You know, it's quite a, quite a commitment and a trek to come to our part of the Amazon to be able to experience this in its native setting. And there were also lots of practices that weren't specifically dedicated to psychoactive plants that could also be shared that had tremendous value. And those could be shared all over the world. There was no question of legality around the plants that were being used, et cetera. And so I was really interested in being able to share that through technology and through streaming. So we've been streaming since 2014, and we made this pivot to really put the entirety of our work online during the time of COVID. The shutdown has been, uh, impressive, to say the least.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, I bet. I bet. So you've said that you've done, uh, 19 years of this particular practice. Have you got any idea how many ayahuasca and plant medicine ceremonies you yourself have done?
- HSHamilton Souther
Uh, yes and no. Uh, it has to be sort of an approximation 'cause I lost track, but well over 4,000.
- CWChris Williamson
4,000? (laughs)
- HSHamilton Souther
Yeah. Oh, definitely over 4,000. Uh, but I, I... You know, you stop counting after the first couple thousand, you know? So...
- CWChris Williamson
That's insane.
- HSHamilton Souther
I was highly dedicated and highly motivated. I was-
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- HSHamilton Souther
I really, really enjoyed the, the work. And, and by that I mean like literally professional ceremonies, not just, you know, sitting by yourself, et cetera. This is with people where I was facilitating with other master shamans or myself facilitating alone, but over 4,000 with, you know, with other people where we were performing the healing arts and the mystic arts together.
- CWChris Williamson
Wow. That's insane. That's over a 10 year... So over your full career, that would be one every, what, three to four days? It would be a ceremony about once every three to four days that I'm gonna guess?
- HSHamilton Souther
Correct. Yeah. We didn't really practice that way though. I mean, it wasn't spaced out like that. We had practice in groups of ceremonies, so we would often do nine ceremonies in a row. For instance, I've participated in eight ceremonies in the last nine nights.
- CWChris Williamson
Wow.
- HSHamilton Souther
So I facilitated literally eight ceremonies in the last nine nights. Um, just for other people that have contacted us, you know, looking for different kinds of healing through the Trinity Retreats that we're doing online, we do three ceremonies in a row. Um, so, you know, they get kind of bunched together and then you take a little time off, and then you do more, and then you take time off. And training was extensive. You know, I trained for 13 years and, uh, when I was training, um, we would participate anywhere from, uh, nine nights in a row up to 40 nights in a row. So, you know, you'd pack in a lot of ceremonies in a very short period of time, and then you would take a little bit of time off, let things settle. You know, sanity and, uh, groundedness is really important through that level of practice. And so you need to be really, really careful with what you're doing in terms of that. There's a lot of restrictions. There's a lot of, uh, things you do to make sure that you're, you're staying sane and safe during that kind of level of training. It would be no different to that of anyone else who's doing something very extreme, like extreme sports athletes or ultra runners, et cetera, that are, you know, pushing the envelope, but knowing how to do that and, uh, and progressing. And so that's not something that you start out as. You know, when I started I thought just surviving one ceremony was a really big deal. (laughs) Like, that was like an unbelievably big deal. But yeah, over the years they, they amassed, they amassed a number, you know, again
- CWChris Williamson
That number is around about 4,000, which is just-
- HSHamilton Souther
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... terrifying. And the thing is as well, with an ayahuasca ceremony, it's, you are not just talking about half an hour in and out here, we're talking about the majority of a day, right?
- HSHamilton Souther
Yeah. It's really at nighttime, so evening to night. And you could kind of just think of it as anywhere from three to eight hours. So each ceremony would be relatively, uh, within that timeframe. So the number of hours is really quite extensive that you're in that state. It's a dedication. You really dedicate to that, that period of time. And it's really sacred. It's, it's also very enjoyable too, if, if you like it, you know, like any other kind of activity, if you really like something, it's easy to spend time in it. But it's not like your 15-minute meditation. You know, it really is kind of a bigger commitment than that. And, uh, like I said, anywhere from three to eight hours is normal. And then there are the kinds of ceremonies that go much, much longer than that. So I have participated in ceremonies that literally go on for days, and, uh, so that's quite another kind of, uh, experience in its own right as well.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, I bet it is. Can you talk about the ingredients that you put together to make ayahuasca and how those combine to actually work?
- HSHamilton Souther
Sure. Ayahuasca is a tea. It's really basic. Um, there's really two principle main ingredients in our part of the Amazon that gets used. One is a vine that is named ayahuasca and, um-I don't know, that's its name. But it's a vine. You- you kinda see it growing there, like many vines in the Amazon. The, uh, the vines kind of tie the whole Am- Amazon together. You- you rarely see a tree without vines interconnecting it to another tree. There are just vines all over the place and many of them have medicinal properties associated with them. There are vines for diabetes, there are vines for, um, different kinds of arthritis. There are vines for different kinds of, uh, cold, you know, kind of like your common cold and flu and stuff like that. And it happens to be ayahuasca. And when you mix ayahuasca with this leaf called chacruna, um, it's a relative of the coffee family, comes from a- a kind of bushy tree that grows in the shade. Uh, you take the leaf and the vine and you put it together and you get ayahuasca. Um, that combination is incredibly visionary. It's incredibly potent. And, uh, it's a mixture of a number of, uh, n- MAOI and whichever these inhibitors that, uh, inhibit an enzyme in the stomach that allows for the digestion and the uptake of dimethyltryptamine that comes from the chacruna into the brain. Otherwise, the stomach would just break it down and you wouldn't have any experience at all. So the combination of the vine plus the chacruna leaves allows for the body to absorb by inhibiting this enzyme in the stomach. And then, uh, you have a much longer experience than what people know of as, like, a DMT trip. Uh, it lasts in, like I said, anywhere from three to eight hours, sometimes 13, 16 hours. And the longest I've seen is a few days, but those are in very rare cases, uh, the- and usually very specific reasons of the- the person and why they would have that experience. But most people are in and out within, uh, three to six hours of the experience. And those are the two main ingredients. And then after that, the shaman, depending on the kinds of plants they work with, can use a number of different admixtures. And there is really not just one recipe of ayahuasca. So in our lineage, we can use anywhere from seven to 14 other plants that can be added to the ayahuasca as well. And they're just added to give it more strength. Um, not in the sense to make it more potent. It's actually the opposite. It's to make you stronger and more capable of handling the experience. And so those are typically different kinds of tree barks that we work with that come from a whole segment of shamanism that's called Palero shamanism or tree shamanism, and then also from Sanango and the Sanangeros, which is Sanango Bay shamanism. The, uh, the shamanism in the Amazon is broken down based on the different kinds of medicinal plants that you're working with and what you've trained with. And so there are many specialties. And our lineage, we're trained in five specialties of different kinds of visionary plants. And so, uh, they kind of all get intercombined into the ayahuasca that our lineage uses so that we can then pull from those different aspects of the practice to be supportive and helpful in the ceremony for all the different variety of reasons you would- you would see in an ayahuasca ceremony.
- CWChris Williamson
13 years out of 19 years spent training-ish, you said.
- 30:00 – 45:00
You mentioned that there's…
- HSHamilton Souther
you spend most of your time learning about the plants through the ceremonies themselves. So you do a process of diets, which they call dieta, which just means diets, and that's a- a time where you drink or consume teas or different kinds of elixirs made out of lots of different kinds of medicinal plants, most of which, like I- I say, are not psychoactive. Most of them are- are, um, just like if you made mint tea.... and you're having a cup of mint tea, just simple as that. And, uh, you learn how to work with the plant that way through these, these diets. You follow extensive restrictions of behavior. There's sexual abstinence, abstinence from alcoholic beverages, abstinence from, uh, spicy foods. There's a very limited diet you're allowed to eat during that period of time, et cetera. And you go through these dietas and then during that time, you also participate in visionary ceremonies depending on the plants that you're training with and that you're working with. And that's really how you spend your time. And so, you're- you do these dietas, the dietas last anywhere from six days, to nine days, to 15 days. In some traditions it's a month long, three months long, six months long, or even a year long at a time of training. And it is literally 24 hours a day. You're said to be taught in the visionary space and in the dream time. And, um, that's kind of how you spend your time. In our case, uh, training for me was spent between foraging for food and going to the agricultural plot, 'cause we lived off of the land itself. You would go out in canoes and go fishing. You would, um, you know, collect food and during the day, or you would do other kinds of mending or building or the creating of the tools that you needed. It was, you know, very rudimentary s- life. Where I lived, there were very few inhabitants. There were about, uh, maybe 50 to 60 people in total and for miles and miles and miles of jungle where I lived. And so, uh, you spend a lot of time, uh, just kind of foraging and being part of nature and interacting with nature. And then the rest of the time is spent in ceremonies as part of the dietas.
- CWChris Williamson
You mentioned that there's been this recent influx of Western tourists, I suppose, wanting to come and do, I don't know what you'd call it, it's kind of like a s- a- a psycho holiday, psychonaut holiday of one- of one kind or another, um, and that perhaps jaded some people's opinions and also narrowed the focus that we're aware of. Certainly, I think ayahuasca is the most famous of plant medicines, but you're right, there's magic mushrooms and LSD and other psychedelic, uh, compounds that we can get natural and obviously, uh, synthesized. How important is it for people to use the ayahuasca in the traditional sense, ceremony-guided music at night in nature, as opposed to in a more transactional, I guess, classic Western sense? You know, someone to order, I'm gonna guess, the dark web's got everything on it, uh, I'm gonna guess that someone on the dark web somewhere probably sells the ingredients or perhaps even like a pre-mixed dry thing, and then someone at the house could do it. How important is it to go through the full ceremony and- and have the guidance there with you?
- HSHamilton Souther
Uh, I would say that the- the level of importance is the same as going to a trained surgeon or a completely untrained surgeon needing-
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- HSHamilton Souther
... a heart transplant. So you need a heart transplant and you're gonna go to somebody who literally has never done it before, or you're gonna go to a trained person who is a, you know, highly trained specialist and has done many of those and knows how to actually do that. I think it's literally, uh, that severe. So l- you get akin to it to, uh, a life and death situation. Uh, you need your life saved, you want it saved by somebody who knows what they're doing in Western medicine. If you go down to tribal Amazonian medicine, you want somebody that knows what they're doing and that has had at least a minimum of five, if not 10, hopefully 15 years of training and experience as a minimum.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, I've heard, as I'm sure you will have done and many of the people listening about experiences where, uh, shamans who are perhaps less qualified or just more careless, I suppose, have taken groups of Western tourists and I guess not given them the, uh, level of care that they should have done, whilst giving them the level of drugs that they perhaps wanted.
- HSHamilton Souther
Uh, it's, you know, it's a very dangerous thing. Fact of the matter is, especially with Westerners who take all different other kinds of medications and don't understand the contraindications and the intermixes of mixing plants with other kinds of pharmaceuticals. And often-
- CWChris Williamson
Oh, so there's a- there's a- a- an interaction there as well.
- HSHamilton Souther
Oh, absolutely. And there's a whole list of pharmaceuticals that are contraindicated to the Amazonian medicinal plants. And in the centers that are really, uh, serious, there's medical screening before you're allowed to participate in the ceremonies. And that's just not being upheld by a lot of different people. And it la- it adds to a tremendous amount of danger associated to the- the potentials of what could ultimately happen. But you really should follow a medical intake form and the people who are organizing the experience need to take it as seriously as running any other kind of clinic to understand whether or not you're a suitable candidate to participate in the ceremonies themselves. And then you also have to understand the, so not only the interactions with Western pharmaceuticals, you also have to understand your own sensitivity to other kinds of plants as well. And often, because ayahuasca is mixed with lots of other kinds of plants, uh, ayahuasca can be blamed for things that have happened that really are the admixtures that have been added to ayahuasca. Um, so I know of people who have been poisoned from tobacco, and they had just so much tobacco as part of the ritual and ceremony, and they had such a sensitivity to tobacco that they ended up getting tobacco poisoning, not poisoned from ayahuasca, and they ended up having severe health consequences. Not at our center, because luckily we don't use tobacco that way, but, uh, it just happened to be that way. And/or things like, uh, brugmansia, which is called ʻtoʻoe or angel trumpet vine is also unbelievably psychedelic and incredibly dangerous, and people die from it all over the world, uh, from mistreating that plant. And it can also be used as an admixture in ayahuasca. And then, you know, because the name is ayahuasca, it gets misunderstood that there were these other compounds and other plants that were added to it that has literally altered what it is and that the people that were, uh, you know, taking the plant, they did not... there- there's no story about what they were taking beforehand or what their medical history was or what their family history is. And if you have a, in your family history, a history of dissociative disorders, any kind of mental, uh, disorder that's bipolar, any kind of schizophrenia, you should not participate in these kinds of medicines. You should not participate in these kinds of psychedelic experiences, especially if you're over the age of 30. There can be a trigger that can literally kick off out of your genetics those, uh, states of mental illness that you might not have experienced before. And it's not talked about and it needs to be taken very seriously. And as this spreads and people are more interested in it, you're going to hear more and more stories of where there has been...... a mistake that has been made. And of course, what you're gonna hear is the, the thunder around that mistake. You're not gonna hear, at the same time, the hundreds of thousands of people that were doing this within a safe way, that were all being healed at the same time. And so the negative gets super overplayed, but it is unbelievably dangerous and you have to know whether or not you are a appropriate candidate to be able to participate in the ceremony.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah. What is it people are perhaps, when the world reopens, thinking, "I've considered it for a long time, I've done my research. I feel like this is something that I want to try." How can they assure that the particular center that they go to or the shaman that they're working with is legit? Because presumably, even the ones that have been around for a couple of years and don't care that much about their clients or their patients, I suppose. What do you call them? What would you-
- HSHamilton Souther
Uh, guests.
- CWChris Williamson
Guests.
- HSHamilton Souther
Participants.
- CWChris Williamson
Cool. Um, they don't care that much about their guests. They're still going to say, "No, don't worry, I am this," blah, blah, blah. There's no TripAdvisor, I'm going to guess, for, um, for different shamans. So what do you do?
- HSHamilton Souther
Uh, I fundamentally think you have to do your homework and your research. Uh, you need to get online and you need to look at a variety of centers, and you need to see how long they've been around and what their track record is. You need to try to find as many comments as you can and testimonials. It's better if you can find somebody that's been there and talk with them in person or chat with them online about it and the experience. You need to look into the shaman's eyes and see if they look like somebody you want to vibe with, because everyone's energy is very different and, uh, no two shaman are the same. And so I think I'm always looking for someone who's not trying to be a, you know, a cult and be hidden. They're willing to be open and sharing. They're very clear about what their intention is and what their purpose is of the work that they're doing, that they have a, you know, a long history and track record of a lot of positive success. You'll also find, obviously, anybody who has a very long time doing anything, there are people that like them and don't like them. So you'll see that as well. I think it's also really important to see how the people treat the scenarios for the people that provide criticism against them. Are they people that lash out online or are they people that, uh, you know, handle themselves in a respectful, honest, and caring way? I think all of these things are important ways of being able to check out a center and s- see if they're viable. See whether or not they do medical screening. Very important. Do, do you know, does the center do medical screening, and, uh, what is their medical screening and why? I think if you have an opportunity to be able to talk to the people that do the boo- the booking for them, it's really important, that it's not just some online process. But that they're actually somebody to interact with, even if it's just emails, and to be able to ask questions and are they willing to provide answers for you? And then I think that regardless of the investment that you make in it, if you ever arrive at a place and it doesn't feel right, and it doesn't look right to you, you should just leave. It's as simple as that. Or you should just not participate in the ceremony. And then you should ask the shaman as well, "Is it okay if I l- if I observe the ceremony? Can I actually be here?" So maybe I go to a place where there's five ceremonies and I decide I want to observe the first one. I don't want a drink. I want to get comfortable with this experience first, just to see what it's about and how do they treat that? Like at our, for instance, at our center, uh, there is no experien- experience that is mandatory, and we allow everybody to be able to observe without participating in the ingestion of any of the plants. We don't believe that the ingestion of the plants is, is entirely important to the nature of the experience of the healing that somebody can receive. We've had people that come from all different programs where it's no, n- no longer allowed, like 12 step programs where it's not allowed for them to participate in psychedelics and things like that. And so they don't drink and they still have visionary experiences. We tell people that if they're not feeling comfortable or they're not feeling up to it, to take the night off. It's not about, you know, night after night after night participating. We offer the number of ceremonies we offer so that people have the maximum opportunity to receive what they need. And for some people that works really well to participate in all of the ceremonies. A lot of other people need many less ceremonies in a week than what's offered, right? One or two or three is enough, even if five or six or seven is offered at the center. You want to see that the people really are caring about you and are interested in your well-being and, and your health, and how they are interacting in that way. And so I think if you do your research, there is a, a way to be able to get some clarity on that and to check inward about that overall experience, and that it really shouldn't be offensive in any way to any center or any practitioner if someone just realizes that they don't vibe with you and that it's not right for them, and that e- even if they need to go somewhere else instead of you. I think that that's completely fine as well. And, um, ultimately in that honesty and clarity, I think you can decide whether or not you want to put the well-being of your own psyche in the hands of somebody else, and then you can make that decision.
- CWChris Williamson
Phenomenologically, how would you describe to someone who's never taken ayahuasca, how would you describe the experience?
- HSHamilton Souther
Oh, (sighs) that's a really good question. That's a really good question. Um, I would describe it as, um, could be literally nothing. It could be literally nothing, and you have to be prepared for that and not get frustrated if it's literally nothing. And then it could be literally within, uh, minutes of having consumed it, the most intense, most, uh, visionary, fastest moving, um, outside of the box, out of body experience that you could possibly ever imagine. And you have to be prepared for that as well. And, um...My first experience was literally, like, 50 to 100 strobe lights going off at the same time, where each one was a vision that needed to be dealt with. Something recapitulated. Something purged. Something confronted. Something that was terrifying me or scaring me. And it lasted hours and hours and hours and hours and hours until I literally thought I would die of exhaustion. It was unbelievably intense. Um, it was by far the most intense experience of my life up until that point. Uh, you can see and hear and, um, understand the field of consciousness and the field of nature in a way that makes everything that seems separate look like it is interwoven in a lattice of multi-D geometry, of the, of the colors made up of the rainbow and every color you have never seen before in your life. Literally, like, every single atom of air is exploding in an interweb of nature, consciousness, and it is all alive. And within it, there is the presence of supernatural voices and supernatural beings and supernatural visions that could come, um, as benign as a whisper to that of anything from any mythology you have ever heard of or ever imagined and things well outside of that. In my first ceremony, I saw, uh, 30-foot wingspan hummingbirds that were having rainbows exploding out of them. A bush that was next to me had turned into a wild boar that was literally telling me what a terrible job I was doing. It criticized me the entire time about how, like, I could not keep it together. Um, I
- 45:00 – 1:00:00
(laughs) …
- HSHamilton Souther
vomited at least 300 times, at least 300 times in that first ceremony. And I was literally trapped in a spiraling spiral galaxy where the center of it was a black hole of absolute insanity taking me to a place 10 billion times worse than hell and a huge voice that would sound like the voice of God telling me to do the work with me screaming back, "I don't understand what they're talking about." And then just purging and purging and purging and purging and purging out all ends with no ability to control the physical body whatsoever. And then ultimately purging a physical object the size of a lemon that felt like hands were squeezing it out of my stomach, up my esophagus, and then out of my mouth, where my mouth unhinged like that of a snake and an actual physical ball, the size of a lemon came out of me. And it represented every aspect of negativity, depression, pain, and suffering that I had ever experienced in my life up until that moment. That whole thing took four and a half hours. And, uh, I remember asking the hummingbirds, whose beaks were like three or four-meter long, to please not kill me and spike me. I remembered the bush, uh, telling the bush that it had... I finally agreed it was a boar and not a bush. I definitely realized it was not a good idea to shape-shift into a jaguar, strip myself naked and run into the forest. That was a bad idea. I realized you have good and bad ideas. Some of them you should not follow. I realized there was a purpose to the purging itself. And at the end of it, I was cheered on by thousands of spirits that I had actually purged what I was looking for. And, uh, and I had found my apprenticeship and that I was going to apprentice. And I remember thinking that that was the biggest cosmic joke because there was no way that I would ever actually be able to learn to have any sort of constitution within that space because I was dug into the ground. The amount of sweat that had poured out of me had become mud. I was covered in mud from head to toe. Uh, l- I, I could not move. And I remember getting into my hammock that night, uh, thinking to myself, "If I make it to morning without soiling the hammock, I'll be really proud of myself." Like, just please don't soil the hammock.
- NANarrator
(laughs)
- HSHamilton Souther
Like, I could barely walk. Um, I thought people who had said it was intense had kind of overplayed it, like, "Oh yeah, sure." And then I realized they had underplayed it. Like, they had underplayed the intensity. It was so intense. And then I learned over the years that that was not the most intense experience I've ever had. That was only like a middle-grade experience of total intensity over the, the, you know, 1000 plus ceremonies that I've been in with, with ayahuasca. Um, and, uh, and, and so you gotta be ready to, to take a leap of faith literally into the infinite and eternal astral and be ready for whatever. And so you want your guides to be really good. And that's my point of the idea of, like, the guy giving you the heart transplant. You want your guides to be really, really good. If nothing happens, your guide didn't matter. But if that happens, you better have a guide who knows how to handle you and deal with that and guide you through that and make sure that you stay in with the good spirits and the light spirits and the healing spirits and energies. And that, you know, you don't get taken anywhere that you can't come back from, et cetera. You need to have somebody who knows how to guide that kind of an experience. It's possible to all of a sudden find yourself, uh, with your eyes open or closed and being able to see exactly the same thing. So you're there with your eyes open and then you close 'em and then you're seeing literally the same thing, and you open 'em again and you close 'em, and you're not in the ceremonial house where you started. You are literally somewhere else. And it's not that you're out of body, you're there, uh, as body, or you could be disembodied consciousness just somewhere in outer space. All of a sudden it could be like literally Einsteinian physics, getting sucked into a wormhole. And that wormhole could literally take you anywhere in infinity. And then you can go from the one black hole of a spiral galaxy into another, into a, another, into another until you're like 6, 7, 8 dimensions from where you started. Literally filled in worlds of beings that you have never heard from of any other kind mythology. You have never seen anything like this. You can't be like, "Oh, that came from a movie," or, "Oh, this experience came from..." No, this is totally outside the box. Like, the brain has literally no reference for it. And you have to be able to keep your constitution and hang on through that until you come out the other side and there is no off button.There is no off switch. There is no, "Hey guys, I'd really like to just slow this down a little bit right now."
- CWChris Williamson
You can't pull the ejector cord, right?
- HSHamilton Souther
There is no eject. There is no eject. There's no second parachute. No, I mean, like literally all the ways humans have tried to like, you know, figure out a way to- to give themselves a second chance when things go wrong, it does not exist in this game. This is a multi-D, uh, real-real time, real played game. I- I- I equated it that, you know, every day is the World Cup. Every day you're in it is the World Cup. There's no like warm-up, there's no scrimmage, there's no (laughs) there's no practice. It is the World Cups game. You are always in the championship game every time you go in there. And no one knows, literally even the shamans, what's gonna happen. And so it's not like the shamans have, like a DJ has a playlist. The shamans have tools and they are ready for literally whatever. And they have thousands and thousands and thousands of tools that they know how to use when they're proficient. And they are gonna be able to pull those- those tools out like Batman using his utility belt, to have a whole bunch of tools to be able (laughs) to take care of whatever could possibly happen within that room. And then the bigger the ceremony gets, the more exponentially intense it is and, uh, difficult it is to manage. So in our center, w- we work with anywhere from 30 to 40 people at the same time. So if one person is that intense, you can imagine when now you have 30 or 40 going. And that's when it gets unbelievably fun. I mean, you gotta be up for it, but that is when it gets unbelievably fun. The next day people are saying like, "I saw you envision over there." And, "This thing came out of you." And- and "We were here" and then the other was like, "Yeah, I saw you there too." And it is like a whole world. It is like you are inside the cosmic consciousness, uh, holographic video game for real. And the barriers of consciousness have been broken down and the barriers of personality and ego have been broken down and it is literally game on. And it can be unbelievably fun or it can be unbelievably scary and treacherous. And so, you know, again, that's where you want your guides to really know what they're doing, have had a lot of experience so that they're not tossed and thrown by whatever gets, uh, brought forth within that ceremony and that they're capable of handling whatever it brings. But, you know, that's it in a nutshell.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs) Man, what an unbelievably beautiful explanation of that. Um, what insight about the mind and about consciousness outside of that realm or what's some of the biggest realizations and insights that you've gained from all of this time that you've spent?
- HSHamilton Souther
Uh, I mean, first of all, I think the- the biggest one is that you're a miracle and that we're not taught to think of ourselves that way, but that you're a miracle. You're an evolutionary miracle and that you are a biological miracle and you're a cosmic miracle. And the fact that you're alive, it means you've already won the biggest gift of all, which is just being alive and most people don't see it that way. Um, the second is that we're not separate in any kind of way and that we're already eternal and infinite and what we are as a body is something that I call being in the womb of earth. You are in the womb of your mother and you were born to the world and now we're all in the earth together. And people like to think that they're on the earth and we're actually within the earth. The earth is in, through, and all around us and we're made of it. We're literally made of the earth itself and if you look at the matter of your body, that is the earth and the earth comes from an unbelievably huge cloud of stardust and that means you're made of stardust. So you literally are a stardust, starlight being that lives in outer space within the density of the earth created as a miracle. And that- that fundamentally is actually true, (laughs) as hard as it is to imagine, science can actually prove that that is a fact and that the matter of your body is over 12 billion years old. So while we might think of ourselves as 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 years old, what makes up your body right now is over 12 billion years old, that's stardust and that- that is a fundamental miracle in its own right and that somehow the earth has magically organized us to be able to not only know ourselves but know each other and be able to speak common languages that allow us to interact and that- that- that's a miracle. And to me it's sad that we have used that to decide to fight each other and harm each other instead of be neutral with each other or harmonious with each other because we're all in this together. Um, I always like to say that we need to start to learn how to get along 'cause once the universe creates you, it doesn't know how to uncreate you. So you have been created and you'll be created forever and s- so we're all in this together, literally forever with all of our ancestors and all of the species that have gone and everything that has ever lived and died is still part of spirit and still part of the universe. And we will go from the womb of earth into the womb of the universe itself which to me is another birth. I've learned that death is not real, that death is an illusion that we're told about which is the shedding of the body when consciousness is ready to be born again, not reincarnated to earth itself. There are sure some people who are reinc- reincarnated to earth but consciousness is something that is constantly growing and expanding and that what we call death is actually a tr- transition into another state of consciousness and being and that it is really about ready to get born and so we're just super scared about getting born, not super scared of dying. And we're not sure what we're getting born into. So those are some core, some core things I've learned along the way.
- CWChris Williamson
There's some fantastic insights I've... The fascinating unifying thread that I see between all of my friends and guests who've had serious psychedelic experiences that haven't been, uh, purely recreational, should I say, and even some of the ones who have just been purely recreational kind of have this insight as well, but so few of them live a reductionist materialist, um, haven't have that viewpoint anymore..."I can know all that is to be known. We can see all that there is to see," et cetera. Um, and I've heard you speak to past Modern Wisdom guests and good buddy, Aubrey, um, about the fact that anyone who is a skeptic just needs to try an experience for themselves. Have you ever had someone who has been expressively, like, overly skeptical arrive at one of your particular retreats and then seen a 180 polar reverse flip of the- v- their view of the world?
- HSHamilton Souther
Uh, literally every single retreat. Every retreat there's somebody who comes unbelievably skeptical. Uh, this is an experience that if you haven't had it, how could you understand it? And many people are coming to understand whether or not i- if it even could be real. So could this actually be real? The story sounds so fantastic. Could it be real that there would be a way out of what seems like the prison of the finite materialistic? The- the spirit is asking for it, but the mind is still in a state of doubt and fear. And, uh, it just takes one ceremony where you have the experience to understand it. So I'll give you an example. Early on, I had a- a psychologist who came down, right? So this is a doctor, you know, a certified doctor. I asked him to put me through every level of psychological psychiatric test he could. Uh, we did. He summed it up that I was not mentally ill, and I was a mystic. So I thought that was awesome.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- HSHamilton Souther
So we got that straight between us. And he flatly refused to believe in spirits, right? Just flatly refused to say that there was a thing called a spirit. He's like, "No, there's nothing called a spirit. They're archetypes. They're things that the mind creates," et cetera, et cetera. So after his fourth or fifth ceremony, I said, "Okay, tell me what happened last night." He said, "Well, a snake came to me, and it talked to me. And, uh, then I became a- a bird, and I flew through the forest. And, um, you know, then these things that kind of looked like extraterrestrials came, and they talked to me, and then they told me I had something in me that wasn't healthy for me. And so then I threw it up, and I threw it up into the bucket. And, um, then these shapes came, and they were emanating voices to me, and I was communicating with them." And he said, "So I'm willing to admit that last night I interacted with what you call a spirit." (laughs) He said, "I'm not gonna call it a spirit, but I'm willing to admit that I interacted with what you call a spirit." I said, "That's good enough for me." I said, "That's all that matters." I said, "How are you feeling?" He said, "I feel great. I feel like the best I've ever felt." I said, "But that's all that mattered. Like, we weren't here to fight over the idea of it to begin with." Right? Like, who cares what we call it?
- CWChris Williamson
I love that.
- HSHamilton Souther
You had the experience.
- CWChris Williamson
It's- it's so funny how, uh, just how different it is, the way that you- you're- you're talking about these experiences and the kind of life that you live as well. You know, you're talking about being out on the water, uh, hunting, fishing for your food for the evening and heading to go and live off the land, so digging up vegetables and picking berries and picking leaves and doing all this sorts of stuff. Um, as you're talking about that and I'm- I'm thinking about it, it just strikes me how different the lives are that we live. And it's easy to talk about over h- hypernormal levels of stimulus through your phone and we're eating processed foods and et cetera, et cetera. But at a much more base level than that, even i- if you get rid of the cur- curses of 2020, um, the type of lifestyle that we're living is so, so far removed from yours, which must be more aligned with what we were typically supposed to do. And then you realize that you- you mentioned it earlier on about the way that language is being used, that language has kind of now become weaponized. And you could actually see language, advanced language as a technology. And there's other technologies built on top of that language, which allows us to further distribute it frictionlessly across the world. And when you think about that, I just wonder... I wonder how much... I wonder how we can balance what is best for us as a species. You know, paleolithically what are we supposed to be eating, doing, how are we supposed to be communicating, what is the level of information that we're supposed to be exposed to? Because it's definitely not all of the globe's news in real time, 24 hours a day. And everything else, I wonder, as we
- 1:00:00 – 1:14:27
Uh, what we're taking…
- CWChris Williamson
get more and more advanced and we move towards colonizing Mar- we're talking about going to new planets now, what from our ancestry and our heritage as a species are we taking with us that's right? And what have we already forgotten that's wrong?
- HSHamilton Souther
Uh, what we're taking that's right is the- the continued evolution of the species. That's what's right. Evolution doesn't have a right and wrong about it. Evolution just means consistent and constant change. And I think where we went wrong is fearing and being stuck in an experience of inculturating fear as the means in which to interact and know each other. So instead of recognizing that we're all here for reasons that are really more common than different, we've been taught that there's more difference than commonality between us, which is just fundamentally false. And so this has created a fear paradigm that has become inculturated, and it creates a great separation between what the brain does and what the heart does. And the heart is an organ that's much more important than just pumping blood. It is the true epicentral locus of where you have your infinite knowledge and connection to consciousness and the universe itself, which then the brain gets perplexed by through this idea of language as a technology. And so what we... all we have to do is bring these two things into balance, and then we ultimately balance collectively. When your heart's open with somebody else that you know, you're not fighting them.You're not quibbling with them over the words. When you're with somebody, you're just hanging out with them. And what a great thing that is. And when you're holding an infant baby in your arms, you're not saying like, "Hey, why aren't you telling me the right words?" or, "You're not using the right gender pronoun for me." You're just hanging out with a little baby. Like, it's that simple and your heart's totally open and it's like, it's like, hey, like, you're like the little koala bear. They're like, "Hey, this is a koala bear." Like, you know, you're not, you're not all freaked out in your head about things or like getting like super neurotic about that. And so I think that that like hyper compulsive neurosis is what is where we've kind of gone wrong, and we can actually corre- collect- collectively correct that as a species by recognizing that there is a balance that's here and that it's something that we can give a little time to, and we can do it together in a way that's actually fun and worthwhile, and that we can recognize that that's the bridge to real consciousness, that the heart has consciousness just like the brain does. And if you've fallen in love and your brain's going like, "No," and your heart's going, "Yeah," you know it has consciousness. Uh, you know. You've had that experience. (laughs) So you just have to kind of suck it up, right? You have to be like, "Well, hey brain, you don't get to be fully and only dominant here. There's also this other part of me that's equally important," and give it some time to evolve. And it... I always say this on our retreats, had they par- put that in the curriculum of school, we would all be different. But, you know, heart-centered learning wasn't what was in school. It was all brain-centered learning. And, you know, shamanic traditions and spiritual traditions teach a lot of heart-centered learning, so if you give some time to heart-centered learning, uh, you'll find that it is really fast and unbelievably evolutionary to you in your own life and makes you better at absolutely everything you do. So it makes you literally better at absolutely everything you do. So like literally two, three, four, five minutes a day to heart-centered learning, it ultimately improves absolutely every other aspect of your life. And so I think it's like a pretty fair trade. You'll ultimately pick different foods. You'll ultimately start to realize that certain friends don't really resonate with you, like the way you thought, and the choices that you make will be better choices. You find that your fitness will, uh, increase and you'll become much fitter and much healthier. You'll find that the way that you speak and the way that you think is much more positive and much more harmonious. You'll find that the relationship, sexual relationship, loving relationships you have are way better. Your body will perform better. Your sexuality will be better. Your sex will be better. You'll find out that your family relationships will start to improve. You'll become more intelligent. Literally, you'll, you'll grow in IQ points that you never knew would be possible. Your left and bright- right brain hemispheres will start to balance themselves simply from the heart itself, which is like a, a psychiatric psychological phenomena. And, uh, it's something that is actually really easy to do. It starts in our intention to recognize the purpose of it, and then there are some basic techniques to help that along. I think that's really-
- CWChris Williamson
Where can people-
- HSHamilton Souther
... like the good or bad.
- CWChris Williamson
... where can people go to find out more about that? They think, "That sounds all right. I want, I want me a bit of that, Hamilton." Where should they go?
- HSHamilton Souther
Well, come to our community. Come to blue morpho retreats dot world. Uh, we're on Telegram, we're Trinity Global, and we have the Trinity Channel. And blue morpho retreats dot world has an unbelievable number of resources that are free. And, uh, some of them, like the Trinity Live Retreat, is a three-day retreat we do where we teach everything that we're talking about. We use ecstatic breath work if you're in a place where other kinds of plants are illegal, so you can per- perform a completely legal ceremony all over the world using, uh, ecstatic and trance-based breath work. We take you, take you through dieta and teach you all about the different kinds of medicinal plants that can be healthy for you. We teach you the value of, uh, intermittent fasting and how to be able to use all different kinds of super foods to be able to literally, uh, supra, uh, uh, heal the body with all different kinds of nutrients and vitamins, super saturate the body with nutrients and vitamins. We teach you how to build that heart-brain balance. And then we also have a program that's called Sunday Enlightenment, which is just a $10 donation, which is an unbelievable thing to get to be a part of, where, uh, we get together on a Sunday for a couple hours. It usually goes two to, two to three hours, and, uh, it's also recorded and people from all over the world ask these questions and we go through it in real time. So as the questions are coming up for the people in our community, we go through how to, how to do this and how to embrace it and how to experience it on a, on a daily level. And we do it together in a place of positivity where we foster growth. We simply believe that each person has unbelievably unique talents that need to be unveiled or uncovered, and we do so through these practices together. And, uh, then in the community, on our Telegram community, everyone shares the way that they're learning, 'cause everyone learns differently. And so no one's right or wrong within the community. We don't fight over ideas. We share ideas and we support each other in actually, uh, you know, being the best human that we can be. We optimize that and, um, we do it together. Blue morpho retreats dot world and, uh, Telegram community Trinity Global. Come join us. It's unbelievably fun.
- CWChris Williamson
I love it, man. There's two common threads that have come up today that I've been thinking about a lot, especially this year. One of them being that one of the primary jobs that our senses have, specifically our brain, is not to perceive things, but rather to narrow our field of perception, that it reduces down what we can perceive. Because if we were able to perceive absolutely everything, firstly, we would have so much stimulus that we wouldn't really be able to move forward with our day. Uh, a- a- and secondly, we'd probably lose our minds. We're not built to take in that much information. Uh, and one of the things that I'm trying to do this year is to reduce down, to take those blinkers off as much as I can, to try and live the experience of every moment as fully as possible, to feel the wind on my skin, to smell the, the smell of the leaves, to... everything that I can from all of the different senses. Uh, and the other thing I've been thinking about a lot is how...... head dominant, how cerebral we are when we come and try and find a solution or an answer for a lot of the things that are going on within our own lives, within, uh, society at large. And the, uh, increasing popularity of embodiment practices, stuff like yoga or an interpretative, i- impressive dance, and meditation and breath work, and, well, you know, a guy like Wim Hof, who for really no reason should be world-famous, but is because people are resonating with the sort of work that he does in cold therapy and heat therapy and intermittent fasting and plant medicines and all of this sort of stuff. It really does feel like there is a, um, swelling underground movement to try and remind people that they are an embodied animal, that they are not simply just this sort of jumble. And I- I'm aware, even from the most utilitarian, rationalist, materialist perspective of anyone that's listening, you cannot tell me phenomenologically that being in love just feels like oxytocin, because it doesn't. You can't tell me that dread, that getting a message from someone that you care about saying that they've been in an accident just feels like a dump of adrenaline, because it doesn't. It feels like so much more than that. And I think that that really crosses the bridge that we're talking about here, that no matter what your background is, whether you come into it from a much more spiritual or a much more, I guess, sort of typical 21st century, uh, viewpoint, both people phenomenologically f- experience life the same, and there is definitely a bifurcating in terms of how, uh, how, uh, one group of people are trying to find a solution, and increasingly I think that that black hole is starting to suck more and more and more people in. Uh, and of the ones who are doing it, of the ones who are taking more time with embody practices and listening to themselves in, in ways that are less cerebral, um, I know very few of them, and in fact, I know none of them who have done it and regretted it. So I think the, um, the work that you guys are doing is really, really important. I'm very glad that you're continuing.
- HSHamilton Souther
I really appreciate that. You know, I completely agree with you. When you are saying that, what comes to my mind is the elephants. We all understand the elephants as mammals, and they all care about their ancestors, and they remember and go hundreds of miles to go to the places where different elephants have passed on, where they died, where now there's literally no traces of the elephant body anymore there on the land at all. And they'll go back and visit that site and they will mourn the grave of that animal. And so how are we any different? Literally, how are we any different than that? And so I think people have forgotten by making a materialist view something that's not miraculous, but there's no explanation for the universe itself. So you can have an entirely materialistic view and that's still a miracle because where did the matter come from? Just ask yourself that. Like, where did you get all of these stars and galaxies? And then where'd you get a body and where'd you get eyes? And you can say evolution, and you can say, yeah, a billion years of that. And then you can go back 5 billion years and earth is, is a cloud of stardust. And you can go back 12 billion years and you can see the formation of the matter that made up this universe itself. You can go back 13 billion years plus and then you're going to find an event horizon where you're not going to be able to tell time anymore. And at that point, at that origin, you're gonna have to ask yourself, where did all this stuff come from? And that's the end of the materialistic view, and it still doesn't have an origin story that anyone can agree on. And so-
- CWChris Williamson
That's really-
- HSHamilton Souther
... I don't think it ultimately matters.
- CWChris Williamson
That's, that's really interesting that actually even the most materialistic viewpoint in the world reaches a boundary, and the boundary-
- HSHamilton Souther
Correct.
- CWChris Williamson
... that you've, you've just identified there is temporal, right? That there is a, a time limit that we can get to with that. So time being one of the most fundamental, uh, uh, forces, the fourth dimension that moves us, allows us to move through this existence the way that we do, someone who concedes that that does exist, that that is a particular limit to the utilitarian materialistic worldview, and yet discounts the spiritual, the astral, the cosmic, the energetic answers and, uh, and potential solutions to things does feel a little bit like there's a discontinuity in their type of thinking. How can you concede it on one hand and yet argue it on the other? That's me. Uh, there will be a lot of people who in the comments below do decide to argue it. But my point is that there's something going on there, and the f- the fact that we don't have a single answer for everything yet means that the open loops that we've got, um, they, they permit us to, to find different answers to these questions.
- HSHamilton Souther
I completely agree, and it's a place for consciousness to continue to be explored. I think what we haven't explored yet enough is consciousness. So I would like the people who believe only in materialism to be able to describe to me the boundaries and the dimensionalities of consciousness, and to do so in a codified way that fully explains the origin of consciousness, the totality of consciousness, uh, the reach of consciousness, and the evolution of consciousness. And if we can do that together, I think then we would understand a common language without there being a disagreement. And, um, I think people have been fighting over the words about consciousness for way too long, utilizing consciousness itself, which is still the greatest mystery of all.
- CWChris Williamson
I love it, man. Hamilton, thank you so much. Everything will be linked in the show notes below, including Blue Morpho Retreat. Anything else? Any other stuff that people should check out?
- HSHamilton Souther
No. bluemorphoretreat.world, check us out. Uh, uh, through our community and through, through our social, we talk about all the other projects that we're doing. Uh, we're involved in a number of other projects that are, uh, not so much based specifically in spirituality, but about helping the world in different ways. We're interested in blockchain technology and, uh, all different kinds of, uh, crypto-based technologies. We're interested in what the future of the planet is ultimately going to look like. We're interested in green energy and permaculture and the transformation of, uh, the land, uh, and the earth as a way of being able to sustain humanity for literally tens of thousands of generations to come. And so if you're interested in not only the past and interested in spirituality or interested in, you know, your own optimization, there's also all of this other amazing, uh, space that we also cover. And so just through our community itself, we share and discuss all of these ideas. Come join us.
- CWChris Williamson
Beautiful. Man, thank you so much for your time today. I've really, really enjoyed it, and hopefully at some point in the future when the world reopens, I may, uh, I may be able to come and see where you are.
- HSHamilton Souther
That'd be fantastic. It'd be a pleasure. Thank you guys so much for having me on the show, and it's an unbelievable pleasure. Thank you.
- CWChris Williamson
Outfits. Yeah. Yeah. Outfits.
Episode duration: 1:14:27
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