Transcending Trauma with Entheogens: A Journey of Rebirth

I have been a psychonaut for almost 20 years, beginning with an unbidden ayahuasca journey in 1997 that changed me profoundly. Entheogens, as the name suggests, have helped me to find God, discover Self, understand Death, revere Nature, refine my character , breaththrough psychological trauma, love deeper and better and more wholly,  find new creativity, and in general evolve myself as a human being.

What does it mean to awaken?

Very simply put, awakening is an experience of dying to the ego (which doesn’t hurt) and waking up in a higher consciousness, where one knows the state that Christ described as “My father and I are One.” This ego death does not have to be some gut-wrenching battle within you, although some sort of struggle and giving way, and subsequent transcendence, is experienced by most. It is an act of Divine Surrender, that You, in all your Highness will initiate.

It’s not always surrender though, each moment has its own right action. Once, for example, at the beginning of a pscilocybin journey, when I felt my eyelids closing and felt my inner vision being submerged in vivid blue-green serpentine imagery, I decided that I wouldn’t surrender, and resisted this submersion, and I forced myself to open my eyes, get up, walk over to my computer and type the words: “We know oursleves in single acts of resistance.” a line from the iChing. And it was true. As I articulated those words and strung them together in a sentence, I too was sentenced to “know myself.”

We know ourselves specifically in the differential between who we are in our normal state of consciousness and who we become when we transcend that limited view of Self. Transcendent, One is a God-fractal, and one’s potential as a human seems to be an ever-expanding cone of possibility, not limited by the vagaries of genetics and environment. And indeed, this is what transcendence offers, ending the trance. And what trance is that? It’s the one at the en-trance to this journey called Life, where we surrender our divine identity and don the mask of a personality, our spirit goes into voluntary confinement in a body, and we act out a life. That mask is what’s called an ego. Its not bad, its simply not the whole truth.

For me, it was frustrating to wake up and understand Oneness so deeply in an altered state and then dumb down again when I was not high. In the normal world, I was a creature of habit, and it influenced the world I inhabited, and I was inhibited in day to day consciousness, but I was a genius in a high state. I keep striving to reduce that differential between being ‘awake’ and being the so-called ‘normal.’ I am dilligent about journalling, visualizing, acting and changing according to the knowledge gained through a sacramental journey, but waking up is really a quantum leap from the known into the new.

A Quantum and Cumulative Event

Waking up is both cumulative and quantum, and only you yourself are setting the goals. Who will you be? How will you live? How can you translate meaning into day to day life? Psychedelics beg these questions, and make you a better person for it.

Over years of journeying, I no longer doubt that Oneness is my true nature. I AM this expansive intelligence, Oceanic awareness. I have reliably returned to this eternal view over and over. I am it. I have woken up to the limitless petal like unfolding of my own Buddha Mind, and I can travel all the way to the edge of that lotus and find that there is no edge. The word ‘infinite’ takes on new meaning.

In an altered state, I have been for an instant Christ on the Cross, and understood the doubt that impelled the words “Why hast thou forsaken me?” and the transcendence of that level of consciousness that was expressed by the words “Forgive them for they know not what they do.” I understood for the first time that many people indeed know not what they are doing, they are caught in the delusion of a separate self, if they knew about this boundary dissolving Gnosis, and the liberation it brings, they would not want to kill the Christ, they would want to be the Christ.

The myth of Jesus and its degeneration into an organized corrupt religion was and is a Cris-T-is of Consciousness, that we as a collective have failed to identify and respond appropriately to. Same with Buddha. Instead of emulating the behavior and example, we have idolized these characters with two thousand+ years of overthinking that we call organized religion. We need to wake up to the truth of Oneness.

Psychedelics are keys to that awakening.

The psy-key. The mirror-sound “psi” means a single vision, or eye, as in Cyclops, and all-seeing as in “enCyclopedia”and ‘thine eye be Single. ’ It is derived from the Greek word for Mind Manifesting. Another word for psychedelics is ‘entheogens,’  generating the divine within, giving rise to ‘enthusiasm.’  It is a huge evolutionary leap in our spiritual development for us to experience the Self as ‘divine,’ it’s a living paradox, contradicted by our ‘in-divi-duality’ in every waking moment.

We have, by our own ignorance driven ourselves into a world that is extremely out of balance, and a tipping of the scale would be just and humane. But it won’t happen without a collective awakening.  We are in are in a different sort of crisis today from that first one out on the savannah, but it is still and always a crisis of Separation. A  direct apprehension of our divine identity is urgently needed today.

When will the hundredth monkey wake up? This water has been warming for millennia, so many are lulled but its dangers are real. We must again have a quantum jump in human consciousness if we are to transcend our destructive, separative nature and agree to evolve our spiritual nature.. Unitive consciousness is by nature a pacifist consciousness. Who are you fighting if there is no Other?

Curing Addiction and PTSD

Approximately 44.7 million people struggle with PTSD in the USA.

If you Google “Is there a cure for PTSD? you would think that the first item to appear would be psychedelic medicines since they are the only things that offer a complete cure in as little as 3 therapist-facilitated sessions.

However, because psychoactive medicines are illegal, one has to become a spiritual criminal to ingest them in the US, in direct vilation of our first amedment rights to worship as we please.

As a result, the common treatment for PTSD is prescription drug cocktails with their slew of side effects, combined with other modalities like cognitive therapies. These, if effective at all, can ‘manage’ symptoms, but do not heal the root cause. Many adults have been diagnosed with ‘treatment-resistant’ PTSD, (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder), a form which often includes compound shocks, such as childhood abuse and the shock of war. These patients are condemned to a lifetime of pharma cocktails, depression, flashbacks, nightmares, and rage. Many commit suicide. Others are criminally insane. Currently, 300 inmates on Death Row are veterans who murdered a friend or girlfriend in  a fit of rage.  

Addiction therapist Gabor Mate says that both addiction and PTSD have their root cause in suppresed pain and trauma. It is the pain that causes the soldier or sexually abused person to seek relief in opiates. Opiates do not heal the pain so they are not a solution, they keep the person trapped in a vicious cycle of need and fear of the pain of withdrawal.

Addicts are prescribed Methadone, the currently touted pharmaceutical treatment for Heroin addiction, which, in addition to its dire side effects, merely substitutes one addiction for another. Heroin and Methadone addicts often spend thousands of dollars trying different rehab houses only to find themselves relapsing.

A common deadly scenario goes like this: A person gets wounded in battle or has a bad car accident, is prescribed oxycodon, a painkiler that contains morphine, and when their prescription runs out, they are left addicted, and many have no recoruse but to buy the cheaper and more readily available street heroin, which leaves them open to the danger of bad drugs and death by  overdosing.

Opiates and Methadone do not heal the pain or cure addiction, so they are not a solution, they keep the person trapped in a vicious cycle of need and fear of the pain of withdrawal. Its a kind of hell created by a medical system that is ignoring the clear and present call of medicines that do heal trauma, truly and permanently, the entheogens.

Profound Soul Shock Requires Profound Soul Opening

Being trained to shut off your emotions, go to war and kill is a profound distortion of the human psyche, especially when the causes are not just. When confronted with that level of soul shock, one needs an equally profound ‘soul-opener’ to elevate, inspire, and heal. Psychedelics are that opener.

Psychedelics are powerful chemical transformers, and need to be approached with care and reverence. One needs to be responsible, and journeying in a group or with a shaman or therapist may be necessary for many. But whether we journey solo or with others, the keys to our own divine nature is a molecule away, and we can reconnect with both our origin and our originality. Both of which we sorely need.

A Visible Sign of an Inward Grace

A sacrament is defined as a visible sign of an inward Grace. At their finest, that is exactly what the  alchemical transformation of entheogens  like Ayahuasca, Pscilocybin Mushrooms, MDMA,  Ibogaine, LSD, San Pedro and Cannabis deliver. We are given a chemical boost that can awaken us from the trance of the ego, the divided self, into Cosmic Consciousness. We see with a single eye, we gain objective distance from the personality, and we become our own shaman. We are initiated into the mystery of Being in all its paradox and power. What we have manifested is our own connection to Spirit, and thus we can heal.

The highest intention you can set for a journey is to connect with the Source, however you perceive that, and thus by your intention be granted admission into the Holy Now of your own consciousness.

Molecular Tuning

Our bodies are molecularly ‘tuned’ for this sacramental experience and Nature has provided the necessary molecular keys.

For example, MDMA releases Serotonin, some Dopamine and Oxytosin at the molecular levels which opens our spiritual heart and energetic heart chakra. We LOVE and FORGIVE.

Ayahuasca, is a tea brewed with 2 plants, one of which is an MAOI inhibitor, which is what allows DMT, or dimethyltryptamine to penetrate the blood-brain barrier giving rise to a powerful mystical visionary experience. The DMT already exists in our bodies, dormant, waiting to be catalyzed.

Cannabis is a life saver for many Veterans, who are able to sleep, relax, get off their pharmaceutical cocktails and manage their PTSD with the use of Cannabis. Apparently, our bodies are riddled with receptors for Cannbinoids, its  a natural fit!  In November 2015 the Senate approved funding a bill that allows Veterans to access Medical Marijuana in states where it is legal.

While this is all good news, we have a long way to go to change the public perception of psychedelic sacraments. Psychedelics have been demonized for a long time. You can trace it all the way back to Adam & Eve, and humanity’s fabled exile from the Garden of Eden. Was it forbidding the fruit that kept us from gaining knowledge of our true nature?  Is it the same ‘fruit’ that is now being forbidden in the US under drug laws which relegate sacraments to poisonous substances?

In the 70s, the Partnership for a Drug Free America’s War on Drugs ad campaigns effectively framed our brain on drugs as a fried egg,  and caused 99% of the population to turn their backs on it. Traces of that campaign remianed in the nomenclature in the phrase “getting fried.”

Now, more than 40 years later, successful clinical trials ushered in after 25 years of effort by organizations like MAPS and academic instututions like Johns Hopkins are revealing that MDMA, Ayahuasca and Mushrooms are remarkable healers of trauma, considered incurable by modern pharmaceutical medicine, with an 83% success rate in clinical trials, and there is talk of psychedelics ushering in a new paradigm of medicine and changing the face of psychiatry.

A psychedelic awakening is the answer to the divided Mind of humanity that is spewing out more and more victims, from childhood abuse to war crimes. While external forces are often beyond our control, we can change on the inside, entheogens aka psychedelics, give us a way to go within, and break thru old fears and trapped memories, experience the spirit within, open to the wisdom and love of the heart, that can forgive, heal, reconcile opposites, and at its best have an epiphany.
The end