are you me?

It was in December of 2017 at the time I turned 50 that a fundamental change occurred with respect to my journey with plant medicines and the wisdom I accessed. Up until that point the avatars of wisdom I would encounter in ceremony would be external actors or an external voice. At the end of November I spent a week at SpiritQuest going through the Huachuma mesadas which culminated in an ineffable Vilca experience that took me to this realm of love and light and instructed me on my nature and my destiny as one of these beings. Afterwards I headed into the Andes mountains in Ecuador and I participated in two more Huachuma ceremonies which were different than what is experienced at SpiritQuest in a group. These were solo experiences and I noticed for the first time the wisdom I accessed with the plant was no longer an external voice but felt like my own higher self. Since this was new to me I didn’t make any connection at the time, instead just chalked it up to another experience. When I returned to SpiritQuest in March of 2019 to participate in four Ayahuasca ceremonies it was a similar kind of vibe at times where I felt the wisdom was coming from my masculine higher self though definitely the feminine presence was still external and I was aware by now she was my sacred feminine half. The clues were all lined up but I still didn’t put them together, not until I went to Arizona for my overnight with Peyote in September. It was one of the questions I intended to ask Peyote. Are you me?

So a couple months later and how about those questions I had of Peyote? The night I spent with Peyote in the wilderness gave me the answer to one question and with that answer I had the knowledge to figure out the rest of my questions. I wanted to know the identity of the wisdom I access when taking a plant medicine substance. It was pretty clear that night the voice was me and when I had a vision of my feminine self as a black jaguar of the night coming up to me and laying her head on my chest it was also signifying that the fundamental unity of all is the embrace of the sacred feminine and masculine. In this world of separation, we are living in a situation that could be called the great cosmic divorce.

I also wanted to know if my path was leading towards fulfilling my intentions?

Without self-discipline it will be difficult.

Am I awake now in my dream?

Yes you are in a lucid dreaming stage now and you have realized you can alter your dream.

Are you the joker, laughing and playing along with our folly?

I am you and you are me and we are all together.

Did you make it difficult to crack the code so we/you could continue playing? And I have kinda figured out the religious puzzle/riddle haven't I?

Yes grasshopper, you are attentive student.

Have I taken up my power to heal? Is it psychological healing?

Yes cultural constructs can lead to confusion. Teach the beloved to look within to find what it is you seek. Culture has defined the beauty you see in others. Act of your own accord.

Remember the teacher in high school who took an interest in your future and pulled you aside to put you on the correct path? That's Peyote and the direct access to wisdom that is engendered within the experience. There's a tremendous respect for those actors in your life that are underappreciated. If I had to guess I would say don Howard learned his guiding style from Peyote.

Peyote bluntly lays it all out for you. There were no riddles or teachings that were going to take a while to unfold. I just needed to hear the answers because I already was shown and knew the answers but for some reason I was waiting for confirmation and to hear them again. I just have to believe in myself, as it is hard to fathom taking that final step. Here I am now, the path has bifurcated. Time to take the step.

There is a caveat to seeking out the visionary experience; in other words to become infatuated with the visions in a plant medicine ceremony. When you chase the visions you lose sight of the process and the main teaching that is central to all these experiences. The path of the seeker of knowledge leads to looking within and trusting yourself for guidance. A quiet night out in the wilderness, just you, Peyote, and the fire allows you to connect with what it was you have been seeking. They were waiting for you all along and will welcome you home with overflowing love and open arms. 

have a good sleep

We are obsessed with measuring the world and putting it to order. Thinking about why we do this - of course it is curiosity and our quest and thirst for knowledge. However it occurred to me that subconsciously we do this because deep down we know that it just doesn’t make any logical sense. I mean why? Why existence and why is it so mysterious? Why does there have to be anything? It's just peculiar that anything exists. How did the universe just suddenly appear out of nothing? Why when we peer into the fundamental nature of existence it gets fuzzy and sub-atomic particles break down into wavicles and fields powered by mysterious energy? Think about the whole what came first, the chicken or the egg, and how both answers just seem preposterous when you think about it. We want it to make sense. Do dreams make sense? The worlds we create when we dream they just appear and we don’t stop to think while dreaming how it all exists. We just mentally make it happen. Such is the fundamental principle of this universe. It just is and we busy ourselves trying to reverse engineer it but in the end all this speculation is just theory. The actors in my dream are all me. The actors in this dream are all from the great cosmic dreamer. A dreamer so skilled instead of being one avatar in the dream they are them all!

The dream creates the notion of self. Think about that. When you go to sleep at night and dream you are the creator and all the individuals in the dream come from you as the creator and the dreaming activity creates all these individuals who would consider themselves an autonomous self just like we do. Our ability to dream is quite primitive but imagine you had mad skills when it came to dreaming. You would create a world where these characters had free will and just like you they would periodically rest and also dream while resting.

So which came first the chicken or the egg? It's the dreaming mind that came first. The answer to the question is solved. The chickens then appeared, fully formed through mentation, and started doing their thing. It is one of those questions that we should clue into as being a mystery because the sheer logic of the question throws into disarray all we find logical. We spend countless hours and much energy to try and bring logic to the illogical. To try and figure out how it all works; to chart the progression from single cell amoeba to Homo sapiens.

When you dream you experience it first person just like life. Is life not but just a dream? Our dreaming activity during sleep is a clue as well as subterfuge. The clue is that reality can be constructed out of mentation. The subterfuge is that we can differentiate between what we think is reality and what is a dream but we can't do it while ensconced in the dream. While dreaming we are convinced it is reality however once awake we realize it was a dream. You know what else seems to be? It is that bodily death puts an end to our reality and puts an end to any local dreaming activity. Death occurs when our energy is depleted to the point where we no longer function. What then is energy and the source of the energy?

Each new child/creature born is the creation of another universe with the potential to create through mental activity. We are occluded from it as we share consciousness and a consensus reality with others. We can and do create our own universe as a shard of the all consciousness when we dream. When we access that part of us that does the dreaming then we start creating our own worlds. Can we enter into that world? Do I still need the bodily host to dream or can that be discarded and then it's limitless?

So why do we dream? Because all of this mentation of the dreaming mind is recursive. Every sentient being is paradoxically a representative of unity and when we dream we come forth as the mirror image; the whole filtered through a prism and split into many as a reflection of our psyche. Our world is the psyche of the one on the other side of the looking glass. From one perspective we are unity and from the opposite perspective we are separated into the many. When we dream we create worlds and these worlds of seemingly separate beings and objects all come from the one mind doing the dreaming, the single mind always reflecting plurality. The plurality revealing the interconnectedness of all. My experiences are fodder for creating my own world via dreaming as my psyche helps form and direct the drama.

Energy is the product of mental activity. We dream when we redirect our energy from waking consciousness to nocturnal slumber. Along the same line of thought, birth is the entering of more energy into our collective dream to keep it going. The more actors present performing then the dreamer stays asleep. The outpouring of energy is still strong. When there is death then the energy returns to the dreamer and they start to wake up. So what happens when we die? Do we wake up from the dream and return to the dreamer? Or is it when the great cosmic dreamer finally wakes that everything is reconciled? What happens if I ride this ship to the end, figure it all out, and 100% declare I know this is a dream. Does that put an end to the slumber? Like everything in life it seems cyclical. Our dreaming cycle occurs usually once in a twenty four hour period. There are short cycles and long cycles. The dreamer of our universe has been snoring away for quite a long time now. Estimates are over 13.8 billion years.

Am I a dreaming fool? I guess it is obvious now as playing is what I do. I'm on the precipice of realizing this is my dream and I entered into it and tried to hide this from myself. Of course it's me. I went too far and lifted the veil. I tried to scare myself away but it didn't work. Can I still influence it or has it gone too far off the tracks? I am aware I’m the dreamer. I’m aware I’m awake in my own dream. All of the universe and the objects I create are aspects of myself. I’m now awake within the dream; my reality has become a lucid dream. When you finally understand your influence over the dream, things start happening for you instead of to you. The psyche of the cosmic dreamer is the world we live in. The hatred and destruction we witness are aspects of the great self who dreams this world into existence. The love and kindness are aspects as well. We can make a choice on how we want the dream to play out.

Riddle me this: when you are dreaming you are for the most part unaware you are dreaming and buy into the drama. So when you die and you wake from the dream how would you know that you just haven't awakened into another dream? The one giveaway I can think of would be the eternal world would not have a time limit, feeling of transience, or expiration of any sort. However does that even exist or is everything cyclical and subject to periods of this dreaming activity?

Think of the whole idea of the multiverse and how many are asleep, dreaming away, and creating all these different worlds. There are infinite dreamers and an infinite amount of universes, all birthing the potentiality of more universes that would house the ability to create an infinite amount of universes. And on it goes. Have a good sleep. 

psychic entities

You can be a hardcore atheist however you are still subconsciously inculcated by culture and its beliefs. You can't escape it. Once you manifest your cultural beliefs what do you think becomes their prime directive? It is to prevent you from growing or investigating the nature of your beliefs as culture is the number one cause of self-limiting beliefs. The biggest no-no is to look within and declare you know who you are. Self-deification is frowned upon and could even get you non-voluntarily committed to a scrubbed down institution. 

I wonder how many that go through conscious altering experiences end up having to face this cultural hurdle? I know I did and personally I didn't believe in what the local spiritual outfit was trying to sell me. I spent most of my adult years as an atheist eschewing the simplistic and to me childish belief in some all father. Eventually I became more open to accepting a higher power but knew whatever culture was throwing at me was bunk. However, my first foray into altering my consciousness put me face to face with the cultural beliefs I had denied. If I didn't have a critical mind, I could very easily see how it could galvanize a belief in the religious institution that is set up for you when you reach the crossroads. It was the third time I drank Ayahuasca and there I was in conversation with the biblical god. This nut job gave me his best pitch to join his team of galactic misogynists. I made no promises but at the end of the ceremony thought that it was strange, and I was harangued constantly for days and months afterwards. There was soon after the meeting this bizarre incident I haven't mentioned much. I was waiting in the city of Iquitos for an evening flight, so I hung out by the boulevard which runs parallel to the Amazon River. I walked the length of it then back and sat down at this spot to rest. This guy came into my sight and approached me with a big smile. If I had to picture what Jesus would look like this was spot on. He came up to me and said, "Where are you from?" I replied, "Toronto, Canada." He replied, "Nice to meet you Paul," and then left. Holy what the fuck? How did he know my name? Curiously, I had written a bunch of poetry the year before and a throwaway line in one of them was, "I saw Jesus at a rest stop.” 

I had temporarily forgotten I wrote that line and then when I read it a few months later I was flabbergasted. When I returned to the Amazon two years later to drink Ayahuasca again, "God" was waiting for me trying to get me to sign up and when I refused, I was threatened with death. It was a major turning point as I accepted my fate and said then you will have to kill me. 

As expected, I have thought a lot about these strange experiences and it's my own private Idaho and not an indictment of religion and people's beliefs. However, it was only recently that I connected it to the hurdle of cultural beliefs that must be faced and then you must decide. The pressure exerted is huge and thus manifested in my altered consciousness experience as a choice between life and death with the expectation that we will choose to live and accept the beliefs culture throws at us. No one ever said freeing your mind would be easy, especially when it was a lifelong project to enslave it. 

I'm non-denominational. Whatever you want to believe in is cool. Be cognizant of that though. You can spend a lifetime looking for answers, as believing in someone else's beliefs is very self-limiting. If you do come full circle and look within then you may find the pearl. It is important to be respectful of everyone and where they are on their path. If not, and you say you have the truth, you become what you finally broke free of, as people can’t be talked out of their beliefs; it must come from within. You must realize that you were once at this point, and you must quell the expectation that they should have a belief in your beliefs. Taken to the extreme you resurrect the ghost of Constantine and use the weight of the state to preach your message and force others to convert to a religion at the point of a sword. 

It's like there is this pre-incarnation agreement to make it difficult and to try and prevent the last step in waking up. So, for me in ceremony I faced being threatened with death, that I wouldn't get home alive, told I would be driven mad and would commit suicide, and being told to go home, drop seeking and plant medicines, and just live out my life. Stop investigating! I had the bug though and could not. I kept going despite all the pressures exerted to make me stop. Culture had become an entity that insisted I blend in at the risk of being excommunicated. 

I have faced the “stop investigating” noise from within and also without, from external actors. Within, as I said, threatened me with death. It was a test of courage and resolve. Also, there is pressure from actors within all of society, those who are close to you, those that don’t understand your journey, those who are hypnotized by religion, and especially some who have taken psychedelics and fell for the enchantment hard. They are the most vocal now that the magic spell has worn off, they see they were duped, and it didn't heal them. They just traded their old baggage for a new set of luggage and never grew from the experience. They ended up chasing the experience instead of integration and results. Oh, the righteous and repentant former user of mind manifesting substances. Couldn't get them to work for you or profit from them like you thought. In response, you do the 180 degrees turn and say you will help those who didn't get out of it what they were seeking. The cycle of the quick fix and false promises remains. 

Psychic entities are part of the puzzle of human consciousness that is overlooked. The inculcation of beliefs into the mind must be dealt with and the energy expended to create them form into a psychic entity that will have an eventual reckoning. It becomes the dragon guarding the pearl and to recover what is lost becomes a near-impossible journey. The trek only becomes possible if you have heart, courage, and most of all resolve. If not, you will stop or end up joining one of our cultural institutions set up that redirect your energies. Why we have done this to ourselves is a mystery. It is because the seriousness of the game is lost if you see beyond the veil. The game must continue, be serious, and have purpose or you will wake from the dream. Waking from the dream pulls the curtain down and gives the show away.

integrity

There are a million ways to run from your truth, from facing what it is you uncovered. There are many methods, diversions, and things we tell ourself to get away. When you embark on the plant medicine journey it is a major commitment and those with a vested interest in your well being recognize this and will offer ways of navigating not only the immediate experience but the challenges you will face after the ceremonial candle is blown out. Integration, you are forewarned, can take weeks and months. I think you are told this in order to get you to realize it is not a quick fix, that it will take work, and the work will not always engender overnight results. What you aren’t told however is that in reality it sticks with you going forward. It sometimes gnaws at you and presents your failings front and centre. It reminds you of promises you made to the medicine and how you have either not fulfilled those promises or have gotten a little lapse with them. There’s no reckoning, just an inner knowing to make good. The medicine does its part and selfish you took what you wanted and haven’t given back like you promised. You are within ceremony, and then post ceremony, faced with challenges. It is a progression and once you navigate through different stages of fears, blocks, and self-limiting beliefs you level up and then face more challenges. It is difficult and you want to run, maybe invent excuses, because hey the course has gotten hard and I’ll rationalize it by saying it isn’t working for me anymore so I am going to stop. You devise all these things in your head to stop, and most do stop, but I’m determined keep going and make good on my promises. If you stop you give it all away and there’s no guarantee it is going to come back. Why should you be trusted? Your word is all you have. It’s ultimately a lesson in and of integrity. There’s no cosmic police at the ready to hold you to it. Reciprocity is a voluntary act and thus the best kind of test. Continuing on and making good, embracing reciprocity, keeping your word, and living with integrity are presented to you and you are faced with the challenge. Like anything truly meaningful in life, you are not forced to reciprocate but you do it out of your own free will and volition because you want to. In a way it is like love. You can’t force someone to love you, nor can you try to love someone. It just happens as feelings are non negotiable. 

Don Howard talked quite a bit about love, reciprocity, your word, being impeccable, and integrity. At the time you figure he is giving you life lessons and stressing a way to go about life living your truth. It is sage advice and at the end of the day as humans it is a way of life that if practiced is something you can be proud of and I don't mean pride in a way where you lord it over others. Instead it is a feeling of I did my best, was honest, and tried to help others. Sure it strokes the ego a bit but every dog needs a pat on the head. You know what I finally realized though? There is another meaning to what the maestro was talking about. I fully admit it sometimes takes me a while to clue in; in this case almost five years. You see when entering into a relationship with plant medicines don Howard made damn sure you were clear why you were doing it, had you meditate on your intention, and make a reciprocal offering to the plants. There is clarity and meaning that grows out of the exercise however there's more to it. We go into ceremony and take. We receive healing from the plants and then for a lot of us that's it. But wait a minute, you made a promise to the plants. Are you going to fulfil that promise or are you going to run, basically as a thief and a coward, or just announce your lack of integrity because you are not going to keep your end of the bargain? Is it too difficult or did you never intend to try to fulfill your promise?

The primary force at work in plant medicine experiences is free will. You are entrusted to decide what you want to do with the power that is being presented to you by the plants. You asked for it and they delivered. You can reciprocate as promised, or you can take and ignore, or you can take take take and aggrandize yourself. We humans are good at that, especially when we find a game that we can rig and profit off of to our advantage. Maybe even become a celebrity shaman, do battle with other shamans trying to step on our turf, or just take advantage of others for your own personal benefit. Perhaps start investigating those sorcerer plants once the medicine ones sour on you. We all know there is an eventual reckoning; I mean eventually you have to come to terms with what you have done or live with that gnawing feeling in the pit of your stomach. The choice is yours.

Integrity means to keep your word and you made a promise and an exchange with the plants in return for their healing virtues and knowledge. They took you at your word. Are you going to fulfill your promise? Deep down you will live with your decision. Energetically you have integrity or you don't. What I am trying to say is why would the medicine plants continue to work with you if all you do is take? I think you see it clearly. To continue to walk the plant medicine path requires you to uphold your end of the mutual agreement. It's the honourable thing to do.