I had heard about chemical- and plant-induced altered states for about a decade before I started researching them in my own practice. And let me tell you, I never quite managed to get impressed!
Someone I knew said he sniffed some plant of the tobacco family which made him feel God’s presence. He then proceeded to learn to brew ayahuasca and live naked in a cave for 2 weeks, drinking the brew from a big plastic bottle. Yes, somehow he lived, although my neighbors had to clean up rubbish after him.
Most people I met spoke about their practices with a sense of unwavering self-righteousness. I think I reacted in the same way many others reacted when someone spoke to them of religion. In my case, I would have preferred a religious person any time over this! Oh, I thought this was a spiritual meeting, one of “those people” said when she saw fish being served for lunch in a Sufi retreat.
It took me a while (and a lot of learning) to understand that what I was witnessing was just a symptom of a disease. A disease that had nothing to do with plants, psychedelics or altered states.
Mending Our Disconnected State
Most of us have been educated in the paradigm of a mechanistic, supposedly rational, disconnected worldview. This paradigm is self-righteous, narcissistically enamored with its hyper-rationality. We know best! We read books! Primitive peoples can’t write and need a savior! We need to save the world!
This view of reality was was a child of the age of Enlightenment, and was much needed at the time. It was part of our journey and evolution as a human race. With human genetic code potentially altered after the witch-burning era (having got rid of all the intuitives and the visionaries), we moved into the era of Reason. Now it was time to use the rational, the thinking mind.
It brought about astonishing progress in science, medicine and social structure. The age of Enlightenment paved the way for Industrial Revolution. It shaped our world as we know it.
We can, ultimately, thank it for the internet and the computer I use to write this post, for the refrigerator and the car, for the planes and trains and a million other things that we take for granted.
But we were left with profound trauma. The magic of life disappeared.
The body became a machine, the brain a mechanism for thinking, and we ourselves, every single human being, became alone, in a hostile, mechanical, dead universe. God was indeed dead. It was just the laws of physics as we knew them.
Of course, it turned our that we didn’t know so much after all, but that is another story.
Now, in the 21st century, the rational and evolved Western human is shaking with anxiety and depression, feels alone and abandoned, is looking for a twin flame and is finding the birthright of his brain in rave parties or methamphetamines. But it’s not surprising, is it?
Could it be that the new era that we are moving into is calling for marriage of Science and Faith, of Reason and Intuition? Above all, could it be calling us to remember our place in the vast Universe, to remember that we are not alone, not separate, nor have we ever been?
Our Brain is Made for Altered States
The magic of altered states is that they don’t belong to a particular plant, or plant compound, nor a particular type of breathwork or meditation. Altered states take us back to our origins, into the multi-layered nature of our consciousness. We are plants, we are elements, we are our spirit animals and our galactic guides.
Plants, elements and animals are our ancestors, too. And our ancestors are a layer of our consciousness and our reality.
What we often forget in a conversation about altered states is the context. We forget that we are part of a vaster reality. That our body is made for altered states. That it produces its own opiates and entheogens.
The mechanistic worldview has imprinted into us that we are separate machines. Even in a spiritual context, we talk about the “illusion of separation” as if it were a thing in our brain, something that we just need to think ourselves out of.
Ayahuasca is not a magic pill to bring something outside of you into your brain and make you see things. Meditation is not a quest for enlightenment. Breathwork is not a path to achieve freedom from anxiety. Nothing is separate from the whole. All these paths bring us back into the whole, into the Real.
Plant medicine came to us from cultures that had a holistic, usually animistic worldview. For them everything was alive. Every tree, every stone, every blade of grass was a living, sentient being, able to communicate, to send and receive messages.
The plant was a master and teacher, part of a long lineage of masters and teachers. It spoke the symbolic language of visions and patterns. This is the original language of all of the Universe, that all beings share, including humans.
Before our ancestors could read or write, they saw the same dreams we see. They experienced the same patterns of light and dark, circle and spiral, death and birth, summer and winter. Maybe, they saw patterns and symbols better than we do, precisely because they did not feel the need to classify them in a structured written-down way of a more “masculine” mind.
But perhaps, this symbolic language (what some call the “imaginal realm”) gives us an insight into “the mind of God”.
The Akashic Records and the Imaginal Realm
The imaginal world is the subtle language of nature. It is the language of dreams, signs and synchronicities. It is also the structure of the Akashic Records.
In my own work in the past year, I experimented a lot with the use of somatic guided imagery (you can find out more about my healing sessions here). The results have been ground-breaking, both for myself and my clients.
Somatic guided imagery is a combination of shamanic journeying, hypnotherapy and guided meditation. Somatic guided imagery is a deep dive into our cerebellar consciousness, our intuitive brain — and the most hidden layers of our subconscious mind.
There is no need for deep trance states or elaborate hypnotic inductions, nor for plant medicine. I don’t mean it in an exclusive sense. What I’m saying is that there are many gateways into the imaginal realm.
Part of the process is energetic, and it is my job as a practitioner to facilitate energy shifts that open us to more expanded states of consciousness.
I learned to work with trauma, deep-seated patterns (I call them templates), addictive behaviors and epigenetic (ancestral) imprints. And there is so much more to learn still! But if you know about psychedelic assisted therapy, or if ayahuasca did change something within you, you may know what I am talking about.
Only I don’t work with plant medicine. I work with the body (the Greek word for body is soma, hence the term somatic). I also work with the elements and human energy field.
Altered state and states of expanded consciousness are our birthright. This was known to all of our ancestors and all spiritual traditions.
These states have the power to heal and rewire the brain precisely because of how deep they go.
Altered states take us into the imaginal, into the Akashic Mind of God, where all is Now.
It is the realm of the symbolic, archetypal consciousness. It is the realm of cerebellar brain so unfairly called the reptilian brain, because of its ancient nature and connection to our survival mechanisms. Our brain speaks the language of the Akashic Records. And when it is activated, we are healed and rewired and made whole — in our own time — because we come online, we connect to the real World Wide Web.
And because we are all a work in progress, we connect deeper, wider and broader and begin reweaving all the lost connections that we have come here to reweave…
