7 Key Insights from 25 years in the Trenches

This is a refined text version of a short talk I gave at the Psychedelics as Medicine Conference in Iceland February 28th 2025.

Sometimes it seems that most people in our society default to believing what the priests of scientism tell them about our reality first and foremost and yet scientific psychedelic research is fairly nascent and quite limited in scope at this point.

I’m personally not a scientismist, and don’t look to science to understand internal subjective states, but come back to my own sensitivity and awareness, to observe, make judgements and assessments. All the practitioners I know who have been working in this space for some years, don’t generally have too much disagreement amongst each other related to what we see, as we discuss what we observe and understand in the living field we are involved in.

People often forget the basis of science is observation, which lies within the human ability to perceive, and to form and test hypotheses. Whereas, many people are brainwashed to believe that they must rely on pure practical “experiments” alone to interpret the physical world, which is of course, a kind of fundamentalist, unthinking approach, that is at the core of scientism, or the belief that science is the best (or only way) we can understand our world.

Sometimes it may be perceived that the people actually working on the underground level sharing psychoactives with people, are almost a kind of dirty species. But the people in the underground are the one’s making observations and regularly talking to people who take these substances. The trenches themselves for sure can be dirty, and it can get messy in there with the human psyche, which is delving into often unexplored emotions and thoughts, let alone all the trauma and uncomfortable insights into the nature of the human psyche.

Obviously, I don’t default to convenient scientific understandings about how psychedelics work, these ideas of neuro-chemical pathways, default mode network inhibition, increased neuro-plasticity and all of those concepts which are clearly just the scratching the surface.

Over 25 years, and many thousands of hours of “flight time”, you gain a lot of insights into the terrain of psychedelics and how they work with people and you also you gain insights into elements of the mystery and what we don’t yet know or understand.

Most of these insights are things that I’ve been communicating for many years where I can, and most of them are fleshed out in more detail in my now over 10 year old book, “Articulations : On the meanings and Utilisations of Psychedelics”

So my first key insight is that:

1. We don’t really understand how psychedelics work (but here are some of my ideas)

* They open us up the most essential nature of the cosmos, in a human paradigm where we are often compelled to forsake such realities, via various mental belief systems, whether that be materialism or religious versions of reality.

* They operate on levels of consciousness we don’t yet understand, beyond the physical, in layers of the psyche that we don’t yet understand.

* They allow us to process emotional and mental material within an expanded state of being-ness and awareness.

* They regulate any etheric interference we may be experiencing. Anxiety is basically synonymous with interference from etheric entities. The issue for most people is that they don’t know what they are experiencing as interference and this can often create a kind of spiralling of anxiety. Once the interference is identified and the individual knows what they are dealing with, and their whole system has a chance to come to terms with that interference and possibly even clear it. That psychedelics can often assist people with cluster headaches, is a key indicator of this factor, as from my perspective cluster headaches are 100% entity attacks, which I have experienced and cleared in myself.

* Psychedelics can open us up to the true human potential and give us hope.

 

2. You can connect with the spirit of the plant and you don’t have to absorb or culturally appropriate another culture to do so.

Plants belong to all of us humans. No culture owns any plant or determine how people actually go about consuming the plants.

We don’t need to culturally appropriate another culture, wear their clothes, sing their songs or follow their way. In fact, we might be involving ourselves too much in cultural artifacts to miss the present moment relationship with the plant consciousness.

In Australia starting in 2002, I began sharing Australian acacia tea containing DMT with Syrian rue. There wasn’t a known cultural tradition of doing this, I had to find my own way. For many years I was regarded as a “cowboy shaman”, but now many people are coming to think that the way I developed just makes sense and most of those people haven’t necessarily found many ways to improve upon that basic method.

And that method is to simply support people to connect with the plants, allowing people to surrender and go deep, playing music, burning incense and not laying down cultural forms of control or trying to guide people in any religious forms of ceremony or artificial “rituals” which appease the mind or ego. I’m actually just encouraging people to surrender, rather than maintain any kind of mentalised forms of control.

You don’t need to initiate into bwiti to connect with iboga, in fact, some people I know have an intimate connection with iboga who have never been to Gabon and have no interest in going.

 

3. Facilitating psychedelics can be very emotionally and physically draining

What we’re starting to see is people holding space for others, getting burnt out. I’ve seen it in the ayahuasca space over many years, as people think they can run sessions week after week, without taking adequate breaks and then burning out so badly they give up serving ayahuasca completely.

We don’t yet know what organic elements in people are stressed or what organs are actually exercised. It appears to often be a kind of processing that happens, the feeling that you get is very akin to jetlag and often times feels a lot worse than jetlag.

Once I was holding an ayahuasca session with a woman who used to be a priest in a cult, and she took on the energies of the group and described it as “eating the feelings.” It took her about 6 days to truly recover, which is the same amount of time it would take me to recover from facilitating a big group weekend.

If you are holding one on one sessions, maybe you can see 3-4 clients a week – at most.

Corporate models must take this factor into account. You cannot just clock in at 9am and see clients all the time over a 40 hour work week. It is too much exposure to trauma, to the depths of human suffering and to the intensity of involving yourself in people’s process.

Part of a remedy for this also is to draw back and not get too empathetic with your clients, maintain your own barriers and let them do the work and support them. Often it is women more than men who give themselves empathetically to their clients, without maintaining healthy boundaries. But drawing back is not the answer either, even if you do maintain correct boundaries and do not get too involved, the drained and jet-lagged feeling after working with clients will often remain.

 

3. Plant Spirits are real.

Plant spirits are something that are a given truth within indigenous cultures and within western culture in 2025 are something that are typically conveniently bypassed as representing a lower stage or state of understanding, simply due to some kind of prejudiced or limited perspective.

And such communications from the plants themselves are clearly evident in people who take psychoactive plants. People who drink ayahuasca very commonly report being guided by the ayahuasca spirit, people who take iboga are almost always guided by Dr Iboga. Uncle Terence McKenna commonly talked about communicating with the mushroom.

This is just a very evident fact of the experience, and even though you might be shunned in mainstream academia for taking about this, for those of us who have been doing this a long time, this is just a very evident truth.

If people were to sit with a plant or tree for five minutes a day, they would begin to tune into that plant and begin to understand its sentience, begin to communicate with its nature and learn from it. This is a process similar to a dieta, practiced in the amazon, and the aim of such a dieta is to build alliances with these plants, so you can channel their consciousness and call upon them for help with healing.

I know a man who did a 14 day dieta where he drank Acacia courtii every day for 14 days. During this time, he developed such a relationship with the tree, that he effectively developed healing powers that enabled to understand exactly what his clients needed.

In 2008, I was the first person I am aware of to take Acacia courtii as an oral tea and share it with people. The tree honestly didn’t know what to do with us, people were unsatisfied with the experience, it was clear the tree didn’t know what to say or communicate or DO with us. But over time, I watched and observed this acacia learn from us, and become passionate about helping people. So much so that Acacia courtii can appear as a dedicated personal coach, communicating extremely specific messages to people, that people would be very lucky to receive from the much more laconic and laid back Acacia acuminata, for example.

From my perspective, the viewpoint that plant spirits don’t exist, is absolutely absurd and goes against the reality that almost all of us experience in these states.

 

4. A molecule is not a molecule. Or DMT is not DMT.

Science tells us that a molecule is a molecule—that DMT is DMT regardless of source, whether synthetic or from a plant, all DMT from different plants is going to be same, because science tells us so!

In Australia, we have the opportunity to try a few different Acacias which are completely pure DMT sources, in that they only contain DMT, and no other alkaloids. The differences between these particular trees are absolutely pronounced and cannot at all be racked up to set and setting. The look, feel, type of experience, but most of all communications from the tree, are completely different.

I’ve observed significant differences between synthetic psychoactive molecules and their natural counterparts, even when they are chemically identical – say between synthetic mescaline and mescaline from cactus. Most everyone knows the experience of psilocybin from truffles differs markedly from that of mushrooms. Different batches of synthetic 5-MeO-DMT produces distinctly different journeys, and then the secretion from the Bufo alvarius toad are a completely different world again.

Consider what might be the experiential differences in consuming iboga harvested from a 40-year-old grandfather plant, revered in its village as a source of spiritual wisdom all of its life and handled with care, versus consuming iboga from a plant grown by a satanist on an apartment window in a polluted city next to a busy highway, who screams at the plant in spare moments of the day and feeds it human blood. Which iboga would you rather take? Do you think there might be a difference between experiences? Even if you didn’t know where it came from?

The molecule is not just the molecule, the molecule is a kind of a window into other worlds of the human psyche and mind. We must remember that psychoactives open us to deeply intricate subjective states that are very much influenced and affected by our environment and our mental state. It would make sense then, that the environment and even mental state of those who procur psychoactives is going to affect our experience as well.

 

5. The synthetic psychoactive substances are also alive.

No molecule can ever be dead or a neutral window onto an impartial reality. There is an animating spirit in synthetic substances I call an anima. (Jung did us a disservice using this word to describe a feminine part of a mans personality, when the root word has nothing to do with sex or gender!)

Realising that the synthetic substances were alive, was something that became evident to me over some years of taking them in the mid to late 2000’s.

Over time, I developed quite a strong relationship with DOC (2,5-Dimethoxy-4-chloroamphetamine), and at one point believed it to be true window and pure perception into human reality and a way to understand perhaps what the psychoactive plants were perhaps not too fond on revealing. However, I found with this substance, sometimes I would go too far into the mystery too quickly, in ways that I wasn’t often ready for, and that could have serious consequences which I discovered at the time.

I found myself like Edward Furlong talking to The Terminator at times, this synthetic intelligence, which had an unusual and kind of alien view of human reality. At that time many young people in the west were inadvertently taking DOC, as it was being sold on blotters probably sold as LSD, but manufactured in China.

What was clear to me at the time, was that there WAS a spirit, which wasn’t quite a spirit, so I called it an “anima”. I never quite figured out WHAT it was. In the case of DOC, it almost appeared to be a being that had incarnated to serve as the anima of DOC, rather than something that was birthed when Shulgin first synthesised and began taking DOC in the 1970’s.

I also had another experience with another of Shulgin’s creation, a substance called 2C-E climbing up a mountain in Wales, UK. The 2C-E revealed itself as a humorous looking chop-sticky 16 bit “chinaman”, who didn’t really know what he was doing, but was doing his best, as “he” was created in a lab by people in China who had never taken 2C-E.

Over the years, I’ve come to understand taking LSD as a process of communicating with the ergot fungus that has been converted to LSD. I understand that what we call “hallucinations”, mistakenly believed to be projections of the mind or brain, are actually most often communications from the ergot anima, as the ergot derivative unlocks neurotransmitter pathways in the brain and in a sense, possesses our mind, with the psychic and visual material and experiences it desires to create.

 

6. Entities are Real.

The extent semi-mainstream conversation about entities that we are often subject to, appears to me as a kind of puerile speculativeness regarding the nature of the “DMT entities”, as if there was a world where entities lived in this presumed DMT space only.

That’s actually not how things are, once you smoke DMT, say 100 times over a couple of years, what you learn is that DMT is an alkaloid or super neurotransmitter that allows access to these beings and these worlds. DMT didn’t create these worlds, DMT just reveals what is already within consciousness itself.

Sure, your average DMT user is often going to start out in the shallow end of the pool, with the jesters and harlequins, and beings of a relatively 32 bit nature and you could call them DMT beings, but as soon as you go into deeper waters, there are more spectacular beings, that are absolute astounding in nature and can kill you by astonishment, as Terence McKenna observed.

Eventually what people come to realise, with enough exploration, and I know maybe only one guy with extensive experience who disagrees, is that we are in fact embedded within an infinite ecology of beingness. That is the download of pretty much everyone who smokes DMT and you can even get that realisation on one big “breakthrough” experience of smoking DMT and many people do.

People forget that shamanism is dictionarily defined as the interaction with spirits good and bad. Western culture is just in a phase of reactionariness from ridiculous religion, into an even more ridiculous atheism, and hopefully coming into an even handed, balanced viewpoint that respects pretty much all human cultural traditions, which understand entities and spirits as a natural part of the human sphere.

Sure, many people are so disenchanted and out of contact with their own spirit, they might have a very hard time believing in them. But this infidelity can be fixed with a few decent sessions of plant medicines, so that maybe then even most people can then begin to interact with spirits. That being said, some people just don’t meet or communicate with entities at all.

Surely “trauma” doesn’t come out of vacuum. If we want to address trauma then we must address the source of that trauma, and understand the source of that trauma. What you eventually understand is similar to what the gnostics understood, that humanity is ruled over by malefic beings they called “archons”. I call them etheric parasites if you will.

Then you will largely be considered “mad” by society, but you can be consoled, that society can easily be perceived to absolutely barmy at this point, and believing that our world is run by evil people sitting round a table, getting instructions from evil beings controlling the world as David Icke believes, actually makes sense given the insane state of the human world right now and all the fairly evident brainwashing and manipulation of the populace.

 

7. Psychedelics can Remove the effectiveness of our natural Shielding

All of us have innate etheric shielding that protect us from various forms of psychic attack and entity intrusions.

When people drink large amounts of alcohol, these shields can come down. Most of us are familiar with how domestic violence is borne out of heavy drinking, where dad comes home drunk and beats up mum, and then in the morning dad wonders what happened the night before. What’s happening here, is that because the shielding has come down after heavy drinking, “spirits” can come in and cause havoc in a person’s life, causing them to commit violence.

Psychedelics can result in the same effect whereby these innate shields come down when we take them, yet the effects can be more radical however. Suddenly in the group of people who are taking mushrooms, everything is peaceful and normal, until one of the people thinks another person in the group is a Demon, and they must kill them with a knife to save humanity. This sort of thing happens more than many people know about.

This is the real problem with psychedelics, they can amplify a lot of this sort of negative and psychotic material, that may have been previously repressed or suppressed. Things can get weird, possessed and cultic in the psychedelic space quite quickly, because when taking psychedelics these natural shields we have to these entities come down and we are then more likely to be heavily influenced by these entities without these shields. Entities can then come in and generative a strange, negative, drained space and interfere with people’s relationships and perceptions of each other. People who come into some expanded awareness often start off good, then the darkness comes, because it wants to shut down the good and it can do that, by capturing and taking over the good.

That’s why I say to people, if you want to travel far, learn how to address and deal with these matters. Collectively, the issue is, there is not a good awareness about any of these things, as shields or entities have not been measured or understood by the religion of our time.

But as practitioners in this space, we need to be vigilant, and be aware this is a real issue. Psychedelics are clearly a double edged sword, they can open us up to the spirit world, with its generative, positive and healing elements, as well as the vampiric, subtractive and negative elements.

That psychedelics CAN potentially open us to nefariousness is not a good enough reason to put them back in the box, because actually there are ways of dealing with these forces and much of that is based in developing a simple awareness first of all.

For myself, Torping is the answer, but for others, it means taking the entities to the light or dealing with them in some other way.

This conversation is absolutely lacking in the larger psychedelic sphere, which gives credence that actually there are agendas cleverly maintained by the extant tyranny to silence this issue and not converse about it. At the very least the social programming against talking about this issue is so strong, that to talk about this you might as well take down your pants and shit in the middle of the room!