TRANSCRIPT – Modern Shamanism & Ayahuasca Awakening | Rak Razam

This interview was originally produced as a podcast episode. We strongly encourage you to listen to the audio, which includes emotion and emphasis that’s not on the page. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.

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0:01 Lorna: Hello there amazing visionaries. This is Lorna Liana and I’m here today with Rak Razam who is a leading experiential journalist, who enjoys writing about and helping shape the emergence of a new cultural paradigm in the 21^st century. He is the author of the critically acclaimed book Aya: Awakenings, a Shamanic Odyssey. And also the companion volume of interviews called The Ayahuasca Sessions which you can check out at www.ayathebook.com, that’s www.ayathebook.com.
0:42 He is a frequent lecturer on ayahuasca and the shamanic revival that is sweeping the west. He wrote, produced and co-directed the groundbreaking new visionary documentary Aya: Awakenings which you can check out at www.aya-awakenings.com and he leads Ayahuasca retreats in Peru. If you want to find out more about this retreat, you can check out www.aya-awakenings.com/retreats.
1:14 So I’m really overjoyed to have Rak Razam with us today because we were going to talk about this shamanic revival in the west that I find so intriguing.
1:25 So before we dive into that conversation, I’d love to ask you Rak, what exactly is shamanism for the benefit of those people out there listening who don’t know?
1:34 Rak: Well it’s a very good question. It depends on who you ask I guess these days. If you ask the indigenous people all around the world, they would say that the practice of shamanism is equivalent to a medicine person and the role of the shaman used to play and still plays in the indigenous tribe around the world is basically of a healer. He’s a healer that may work through different modalities like trance and hands that largely it is being healers that work with medicinal plants and herbs and things like that.
2:06 The western anthropological understanding of shaman has quite eroded over the decades. By the 1950s, what the word shaman was being based upon was an understanding of Siberian shamanism. We basically in the west appropriated the term shamanism and exported it back onto the medicine people of the world.
The majority of medicine people across the world don’t call themselves shamans. In Peru, they call themselves curanderos. That’s from the Spanish. It means to heal. They might be brujos or sorcerers. They might be taitas. Every region has their own language for it. But essentially, it’s men and women across the world who are in service to their communities and are healing people. That might be with medicinal plants but it also works in the spiritual level where sometimes they’re responsible for the spiritual well-being of the tribe as well.
3:00 So in the west we have largely forgotten it. We have glorified the term shaman because of the absence of that archetype in that culture, basically because western culture eradicated the medicine people over many hundreds of years. We have to some level glorified this archetype and it’s become to mean a little bit more the mystical sorcerer, wizard, sort of Hollywood archetype which we’re relearning. We’re relearning what that means in western culture.
3:27 Lorna: Yes, it’s interesting. When I spend time with indigenous healers and plant medicine people in the different tribes that I’ve gotten to know in the Amazon regions – I’ve been to Peru and Ecuador and Brazil – it’s interesting how they refer to themselves as shamans just to be understood by westerners. Even though as you mentioned it’s not really a traditional term for them, it was co-opted from the Siberians.
I’m curious to know in terms of your research of the topic why do you think ayahuasca shamanism is so popular now.
4:07 Rak: It’s a very good question. There are many different plant entheogens. The word entheogen itself was coined in the early 80s by a group of academics to distance the culture from the stigma of the word psychedelic. Entheogens is more targeted to what plant-based medicines and sacramental usage of psychoactive plants. Ayahuasca is predominantly amongst those plants getting a lot of media attention at the moment precisely because of its ability to heal.
4:37 Ayahuasca is legal in many parts throughout South America and even in the world in the gray areas of the law that it has the tradition. It has in the thousands of years a usage in the Amazonian basin. It has the traditions around it. It has the container of the ceremony and of the central role of the shaman or the curandero.
4:57 So it’s not just the ayahuasca, it’s actually this sense of legacy and of the elders of the tribes of the earth and of the caretakers of the land who are bringing back the knowledge of ayahuasca. There are many, many different other substances like psilocybin mushrooms, salvia divonorum, [00:05:17 Inaudible] San Pedro Cactus, all of them are on the rise but Ayahuasca is still getting the major attention. I think that’s because it has so many safe guards within it. It can’t be used very recreationally more easily because it is such a prejudice and …
5:30 Lorna: It is such a party foul. Could you imagine? Your friends would say I can’t take you anywhere. All you do is projectile vomit when we’re just trying to have an all-night dance party.
5:42 Rak: That brings up a really interesting point because a lot of the western content with mind altering substances has been recreationally or it has been in the context of something like the 60s with LSD or man-made chemicals which are very, very different from the plant-based entheogens. The plant-based entheogens like ayahuasca demand not just your respect but they demand a relationship. They demand you to get something of yourself.
6:07 We’re so used to in the west these medicines that adapted in size like a pill and you take that and the pill does all the work. You just sit back and this medicine will make you better. Ayahuasca doesn’t make you better on its own. Ayahuasca in consent with the diet and with going into cleansing and to removing yourself from your world and focusing on your problems and your issues; ayahuasca opens up your own potential for healing.
6:31 They’ve done recent studies with MRI scans and EEG scans and they’ve discovered that ayahuasca as well as other psychedelics turn off the default mode network of the brain, these clustered regions of the brain which involved with the sense of identity and ego and making us who we are on this level of consciousness. When those are switched off, it’s actually our own brain that is opening up our open mind. It is opening up to reveal the capabilities it has within itself and to connect to larger facets of beings.
7:00 So ayahuasca often engages your own subconscious and unconscious in your conscious mind and it asks you where your problems are. Like you engage in the dialogue but it forces you to see yourself and it doesn’t do the work on its own. So it’s very unlike the ways and understanding of medicines. A lot of the indigenous people when they say la medicina, when they say medicine, they mean something different from what we understand [00:07:27 Inaudible] not just a neurochemical there is a spirit or an aliveness of being in plants. That is the being that we have to establish relationship with on our spiritual level.
7:41 So it’s not just the flat sort of western and before the assembly line of chemicals. It’s something you need to engage with in a spiritual level. That is beyond the western paradigm but it is fast coming into the western understanding, this spirituality not just as an “airy fairy creepy” thing but as a level of being on how we can practice and shop and in tune into it and how we engage with that spirituality for our health and our well-being.
8:08 Lorna: Yes, it’s interesting how you describe ayahuasca and the relationship with the plant medicines and how it’s so different from the psychedelic drugs of the 60s for example.
8:22 Often when I speak to people about ayahuasca, the very first question that I receive is usually is it anything like LSD. If I were to describe the difference between LSD and ayahuasca, I almost kind of say that for me LSD shows you the exuberant potentiality of things. Like the broad horizon of expansive, inclusive potentiality and human existence.
8:56 Whereas with ayahuasca, it will show you that but it’ll also show you what you need to work on in yourself in order to move in that direction. What one thing that I see with LSD and I’m sure that this experience is very different for different people but for me I feel like when I have experienced LSD, I see wow, anything is possible. We could totally do this. Then the next day, it’s like okay. It seems like it’s so far away from where I might be at that moment.
9:34 Whereas with ayahuasca, it almost always shows me okay, this is the direction you want to go. That field of infinite possibilities. But it’s like, Okay these are the things that are blocking you or keeping you from moving in that direction. Here’s where you’re stuck. Here’s where you need to release what you need to let go of and what you need to change.
9:57 So I’d love to know what your thoughts are on the differences between ayahuasca and LSD from your experience.
10:03 Rak: Well there’s an interesting cluster of ideas around this but essentially LSD has been scientifically proven to be an amplifier. So what it does is it amplifies the senses. And even the psychoactive sense, you’re getting more of an experience but you’re getting saturation that deepen your colors and of nature and of perception and time dilation. But you’re still essentially that consciousness. You’re still essentially your consciousness altered and perhaps deepened and more.
10:32 On ayahuasca it’s very different. It’s more inward bound and it’s more exploratory of your own unconscious and your emotional being and your own journey through life. It does seem that there is a spirit with ayahuasca. And there is a mythology that is arising around the ayahuasca as its incorporated back into the west, the indigenous countries in Peru and through South America.
10:56 They often call ayahuasca madre or the mother or the grandmother. It seems to be this energy, a feminine energy around it and a spirit in ayahuasca. That can be true or it may be some type of projection from the unconscious. But essentially in that relationship with the spirit of ayahuasca and it does seem to be some type of presence there which is not present with LSD.
11:19 It seems that the plant’s spirit is wanting to engage with us and wanting to work on behalf of us around healing. It seems that the spirit of ayahuasca is an avatar in some things for the earth herself. If mother earth and gaia as a concept. It seems that any of the entheogens are working to heal, they’re healing plants. They’re not just random psychoactive which are used recreationally. They are specifically designed to be taken to either physically heal or to reconnect us to the web of life.
11:55 In reconnecting us to the web of life, they heal the spiritual lack or the disconnect that we had been feeling. Now the original Latin for religion is to reweave or to reconnect. It makes us ask the question what are we reconnecting to.
12:10 We’re reconnecting to the original matrix which is the planetary matrix of mother earth who both feeds and creates and destroys and has a level of spirit and awareness and intelligence to nature herself in what she creates, how she creates, how the species interacts and cooperate together and how the web of life unfolds as one organism.
12:33 Now you may have both type of mental understandings on LSD but it is quite rare to have those types of spiritual connections and those types of workings on the body to as you say clear the blockages. When the blockages are cleared through modalities like ayahuasca, what is really connecting then is our own innate ability. Our bodies and our choppers and our NG systems to club back into the planetary matrix and to be whole.
13:00 That is what to be healed means. It doesn’t mean that you get anything more than you have. But it means you have full optimal capabilities of the human body, the human energy system and human soul. Then to remember what that means and how that clubs into nature. I think it’s part of the great learning of ayahuasca. It’s like coming in full circle back to the garden and back to the great green wood where we all began.
13:23 Lorna: I really appreciate your thoughts on that because I would say that in my experiences with LSD, I didn’t really feel the presence of a guiding, teaching, healing plant spirit at all. So yes, I would agree that for me the experiences with LSD can also be really therapeutic and healing but yes, it was much more of an amplifier – definitely seeing much more in the intellectual realm rather than in the full body healing realm within which ayahuasca works so well.
13:58 It’s interesting because one of the things that I see in the global international near shamanic world is the tendency towards psychonautism so to speak when working with mind expanding substances and even some of these power plants.
14:21 One of my favorite books is a book by Daniel Pinchbeck called Breaking Open the Mind. I see his book. It’s almost like a biography of my life in a certain way but just different. Like wow this person led a parallel life to me and some of the realizations that he received are very similar to the shamanic journey I’ve been on. Well one thing that I noticed was that his book was really psychonautically focused and kind of oriented towards what extreme dimensional realms can you go to, can you access through your consciousness exploration.
15:01 For me, I personally don’t think that that’s the point of it really. I feel like for me the point of working with power plants, working with mind- expanding entheogenic medicines is much more so a journey in word, a journey back to the earth. Not how far into the outer world can you get but how much can you return to Mother Earth. And feeling or recognizing our place in the intrinsic infinite web of life. I think that’s a much more – for me it’s been a much more grounding and holistic experience.
15:42 Rak: I think you’re very right. When I first went down to Peru eight years ago, as journalist, experienced with journalists documenting ayahuasca culture and this resurgence and interest from Westerners going down. A lot of curanderos or the shamans that I interviewed and spoke to said that there is an identifiable target market of people that are going down for physical healing, that the vast majority of westerners did not have physical ailments.
16:09 But they sensed on mass that there was something missing. There was sort of a spiritual malaise or this sense of disconnection, this sense of not belonging that there was something more that was lacking this sense of spirit, this sense of something like you’d believe in and connect to and be nurtured by in their lives. Because Western cultures is often reductionist making this big and it doesn’t cater to that.
16:33 So when people are running that reconnection with things like ayahuasca, it’s about not focusing just on the mind because the ego is an amazing tool. But the ego will – it will adapt and it will modify anything that comes at it. So if shamanism and entheogens and psychedelics start to come back into the Western mindframe, the danger is the ego Gaia.
16:56 Okay if we can work with this and we can use them almost as a psychedelic armoring. We can take onboard these tools without really changing. What needs to happen I believe in the world at the moment is this great rebalancing is going on and relearning how to reengineer our consciousness to be sustainable again, to be sustainable in the web of life as a culture within ourselves, within our society, but also with the planet. To do that we have to come out of the dominated culture instead and we have to come back into our hot space.
17:30 What ayahuasca and the entheogens are helping us do is not just intellectually explore inner dimensions and the shamanic paradigm and the intergalactic cosmos type of deal. They’re really bringing us down to much as their own healing but our own hard space.
17:48 When I was in ayahuasca retreats just last September, I worked with the curandero Percy Garcia. He is such a hot-paced practitioner. He spent so much time with us trying to make us understand it’s not about the head when you’re in these realms. How you navigate is through the heart. You navigate through the realms of the heart, how you feel. So it’s that feeling and attribution and the subtle energies which to a large degree the west has forgotten or shut down or atrophied or just not supported. Because there’s so much about culture and intellectually and aggressively driven towards conquering an action, an outcome with begetting that we need to relate to people. We need to relate to ourselves to our own needs, to our families’ needs and to the tribe and the society’s needs and to the planet’s needs.
18:40 So the great thing I think of healing in the west is have a heartache. We have a heartache that maybe this are recognizing and to a large degree how is that they are still not recognizing. They refused to acknowledge the fact that we have a broken heart in the west. It’s our relationship with mother earth, our mother and nature and how we be sustainable, that we need to heal this relationship from. And the entheogens and ayahuasca can help us remember that we have a heart, has to use that heart and have it connect with each other. That is part of the great healing which is underlying the world at the moment.
19:17 Lorna: In our conversation so far, you have brought up the term entheogen and psychedelic a number of times. One of the things that I encounter is in a lot of people who really know what entheogen actually means and what the difference is between the two. So I’d love if you might explain your understanding of either term.
19:40 Rak: Yes, well originally the first thing at the start, it was a term coined in the 80s to distance itself from psychedelics but entheogen is from the Greek and it means to invoke the divine within. That can be a contentious sort of term in the west because people don’t believe in the divine to a large degree or some people do but they have brand recognition and brand control over whose divinity means what.
20:04 Essentially it’s saying that there is a divine spot within us and that these entheogens are substances which reconnect us to that divine spot in ourselves and in nature. As I was saying with the scientific discoveries of light, with the MRI and EEG – after discovering it turns off these parts of the brain. I think when we turn off those intellectual parts of the brain, what we’re reconnecting to is that emotional part of that within. We’re looking within and we’re finding that we are divine. We do have this spark of life. We are created with this purpose and with this spirit within us. We hang up for authentic connection to other people and other spirit and to be fed by great spirit.
20:47 So “psychedelic” –  which I still feel is a great valid term and is coming back to a large degree within the global push for the medicalization of psychedelics. It’s essentially still referring to manmade chemicals like LSD and MDMA which they’re using organizations like MAPS, the Multidisciplinary Association Psychedelic Studies pioneering lots of legal tests at the moment with doctors around the world for helping Iraqi war veterans who have PTSD with MDMA.
21:18 Lorna: Helping Iraqi war veterans with MDMA?
21:21 Rak: Yes, there’s a lot of work being done with legal psychedelics in medical case studies at the moment. They’re using LSD for cluster headache alleviation and Psilocybin for cancer patients with anxiety and terminal patients with alleviating their fear of death. They’ve been utilizing psychedelics in the medical establishment which is very good and very well.
21:46 Ayahuasca is also being used in one of the clinical studies as well. But there’s also a larger potential again not too intellectualize these substances just as commodities. They can be reduced down to a pill like an aspirin or something like that. It’s that there is a process at work. Both of the psychedelics and the entheogens is moving us and it’s engaging with us on a deeper level. To use justice medicines on a physical level is to ignore the fact that a lot of the problems around health start from the spiritual cohort. They start from the spiritual center. If we’re not centered in our relationship with ourselves and our relationship with the earth and where we get our food from, where we’re getting our energy, sort of intake from then that will result in disease or being out of center.
22:40 So “psychedelic” is still a very valid term. It’s what I’m getting at. Essentially, they do relate to the manmade chemicals where entheogens invoke the divine within. Psychedelics was point in the 50s by Humphry Osmond and others. In Greek in meant to manifest the mind. So it began this difference between the mind which is very much an egoic construct and very much a western thing.
23:10 We have incredible amount of mind expansion in Western culture at the moment. Since the 1960s like 50 years on, some of the first wave of the LSD exploration, we have now non-linear social networks, distributed consciousness, cloud computing. Now we are all on screens and we’re fragmenting our consciousness and we understand what it means to sort of timeshare and to split our consciousness in many ways.
There is a whole medicalization in our people that are on many different substances especially in Western countries like the US. People basically in altered head spaces everywhere. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that it is healthy or that this was best outcome. But we almost understand my  manifesting is just the mind, that the plants and the entheogens are asking us to go deeper. They’re asking us to go down to a based level and to understand that there is this divine within or this spark of life or essentially a soul, something which is more than just the mind involved in the dynamic of being human in how we have life relationship and interact with what we are embedded in which is another organism, a macro organism of planet earth.
24:24 Lorna: So why did you make your film Aya: Awakenings? What inspired you to take on this endeavor? Because it’s a lot of work to make a film and lot of resources and I want to understand what your goal is with this documentary.
24:41 Rak: It goes back to the start of my journey with ayahuasca which was in 2006. I went down to the Amazon to write an article, a freelance article about this lies in global shamanism and issues of Westerners in ayahuasca. That began the book Aya: Awakenings the Shamanic Odyssey. There were so many incredible profound experiences in my own. I drank with other 24 different curenderos or shamans. I basically try to map the territory of what was happening in Peru and around the Western interphases and that shop of cultures between old world and new. What the supply and demand of shamanism meant. What was happening with the western money coming in and buying spiritual experience and what people are getting out of that.
25:27 I interviewed the curanderos and all these Westerners. I had my own experiences and so much of that was so profound and transformative for me that in making the book eventually, a few years after the book came out, we had the opportunity to make a documentary adaption of the book. And so that began with the director and editor and my partner Tim Parish who have worked credibly for over a decade. He was the one who instigated the work on the film.
25:54 What we’ve attempted to do in the film that we could do quite successfully is we’re using the narration from the book and it’s a very truncated overarching. It’s like the heroes journey from Joseph Campbell. There’s initiation, departure initiation and return. We take the narration from the book to give people an emotional anchor and the experience and explain what ayahuasca is. Then we have the visionary component. We have a lot of video that we’ve shot and we’ve sourced and we explained what the ceremony is like with ayahuasca with the shamans. But then we’d go in on the interior journey. These are the terra incognito or invisible landscape of the mind.
26:34 We’ve used some quite cutting edge algorithms and software to recreate some of the effects and visionary components that we can see on ayahuasca journeys. Many, many people who have seen this film had said that this is the closest thing you can get to an ayahuasca experience on the inside by watching this film.
26:51 So I like to think it’s a shamanic artifact and that we typed in the narration from the book which was from the raw experience with the emotional narrative that visionary video experience and the incredibly intricate soundscapes of the powers or the powerful shamanic medicine songs of the shamans and the soundscapes to the jungle. It seems aesthetically combined it becomes something rugged in some of parts.
The basic lead catalyst when you watch this film, it catalyzes a reaction in the viewer. You cannot help but be affected by this. It’s a very powerful film. So in some way, I feel like we’ve tracked a little bit of the essence of this experience, the infamous film to make it come alive again. So in that way, it’s not just talking about ayahuasca, it takes people on the first person journey into the Amazonian to the heart of consciousness itself. So it’s a very valuable cultural artifact to be sharing with the global tribe.
27:43 Lorna: Well that’s fantastic. I can’t wait to watch it. There are so many moments where I wish I could step into my mind and take some digital photos of some of the things that I’ve seen in the ayahuasca vision escape. One visionary artist who I think really captures the visionary realms so well is Alex Grey.
28:07 It’s interesting when I look at his paintings, I can tell which ones are ayahuasca visions and which ones were something else. I would say that some of the work that I’ve seen came out with so much like some of the visions that I’ve experienced myself. So I’m looking forward to seeing what you guys have done with…
28:28 Rak: It’s a very good point. People like Alex Grey who is the great godfather of the visionary art movement and there is a movement of hundreds of artists worldwide now. The difference between a normal surrealist artist and a visionary artist I guess in this sense like Alex Grey. There are other ones like the Peruvian Andy Debernardi.
28:48 Lorna: Oh he’s wonderful.
28:50 Rak: Yes, Android Jones has done some.
28:51 Lorna: Android Jones is my favorite, oh my God! It’s hard to pick. They’re all so good.
28:55 Rak: What they are doing is that they are having visionary experiences with entheogens or however indigenously. They are encountering either entities or projections, the ring realms which are valid consensual realms that medicine people and shamans across the world say, “Look, this realm exist.” There is more than just this physical dimension.
Basically they’re saying the web of life extends onto the astral and onto larger planes of existence. It is a science. It’s a science of curanderismo. When these artists go in like what we’ve done in the film is that they are mapping the territory and they are bringing back the images and anchoring the experience.
29:34 In a similar way almost to what the Aboriginal Australians do with their dot-matrix paintings, they say that they’re not representing the landscape. They are capturing the landscape in a way that it comes alive. It’s almost like holographic.
29:48 So, when these visionary artists anchor this material, when people see it, they’re seeing something which is a catalyst and a trigger. It’s giving us a cultural artifact in the west to understand. Because in this we have a vocabulary and an understanding with the potential of this realms then they’re invisible to us. The more we can see them and share them – you don’t have to believe they exist. But you understand conceptually that they could exist is the first step to integrating and for this generation to step into those realms and to learn how to map and to navigate them. To reclaim the invisible landscape for our generation and our culture.
30:27 Lorna: Do you believe these realms exist?
30:29 Rak: Undoubtedly. I’ve been to these realms many times and it’s an extension of nature. I don’t believe there’s anything esoteric per se about it. I think it’s just so we have been [00:30:20 Inaudible] and then denuded into mechanistic universe since the industrial revolution or so. And we’ve forgotten, we’ve forgotten this connection.
30:48 All of this lies in global shamanism is pointing to not just the healing. Underneath the healing is the connection. When we have the connection to spirit and to nature in the web of life, I just think that the belief in edge technologies are also leading us to the same direction as shamanism whether that’s quantum physics or advanced internet technology.
31:11 Lorna: Virtual reality maybe?
31:14 Rak: Virtual reality, here’s the thing, originally there is saying. There’s a few scientist which have coined this thing. There’s validated reality. There’s virtual reality. And there’s vegetal reality. Vegetal reality is the original matrix and it’s like plant broadband. The plants are communicating amongst themselves using the root systems and the mycelial networks under the ground. They are a larger synergistic cooperative organism which exhibits full spectrum consciousness. It exhibits the mobility of different species of plants and trees to synergistically communicate almost in a network.
31:51 A lot of the understandings and terminology around the internet and around the way the information can be contained and transmitted also applies to make picture. We’re learning that as above or below, these systems are very similar to each other.
32:07 I think that shamanism is a technology. It’s the vegetal technology, plant shamanism. It should not be discriminated against just because it was brought to us by indigenous people. This is still western imperialism and still colonialization that we’re saying indigenous people are savages essentially because they’re technology is less than ours. Well hello, they can communicate at a distance. They can hear at a distance. They can do things that we are not catching up with.
32:35 We should be looking at their technologies and their abilities and testing if they work because this is the essence of science: tested locally but try it. If it works for you, decipher it. Incorporate it into your vocabulary into your scientific paradigm because this is what the new paradigm is. It’s a reclamation of the archaic revival and of the Western knowledge and technology so we have this sustainable fusion. It’s the old and the new coming together into the now.
33:05 Lorna: So what was the most visionary, out of this world experience that you’ve had? How did it affect you? What did you learn from it?
33:14 Rak: Well, I’ll give you the most visionary experience. I’ve had many levels of visions and you could understand as well that the westerners are in general are very enameled with visions because this is again the mind wanting to know and to see. We mentioned that the virtual reality before. It’s almost as if that in the west, they don’t believe things unless we can see them. If you can feel them, it’s not enough. You think it’s like hallucination.
33:43 But if you can see them, you think there’s something in there. So a lot of the visionary component of ayahuasca experience maybe projections from the subconscious codified into a visionary archetype that is speaking to you and meaningful to you. I’ve had those type of archetype things happen. I’ve seen the classic jaguars. I’ve seen ancient people have been interstellar journeys.
34:06 But what we’ve got in our film Aya: Awakenings was a very specific encounter with a deeper level of reality. It wasn’t through using the modality of ayahuasca. It was actually smokeable 5-MeO-DMT which was used by a shamanic practitioner in the jungle at the time. In that experience, I underwent the classic white light tunnel experience that many people would have near death experiences. This sort of feeling of the lower bardos transcending to a great reservoir of primal consciousness or what you could call the Source. It’s felt to me like – I call it the Super Hadron Collider of hyperspace. It was really a vast realm again where it’s not about seeing because essentially it was an incredible expanse of white light. Its subtle variations in a tunnel oscillating effect that emotionally, intuitively, and vibrationally my energy body was being read like the laser in a CD, reading a CD.
35:13 The information stored in me was merging my wave front with the Source. What I understood from that intuitively and this is what we all put out on words onto it. When you have mystical transcendental experience, it is great personal to you. It doesn’t mean that it’s not true. It doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen. But we need to develop our own language and understanding and contextualization of it.
35:35 It just seemed to be that in this experience I had this overlap and merging with the Godhead who I would consider the Source. It’s very close to what they say when the drop rejoins the ocean. Here’s what I learned from it. It felt like there were larger scales of – with larger rhythms of work wherein basically, it’s like the condensation cycle of moisture in nature that when the drop comes down and rains and hits the ground and goes back up again, this is eternal return. This is external mystical return back to where it came.
36:13 In that place, I melted into oneness of unity consciousness with the Source that I’d give it consciously every second of the way. I was opening and it was reading me and I was reading it. I was remembering that I was it and it was me. What I learned from it was that the entire journey of our lives, we get caught up an electrical spiritual charge. From every action we do, every thought we had, every kindness, every hurt, every step on our life path affects our energy body. We store these charges as memories, as traumas, as experiences. I have vibrational register and when I was merged back into the vibrational docking port of the Godhead, it was absorbing and in some sense you could even say eating or really taking in all my me-ness, all my memories.
37:15 What I got from that is that the web of life continues. On a cosmic inner space level, I believe that the Source incarnates on the explicate level down here as form for a reason. And that the combination of our life’s path is essentially to feed the Source. The Source is the perpetual engine of creation creating and growing. It grows through incarnating and then our incarnation goes back in the cycle of life and feeds the Godhead. It was this beautiful, reciprocal experience that was the most profound experience of my life.
37:59 It was captured on the exterior flesh body in the film Aya: Awakenings. We have recreated the theory of visuals as closely as we could to take you on that journey. So I invite you to watch the film Aya: Awakenings and you’ll get a deeper understanding of what I’m talking about.
38:15 Lorna: Fantastic, so we’ve about reached the end of our time together. I’d love to ask you Rak. How can we best stay in touch with you?
38:23 Rak: I’m all over social media. You can find me on www.rakrazam.com. That’s R-A-K-R-A-Z-A-M.com. The website as you mentioned at the start aya, A-Y-A-awakenings.com. And I’ve got the Twitter account and Facebook account mainly in my name. So I’m very accessible. I do connect with the global tribe quite regularly. I do a podcast show called In a Perfect World which holds a lot of interviews with leading consciousness researchers, and shamanic figures. I’m always looking forward to connecting with the tribe.
39:02 Lorna: Wonderful. Thank you so much and you have a beautiful day.
39:05 Rak: Thank you very much. Aloha.