Duncan Trussell Family Hour - 510: Sophia Rokhlin

Episode Date: June 4, 2022

Sophia Rokhlin, co-author of the most psychedelic book since The Archaic Revival, joins the DTFH! Check out Sophia's book! When Plants Dream: Ayahuasca, Amazonian Shamanism and the Global Psychedelic Renaissance, available everywhere you get your books! You can also learn more about Sophia on SophiaRokhlin.com and follow her on Twitter. Original music by Aaron Michael Goldberg. This episode is brought to you by: Lumi Labs - Visit MicroDose.com and use code DUNCAN at checkout for 30% Off and FREE Shipping on your first order! Squarespace - Use offer code: DUNCAN to save 10% on your first site. StoryWorth - Visit StoryWorth.com/Duncan and receive $10 off your first purchase!

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These are the oldest signs that I know of, the signs. Sign one, you dream about a sexual hug that reminds you of your mother. Sign two, you wake up with a number 69 tattooed up of your ass. Sign three, cops start coming to your house to show you a green diamond. Sign four, you notice a small gray film.

It's the small of your back. Sign five, you create a universe and are populating the things that die. Sign six, you become very sensitive to underwear that's not silk. Sign seven, when you roll around in a box of live crabs, they don't pinch you. They leave you alone.

Sign eight, you start eating food by pushing it into your asshole. Up into your stomach, and you poop out your mouth. Sign nine, Ken Burns shows up at your house with a tiger. You ride it around while he films you in the nude. These are the signs that you're having a spiritual awakening. These are the only signs that I know of, the signs. That was Signs of a Spiritual Awakening by Krishnamurti Jackson

Brown, and you could find that on Mexador Records, friends, what an incredible podcast we have for you today. Sophia Rocklin has written the greatest psychedelic book that I have encountered since Terence McKinnon's The Archaic Revival. It's called When Plants Dream. And it's the only book that has ever truly made me want to drink ayahuasca.

Maybe one day we'll be able to microdose ayahuasca. Wouldn't that be nice? Just to have a nice, small, manageable ayahuasca experience. Have a little micro puke. Only micro shit your pants. One thing we do have is my favorite new microdose gummies by Loomi Labs. Friends, Loomi Labs microdose gummies

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next week. That's the 9th, the 10th, and the 11th of June. I got lots of other dates coming up. You can find them all at dunkintrustle.com. And now, friends, I want to introduce you to Sophia Rockland. She just wrote a book with Daniel Penchbeck called When Plants Dream, It Is Glorious. Order the book.

It's such spectacular writing. And it's such a deep, beautiful topic. And you'll see from the conversation that you're about to listen to that she is a brilliant person who has a lot to say about medicinal plant medicine, ayahuasca, and saving the rainforests. Everybody, please welcome to the DTFH, Sophia Rockland. Welcome upon you, that you are with us.

Shake hands, no need to be blue. Welcome to you. It's the dunkintrustle, the real, the real, the real, the real, the real. And I, of all the books that I have read that talk about ayahuasca, none of them has made me really want to try it more than your book. So thank you, because I'm always sort of scared of it for some reason. I mean, the vine of death. It's not exactly an enticing name for a psychedelic.

Well, it depends on your kink, I guess, but. Yeah. Yeah, that's or kamarank, which is the vomiter. The vomiter. The vomiter, also not the sexiest. It depends on what you're into, I guess. Well, you know, I found it interesting that they've connected why it makes you puke.

I always thought the puking was a result of, I mean, aside from the mystical explanations for it, I just thought it was because it tasted like shit. And it, you know, was an alkaloid and so it just upset your stomach. But it was interesting that it has some kind of connection to a part of your brain responsible for puking. The brainstem. Yeah. Well, first of all, I didn't even know the brainstem was the reason that we puked.

But it's fascinating that it has some interaction with that. Yeah. You know, I guess with anything with ayahuasca and anything with the world in general, really, if you look at, there's going to be like a spiritual explanation and then we can attempt to boil it down to some sort of a material source. But my understanding is that there's this researcher out of Georgetown University who was looking at, it's called the area posterima. And there are dopamine receptors in that zone that are just like getting pounded by the

brew and that's kind of making some gaggy things happen. Has anyone looked into the difference in recipes? In other words, like the, how nuanced is the effect of ayahuasca from one shaman to the next? How similar is it? Great question. I would say there, you can be an ayahuasca connoisseur depending on what kind of life you decide to live.

Yeah. I mean, I think ethnobotanists have identified just a few types of benasteriopsis copy. And then there's the diplopteris, which is also known as chalipanga or the psychotria. So even right there, you have two or three and then people throw in different things. There are different types of preparations depending on, you know, if you want to rasp the bark off of the vine that will or will not create a more, it has more emetic tannins in it. So depending on what you're going for and really interestingly, I'm sure you've kind

of, perhaps you've meditated on this idea, like how did people discover ayahuasca out of all of the different plants? I think a quarter of all known plant species are in the Amazon rainforest. And it's the most biodiverse terrestrial ecosystem on earth. So right there, you're kind of like, okay, I mean, this is botanical pharmacy and you're just playing around. One of the theories, which I love is by this guy, Stefan Bayer, and he was actually looking at that people's needs to find good purgatives because you have lots of, you're not cooking

with a lot of fire. You live, there's a lot of competition. There's fungus, there's bacteria, there's parasites. And so people became very well versed at preparing what's known as vomitivos. So that's something that I sort of, I think we're sorely missing in our culture, which is actually vomiting therapy. So taking plants that go, they kind of gush around in your belly, you drink massive amounts or small amounts, and then you can't believe we're talking about this.

So quick projectile vomiting, and it provides both obviously like a physiological relief. And then there's a bit of a psychological relief in the gesture of just purging. So one of the theories is that communities were looking for a better way to purge. And lo and behold, they took this banisteriopsis copy and combined it with namely a DMT containing plants, cicotria, the mono-aminoxidase inhibitors in the banisteriopsis allowed for the psychoactivity of the DMT to kick in, and then suddenly they're on a different trip. The purgative function, it could happen minus the DMT, right? Without mixing the two together, you would just puke, or is the psychoactive component

contained within the, wait, I always get confused about this. It's the vine that has the DMT in it. Is that the purg? Other way around. Oh. I know. I know. The vine makes you puke.

The vine is the star of the show, but think about it like this, DMT is theoretically endogenously produced in tons of different plant and animal species. We have it in our cerebrospinal fluid, you find it in like citrus peels, it's all over the place, but the real magic is what allows for the DMT to be experienced in the way that it's experienced, if that makes sense. The copy has these digestive enzymes that allow you to just feel it. Those are the MAO inhibitors. That's right.

The vine is a MAO inhibitor, the bark is the DMT. Which one has the purgative medicine in it? Is it the vine or the bark or both? The vine has the bark. The banisteriopsis copy, if you can visualize it, it's this beautiful woody liana or like a barky vine and it grows in these double helices and it loves hardwood trees and it actually eventually chokes them like large serpents. That woody bark on the vine has a medic, it has tannins, which can feel a little bit

queasy and also different alkaloids, harmine, tetrahydroharmine and harmaline, which I actually don't know how much we know about whether or not they have any kind of direct purging activity, but it's such like a chemical bouquet that there's a lot to be looked into. I love the theory that it was a purgative. What is it they used to, in Tom Sawyer, what is it they would make you drink? If you were at Tom Sawyer in a long time, I missed that part. God, no, in the very beginning you would punish kids by making them drink, God, it would make you puke.

It was called, let me look it up. When I was a kid, I was terrified by it, but by then, no one was using it anymore. Let me look this stuff up. One second here. What are you googling? That's my question. Tom Sawyer. Thing that made you puke.

Yeah. It was called, medicine that makes you puke. Let's see here. Whatever. It's like some weird old, no. We're just to take place. It's like an Appalachian story. It's a Southern story and it was called, oh my God, I'm so brain dead.

I can't believe I can't remember the name of this stuff. But anyway, the point is they did have a purgative back then that they would make kids drink to punish them. It would make you puke. That's cool. But it's interesting that in our culture, that seems to have gone away. Unless you have fucked up or your kid ate the wrong thing and you go to the hospital, they'll give you something that makes you puke.

But it's not like you can get over the counter. This is going to make you throw up. You've forgotten that there could be a usefulness to vomiting. It's not just something that means you're sick necessarily. What you're saying is pretty interesting. In the conversation around ayahuasca, certainly puking is a big part of the conversation. This is one of the reasons. I'm afraid of this stuff.

Two reasons. One, communal reality. Puking around a group of people or shitting my pants or whatever I'm wearing around a group of people seems incredibly embarrassing. Just that alone. Add to that having a divine conversation with the spirit of the earth or the spirit of the forest or maybe there's no difference. Those two things happening simultaneously.

Don't knock it till you try it. How many times have you puked in front of people? How many times do you think you've puked in front of people? The real question is how many times have other people been lucid enough around me to know that I was puking? If you puke in a forest. I think that's the great joke. Your self-consciousness is so amplified when reality everybody else is just on their own

journey too. In the end of it you come out in this deep solidarity pact. We just went human. We went really human together. That is going to definitely give your good lenses of perception a little wipey-wipe. I like that. I see. I recognize it's just an egoic block that I don't want to be that vulnerable around people.

It's embarrassing to vomit, isn't it? You sort of lose control. It sounds gross. It's so fascinating all the psychedelics that ayahuasca, as far as I'm aware, is the number one, is the only one I can think of where puking, maybe mushrooms I guess, but where puking is a central part of it. Do you buy into the idea that there is more going on than just purging, like a physiological purging, that you're actually uprooting or evacuating some kind of dark spiritual energy?

Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that this is where the, in this conversation of, I'm sure you've liaised enough with New Age life coaches to hear this word intention thrown around enough, but it really is. You're about to go on that journey and you identify your North Star and you will go out there with your little ship and you know the waters are going to get rocky, but if you have your map there, it can help.

What I'm meaning to say here is in the process of vomiting is often the meaning that you ascribe to it. So you might start to feel like, oh man, these feelings of jealousy or these feelings of guilt and regrets are representing themselves in tarantulas under my skin and the just queasy, brown blob people that are inviting me with their spiky thorn and electric gills and you know, all of this creepy crawlies just come up to the surface in this unlangageable way. And to be so overwhelmed by that, that the way out is literally out, is quite beautiful actually to not have to grapple with it with the faculties of language, but through our

bodies and I will say that more than once I've looked down at my little puddle of relief and been like, wow, that is, I don't know if you've ever seen spirited away the Miyazaki movie, the black blob creature that is just absorbing all of these different things in the spa house and that's kind of like the purge, you know, you pull out the handle of the bicycle and suddenly all of these different memories and senses just come out in this one dramatic gesture. And I think there's something quite poetic about it. I never fancy myself an advocate of vomiting, but here we are.

And we use it as a culture, right? Like, don't you feel like we just need a good bar, maybe not, I don't know, honk if you like it. I mean, yeah, I do think that that could be a useful. You know, I do know that when I've had food poisoning and when it when it's done, when I'm better, I feel so good, like there's a sparkly, weirdly healthy, almost reborn feeling that comes when you've been vomiting for a couple of days straight. You do feel better like something definitely comes out that seems to be more than whatever

shitty food you ate totally, totally. And remember also that within the greater body of this traditional ecological knowledge of ayahuasca and Amazonian plants, we as Westerners get like the hyper abbreviated version, which is maybe, you know, go to a fancy loft and Joshua tree and have one night of an experience. Whereas, you know, in another context, there's a whole understanding of basically this process of a dieta, which is a long aesthetic cleaning out of the vessel and the instrument, which is our body to receive God or gods or whatever spirit have you. And that purging plays a much deeper role.

You're not just purging yesterday's spaghetti, you're actually having fasted for days, sometimes weeks, really, really intense diets. And so you're getting to deeper things that I think are incomprehensible to to those of us who are just, you know, living the everyday life without that contemplative pause. Does that make sense? Yes, it does. The dieta, is there in your encounter with the various cultures who sacramentally drink ayahuasca, is there a commonality between the dieta?

Does it change up from one tribe or one culture to the next? Yeah, great question. So the dieta is, I think of it like a knowledge process. It's an epistemological knowledge producing system where people learn about plants. So within these universities, these botanical universities of life in the rainforest, people have different curanderos or healers or onanhas, they all have different names for healers and each of the names mean different things. But a healer, a seer, some of them will have specific plants that they have kind of become

emissaries or representatives of. So the obieta vaquero, somebody who's a trained in the tobacco medicine, they'll be ayahuasqueros, people who are trained in ayahuasca and so on. And so these people, after having spent months and sometimes years of contemplative meditation and in a way a marriage to this plant, then carry the medicine of that plant and that medicine is represented, this is where it starts to get pretty metaphysical, transcendental. It could be the essence of the plant, the quality of the plant. They kind of see through the plant's eyes or something.

It's pretty far out. So I mean, the brass tacks of it, typically what I've seen is there is a process of making a promise to the plant, it's an exchange. I'm going to give you something in order to receive something from you. And what we give is our hunger, basically all of our appetites, our physical hunger, our thirst, our sexual appetites, our desire for certain things. Certain plants, the traditional wisdom calls for different renunciation processes. So you're not going to look in a mirror, you're not going to use soaps or anything fragrant.

You are only going to eat the fish that has so many little bones that you really have to work for every piece of meat. You eat a plantain that is cooked in this particular way and that is just the thing. It is not meant to be pleasant, but you are in this exchange, like I'm giving you, I'm giving you, I'm giving you all of my desire. And there's a point where the body hollows enough, the spirit hollows enough. And typically you're also alone in a small tombo, they call it a little home, outfitted with a hammock and nothing else.

So no notebooks, no music, no anything and you're there. And you just are opening to receiving the information of that plant. And I'll tell you that there's a certain point, obviously, then there's the imagination and there's suggestibility and there's all these other considerations. Like, oh, I'm supposed to have this experience and I trick myself into it. But I mean, I'll tell you that I've had moments where I'm in the middle of the night, wake up and suddenly I feel like I'm being outfitted by this fractal, rhizomatic, botanical armor. And it comes gently, but it comes surely.

And sometimes it's like electric and very scary. And other times it's motherly and it somehow energetically feels much like the plant itself looks or tastes. And you're like, oh, wow, that's that. That's literally unlike anything I've ever experienced. So I've always had, I've always kept one foot very firmly planted in this world that we are from. But there were times where I've really had to like seriously reckon with the fabric of reality that I've inherited because it blew my mind into smithereens.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, well, I mean, it's just a strange thing over here. If anyone is even talking about plants, usually it's just gardening tips or how to cook with them. There's very little, it's not like people are so idiotic that they don't recognize that plants have a kind of personality or a sort of, they clearly are living in their own reality. But they're in the West, they seem more ignored than they are in places that have given birth to ways of engaging with plant life via psychedelics, you know? And so I guess that's part of the mind blowing part, right? It's not necessarily mind blowing just because, holy shit, I am being possessed or I am dancing

or I am having sex with a plant. It's mind blowing because we've been in a sort of North Korea situation over here, right? Like a kind of bazaar bubble within which computers and all the Western modes of recreation, pleasure and business somehow obskinate that reality, right? Isn't that why it's mind blowing? I mean, it's probably what would be mind blowing if you pluck someone out of any hyper-fascist Orwellian universe and showed them, look, the whole planet's living in a completely different way. I want to thank Squarespace for supporting this episode of the DTFH and for creating

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of a website or a domain. All the Western modes of recreation, pleasure, and business somehow obfuscate that reality, right? Isn't that why it's mind blowing? I mean, it's probably what would be mind blowing if you pluck someone out of any hyperfascist Orwellian universe and showed them, look, the whole planet's living in a completely different way. Totally.

Totally. And I think it takes, I mean, imagine the fact that I think the Western hubris is so damn thick to allow us to believe that we could be acted upon. We could be acted upon. We're not just like penetrating our environment, but we are actually, we are doing the bidding of the corns and apples and the ganjas and the hyaloscas. Just imagine that. I mean, we are just teeny weeny little flesh skeletons walking around and I look at us

like delicious compost pellets that the plants are just going to love up eventually and could it be? And I think that when, yeah, when you have moments like that realizing that psychoactive plants have shaped and do shape our consciousness and almost like the bee gets drunk from the nectar, the ant goes crazy for the little droplets of honey, like we too kind of circulate. I think about coffee and cocaine and marijuana and these different and tea. I mean, our civilizations have been completely shaped by our appetites for those plants and we see it as us cultivating them, but I don't know.

Yeah, it's curious. In your book, you were talking about, I don't remember the name of the practice where they cut parts of, they burn it down. They burn it down. The slash and burn forests. But they're burning it down to grow from it because it fertilizes the soil. You burn little swaths, plant seeds there and then come back and now you have things that you can eat.

It's a form of cultivation in the jungle. Totally. I had a dark thought. Spill it. The dark thought was, my God, if we are being poveteered by the plants, maybe all the environmentalists have it totally wrong, that the plants are poveteering us to destroy ourselves in mass so that they can grow from the smoldering ruins of our civilization, that there isn't a kind of benevolence at all, but rather an accelerationist motivation happening from

the vegetable kingdom. We are all like, the plants are telling us, oh, we want to save the earth. We must be less consumerist, but really the plants are like, no, no, no, war. Go to war with each other. Just blow, just destroy yourselves so that we can have more fertile ground to grow from. 100% and then imagine this. What if the plants are the emissaries of the mycelium or the mushrooms? Some of them grow in Chernobyl.

Some of them are plasticators. Maybe they're like, oh man, the plastic civilization, fast forward a million years, they're just going to have this amazing mycelial kingdom just feeding off of our ruins and that's going to be life. The plants were the middlemen. I don't know. Yeah, they were just the part of the process of human beings wiping ourselves out. When you have had your own communication with plants, have you gotten that kind of message

from them? I mean, the people I know who have taken ayahuasca, generally the message is sort of more compassionate than that. I don't know how much it would be in their interest to spill their beans to me in that way. It's kind of like a toilet zone thing. How does it go, how to prepare man, remember that I'm just saying this. Oh yeah, that's cookbook, they find the cookbook that you're preparing man or whatever it is.

I haven't seen it that way, but I have been prepared for death and I've felt less, it's kind of like ready or not, it's coming and I think that this is one of the things that psychedelics in general have a unique affinity to accelerate us towards. How do they prepare you for death? Well, I think very practically my favorite iteration of this is when it's like, okay, I am Sophia, okay, I'm Sophia, I'm from this place, I'm from this place, what is this place, who's this person, and then my whole narrative just disintegrates like soft spider webs in the rain, and there I am, nobody and everybody, and that's a sweet way.

That's a sweet way. That's a non-struggling way, but we arrived to that in different ways, so I think practicing the good death is an interesting one. Practicing the good death, you mean practicing it via psychedelics or just meditation or what do you mean? I don't know, in all the time, I've personally been, I guess like a share, I wrote this book and I don't know if you've ever had this experience where you publish something and then you look at it and you're like, what the heck just happened?

Was that, I just blacked out, did I do that? Who is that? I don't believe anything in there, and you start to realize that your little, your attempts to cling on to some sort of a reality or a materiality just kind of dissolve in front of you and it's terrifying, and I think that I'm consistently needing to confront these ego deaths and I need to, an expectation to promote a book or succeed in a job or whatever it is in this civilization, and yet I have this tendency to want to unravel and compost. I love composting.

Compost is like my religion lately, I want to get a tattoo or a flag or something. We need that, allow ourselves to just keep dying, don't get too attached, I guess, right? I don't know. I don't know. One of my favorite mushroom experiences was, just exactly what we were talking about, suddenly I'm having this sense of like, oh, I was doing something. What was I doing? I was doing something.

You're doing a thing. Yeah, I'm like, I was doing something that started dawning and I'm like, oh, oh, I was being human. Oh shit, I'm human. I'm human, you know, like suddenly coming back into the identity, not from the perspective of oh, thank God I'm alive or, which I've had with the like, MEO DMT or like, oh my god, I'm here. But more of a sense of like, that you hear people who have ND, near-death experiences,

they don't want to come back. They're, usually their ancestors are saying, no, no, no, you've got to go back. You're not done. School's not out yet. You know what I mean? Like, it seems like this, in general, one of the through lines in near-death experiences is that people, it's not like they're dying to come back here. They're dying to not be here, literally, you know?

So do you get a sense that what the New Age people are saying regarding human incarnation is correct, that this is some kind of university or a teaching simulation or something? That this life experience is a teaching simulation? Yeah, like a school, a university, a kind of spiritual... Like there's a sysaric kind of loops to pass through or something like that? Yeah, like, yeah, exactly. Like, totally. It's not some meaningless thing.

We've sort of been assigned to something here. There's a reason behind it. Do you have that sense? Well, I think the most sense that I've ever made of that, because I don't necessarily feel that my world view does not neatly fit into this idea that like, oh, one llama dies and another is born on the hill, right? I don't know if the soul jumps bodies in that same way. I may never know.

We'll never know, but I do really love something that my maestro, his name is Jose Lopez. He's a shipibo healer. And he said something when we were in a diet and in a ceremony, and he was like, we do this work not for ourselves, but to relieve our past and liberate our future. And I was like, wow, dude, I don't know, I mean, it seems straightforward, but at the same time, in that moment, I realized like, okay, the work that I'm doing right now is because I am the one that is conscious in this moment. I am the one who's living and breathing.

And I have my grandmother's irises and, you know, information from her eggs in my uterus. And you know, all of this memory is in me, a part of me is reconciling the generational pain and trauma and patterns. And it is through reproduction, I myself don't have offspring yet, but I suspect that, and even in your relations with others, just untangling, we're in this great untangling process. And any bit of untangling we do along the way is worth something, I guess, you know? Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. How about you? I'm curious. Yeah. Well, I would love to answer that, but if you don't mind, Jose Lopez, when he was telling you that you're relieving the past, does he mean it like, I'm just thinking in terms of like Western psychotherapy, like I'm relieving trauma or I'm relieving myself or I'm, you know, untangling my own like false connections to the past or to, you know, my own shit or

whatever you want to call it, but it feels, does he mean it more in like an extre-temporal sense? Like, is their view of time different than the Western view of time? I mean, you know, like in other words, are you go literally relieving your ancestors of their karmic debt, of their stuff, because everything's happening at once, meaning your ancestors in some part of the time space continuum are still existing? I couldn't speak to their worldview because I am not of it, you know, but I think that, yeah, there's definite in some cases a more embodied understanding, like there are spirits

and there are influences that in some shape and form linger in our realm and they can feel a sense of alleviation, but, you know, I don't necessarily feel that way. I don't have as enchanted of a worldview because I wasn't brought up in a physical environment that creates that worldview, right? So I think for me, if anything, it's like, if any, if there's anything in life, it's our relationships and the energy that's created and relating between two people and in the memory of that relation and the feeling that that relation creates that to me is the realest thing there ever is really.

When people are on their deathbeds, they're not like, I wish I bought that car. They're like, oh, I wish I told her I loved her, right? Like that's the thing. We want to be touched. We want to touch and be touched in this world. We're that earthy, you know? And so to me, it's like, yeah, I think if we touch the memory of a thing, we are touched by it and it really is as ephemeral and fleeting as that.

I'll never forget the time my dad started telling me about his pet crow. He wouldn't often talk about his childhood because it wasn't an easy one, but holy shit. Apparently he tamed a crow that he really liked and the crow got eaten by a cat. I only wish that Storyworth had been around back then so that I could have collected more and more of my dad's wild stories. Sadly, my father has gone on to live in the eternal story in the sky or wherever it may be. So all of those stories are gone.

Also after approximately two decades of using various psychedelics, it's not like my brain is a steel trap. So the stories he did tell me, I can barely remember. I wish that I'd gotten him Storyworth for Father's Day. It's the perfect Father's Day gift. It's an online service that helps you and your dad or father figure connect through sharing stories and memories and preserves them for years to come. Storyworth has a reservoir of awesome questions like, have you ever feared for your life or

what's your favorite childhood memory? And these get sent to your dad who will answer them and then over time you will compile this incredible book filled with all of your dad's stories that you and your kids and your family will be able to enjoy and share for generations. It's a great way to make your dad feel special and it's a great way for you to find out many, many secrets because I promise you he's going to write things in the email that he might not have told you face to face. Give all the fathers in your life a meaningful gift.

You can both cherish for years to come. Storyworth, right now for a limited time you can save 10 bucks on your first purchase when you go to storyworth.com slash Duncan. That's S-T-O-R-Y-W-O-R-T-H dot com slash Duncan to save $10 on your first purchase. Storyworth dot com slash Duncan. To me, it's like, yeah, I think if we touch the memory of a thing, I think we're going to be touched by it and it really is as ephemeral and fleeting as that. Yeah.

Yeah, obviously, I have no idea. I just love that. Oh darn, I was hoping you might have the answer. Bad news, I do not. But I would like it if I did. It would be so powerful. Cool. I think I was listening to a lecture from Terrence MacKinnon.

He was sort of talking about the shaman, the maestro, the shaman is being somehow outside of time and space or I think he used the example of you're in an airplane, you look down, you see the terrain. For people who had no access to that altitude, you're reporting in on what's over the next mountain or whatever would seem spectacular, magical. I think he was saying the shamans, they through this work have gained access to a kind of temporal altitude wherein they can see what we call the future or have access to the past via something other than memories or something like that.

Makes sense. I mean, also if you look at just the lived practices of people who are broadly referred to as shamans, like even the Heyoka character, the sacred trickster character, they're living outside of the community hub. They live very often in isolation. They do not participate in the same rites of passage. They do not eat the same food. They don't go to the same parties or listen to the same music in many ways.

It's like they have chosen the different angle. Even if you just look at how people physically arrange themselves in a society in those communities, you'll see that of course they're going to have a different perspective and they may not be as entangled in the dramas of the lay people, the technicians of the sacred. They have different toolbox. Yeah, yeah, a different toolbox and yeah, well, I, but I mean that toolbox, it's so spectacular, at least from our perspective, it's so spectacular, isn't it? I mean, it's you, it's much older than our technology.

You know, we've got all this plastic shit that flickers and glows and can answer questions and stuff, but it's brand new. Whereas this technology that you're writing about, it's so old. And so I, I, anyway, I don't know, it's all speculation. I mean, there is so much mad. You read about God, anthropological essays on indigenous cultures with shamans, and there's so much sorcery there. There's so much magic.

There's so much Hogwarts level stuff going on. Honestly, I have to say, I'm a little surprised that you don't feel as connected to that reality as I imagined you might. Yeah, totally. And no one to expel you from that Hogwarts either. That's the scary thing. There are no parents in the room. Yeah, that's definitely like one of the funny tropes.

I don't know. One of the things that's a bit challenging in Westerners meshing with jungle people's medicine is that they expect these shamans to neatly, you know, mirror our saints and our priests and the concept of duality is just not what, not the 2000 year old plus story that we have been perpetuating. It just isn't the same. Like I always remember one of my favorite things is just in Shippebo. It's Shippebo is a community that live in Peru and they've become quite popular because

they have shared their medicines and their traditions pretty generously with Western folk and their greetings are Hakunyantan and Hakunyamakiri, which is basically, there are a couple of different ones, but it's like good morning or sorry, good night and good not night. Like there are little things like that where you're like, hold on a minute. What? Why not? You know, and you could just bang your head on that one there for a little bit.

That's so cool. Yeah. So little, little things like that, right? Where you start to realize like, huh, right? Like the night is not what we think it is, you know, and that's so cool. Yeah. So and I mean, also the, the, the ideas of sorcery and the different things that people have integrated into these practices have served purposes that are vital for this

continuity of a different community. Like, oh, that guy needs to go down because he's casting stuff on us. So we're going to, it's just a self preservation technique too. It makes sense within different containers. And then if you also look at like the different megafauna or like, you know, the Jaguar, the different people, the apex predators that are celebrated within the ayahuasca kind of pantheon, right? Like the psychedelic pantheon there, these are predators.

They stalk and they hunt and they kill you, you know, like that's, that's, that's that. Like those are your role models. I'm not, I mean, this is not an endorsement of, you know, Jaguar like violence, venue means, but just to kind of expand our worldview that things can get a little spooky there because you really are hanging on to a morsel of this essential goodness that I think we hope breathed life into this world. And you maybe realize that the disintegrating and darkness forces play a bigger role than we care to see.

I mean, I see compost, compost totally. If you walk around the Amazon, I've done this or any forest really, hopefully not all forests, but in the Amazon specifically, lots of deciduous trees and not ever greens. And I realized at a certain point that I am seeing as much death here as I'm seeing life. There's as many felled trees and dead things, just so much death around me and yet I'm only seeing the green because that's I am green. And if you slip into the yellows or the browns or the blacks, you start to see all those other ones and you're like, whoa.

Yeah. All right. That's so this. Okay. This is something I think about not just regarding people going to the Amazon or places like that to drink ayahuasca, but also people when they take their pilgrimage to India in search of the guru like Ramdastit or whatever the remote location is to find the awakened being. It seems like Westerners carry with them expectations based on what you're talking

about, based on this ethical system that has its roots in Christianity, fundamentalism, evangelical Christianity, whatever. They come to a place where that is just not the worldview and somehow even if they're going there to drink the medicine, to be healed, they still come back sometimes quite offended by something that happened there because the people in a completely different place from a completely different culture did not follow their idea of what morality is like. And sometimes I think maybe it's just really unethical for Westerners to go over there at all.

We're not supposed to be there because we're not ready because you can't go to another place and do this kind of weird subconscious colonization. Like you know what I mean? Our ideas of sexuality and their ideas of sexuality are two completely different things, probably. Yeah. And yet there's an expectation you're going to abide by our ideas of how this works. And I've always found that to be sometimes it gets people over there and lots of trouble

doesn't it? Oh yeah. Sometimes it causes all kinds of drama and trouble and horrible things, not because the person did anything necessarily bad from their worldview, but from the worldview of the tourists who came there to take the medicine. Do you ever think about that? Like maybe it's better for us just to stay away. Oh yeah.

I've been away for a while now. I think I've been grappling with all these things. Like for example, I remember the first time I went to the Ecuadorian Amazon. I was like still very much a fledgling in this space and I was with a community. And nobody made eye contact at all. No eye contact. Or when they shook your hand, it was a very limp kind of biscuit thing. It was like, you know, just what we in our culture would totally perceive as super rude,

you know? Well, they didn't look at me. So if you're just flashing eyes and you know, I'm having a spiritual experience and a gaze into the eyes of this person, you're going to realize that means something totally different than what it does for us. So yeah, I mean, I do, although I would push back against maybe forgive me if it's like the suggestion of a contamination or like this sort of call, you know, this, right? Like I think that we have this idea that indigenous communities are sort of hermetically sealed

in this container that is the forest. But if you look, if you look at different archaeological records or stories of trade routes, or if you even look at the botanical evidence of cross pollinators and birds and animals and peoples moving around the world, we are just like going straight for this diversified heterogeneous like like world. Like that's just the gesture. And also I want to say I was just thinking about, you know, are you talking about the botanical technology?

I was thinking about at the, at the risk of diverting this conversation. I just remember this, oh gosh, who was it? Somebody, it wasn't Rupert Sheldrake. It was, it was a, it was a piece, it was a speech written in 1928. I will find it and send it to you. And it was this, it was this kind of contemplation about the different, it was this visionary look at how there will be a new mineral dynasty, that the minerals, the mineral kingdom, we are emissaries of the mineral people.

And I'm just looking at phones and technology and all these metals and these communicators and these things. And I just want to throw in that, like, there is a worldview where people think, oh, we're returning to this eudonic, pristine, you know, prelapsarian past that is the plants and Pachamama and love. And, but then I also think like, whoa, if there are all of these other consciousnesses or creatures that influence the way that we do things like titanium and different, you know, like, I mean, all of these different metals that are, we just interact with them

like a deep frickin way right now that are, you know, that are, that we are communicating through right now. Like that is a whole other domain of, of, of power, of influence in the world. So, you know, I don't know where I was going with that. But I, it's interesting. That's cool. I like that the emissaries of minerals is, it's, it's fascinating. And then it was, and then there was another part that was like, they will cast webs in

the sky. And I was like, oh, shit, it's Skynet, you know, like it's, and it was like that there will be spider webs. And this was in the 1920s. We had no idea, you know, so. You mean you're talking about the prophecy, the apocalyptic prophecy of, right? That's the, well, it wasn't even apocalyptic. It was, I guess I'm just, I guess what I'm pointing to, to take a step back is, you

know, when we talk about ayahuasca and plant medicines, suddenly we are presented with this idea, oh, maybe there are other elements and creatures that are acting upon our consciousness and we are doing their bidding, right? So those are, let's say organic or natural biological entities. But then if you actually look at who is getting energy pumped into them or who's shaping our consciousness, it's like, there's this whole mineral paradigm that is going off the chain right now. You got me?

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Well, it's a collision between the two, isn't it? I mean, it seems to be some kind of like ongoing conversation, argument, debate. I don't know, game of chess or some attempt at dancing with each other, which seems to be going, I mean, depending on what side you're on. I guess, I mean, I don't, I, sometimes I just, like, it seems so interesting to me that we fly to these places to drink the medicine, flying over the damn

things, jet fuel falling down onto the thing, bringing, and I don't mean contamination, I just mean, yes, perhaps there is some sentience to jet fuel and maybe in the long term as the earth spins and spins, some incorporation of oil and plant matter will happen or something like that. But, um, totally, it just, and I don't, I don't mean to get dark or anything, but I just can't, for the life of me, work out how these two cultures could ever merge in a way that wasn't going to just completely wipe out one or the other.

I don't see how, how do we, you know, I don't know if you ever read Guns, Germs, and Steel, but you know, how do you, the power dynamics fucked, man. We've got all the money. We've got all the weapons. We've got all the stuff, you know, and, and, and, uh, I don't know. So I, I mean, I'm not saying we should hermetically seal them or anything like that, just sometimes the, and you wrote about it in the most beautiful way. I think you called the ayahuasca the, oh my God, the diaspora, like the, do you

remember that part of your book, the Amazon, the Amazonian diaspora, stretching out into the cities, into the lofts, everywhere. And I found that to be beautiful, but also somewhat sad, like the, like a child's just sending a random message out to the planet, like someone fucking help us. This is, you got to do something like there, there has to be something done more than just, uh, more than what's happening now. I just don't know, possibly understand what that could be. Totally, totally.

Yeah. I mean, and there are records that I've read and just stories that I've heard of these communities who many of them, you know, ayahuasca is not celebrated. It's actually put into this context against like capitalism and Nike sneakers and bubblegum and oil extraction. And it's seen as this antiquated vestige of the past that needs to be like literally killed in some cases, you know, and you find these, yeah, oh yeah. Definitely.

There are shamans that are killed sometimes in communities by different young folks that are part of that because they're seeing them as tying them down or it's witchcraft or, you know, they're just these old guys that don't know anything and they're working against our interests to develop. Holy shit. You know, because also remember that it's like, it's now, I mean, I work with communities in rainforests now and they, they are integrated into a global economy. There's no like going back, you know, it's, there's no pulling the plug on the thing.

And during COVID, I was working on this emergency fund and it was a group of nonprofit organizations and grassroots organizations and everybody came together at the request of all of these indigenous federations that were saying, listen, we just got totally caught off from the global supply chain and we don't have access to the traditional things that we used to have access to. You know, our lands are disappearing. We don't have our traditional agricultural practices and we are kind of cut off and we're about a generation, maybe two or half a generation, depending on where

you are in the forest, cut off from that. And in some ways COVID was really beautiful because it supported people in remembering those practices that they need to sustain themselves. But the, the, the acceleration is here, you know, the acceleration is here. So I know I've definitely grappled with that too. You know, feeling very sad, like hearing these stories about these old elders that used to transform into tigers and jaguars and, and, you know, they just were total transcendental masters and they were formally recognized by their

peers and every generation that goes by, people are less and less experienced and trained in those ways because there's more distraction in life and they don't have those 25 years of meditation beneath the tree that one might have needed to access those realms. You know, that is the story. So there's a lot, there's a lot to grieve. There's a lot to grieve. And, and I've also like, sorry, please, I just, I just, to the fossil fuels point,

I just, you reminded me of this vision that I had years ago. I was in a community that had an oil spill happen in the 19, in 1964. They called it the Chernobyl of the Amazon. It was this, to this day, there are, they're just these swamps of oil. Communities are born with deformity. It's just freaking terrible. There's no way to phrase it in a lighter way. And I was with the medicine and I'm in this moment and I'm just in, I'm, I'm

like a seagull in oil. You ever see those images of like the dawn commercials with the birds and the oil? Yeah. I, I am that. And I'm just like, whoa, and I'm, I'm getting crushed between these grinders and we're going in here. And I just had this moment of like, what are fossil fuels?

And I'm like, it's the past. It's the past. Like we are sucking the past out of the earth to accelerate the future. And we're just bending time in this way. And we are, we're like accelerating in this lifetime at the expense of the past. But then we're actually eating away at our future. And we just like hit this weird go button. Does that make sense?

Yes. Yeah. Terrifying. It's fucking horrible. It's horrible. It is horrible. You were a seagull when you were, when you were having this vision, you were an, an oil encrusted seagull.

Yeah. Jesus Christ. I see seagull with these thoughts. Yeah. So I mean, yeah, there's, so I guess, you know, to, to put a bow on it. Put a bow on the oil, die seagull. Fuck the soap. Let's go to oil spills and put bows on it.

It's like when I was really underline, they brought bags of candy to oil companies, brought bags of candy to communities who are already diabetic in order to get access to their lands. It's like, are you kidding me? It's terrible. It sucks so hard Duncan. It's so sad. So it's, um, yeah.

And like how to, how to sit with that, you know, and then what to do with that. Yeah. I think that that's where, you know, I, I struggled a lot writing this book, One Plant Stream, mostly because I dealt with my own self perception and the idea of other people's perceptions that I would be a colonialist who am I to write about this sort of thing. This has just been an intensely fascinating edge realm for me to dive into. And I hope I've never attempted to speak authoritatively, like as a person, only

as a person in this dynamic, you know, ecosystem, it's changing. And when I was younger, when I had my first really deep medicine experiences, one of which was as an iteration of his oil seagull, I had this knowing like literally the best thing that I can do with this incarnation is secure these lands, like make sure that the elders who have this wisdom have that land protected. And I've done everything in my power in this lifetime to work for that because I don't, you know, I don't see myself going to a two week ayahuasca retreat and becoming a shaman and saving the world.

Like I'd much rather be trained in the faculties of land protection and, you know, territory monitoring and all these different things. And that for me gives me like a bit of alignment with my Dharma, you know? I got it. Yeah, that's what I got. I didn't get any colonial anything from the book. I've just felt like I was transported to the Amazon. I felt like I was, I mean, that's why, I mean, that's the part that was upsetting to

me. It was just like you, you're, you're so good at writing about it. And like, I felt like I was, I've never been there. I felt like I was there. And then it was just a map, like your descriptions of the kids and the dogs and the, it just made me think of my own kids. And then I just, I don't know. I just, I felt like this immense like sadness and sort of like, uh, I don't know, it's like the library, you know, they say the library of Alexandria

burned down. There's all these ancient. Don't remind me. Yeah. Ugh. It's such a fucking bummer. Bummer. What was in there?

We'll never know. Is it in the Sphinx? Who knows? But it's something similar is happening right now, it seems like. And, and, and it's just the, you know, the, it's the, the, the, the things that are written inside of plants and, and, and sung about you. So yeah, I, to me, there's a, you know, everyone's get, you know, it's all up in arms over book burning.

But we don't realize like those are books too. Yes. There's a books and they're just going away. It'll just disappear too, probably. It'll just go away. That thing you just told me about, about, uh, younger people out there just telling shamans to shut the fuck up is really depressing. Yeah.

And maybe, but maybe that's just the way it goes. Composed, right? Like, what are you going to cry over? Something else will grow out of it, I guess, right? Something else will grow out of it. And that's why I have really like, you know, I mean, everyone likes mushrooms these days, but I really like mushrooms these days because I do find a kind of redemptive worldview around the idea that like, you know what, they're just going

to do the work, they're going to do all of the work. They're going to re-weave the world. And the best we can do is just compost gracefully, you know. I know, eat light and suck dirt. That's just like, eat light and suck dirt. I don't want to suck dirt. What does sucking dirt do? I've never heard that before.

Oh, you mean eat light. I thought you meant like eat less food. Now I get it. Sorry. Plants, that's like the play, you know, that's what they do. It's no, I got you. I thought you were saying maybe eat a little less cheeseburgers and suck dirt. It sounds like an insult.

Eat light and suck dirt, asshole. Get out of my cab. So, okay, I have. Tell me, tell me about your, this preservation, tell me about this, like, you know, I love the redemptive quality of psychedelics. I love being born again. I love getting high just for no reason at all. But I, and I, I, what, how do we get into like actual real world preservation of

these cultures and these places that, you know, to me that the, I think the whole healing thing is fantastic and everyone's into healing and it's like, how many fucking times do you have to heal yourself? But the, to me, the, the, the message in the bottle from these things is, Hey, help, can you help? We need help. Do something. So what does that look like?

Pragmatically, what does that look like? Uh, how do we, how do we help for real in a way other than just like, you know, having visions of our ancestors and all that though, I, yeah, et cetera. I mean, I'll refer to my little notebook of life, which is, you know, has a few notes, um, this is just what I've arrived to. I think that we're in an immensely complex world and you find one thing that you really feel moves you and you love and you hope future generations might see. Um, in terms of actual rainforest conservation, which became my go to and

not conservation, this is the thing. Like in environmental conservation, traditionally, unfortunately, you actually see really messed up things like Western people coming and saying, this is like public land now. And then dispossessing indigenous peoples who have cultivated, you know, thousands of years of relationship with those landscapes. That's messed up. You know, um, so I've always, I kind of had a sense that basically human, a

human rights approach to environmental conservation is the way. So not this kind of authoritative outsider thing, but actually working with communities on the ground to preserve the lands that they depend on and that their stories and memories and myths are woven into. Nobody is more invested in the longevity and happiness of those lands than the people who call them home. And I think that that's a really important thing to remember. Not always, but often.

Um, and so for years, I've been working with different organizations in Peru and in Ecuador. And now, uh, I work with an organization called the Rainforest Foundation US. And we do, we take that rights-based approach to defending different rainforests in Central and South America. Um, and the story of how it was founded was kind of funny. Um, it started at a sting concert backstage in the 1980s when these Brazilian activists smuggled in, um, this Rowney chief, chief Rowney, uh, he's this

Kayapo indigenous leader, and he has, you know, the large disc plate in the full and feathered regalia. And sting was not expecting that when he went backstage and chief Rowney said to him, Hey, man, like we need help. This was in the 80s, you know, and he was like, okay. So sting worked together with Rowney to protect their lands. And he started the Rainforest Foundation. And so, yeah, pretty far out.

That is so far out. So wait, how? Okay. So somebody when they're thinking like, what are we going to do here? They're like, I've got an idea. Take our chief backstage at a sting concert. How did they come to that of all the other for like, why sting? Whose idea was that?

I don't know. I have no idea. Was it a dream? Was it a nice batch of Kool-Aid? We'll never know what series of events led to that. But it ultimately led to an area about the size of the state of Pennsylvania being preserved in the Amazon, which is really cool. Yeah.

But the analyst, what does that mean preserved though? I'm sorry. What do you mean preserved? Like, what does that actually mean? So it means it's a great question. In this particular case, it's officially demarcated and recognized as indigenous territory. That's what I meant by it.

So different communities do have land rights, but what happens often is that they don't have mapping technology to bring forth to federal databases. So federal states or whoever it is will sell concessions to soybean and cattle ranchers or whoever it is. And there's no second record to say, hey, this is actually our traditional land. And those traditional lands do have some internationally recognized rights. So one of the things that we do is work with indigenous communities developing mapping technology and basically working with satellite data.

There's this network called Global Forest Watch, which has this amazing live database and you can see actually deforestation all around the world. And we work with communities using smartphone technology and drones. And it's very actual. It sounds kind of complicated, but it isn't that complicated. And when they see deforestation on their land, they can actually check that with Global Forest Watch's data and then they have a case that they can bring two different authorities to report environmental crimes, if that is what happens.

Wow. And yeah, that is so high tech. That's wild. Minerals, man. The minerals. I got you. Yeah. Circle.

I'm a little slow. Okay. I'm slow. Just on time. I get it now. Right on time. You got it. Kind of neat though, right?

So yeah. So you're like, okay, okay. You can kind of see how there's some, there's some coming together. There's some synergy happening here. Yeah. And so there are, you know, we at Rainforest Foundation, we work on the monitoring part, which I mentioned. Then there's also, then there's supporting with capacity building.

So a lot of the time you'll have these communities that are like super stoked on defending their territories, but the nature of the 21st century is that we need funding in some cases to get offices, like basic thing materials, like a printer and a computer and different things that you might need to apply for grants or funding that you might need to advance a different project, maybe for solar panels or for, you know, regenerative agriculture projects or for mapping or monitoring or whatever it is that communities feel that they need in order to live a good life and protect their forests.

And so we support them in identifying what their needs are and then helping them building out those tools that they need in order to do what they got to do. You know. Wow. So, yeah, and, and we are wading into the waters of blockchain technology and web three, all those words, yeah. And I mean, you know, I am no whiz, but what I do know as somebody that works at a nonprofit is that these institutions and just that concept of

philanthropy in general, you know, I hope I don't regret saying this in the future, but it's, it's pretty like people just don't pay tax, rich people don't pay taxes and they just do philanthropy instead, which is like, yeah, okay, I guess, but I mean, it could be improved upon, I think. And, you know, the concept of foreigners coming and helping different people is also like a colonialist reproduction, right? Like how do we move past that? And then there's the whole thing where we're petitioning to large financial

institutions that are built off, whose wealth is built off of extractivism and saying, please, can you help us fund, you know, protecting the Amazon? And they're like, sure, let me just give you this money that came out of this oil, right? Whoa, what a Maya over here. Like that is so wild. It is deep. Yeah.

So, I mean, so what I've noticed is that I think one of the, one of the really cool things about the funding that we receive in cryptocurrency and, you know, through via blockchain technology is that we suddenly have this stream of income that is unrestricted, meaning that we don't have these big, heavy financial institutions that are looking to have their names embossed in like a gold plaque at a museum saying we did this thing, right? But instead, it's mostly anonymous donations from young people who actually want to see their wealth go towards something that is changing the world.

And like on my side, it actually is like we're suddenly getting a really impressive influx of funds that is allowing us to do the urgent work, like literally very urgent work that we need to do. But it's a complicated subject, you know, as there's environmental factors, you have to calculate, there's so much going on there. But that's one thing that I feel interested in and about. So. Incredible.

I want to be, I want to help. How do, how do we make an NFT with us, man? I thought NFTs tanked. Didn't they tank? Doesn't that, isn't that done now? Aren't they yesterday, aren't NFTs over? I'll make, I would love to make a rainforest saving NFT. I don't know how, I don't think you're going to get sting level movement

from that thing, but we can try. Who knows? Yeah. That's incredible. I'm so happy to meet you and thank you for your time. I, it's such a wonderful thing. You know, just first of all, you're, you're such a good writer and your book is really, really good.

I'm so excited to finish it. I love it. And it's so nice to find a book that actually transports you to a place where you're like, I haven't felt that the last time I felt like this reading a book was like McKenna, you know, he could do the same thing where it's just like, holy shit, what is this coming from? So thank you for that. And, um, I really hope that, uh, you'll come back on the podcast.

I would love that. Talk more. Yeah. Okay. So much for having me. Will you let people know how they can plug in and, and like connect to not just your book, but to also, uh, the rainforest conservation and what can we do to help totes?

All right. So the book for starters is called ayahuasca. It's called when plants dream ayahuasca, Amazonian shamanism and the global psychedelic renaissance. Um, you can type that one into the search places. And then I work with the rainforest foundation us. So we're rainforest foundation.org and you can learn all of that. We have a great stories team.

So we have people on the ground reporting and getting really into the nuances and different, you know, updates on the technology, what's working, what isn't working. So if you really want to like learn about that, um, we are also super excited about working with small companies and different projects. And if you have a thing and you want to, you know, contribute some portion of those proceeds to the rainforest and directly to indigenous forest defenders, you can write us and we can do that.

Um, and then you can find me just at Sophia Rockland on all of the places where people appear as at. Thank you. Thank you so much. Oh, all the links you need to find Sophia are going to be at dunketrustle.com. Howdy Krishna. Thank you. Halleloo.

A big thank you to Sophia for coming on the show. Are you all the links you need to find her are going to be at dunketrustle.com. Please come see me in Philadelphia. Check out the other dates that I've got coming up at dunketrustle.com. And I'll see you all next week. It's a two podcast week. We've got a conversation with Dan Harmon coming up and a really deep dive into Taoism with Monk Yun Ru.

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