TrueLife - Hamilton Souther - Ineffable

Starting point is 00:00:01 Darkness struck, a gut-punched theft, Sun ripped away, her health bereft. I roar at the void. This ain't just fate, a cosmic scam I spit my hate. The games rigged tight, shadows deal, blood on their hands, I'll never kneel. Yet in the rage, a crack ignites, occulted sparks cut through the nights. The scars my key, hermetic and stark. To see, to rise, I hunt in the dark, fumbling, fear. Hears through ruins maze, lights my war cry, born from the blaze.

Starting point is 00:00:40 The poem is Angels with Rifles. The track, I Am Sorrow, I Am Lust by Codex Serafini. Check out the entire song at the end of the cast. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the True Life podcast. I hope everybody is having a beautiful day. I hope the sun is shining. Hope the birds are singing. Hope the wind is at your back.

Starting point is 00:01:13 I've got an amazing show for you today I have with me. What promises to be one of the most transformative conversations we've had. Today we are joined by a true pioneer of consciousness, a man whose work bridges ancient wisdom and modern life, Hamilton Southern. Hamilton's journey is nothing short of extraordinary. After being called to the Amazon over two decades ago, he became the first Westerner to be fully initiated as a maestro-medico-vegetalista, the title rarely bestowed.

Starting point is 00:01:43 Under the guidance of the legendary Julio Lerena Panedo, Hamilton emerged himself in the depths of shamanism, a calling that has since transformed not only his own life, but the lives of countless others. What truly sets Hamilton apart is his ability to bring this ancient lineage of plant medicine into the 21st century, guiding more than 15,000 people through over 3,000 life-altering ceremonies. But he's not just someone, he's not just a healer in the traditional sense. He's a visionary, a thought leader at the intersection of spirituality, technology, and the future of human potential. As the founder of the Blue Morpho Academy, Hamilton has built a global movement that not only preserves the sacred traditions of the Amazon, but also adapts them for modern seekers, people searching not just for healing, but for profound transformation. Hamilton's work has impacted high-profile leaders, entrepreneurs, and creatives who seek to transcend the limitations of conventional success and tap into something far great.

Starting point is 00:02:43 their own mastery. His groundbreaking think tank is at the forefront of exploring how technology and consciousness can coexist and evolve together. And through ventures like Gaia Labs and Liquid Earth, he's pushing the boundaries of what's possible, not only in the spiritual world, but in the realms of science, technology, and collective consciousness. Today we'll be exploring some of the most profound questions humanity faces. What is the true nature of reality?

Starting point is 00:03:09 How can plant medicine and altered states unlock new dimensions of consciousness and perhaps most importantly, what does our future look like if we can come together, heal, and elevate as a species? Before I move a little bit further, I just want to say thanks to a mentor of mine, Marco Algron, who had brought, who was a friend of yours, a friend of mine, brought us together, and shout out to Marco. Thank you for doing everything, for being a cool mentor for me for 30 years. Hamilton, how are you today, my friend? Hi, I'm doing really well. Thank you for having me on the show. Yeah, I'm stoked you're here today. I've been speaking to a lot of people about integration,

Starting point is 00:03:43 And on some levels, it seems that your whole journey of life has been integration. Like you move between these two worlds. And I'm wondering if you could talk about that a little bit. I think ever since I journeyed into plant medicine, I've been integrating that first, that decision to have embraced plant medicine, first out of curiosity and a calling. And it continued integration of all things life. There's a continuous cultural integration, personal integration. and my continued work in plant medicine,

Starting point is 00:04:17 and one of the joys of it is that it's not just for the people you're working with, it also is for yourself at the same time. So there's this continued exploration and this adjustment that's taking place all the time between cultures, languages, people, backgrounds, industry, and kind of the greater collective that we're experiencing now. I think this is the most diverse and exciting time in history. Yeah. Yeah, that's really well said, and I couldn't agree more.

Starting point is 00:04:45 It seems that there's so many opportunities as well as pitfalls out there. I kind of thought it would be a good idea to start this conversation talking about Susto, like this idea of this illness in Latin America where people are affected by, you know, maybe it's ill finances or bad. Like, I'm sure you can define it better than me. But it's interesting to think about the concept of Susto and then like the concept of all this stuff in the DSM-5. Maybe you can talk about those two things a little bit.

Starting point is 00:05:10 Yeah, Susto is a name given to a traditional kind of spiritual illness that they describe of as a spiritual fright or spiritual trauma. And typically affects babies. You see it really common in babies. And then you also see it common after traumatic events. And I think that what's unique about the Amazonian cultures in relationship to Susto is first they're diagnosed. that there's an affliction, there's a problem very early on in the disease creating cycle or the illness creating cycle. So they recognize that at spirit, which for them means energy, not like a disembodied ghost so that we're clear on what we're talking about. We're talking about like your energy field. It's scientifically measurable, et cetera. They're saying that when that has been impacted, they have a way to diagnose that impact. They call it Susto. And then they have a way to diagnose that impact.

Starting point is 00:06:08 they call it Susto. And then they have a way to treat it and a way to heal it, which kind of curtailed the disease creating or illness creating process. So if someone goes through an event that causes Susto, they recognize it, they diagnose it, they treat it. It doesn't turn into depression or anxiety disorders. It doesn't turn into, you know, other kinds of afflictions that could last over a long period of time like PTSD, et cetera. And so it's a unique and fascinating way of viewing the beginnings

Starting point is 00:06:41 of mental disease or mental discomfort that could become mental disease and a mechanism to actually address it. Yeah, it's a, and one of the questions I have written down. In Western medicine, the Cartesian model tends to separate mind and body, whereas the Latin American concept of Susto sees trauma as a deeply intertwined experience of body. spirit and environment. Could this contrast between Susto and the DSM's compartmentalized approach reveal a deeper, more unified understanding of illness? Yeah, I think it can.

Starting point is 00:07:17 I think Susto is probably just the, you know, like the doormat in front of the door of going in that direction of understanding. I think as you start to pick that apart and you start to look at it, you're going to find out that there isn't a compartmentalization. period. So the idea of compartmentalization as a mechanism to understand something, while allows for tremendous focus for a short period of time, is not taking into consideration the greater global issues or the greater unified issues that somebody would be experiencing. And so I think if we look at that from a beginning perspective, you see that the Amazonian traditions

Starting point is 00:08:00 treat you as a whole being. A good example of that is, have an issue, like you break a bone or you twist an ankle or you dislocate a joint, after healing the physical illness, they'll treat your spirit as well. They'll treat your energy as part of the natural process of healing. And so anytime after any major trauma, any major traumatic event, there's a recognition that there's been an impact on your mind. There's been an impact on your spirit. There's an impact on you.

Starting point is 00:08:29 you know in the deeper aspects of you the part that only you know they recognize oh there's an impact there we need to intervene and heal that part of that person yeah what comes to mind is the separation of treatment versus ceremony like it seems like the ceremony is itself a treatment right there feels like we're kind of lacking that in western medicine i you know in the practice of visionary medicines. So to, you know, first be clear in the Amazon, there's the visionary medicines and the medicines that look very much like your herbalist practices or your naturopathic practices or even your Western medical practices. So just to keep that in mind, you have poultices, tinctures, wraps, baths as a way of transferring the medicinal properties of over

Starting point is 00:09:25 a thousand, two thousand different kinds of medicinal plants. There are many more than that, but commonly used in the Amazon as a means of treatment for a variety of every kind of illness they've diagnosed over the last thousand, two thousand years. So as a complete body of work. And then they also recognized through the use of visionary plants that there was a means to access the much deeper states of the mind. Like we have the conscious mind, subconscious and unconscious. They figured out how to access those layers with interoperable. person and even go deeper than that into them, which is typically referred to as the visionary arts.

Starting point is 00:10:01 And when you take somebody in, you get past the idea that there's individualization between the mind and the body or the mind, body, and spirit. It's recognized as one whole organism. And then in the visionary arts, there are the practices that are ceremonial. And the purpose of the ceremonial arts is to connect to something that's fundamentally deeper and part of the mystery of Earth and the cosmos. And they use mythological terms for it, but they ultimately translate to the energy or the force or the power or the phenomena.

Starting point is 00:10:41 And in a psychomagical or spiritual way, it could be described of as spirit or divinity or God. And so they bring into the notion of healing ceremony for a direct access and direct communion with this origin of our life, with this origin of the earth itself, and through that direct connection, facilitate healing and altered states. It's interesting and sometimes difficult to imagine how you can integrate that kind of learning. Coming from, like, the Western world, where obviously I come from,

Starting point is 00:11:20 how was it going through and trying to learn some of these big ideas about, oneness, these big ideas about healing in some ways or how the body heals itself. Were there some, in your process of becoming who you are today and helping a lots of people and finding new paths for yourself and others, were there some parts that were particularly tricky for you? There were many parts that were tricky. This was uncharted territory. And we had no frame of reference for what was supposed to happen if somebody was.

Starting point is 00:11:56 tried to do this. I was a pioneer in that sense and I was in my early 20s and enthusiastic and ready to go on the line, you know, for knowledge and wisdom and the path and science and everything else. I think there are many tricky parts. First, I think I was well prepared and unique in a perspective that I had studied anthropology and I had learned how to study people, including myself going through that process. The second piece of it, I think, I think I was very well guided by Julio in his teachings. Maestro Julio taught me to be aware of what would have been very concrete, rational, practical understandings in your everyday environment and then also these much greater perspective.

Starting point is 00:12:45 So I think having a grounded representation and a connection to something much greater than that was helpful. And then I think the really big hurdles was trying to understand that the way we had been presented knowledge and understanding was only way. So I had grown up with education is and then a description and an experience of that. Learning is and a description very much a teacher in front of a whiteboard or a projector of presenting information, lectures, the ingesting of that information, the processing of it, the ability to take exams. And all of a sudden, I found myself in the Amazon where there was none of that. There were what they called tests. And tests meant if you could survive the test, then you could move on to the next test.

Starting point is 00:13:37 So it was very much a right of passage, not an ingesting of information and a presentation of that information. So it transcended the mind and it went into something much deeper. and that could look like, you know, one day being presented a large cup of plant medicine and you drink the plant medicine and all of a sudden you're in a very difficult situation for extended period of time. It could be that you're expected to, you know, do physical activity as well as fasting for extended periods of time and also during that the ingestion of other plant medicine. So there are these training techniques that you get put through that they just called the tests. and I would ask, well, how do you know you passed the test? And they would just say, you're still alive. You have to quit and you're still alive, then you pass the test.

Starting point is 00:14:27 And so I think there were some, you know, dramatically difficult times. Hard to know the elasticity of life itself, but it felt very much like there were times when that elasticity was stretched very thin. And we were right on the, you know, the cusp or the verge of what transition to death would be. And then I ultimately learned that you get taken through the states of consciousness or the states of mind or the physical states yourself pushed all the way to that edge. Many claim they cross over, have near-death experiences and come back who've gone through the training. You get taken through those processes so that you have an awareness and an understanding of all of the different kinds of experiences that somebody in the tribal society is having. So if you're treating somebody who's in the transition of life, if you're treating somebody who's very young, if you're treating somebody who's had a broken bone, if you're treating somebody who's in high fevers, you will have gone through almost all of those experiences yourself. So you'll have a frame of reference to be able to understand what that person's experiencing and how to be able to treat them.

Starting point is 00:15:36 That's, it's amazing description. I've never heard it put that way. It makes a lot of sense to understand how someone can help other people. who may not even know them or thoroughly understand all the consequences that led them to that spot. But yeah, that's, it's brilliant there. You spoke to the idea of patterns a little bit about being able to see the bigger pattern and apply it to the patterns in your life. Is that something that you learned when you were younger, that you learned down there, learned in both aspects of education? I think Western education is pretty abstracted.

Starting point is 00:16:14 And maybe only until you get much older, do you realize the real applicability of in your life. When I was first in the Amazon, I treated it as almost like a second childhood. I was living in the forest, having to learn how to live in that environment. And to put it into perspective, I was up a very small tributary beyond other inhabitants. And upriver from me, there were no permanent inhabitants of the forest. So this was untouched Amazonian primary forest and filled with all of the animals and everything that you could think of.

Starting point is 00:16:48 And if you got lost out there, there would have been no one to help you, no one to find you, there are no services, there's no support, there was no telecommunication, et cetera. It was just nature and you being alive, which I found invigorating and fascinating and an incredible to be. Out in that environment, I realized that the applicability of information and the applicability of learning was something that you had to apply to your self. immediately and you had to recognize patterns immediately in your life that could support you and sustain you. And so the nature of pattern recognition was very important. And that could be

Starting point is 00:17:33 just where you are in the forest. It can look homogenous or to a person who's used to it. It can look completely different. Every meter of forest could be completely unique to them. They don't just see a mass of leaves. They see a context of very diverse patterning that's there. It could be how you recognize what food to eat or what not to eat, how you recognize a medicinal plant and how to be able to know how to harvest it. And then it can go all the way into the visionary ceremonies where people speak about seeing very complex, highly sophisticated patterns, fractals, colors, and representations of very advanced mathematics that I found to be fascinating because you're in such a low-tech environment from a human perspective. I think the Amazon is one of the

Starting point is 00:18:18 highest tech environments from a biological perspective. But from a human perspective, you have very rudimentary tools there and then consuming plants that give you access to your consciousness where you see the most sophisticated forms of mathematics and linguistics and patterning. And in that, you have to learn how to deduce and discern the patterns of illness in somebody. And that really becomes the diagnostic field through which somebody, learns to understand the illness or affliction somebody has, how to diagnose Susto,

Starting point is 00:18:54 etc., is in these extremely complex patternings that would be invisible to the naked eye to a normal observer. And so I think the ability to rene very young in me and certain aspects of it were helpful to me when I was in the Amazon going through that, quote, second childhood, learning how to now as an adult live an entire new environment and a complete new way, from sustenance to moving around transportation, navigation of the environment, et cetera, but then also going into a highly sophisticated area, which was the plant medicine ceremonies themselves,

Starting point is 00:19:30 where it seemed like we would transcend ordinary reality, go into non-ordinary reality, and confront maybe some of the hardest problems and most complex patternings that we knew how to imagine. Man, that is, it's poetry. I'm trying to wrap my mind. around a lot of it. The idea of linguistics and mathematics in that age old, you know, question, did we invent mathematics or did we discover it? Sometimes you see these incredible

Starting point is 00:19:59 patterns, one of which is like these incredible geometric images or tesseracts that are moving in some ways. Is that a language in itself, in your opinion? I think it's an aspect of linguistics. Natives learned how to read the geometric patterns that people see in ayahuasca vision. bring language to them in the form of ecoro and be able to transfer the nature of that information to somebody else, meaning that you could have a room of 10, 20, 30 people, or maybe even a larger group, and the medical vegetalista can bring ecore to that space, which is melodic and sound and chanting, rhythms, and language, all in it at the same. time, and then the collective field that everybody is seeing and experiencing starts to take on similar to identical characteristics amongst all the parties there.

Starting point is 00:21:00 And so that represents an understanding that there is a language that's behind it, but I like to think that humans are the ones who codified language out of something inherent and fundamental to the universe itself, something inherent to the cosmos, the galaxies, Earth, which even though we abstract it, typically in our mind, this is the universe right here. There is no separation from the universe. The universe is the whole cosmos, and we're part of it, which is a miracle in its own right. And so I think that the universe itself has incredible complexities and refinement as you go down in subtlety of energy, like from cells to molecules to atoms to subatomic particles

Starting point is 00:21:43 to quantum. As you go into that, there's a tremendous. tremendous quality and a tremendous beautiful patterning associated with that. That becomes very visual and very contextual inside the visionary ceremonies themselves. And I realized very early I was interacting with, we're not having a psychedelic trip in the way that that had been described to me in the West, but they were actually exploring something that I ultimately came to describe of as consciousness, that they were exploring a fundamental aspect of the reality around them.

Starting point is 00:22:22 And that consciousness was shared and it was also unique to an individual. And it was also something that extended beyond the body. And I believe that those patternings are real, consistent and part of this great matrix that were matrix of matter or matrix of energy that were a part of. And that we as humans discovered the ability to codify that into language. And so then the language of mathematics comes from that, the language of spoken languages, the archetypal languages, all the different symbolic codes we use to bring meaning to what is consistent, repetitive, and consistently experienced in our awareness. It's amazing to hear the way in which we make meaning out of language. And when I get to hear the story about the Caros and someone's ability to bring a meaningful ceremony or a meaningful event into the lives of other people, that sounds like a bigger aspect of language to me on some level. Like sometimes I feel like we're just now figuring out how to communicate meaning to one another.

Starting point is 00:23:35 What do you make of meaningfulness and conversation in linguistics? When I think of linguistics, I typically like to think of deep history. and the simplest way to understand for me language is when we didn't have them. So what were we, try to imagine, what were we before these languages? And if you go and study language, you realize that the languages are living organisms. They change. Today, people speaking quote unquote English sounds nothing like English from 100 years ago or 200 years ago or 300 years ago. And if you go further back in history, no one's speaking English.

Starting point is 00:24:16 Then you go back further in history, and we realize that, you know, 98% plus of all the languages are all extinct, just like the species. And so we keep going back and back and back. And then we realized there was a need. There was a need for our ancestors, one of us, a homo sapien, a human, to express themselves and make meaning of that expression. And that's the birth of this language and a need to express. commonality associated with it.

Starting point is 00:24:45 And I think that the reliance we have right now on spoken languages is a very new advent in Earth's history, and that before it there's a kind of language that's much more energetic-based or field-based or nuanced-based. And that nuance into syllables, into words, into syntax, into language is actually fairly new for humans, maybe it's hard to say, but maybe within the last 100,000 years, we developed those capacities. And so to think that now what we're actually doing in the evolutionary cycle is finally developing the ability to communicate deeper meaning, finding the ability to use language in this form to express subtlety and recognize it, finally crossing the chasm of the mind, the individualized

Starting point is 00:25:38 mind and language to really get to two people communicating in a way that makes a lot of sense is actually something very new. And I don't think it's far to think that as a species, we're very early in these technology, in the advent and use of these technologies that we take for granted today. So I see lots of technologies that are very new for Earth, as the first time Earth has had any for emergence of these tools. are of these languages, say within the last thousand, two thousand, ten thousand, hundred thousand years. When you think of Earth being four plus billion years old,

Starting point is 00:26:17 you say, well, oh, if it only happened in the last hundred thousand years, that's really new for the earth to have these kinds of languages. And so to make sense of that for me, I like to try to think of, well, what's human? What are we in a million years, a hundred million years, a billion years, if we're still around. What are we? Well, then we would be right now some of the earliest humans that ever existed. We would be some of the prototypical versions of humans. Most of us and most of what's been going on right now in the world would not be in our history books. It would be completely forgotten. There might be a single touch point like we're using to describe 500,000 years ago. And it's hard for us to realize how maybe relevant and irrelevant that is,

Starting point is 00:27:02 but at least it gives context to why we could think, the use of meaning, the use of language, even though it's so taken for granted now, is something very new and something that's emerging and finally gaining some real capacity to express ourselves through. Yeah, sometimes, you know, if you look at the aspect of everything happening in the world, you go, man, we descended from angels.

Starting point is 00:27:28 You think, what a mess. But if you think we descended from this other branch of monkeys, You're like, hey, it's not too bad. We're kind of crushing it in some ways. Oh, man. When we talk about cycles and patterns a lot, and it seems to me, in some of my journeys, like it comes in waves. Do you think that this technology or this sort of tide of psychedelics that's currently moving forward in the world is part of a cycle that maybe something happens to us when we're ready or it's maybe we're in danger or something? or how do you see that as a pattern or is it?

Starting point is 00:28:05 The first thing I like to think is that it's only in the most recent history do we have any evidence that the psychedelic visionary plants have ever been restricted. So I've been all over the world. And the one thing I notice about humans all over the world is that they figured out what you can and can't consume in your environment a long time ago. And I don't venture into understanding exactly how that got worked out by everybody. there are different theories, but I do know in every environment I've gone into, almost everybody there knows this is what's edible, this is what's not.

Starting point is 00:28:41 And so that just leads me to think that the understanding of the ingestion of mind-altering substances has been around for a long time. Sophistication grows around them, like in their preparation, how to combine them, how to use them. Maybe that's more recent in history. So I think first I think it's just important to understand that as a species, I think the simplest argument for why all of these substances is because we came from beings consuming these substances and we've been consuming them from the very beginning. I think that just makes the most sense. There's no reason to think there would have been a prohibition. There's no reason

Starting point is 00:29:18 to think there would have been a question of morality, ethics, efficacy, medicinal quality associated with them, et cetera. So I go back to our original ancestors, the first homo sapiens. are consuming in their environment, figuring things out. And some of them happen to be mind-altering. And when they are, they kind of have the big eye, aha moment. And they just jot that one down. They figure out how to collect it or cultivate it

Starting point is 00:29:44 or keep it around if it was positive for them. So then you come into a really unique period of history in the last hundred years, which I think of as a great application of restriction, a great movement. to bring illegalization to complex societies. I think it's important to understand that the legal codes that we live under now are some of the most complex ever in history.

Starting point is 00:30:15 And because of that, we see these great prohibitions. And the great prohibitions around the plant medicines come in the last 50 to 100 years. And the most restrictive coming in the 1970s. So if we understand that, there's a really unique time that has happened, which is a kind of legislation against these compounds and against these plants that have been around forever in our history that are all of them plants that existed before the first Homo sapiens. So those plants were growing and propagating themselves and growing and the fungus was growing and propagating itself before there ever was the very first Homo sapien. So the Homo sapien emerged into Earth with a mind-altering substances wherever they found them. And it's only in the most recent history there's been prohibition. And at that same period of time, there's also a great social compression.

Starting point is 00:31:16 And we're now at a time where people are realizing that there's a greater need associated with these plants, especially around mental health and well-being and exploration and consciousness and greater meaning and purpose in their lives. And they're now venturing into explore experiences with these. And that has caused a wave. But the wave wouldn't be a wave if there hadn't been the restriction and compression to begin with. So that's artificially created by our own legislation and by our own politics. If this had been embraced, if these had been embraced and truly studied for their medicinal qualities and purposes as they emerged, as the anthropologist and explorers brought them to Western attention,

Starting point is 00:32:00 and they got the same amount of funding and support adopted into where they were appropriate for medicine decades ago. But because of that restriction, that wasn't possible. So right now there's this great expansion and great wave because of that. I think that that is part of a unique need right now that humans have to explore what I think of as the last unexplored frontier, which is consciousness itself. and the nature around consciousness is becoming very important to people. And it's misunderstood or ill understood.

Starting point is 00:32:37 And there's very little out there about it. But when people have experiences of it, the unique thing is that one, they can't undo the experience. And two, they know it's what everyone was calling consciousness. There is a deep, resonant awareness that this person who had only heard of consciousness before

Starting point is 00:32:56 is now experiencing it in a direct and applicable way to themselves. And they come out of the experience and they say, okay, I tapped into consciousness or that was consciousness or, oh, my God, that's consciousness. You know, they have these very deep experiences. And that's causing a wave. And I think it's very important now in terms of our relevance because of the other things going on within the earth itself,

Starting point is 00:33:19 like the continued expansion of our telecommunication and information technologies, what's now called AI and the nature of generative models around linguistics, what's going on with quantum computing and biotech, you kind of put all of those together and you realize that we're at a cusp of a great awakening. There will be a great awakening in science that's happening. There's a great awakening in language and information technologies. There's a great awakening in our physics, all happening at the same time.

Starting point is 00:33:53 And there's a convergence that's naturally going to happen amongst what seem maybe like differentiated or siloed industries. And I've always, you know, since I studied people, I use representation of that. And I say, well, you have information technology here. You have biotech running through the whole thing that you are right now. And you are a form of computation. So you are the unified state that these other great industries are pushing towards. And they're going to, it's going to happen. And so I think that that's part of why there is an emergence of the importance of consciousness at this moment in time.

Starting point is 00:34:31 And also why our tried and true ancestral consciousness expanding models are coming to the forefront. Yeah, it's such an interesting time of coming together, you know, with the AI LLMs and the sort of awakening that seems to be happening on some level. what are you most excited for if we're able to integrate those two things together? Maybe you're working on some projects right now, but what are you most excited for when you take some time to really imagine what is possible with the merger of these two things? I think the most exciting thing for me is the idea that everything that has ever been has been leading up to this and what comes next is unknown.

Starting point is 00:35:28 The most exciting thing is that this whole expansion can be, the unknown and that that unknown has within it an ability to bring solution and transformation and resolution that transcends an age-old dystopian apocalyptic narrative that I think humans created and are perpetuating. And so the most exciting thing to me is a entire mythological transcendence that can take place storytelling transcendence through a great awakening. And we've seen that at different times, like dark ages into the Renaissance and entirely religious philosophy times into scientific times. So we've seen these times of cycles and expansion. And I think what's unique about this time is that I think of it as like humans

Starting point is 00:36:18 finally waking up. It's an opportunity to see beyond what was the illusion of reality around us based on the nature of our senses that we're reducing an understanding of the environment we were in to now being an extension of this incredible complexity and diversity that's the environment that we live in from the quantum environments to the subatomic environments to the atomic environments, etc. that we've theorized and talked about but haven't really had direct access to and through. That I think is a really exciting possibility. I would like to think that humans can create their own relevance, take responsibility for our own evolution, and transcend this fear-based dystopia narrative that I think has been plaguing the imagination

Starting point is 00:37:11 of humanity for a long time. Wow, that's so awesome. It really well said. It makes me excited to think about it. As soon as you start talking about that, I started thinking about this change in sense ratios. You know, we spoke a little bit earlier. about how linguistics is sort of new. What does it mean when we begin to pair these incredible images and large language models and the way we're taking in information is such a different rate?

Starting point is 00:37:36 Just a small shift in the human sense ratios has a fundamental shift in awareness, right? Absolutely. First of all, the information that we've been taking in for the last at least 50,000 years has been a reduction of what's here for everybody, for everybody. We've had to dole our senses to be able to isolate the mind and to be able to make sense of it in the nature of our cultures

Starting point is 00:38:09 and in our ways of thinking. And we're just on the cusp now of an evolutionary shift to where we learn how to take more in. And I've already seen information on the first brain-to-computer interfaces that are now operating at the speed of, typing or the ability to use a mouth. So even though we've habituated and inculturated this form of interface with our environment, we're about to create an entire new interface within our environment that allows us to open our senses. And when that happens and you think of,

Starting point is 00:38:44 you know, three or four billion humans participating in that continuously, truly continuously participating in that the expansive creativity and the growth that that creates as a species, as a collective is something that's hard to fathom right now. It's hard to find technologies are growing and expanding exponentially, not linearly, so that each evolution of them is an exponential growth. It's like here, here, here in terms of growth and scale. with this kind of understanding of sense to ratio and the expansion of that, we start to see the nature of human creativity get harnessed in that same way.

Starting point is 00:39:29 And I think it's hard to even imagine what that could look like. I just think it can be incredibly important and supportive of large-scale solutions to large-scale problems that we face that helps us transcend, you know, current collective difficulty. It's beautiful. I get the idea of like a, you know, they put these to put the rockets on those big platforms. And then the platforms would fall away. And then the booster would fall away.

Starting point is 00:39:59 I kind of feel like that's where we are on some level. And I think it's a good metaphor for the idea of time. It seems like our concept of time is changing. And I'm sure there's been multiple times in your life where you've experienced multiple lifetimes or you've sat down and saw people go back in time or forward in time. How do you think that our understanding of time as that changes, so does the way we live our lives? That's a good question.

Starting point is 00:40:22 Yes, thank you. Yeah. I think time has been the unifying element for humanity. And our interpretation of time isn't time. And it's a confusion for humanity because our interpretation of time and the tools we use to measure time aren't adequately reflecting what time is. So we use rhythms to understand. time and those could be you know 60 seconds in a minute could be fractions of that but fundamentally

Starting point is 00:41:03 you understand something that is dimensional and dynamic i think it's hard for people to grasp that their concept of time isn't time time is allowing them to have a concept of time their measurement of time isn't time time is allowing them to have a measurement of time meaning allowing them to have a clock. When they think it's 12, that's the clock, not the time. What time is it? And they go, it's 12. It goes, no, the time is the time.

Starting point is 00:41:35 It's the dimensionality of the universe, and we measure it in these ways. And so when you shift the way you understand that dimensionality, you shift fundamentally how you experience it. And the idea of a linearity applied to a timeline goes away. and you start to see time as a very creative quality to the space. It's what's allowing creativity. It's what's allowing the total of the planet and humans at the same time, in a simultaneous state.

Starting point is 00:42:11 And so I think we'll understand in the next number of years that what we've been calling time is a very rudimentary, very old technology in the form of a clock, a calendar and that we're going to get a much deeper and greater understanding. And as more people awaken to that, kind of just like updating a technology, as you just update a way of understanding this phenomena of time, the way you experience it changes. And then also how you can use it for creativity and how you can use it to understand the importance of humanity also evolves, meaning that.

Starting point is 00:42:53 that we can start to see ourselves in a very expanded way. As an example, imagine yourself as eternal. Imagine yourself as having already been in existence for billions of years before you were single cell and became an earth being. Imagine that beyond this lifetime, you will live for hundreds of billions of years, not decades, and then measure the time that was this life, that perspective. It dramatically changes the nature of how you would envision even what you're doing right now. When I do that, I often see my entire lifetime as not even a full flash of light. That everything I'm experiencing is within a tiny little burst and this much greater expression is available to us. And even then, it's still an expression of time, you know, in just a much

Starting point is 00:43:53 more expanded form. I'm very fortunate. I get to speak to a lot of really amazing and individuals and I feel like I'm always learning. And when I think about time, you know, you hear a lot of people that have problems with PTSD or trauma, once they're able to go look, go back and look at their life without shame, you know, they, they're able to have a better time. So it does seem like on some level we are expanding our idea of what time is. It's just such a fascinating question to think about, especially because it comes up for a lot of people in the, in the experiences they have on psychedelics. It's like you get to have the training wheels, maybe put on or taken off, depending on how you look at it in, in those journeys. Do you notice any patterns with so many people that you

Starting point is 00:44:41 have worked with in the past and currently? Do you see any patterns of transitioning happening? Like, was it 10 years ago certain people were trying to find this and now they're trying to find this? Or are there any significant patterns that you realize through your work that you've seen in people? The patterns of people that are evolving is based on a natural created around purpose and need. Okay. And the first purpose and need was an awareness that there was a mental health crisis and there was very little support for the people in it. And they were looking for support and help. And when anecdotal evidence came out of people experiencing that help and support through the visionary plant medicines,

Starting point is 00:45:29 that was the first expansion of need. And there were always the explorers, the psychedelic explorers that were also looking. I think there's a need at this point to, you know, isolate the visionary plant medicines from other kinds of psychedelics. The plant medicines, psychedelic treatment can help people, and I'm not questioning that, but the visionary plant medicines have a quality to the experience

Starting point is 00:45:54 that many people describe, who've been in both worlds, who've been in the pharmaceutical, psychedelic space, who've also been in the visionary plant medicine space, that have said that something fundamentally organic about the plant medicines, there's something fundamentally communicative and transferable in them that they don't experience in these other states. There's something that's a transference of knowledge, awareness, and understanding that takes place. There's a shift in consciousness associated with it that takes place. And so I think when you

Starting point is 00:46:23 put all of that together, we realize we're tapping into something, you know, very unique. So the need starts in this mental health crisis that starts to draw people in and they have the experience hearing that they could be supported and helped. And then what's immediately on the other side of that is this incredibly expansive experience that someone has. So, you know, the thought I have of that is that would be like there's a fish in the ocean that only knows it's inside the bubble the size of your hands. And the fish inside the bubble, the size of your hands is a human before they have this experience, and then they go have the experience, and they see the ocean, right? Or it'd be like thinking you're only inside the

Starting point is 00:47:07 earth and you've never seen the stars, and then all of a sudden one day you can see the stars, and you realize there's a cosmos out there. That is what it's like for people when they have this experience, even when they're coming just for healing. They're coming for healing, and they don't know that what comes with it is this vast expansion of awareness and understanding that was impossible to have beforehand because they had no context for it. So then that opens up a whole new group of people that come in that start to hear about that and they're interested in that. And they're interested in it for their own spiritual growth and development.

Starting point is 00:47:43 They're interested in it for exploration. That has now merged into the competitive spaces where people are now looking for an edge. They're saying, wow, if this creates this tremendous expansion and it heals any limitations that I have inside myself from childhood trauma or the formation of my personality. In the professional field, they're looking for an edge. And so now you're seeing a huge expansion into the hyper-competitive professional space. Same with the creative space. When people are in a competitive creative space and they need to generate continuous,

Starting point is 00:48:21 high-level creativity, and they start to experience any kind of shutdown or blockage, they start to look for support and help. and the psychedelics and plant medicines have been recognized as a support for that. So I think there's this kind of intercultural, ubiquitous need for healing. And then there's this concept of our place in the world and our purpose and the greater questions and more existential questions, spiritual. People start to explore that. And then the competitive spaces, how to be ultimately a better version of yourself, an any social role that you have. And we've watched now over the last 20 years the movement of society.

Starting point is 00:49:09 Some people say that the best predictor of future behavior is past relevant behavior. And if we look back to the last wave, it seemed to me that a lot of people in authoritative positions got really scared and they tried to shut this thing down and put it back into a medical container. Do you think that we're at risk of that happening again? I think there's always a risk of increased regulation and fear and movement around that. And I think it's the responsibility of the people participating in the plant medicine space and the psychedelic space at this time to exemplify why this is non-threatening. So first you have to understand that the plants and the psychedelics are completely neutral. Like a hammer's neutral. Like there's a hammer lying on the ground. There's a mushroom

Starting point is 00:49:59 growing out of the ground. It's completely neutral. The hammer's not telling you, pick me, use me in an aggressive, antagonistic, antisocial way. And around any anti-movement of any kind, I want to stop everybody and say, guys, wake up, please, there's only us here. There's no anti. Anti-what, you're anti-yourself when you're anti-anything. There's only our group. So we have to learn how to get along and we have to learn how to see eye to eye,

Starting point is 00:50:31 and we have to be able to find our balance in harmony. And I know those might be really big words for hyper-polarized society right now. But we need to come to that awareness. These plants can help us with that, not create a movement against ourselves in the nature of our own society. And so I think that this is a time where our society needs deep and profound healing and understanding more than ever. It's a time when we need to see the commonalities amongst us,

Starting point is 00:51:00 not the difference is. And we need to share society, including those that legislate and make the rules, how certain plant medicines help support that. And certain psychedelic substances can help support that. Now, if you want to take those substances and create a antagonistic movement within your society, that's the person doing it, not the substance. And I think it's very important to understand that, that the substance is neutral and it's our responsibility now to show why this is beneficial as both a medicine and as a form of spirituality and sacred religious practice and a mechanism to share in a greater awareness of who we are and our relevance in place both within the evolution of the earth and the cosmos. And we have a responsibility to

Starting point is 00:51:51 ourselves to do that now. And so I would like to just support that message and people being involved to understand the level of sacredness of what they're engaging in. Who are some of the people that you look up to today? Like when you're reading or if you're going to sit down and listen to a lecture, or maybe there's people your neighbors that you talk to, who are some of the people that you look up to today? The people I look up to most are the people that exemplify deep wisdom and knowledge from our ancestors.

Starting point is 00:52:32 And who left what I call the breadcrumbs, meaning writings, texts, awareness is about them because so many are forgotten. And it's the people that are representing and exemplifying a transcendence of a dystopian narrative around humanity. And I think of it as like a great dark age that we're waking up from. And so the people that learned unconditional compassion, the people, our ancestors that learned unconditional love, have really sought to promote a balanced harmonious lifestyle are the great teachers that I think are most relevant. And I support anybody currently who's alive who's supporting the openness of the narrative around these kinds of conversations and this kind of content so that people can hear it.

Starting point is 00:53:27 And so there's a number of thought leaders and pioneers that are really trying to open the doors to these kinds of conversations. and I support all of them. I love it. You've been instrumental in helping a lot of people and you have found this thing that you're very passionate about. What is it that you hope for when people come and they talk to you or they come down to Blue Morphal? What is the message that you hope people leave with?

Starting point is 00:54:01 I think the greatest message is that we have the capacity and when we harness that capacity and deep alignment with the universe and deep alignment with Earth. and we're humble in our awareness of where we are within the great hierarchy of the cosmos, which is that there's first the cosmos and then there's Earth and then there's us. That when we live in that harmony and we learn how to align with that, that there's a great, both awakening of consciousness and a great power that we harness in terms of our creativity, mental states, intelligence, and awareness,

Starting point is 00:54:38 and that we're capable of creating a now and a future that is much more harmonious and much more balanced and fundamentally more humane for everybody and that we must be these beacons of light for our societies so that we can exemplify and show the nature of our own evolution. And I've created a program that I call sanctuary a state of healing, harmony, balance, grounding, and the reorienting of our awareness to our own fundamental facts and truths of our own lives. And so it's not a form of ideology or doctrine, but rather a method of exploration to help you be able to create the sanctuary that you are inside of you and the sanctuary around you, which is fundamentally a place of safety and refuge for yourself and others.

Starting point is 00:55:34 to most exemplify and express their talents and the boundless infiniteness of their consciousness. Hamilton, we just blew through an hour like it was 15 minutes. I feel like we, it just flew by so fast, but that's such a great marker of a cool conversation. And I'm really thankful. You've been gracious with your time. But before I let you go, what do you have coming up? Where can people find you? And what are you excited about?

Starting point is 00:56:01 Yeah, thanks. coming through blue morpho tours.com, if you're interested in coming to one of my events, we work with my own plant medicines that I make myself down in Peru and South America, both in the Amazon and in the Andes. They're all at luxury locations, phenomenal places. We use the methods that I talked about to explore everything we discussed in the podcast. If this is of interest, go to blue morphotours.com. And I have certification programs to learn about the plant medicines,

Starting point is 00:56:31 foundation levels and facilitator levels at Blomorpha Academy.com. And you can always find me on social media at Hamilton Souther or Hamilton Souther official on Instagram and Facebook. Well, fantastic. Hamilton, hang on briefly afterwards. I just want to talk to you about a few things. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for your time today. I hope you have a beautiful day and know that we are living in extraordinary times.

Starting point is 00:56:56 And the miracles there if you want to embrace it. Ladies and gentlemen, have a beautiful day. Aloha.

TrueLife - Hamilton Souther - Ineffable

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