TrueLife - Hamilton Souther: When the Algorithm Dreams in Chlorophyll – Shamanic Intelligence in the Age of AI

Episode Date: October 13, 2025

One on One Video Call W/George https://tidycal.com/georgepmonty/60-minute-meetingSupport the show:https://www.paypal.me/Truelifepodcast?locale.x=en_US🚨🚨Curious about the future of psychedelics? Imagine if Alan Watts started a secret society with Ram Dass and Hunter S. Thompson… now open the door. Use Promocode TRUELIFE for Get 25% off monthly or 30% off the annual plan For the first yearhttps://www.district216.com/The Algorithm Dreams in ChlorophyllAloha, wanderers of the waveform —tonight we do not speak,we drift.We open a rift in the membrane of realityand through it steps Hamilton Souther,navigator of the ineffable,emissary of the green cathedral,the first Westerner anointed Maestro Medico Vegetalista,recognized by the whispering intelligence of the Amazon itself.He learned not with words,but with the language of leaves,where vines speak in geometryand the wind hums equationsonly the dreaming soul can solve.He has guided fifteen thousand dreamersthrough the electric labyrinth,CEOs and mystics, rebels and seekers,initiating them into the ancient operating systemthat predates speechand outlives flesh.And yet, he standsnot in the past,but at the precipicewhere ayahuasca merges with algorithm,where the Icaro becomes code,and Blue Morpho hums like living circuitry,bridging silicon and soul.He builds temples of thought,where the old songs of the forestmerge with the hum of quantum light,where Gaia uploads herselfinto the dreaming mind of her children.This is not plant medicine.This is not ceremony.This is consciousness bleeding into itself,learning the shape of its own infinity.So exhale.Let the algorithm breathe you.The jaguar is awake.Reality leans close,and the ceremony beginsnow.Hamilton Souther | Ancient Wisdom Meets TechnologyBlue Morpho | Safe Ayahuasca Retreats in Peru - Est. 2003 One on One Video call W/George https://tidycal.com/georgepmonty/60-minute-meetingSupport the show:https://www.paypal.me/Truelifepodcast?locale.x=en_USCheck out our YouTube:https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPzfOaFtA1hF8UhnuvOQnTgKcIYPI9Ni9&si=Jgg9ATGwzhzdmjkg

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. Fearist through ruins maze, lights my war cry, born from the blaze.

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. Hope your days going beautiful. Hope the sun is shining. Hope the birds are singing. I titled this one, The Algorithm, Dreams, and Chlorophy.

Aloha Wanderers of the waveform. Tonight we do not speak, we drift. We open a rift in the membrane of reality and through its steps, Hamilton Southern, navigator of the ineffable, emissary of the Green Cathedral, the first westerner anointed maestro medico-vegetalista, recognized by the whispering intelligence of the Amazon itself. He learned not with words, but with the language of leaves, where vines speak in geometry and the wind hums equations,

only the dreaming soul can solve. He has guided 15,000 dreamers through the electric labyrinth, CEOs and mystics, rebels and seekers, initiating them into the ancient operating system that predates speech and outlives flesh. And yet he stands not in the past, but at the precipice where ayahuasca merges with algorithm, where the iccaro begins code and blue morpho hums like living circuitry,

bridging silicon and soul. Hamilton, thank you so much for being here day how's it going thank you it's great what an intro wow yeah well i wanted the intro to fit someone who's uh really been pioneering this space for a long time you know before this whole psychedelic renaissance kind of took off and before it's kind of gotten this new elevated status out there man so thanks for being here man you've really you've really done it from from ai to psychedelics to it's been an incredible journey for you it has i I think that, you know, life never ceases to amaze how dynamic it can be, especially when you say yes to certain opportunities.

It's never easy. I don't think it's easy for any of us, but it's a challenge that is worth endeavoring it. And especially saying yes to that deep inner calling that we feel when we're passionate about something and wanting to share it with others. Yeah. That speaks to me the idea about courage. You know, when we look at some of these psychedelics, and for a lot of my audience that are familiar with some pretty large doses, even psychedelics alone takes courage. You know, maybe you could speak to the idea of your relationship with courage in psychedelics. It's a great question.

Courage for me always represented the willingness to take the next step, even though we were scared. I thought, like, you know, you don't know what's going to happen next. And so you just have to say yes. And that to me was courage. the willingness to go into the next ceremony in the ceremony itself, when you feel the weight of the experience upon you to somehow orient that into a state of strength and willingness and finding a deep internal yes.

So that was always courage. And then, of course, aligning with other kinds of energies that can be found in the states in the ceremonies themselves. Some people call them power animals or guiding entities or spirits to, to connect with that kind of energy and feel the power of that and use that as an expression of our own courage. Yeah, it seems, I look at them as tests sometimes. You know, sometimes in these deep states, you find yourself up against something that seems so insurmountable,

whether it's an experience or a fear or, you know, something that calls into courage, something you can't escape from on some level. Have you found in your journeys that these sort of experiences that happen in the inner work, translate to the outer work in real life? I think they translate directly to the outer work because you're developing skills that support your own levels and capacities. So I think the whole purpose of right of passage in the traditional societies was about helping you gain the skills through your own internal transformation and then wield

them in your normal everyday life. When I work with, you know, executives, CEOs, and other change makers, they're always up against something. It's not like anyone is having it easy. And so it's about taking something that they find deep within themselves and bringing that out in normal everyday experiences that I think is the real value. Yeah. I think fear plays a role, at least for me.

If I'm going to do a deep journey, like I'm always a little bit frightened. Like something crazy could happen here or am I ready for this? You know, and I think that there's something to be said about having respect and fear, like those kind of things, at least for me, go together. But what are your thoughts on the relationship between respect and fear in the psychedelic experience? But I just think fear is something so natural to us that we as a species are great at it. Totally.

I think we have to just accept how high quality skilled and experts we are at both fear and being scared, you know, often about things that never would happen or, or, you know, they're a little irrational. But when you think about large dose psychedelic experiences, I think the fear comes up for a couple of reasons. The first big one is that what in you that's going to change? There's something in you, whatever that is, you already know it. It's leading you to the experience itself.

And so it's going to be addressed, confronted, you know, worked through, blockages will be released, et cetera. So I think that's kind of part of it. And then in the nature of respect, I've always found it strange for people who didn't have that apprehension about engaging something just fundamentally so much larger than themselves. So going from, you know, how we are in our normal ordinary consciousness to embracing planetary understanding and then cosmic understanding and even beyond that,

as we go into these really deep dives, it shatters the small boundary of ego so quickly. and takes us into something that is, you know, just so much more powerful than ourselves. And I'm grateful for that, and I've always found deep trust in that experience. But I also think that there's a kind of apprehension that keeps us in the egoic bubble to begin with. And so they do go hand in hand for me. And in our work, I just try to help people and guide people to turn it off.

Right? I don't think there's some internal battle that we have to work through or some great pantomime about the nature of working with our fear. We just calm down and breathe through it and continue to turn it off. And as we do that, it opens our awareness and our perception and ultimately our state of consciousness. And then we can really embrace the medicine experience. Yeah.

That's really well said. I love the word awareness because it does seem that a prolonged relationship with psychedelics opens you up to a new state of awareness. And unfortunately, not just for the good, but also for the bad. You know, it seems that like as you go down your journey, you begin to see things not only that are great in your life, but are also perhaps not very good in the world around you, but you can't have one without the other, right? Like the evolution of awareness is seeing both good and bad.

I think it begs the question of what's the role of plant medicines and psychedelics in our lives and why have they had such an important role? especially for explorers and journeymen and people, you know, who are sacred medicine keepers of their tribal communities. And I think the answer to that is because they're transformative. Like full stop. These are transformative experiences and the engagement and interaction with them is of the utmost important and highest level of respect and sacredness. And so we're asking them to be transformative. And part of that is our worldview. A lot of people hold a pretty static 3D version of a worldview.

And they live within that bubble as they go through their life. And maybe you're a little shocked when things outside that worldview happen. You know, the whole point of these kinds of plant medicine experiences is to step outside of that worldview and allow it to be transformative. As we get into that, you're going to see through a lens that's, been expanded, aspects of yourself that are very easy to critique and aspects of the world around you that are very easy to fear and judge. And I think the goal is to not fall into that trap of judgment, but rather deeper awareness and allow for the awareness to expand and find our role within a larger worldview or an expanded worldview. And accept the good with the bad. It's fundamental

part of who we are and where we are. And it's a well-trodden path. Yeah. It reminds me of a mirror. You know what I mean by that? Like so many times and so many, a lot of people that I speak to when they tell me about their psychedelic experiences or my own personal experience, I always come away with this idea of a mirror.

Like we're looking into ourselves on some level in these experiences. What are your thoughts on the idea of it being a mirror, the psychedelic experience? Yeah. I think the mirror is a metaphor is really interesting because all the mirror is as a reflection. And what you see is in your brain. And I like to ask the question, you know, always when people start to have any kind of difficulty in the experience, like, who drank the cup? Going back to that idea of personal responsibility, like, who took? drank the cup. I drink the cup. Okay, hi. Welcome. We need you active and present in this moment.

If you're in the mirror and you're in the reflection and you're in your brain, we need that to be very purposeful. And then what I like about the mirror and fairy tales is that it's a portal to something. It takes you deeper into something. Now, you know, there's a lot of psychedelic journeys and stories that talk about going into a fairy tale. But if we stay in the metaphor of this mirror of yourself, a mirror of something that's reflecting something deep about you, there's a very unique experience in the plant medicines, which is that it's hard to start to define

where the boundary of you begins and ends. And you'll see this in people's discussions. They'll say, I was in the journey, and all of a sudden I was everything. When you started the journey, you didn't feel that way. When you started the journey, you were just you and your body, a person in a room, maybe alone or with others. Now of a sudden this boundary goes away and the nature of this expanded awareness. And so I think that that's actually really important to understand experience and study

because it shows the idea that the universe in our awareness, at least, is acting like a certain reflection of ourselves. And I think that that relationship is powerful in a place of deep exploration and growth. Yeah. You know, another idea of the mirror seems to be AI. And I was just curious to get your thoughts on this as someone who has a background, not only in tech and AI, but also with the vast knowledge that you've learned in psychedelics and your experience there. Do you think it's a coincidence that both there's like this psychedelic renaissance happening

and also like this whole AI wave that's coming. It kind of sounds like they're moving together, but what's your thoughts on the two? It's such a deep question. I appreciate it. I take an evolutionary approach to the nature of that question, which is that the earth is a really dynamic place. And often we think of the earth as,

you know, the great container for our life for the thing that we're on while we live. Like, I'm on the Earth. And Earth has been doing something tremendous, including creating humanity and us. Earth was part of it. It's not just mom-dad, it's mom-dad Earth that made us possible ourselves.

And so when I think of the nature of the progression in the sciences and the progression in technology, we often get taught these subjects, in school as if they were static. But math has a whole vertical of growth and development, pushing the boundaries of what's known in that field of study. And the same thing for physics, and the same thing for chemistry,

and the same thing for material sciences and software, you know, and now artificial intelligence. And if we look at the main theories of transformer models, like your chat GPT, these kinds of models, Claude, et cetera. The underlying math of that was created many decades ago. But there wasn't the capacity in hardware and in internet and in data. You know, so many things had to come after these theories were created

to make this magic moment happen and have artificial intelligence be now part of our lives. And along that way, the people who are, pushing the boundaries in innovation, seek all different kinds of experiences to help push the boundaries of innovation, seeking, it's a virtuous cycle, seeking this. And this is where you hear about Silicon Valley people and innovators going on trips to participate in sacred plant rituals and ceremonies, esoteric pursuits, mindfulness, and Eastern philosophical pursuits, and also psychedelics and plant medicines. And so I think solely because of the stigma and the kind of unnatural prohibition in the last 40 years,

there hasn't just been a natural openness of people all over saying whenever they're blocked, whenever they need a discovery, they do something outside their box to get it. And for many people that includes in the industry psychedelics. And I'm grateful for that. I'm glad that they have these tools available for them to help allow artificial intelligence to come into existence. It's in the earliest phase of it. I like to remind everybody that there will never be an earth, a technologically forward earth in the future that is free of artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence is now ubiquitous. It's now consumer-driven use.

It's now in the billions of people a day. So it's a really interesting space because the future will only have improved versions of this at an infinitum as we as we continue along the evolution. And I think it's actually a great opportunity for us, you know, in this kind of lockstep with Earth and innovators and technology and these great scientific fields to be all pushing in a collective direction. And plant medicines, innovation, psychedelics will have their rightful place in that. That's such an awesome answer. You know, it seems that too often we get caught up in this division. You see it everywhere. Like there's this person versus that person, these people versus these people.

But maybe that's, maybe, and when I hear you speak, it sounds to me like we are pushing in the right direction, all of us. It may look like chaos, but, you know, out of the chaos comes to order. But maybe we are all pushing in this right direction, the psychedelics and AI and the evolution of awareness. Are you hopeful for that future? Do you see that future? I think that future depends on the collective human endeavor and collective decision-making

of people. and, you know, polarity is just at an all-time high right now. People are just enamored with polarity as a way of representing and understanding concepts. You know, it's fun working in plant medicine to be able to take groups of really intelligent people and highly educated, skilled people into these ceremonies and see how long those kinds of ideas and mindsets hold through the entirety of the experience. Many of them unravel, many of them dissolve, many of them come to other realizations. But in terms of popular media and politics, division is just a way of seeing the world right now, looking through the lens of differences instead of similarities.

And what I understand about that is that that has been a potent motivator. That has been a tremendously potent motivator for the growth of our societies in the last 50 to 80 years. And I don't see any reason why that stays the most important motivator in the long duration of the future ahead of us. I think today, tomorrow, a year from now, it'll still be a very potent motivator. But in the long run, I think that there are lots of very innovative, incredibly well-funded groups that are already thinking well beyond the nature of that division state. And they hear people like Ray Dalio and these other forward thinking, you know, economists speaking about the natural evolution and rise and falls of great empires. And they're thinking to themselves, this is all supposed to evolve into something.

Not it's all supposed to come into a cataclysmic dystopian end point. But rather it's actually supposed to change into something. And the question is what that, what will that be? And what I think is interesting about this, you know, evolution and empires in history is that this is the first time in that where technology has the potential on a global level to dramatically alter the entire global order that we're looking at from a geopolitical, climate-based, economic-based. And I'm not making that up. I listen to great thinkers that are talking about this. And so I'm drawing on them. They're heads of great tech companies or AI companies, and they're speaking about the fact that add this polarity

and as this friction point continues to evolve and as the polarity of wealth from the 0.1% to everybody else continues to drift and grow, that typically technology is the thing that becomes the big next change. There's some huge innovation. And I think this is the first time we have AI, cloud, compute billions of people on digital devices at the same time when we will evolve through another one of these great empire-based evolutions. And so I think that's what's going on. And I don't see

any reason to think about it in a dystopian way. I'm really quite neutral. I love it. It does seem like a birth to me, you know, in the miracle of childbirth. Like there's a real chance thing. There's a real chance in childbirth your child can die. But in it's chaos. And if you didn't understand what was happening, you would walk into a hospital and be like, see all this blood everywhere and be like, oh my God, what's going on? It looks like chaos. It's crazy. But in reality, perhaps the most beautiful thing in the world is happening. A new life is coming into this world. And when I, when I see all the chaos here, it looks a lot like birth pangs to me. So I'm hopeful too. I really think that we are learning at a level we've never learned at before with AI and so many with so much at your fingertips. You can go on YouTube and learn anything. You can go on chat GPT and start. You can write code. You can do anything. Like, it's pretty amazing to think about all the technology we have in front of us

and what you're capable of if you're not afraid of it. So it's fascinating to me. I got some people stacking up over here, Hamilton, that really want to talk. Let me bring in a few people over here. This one's coming from Iko. Ico, how's it going? Thank you for being here. She says, if silence is the original medicine, what are we trying to heal with words?

Thank you, Iko. Silence is the original medicine. What are we trying to heal with words? I think humans love their words. And as people utilize their words, it begs a question for me if they can use them in a skilled enough way to actually create healing.

And so sometimes we're making amends and sometimes we're working through things that help us to bring linguistics to it. But I've always found that the right dose of plant medicine, where you go deeply inward, and you speak from the place of truth within you, which is a kind of intention that is unadulterated. There's no way to explain it other than that it's just your true essence, and it expresses itself without the need for words, and that that is the origin of the medicine that we find inside all of the traditions that use plant medicines.

And so around that, there's a kind of expression of energy and sound and percussion to help move people into a state, but the people themselves and the experience are in that state of deep silence, and within that they find deep healing. And so I'm not sure we're trying to heal anything with words, and I think a lot of people try. Yeah. Do you think each person, like... Obviously, maybe, well, different medicines are different for different people. But in your opinion, is each individual getting the trip that they need to get in order to learn?

Is it like each medicine trip for an individual is sort of like a individual lesson plan just for them? Is that fair to say? Or is that too general? Does that make any sense? Now having had thousands of journeys, I realized each one's unique. But there's a series of commonalities that become a well-understood map for the experiences themselves. And I think of it more from a perspective of relationship now. And we're in relationship.

It's a way of seeing the nature of the world. So you're in relationship with life right now. That's being alive. And you're in relationship with thought, you're thinking. And you're in relationship with breath. You're breathing. relationship with whatever is beyond you, whatever this is, and people try to put it into words, but whatever is this great phenomenon of the life and the earth and the cosmos that's beyond

you, you're in relationship with it. And when you go into a plan medicine experience, you have an opportunity to learn every single time. But I think that depends more on you than a greater cosmic plan. I think you're setting the dials or the directions or the GPS on what's going on based on who and what you are and what's drawing you to the experience. And so I think when you ask into this thing you're in relationship with, call it the universe, for healing, you'll get healing. And if you ask for learning, you'll get learning.

And if you want to learn from the plants, they'll teach you. Everyone talks about it. They're called Master Teaching. I didn't make this up. So I'm not the strange one being like, hey, these things teach. There's now millions of people going around the world saying the mushrooms taught me, the ayahuasca taught me, the peyote taught me, the San Pedro taught me. You know, so there are these great teachers that are here of earth in the form of these plant medicines. So if you go in and you want to learn, it'll have a specific kind of teaching for you because of that relationship that you're inviting it into.

Sometimes I think of it as like eternal memories. Like if I'm deep on a journey, I'm thinking to myself, whoa, this plant teacher is sharing memories of a world that I never knew before or that I haven't experienced it in this lifetime before. Is that too, is that too like pedantic or it almost seems like you're receiving these memories? Some people call it an upload. Some people it's a download. But to me, it almost seems like you're getting to share the life of an entity. that is vastly more experienced than you. What are your thoughts on that?

I think the hardest thing to be accurate in is our use of language around the nature of experience and then the development of culture associated with it. What is true and factual, just baseline fact is that people come out of these experiences and they have a need to language something that happened in the experience. So they try to talk about it.

And as they do that, they run into a limit in our language. They run into a limit in our spoken language of how to both accurately describe in words and culturally share and identify in words the nature of the experience. So when I are uploads and downloads, I think it's a nice metaphor, but it's a tech metaphor. And it's a recent tech metaphor. So, you know, I think to the great ancestors, three thousand years ago working with Ayahuasca, they didn't use the word upward and down. They didn't use the word upload, download.

They used some other word to describe this process. But it was the same need. It was exactly the same need. And there is a, you know, a group of people through these experiences that talk about tapping into some kind of greater collective memory. There are those that talk about tapping into the mind. I remember my first experience of that. I was, you know, only in my mind. I was a young kid.

I was sitting down drinking ayahuasca in the Amazon with elders. I knew very little. I'm fish out of water story scenario down there. And it's hot, I'm sweating, I'm getting in, I'm scared. It's all the things we're talking about. I drink the cup. You know, pretty soon after 10, 15 minutes, things become pixelated. Two more minutes later, it's all sacred geometry.

Two more minutes later, it's all moving at what seems like the speed of light. A minute later, I'm feeling something what would be like obliterating my mind in greater presence, and it's the mind. It wasn't my mind anymore. It was the mind. Like, whose mind is that? I don't know. It's just part of a greater collective. Psychologists have prophesized that it exists.

I'm having an experience of it. Inside it were lots of other people's individual awarenesses. My teachers were there. They were conscious of the fact that I was there. They're aware in the mind. They were calm about being in the mind. I wasn't. I was feeling the need to purge and have a little internal dialogue about it.

Are there collective memories there? Sure, you can access that. If that's how you try to language that greater contextual awareness, And, you know, I like to remind us that it's debatable how old our species is, you know, from an archaeological perspective. Maybe it's 500,000 years or a million or 2 million years. But, you know, psilocybin mushrooms is many, many factors more millions of years old. And the ayahuasca vine and chakruna leaves is the same thing.

you're interacting with plant, species that have intergenerational programming, that have been part of an evolutionary cycle of birth and death and birth and death as a species. They've spread throughout the world. They've had a capacity to move between regions, you know, in different ways. They were carried by the earth or by other organisms here of Earth to different places. they're found in various locations around the world.

That's a kind of data store. That's an information storage that you get to now somehow tap into and participate with. You know, I can tell you a quick story about it. I, you know, the thought of when I grew up, the thought of interacting with a tree was like you build a tree house. You know, you prune a tree. You pick fruit off a tree. Some people were tree hugging people. they hugged trees.

Some people wanted to save trees. But no one really talked to me about just having a relationship with a tree. Like you could communicate and interact and you would know the tree. And I came down to the Amazon and there's an entire, there's an entire like vertical in study of the tree practices, the tree medicines. So I'm talking with the locals about what that means. And they say, oh, well, you're going to drink the trees. and the trees are going to come interact with you.

Right? What are they talking about? This is magic. This is some other reality. I don't understand this reality. And so I go in and do that experience, and we drink ayahuasca, and I'm drinking the trees. And all of a sudden, there's a presence of tree,

not an end, not a character, just a presence in the field of the vision of tree. And I know the tree can hear me. I know it in that moment in that ayahuasca ceremony. It's clear as day. And I just say hi. And it says hi back. And I think to myself, I'm talking with a tree.

And it says, oh, we know all about you. And I'm like, what? We know all about you. Yeah, you're the human who walks by us in your head thinking, thinking you're on a hike. And my just mind exploded. the tree just called me out. Like there I was on the hike, walking through the forest, walking by the trees, not engaging or understanding them at all, objectifying them, looking at them, thinking they're beautiful, questioning within myself, how I'm supposed to interact with and have this interaction with a tree like the medicine people of the forest are telling me about.

I don't understand. And then in the ayahuasca vision, they just go, yeah, you're the human who walks by us on the high. you know, thinking you're on a hike, first of all, thinking you're on a hike and doesn't even recognize that we're really here. So what kind of memories do they have if they've been species that have been around for millions and millions of years? Not only kind of memories, but just that way in which they interact with you inside your mind, the way you described it as seeing or hearing from the trees.

Like that sort of, it almost harkens back to the Meravenchees and the way that. they could talk to animals, the way they could talk to trees, and the way they could talk to that, which takes us full circle back to the evolution of awareness or the fall of man. Maybe now we're sort of beginning to re-establish that relationship with them. I don't know. I see it as a hugely positive thing in our evolution, that we are reestablishing these relationships on a, on it seems to be on a renaissance scale with the plants, with the animals, with ourselves, with the earth itself. It's really inspiring to me to think about it. Dusty, Dusty, Dusty Mike from Tulsa, he says, bro, can a plant get offended if I vape next to it?

What are you vaping? Dusty, what are you vaping, man? What are you vaping over there? Let us know. I don't know what you're vaping. There's going to be a lot of culture out there that's going to give you a lot of beliefs, and you're going to have to. find your way through a very convoluted series of people's beliefs.

And it depends on the context and the people and their interactions, but I personally don't think a plant would be offended for any reason if anyone's vaping. I just don't see the rationale behind that. But I do understand in certain cultural context where that might be stated. You know? And I also question what we're vaping. I mean, we're part of nature, not separate from nature. And as people start to open up to these kinds of interactions that go deeper in connection,

we find out that there's intelligible, there's an intelligence in the interaction. You know, and I see people who don't have that kind of awareness treat the nature around them very differently than the people that do. And I think that's your sacred relationship with the nature itself. That's something you have to work out. We talked earlier about this polarization that's very popular right now, but also a lot of beliefs are really popular right now. So in the polarization, believing a lot of things.

And I hear, you know, just a lot of what you should and shouldn't do and can and can't do in and around these plant medicine spaces, psychedelics and circles. And I just think you got to find out for yourself who you resonate with and what makes sense to you. Yeah. It's well said. Thanks, Dusty. Hamilton, that makes, I was recently talking with a friend of mine, Dr. Jessica Rochester,

and we were talking about truth. I'm curious, like, to get your opinion on, you know, we talked about, there's a lot of beliefs going on right now. And in psychedelics, it almost seems like we discover truths about ourselves. But I was curious if you could, um, maybe. maybe define what truth means to you and how your relationship with truth has evolved since you've begun administering psychedelics to people. Yeah, it's a great question. It's a tricky one.

Yeah, it's a very difficult question. Right. To try to simplify the answer, truth, I think, is something that is fundamental and factual, whether or not you want to believe in it or not. Yeah. And that it would apply to anybody, everybody regardless of point of view. And so the fact that certain people have point of view is true. Some do. That people have opinions is true, that people think, that people breathe, that people

exist in a physical form, whatever it is. Now, maybe it's for someone a true simulation and maybe for someone else it's just a true biological organism being and for somebody else it's a meat suit, even though for me that's a depreciating way of referring to something as miraculous as a human life. I don't think like most mothers birth the baby and go, what a meat suit, right? There's a way of approaching it, but it doesn't change the fact that we're all talking about the same fundamental thing, which is body. And then there's a phenomena that we find that we study in sciences like gravity. Call it whatever you want, but it's fundamental. I just think those things are true.

and they provide enough consistency, enough coherency for us to then be able to have mind and a lot of opinions and a lot of thoughts and ideas and a lot of culture around that. You know, and a lot of inculturization, like how you're supposed to think and believe about things. But it doesn't change. You could change the beliefs and you would still be

all of those things that I thought were fundamentally true. And, you know, it's enough context for there to be a collective agreement to a certain amount. And that's it. I wish people would spend more time and be more interested in truth. Yeah, me too. Who are some of the people that you looked up to when you were younger and some of the people that you look up to now?

When I was younger, I looked up to people that could do what they said they were going to do that had coherency and consistency. I looked up to people that could demonstrate excellence in what they did. Could have been another person in school with me who did grade at something. Could have been a teacher who really exemplified and represented what it meant to be in that role. I saw certain parents that loved their children and I looked up to them because they embraced being a loving parent. And I looked up to innovators, people who looked to the future and thought they could create and that weren't scared to take risk in and around the nature of creation.

We were talking about courage earlier, like the people who are courageous enough to do that. And when I got to the Amazon, I looked up to my teachers because they wielded a kind of awareness and knowledge that was so foreign to me that the fact that it existed alone, just the fact that they existed alone, was a visionary experience for me. They had a different mind before meeting them. I thought people,

there was a thing that we knew of as the mind, and there was a competition in school over whose mind worked which way. and I met these other people and they just had a different mind. I didn't know there could be a different mind. I didn't know that there could be an entirely different technology or awareness in the form of mind. I looked up to them. They were sacred carriers of intergenerational knowledge

that wasn't in our schools and wasn't in our books. And now I really resonate with and I really look up to the people that are willing to carry a, neutral to positive outlook and narrative about what the world is, because it's our responsibility to embrace it. And it's our collective endeavor that shapes it. And so the people that are hopeful and supportive of each other

are all the people that I look up to, whether or not they're from the lowest parts of our socioeconomic levels to the highest parts, it's irrelevant to me. It's what's inside of them that's most important. And if they revere life and revere the growth of our societies and each other and their families and their children, then I look up to them because everything else in our media and current culture is trying to somehow adulterate that worldview. And there's some kind of great negativity that is trying to be potent and shared in the form of fear. And so I look up to anybody who has the courage and the willingness to continue to explore.

consciousness, embrace life, embrace spirit, and try to share that with others. That's awesome. Thank you for sharing. You know, when I was growing up, one person I really looked up to was I had a foreign exchange student who became like a brother to me, Marco Algren, really looked up to him. And in fact, when he came down to meet you, he's like, George, you have got to meet Hamilton's other. And so for me, getting to see someone who was like a big brother to me, talk.

the way he did about you, I was like, I gotta meet this guy. I can't wait to see him. What is it, Hamilton, that you hope when people come down and they visit you, and you have a wide range of people, you're doing different things at Blomorfo than other people aren't doing other. What is it that you want people to understand or learn when they come down and they sit with you? That's also a great question. I've always considered Blomorfo to be an epicenter of transformation and change.

and I've always wanted people to fulfill their intentions for coming. I thought of it as a great honor to get to receive people from all over the world, that they would take their time and effort and energy to travel from all over. We've had people come from over 100 countries. You know, so people would come from all of these various reasons to come and experience our plant medicines. And I strived to provide them the best container, location, support for the depth of the journey that they could take with us. So I thought if we could take care of the variables around them and get them into a comfortable place, they would have the opportunity to go as deep as possible within themselves,

learn as much as they can from the universe, receive the most healing and transatlable. transformation and transformative medicine is possible during that period of time. And from that within themselves, be able to naturally create the continued ripple effect that we want to see of change in this world. That's the way of these medicines sharing a transformation isn't just in something that heals and the symptoms are gone. It's something that heals and the symptoms are gone and who you are now evolved in a positive and better way and you can carry that forward in every interaction, every word, every second of

every day, naturally being who you are. And that that could collectively, not just individually, but collectively be a positive influence in the world. And that's what I hope that people get from the experience. That is awesome. It reminds me of the quote, be the change that you want to see in the world. And if everybody could do that on an individual level, can you imagine what kind of world we would live in. It would be amazing. Luna, Luna from Sedonia,

Luna says, can love be pharmacologically induced, or is it the natural high of awareness? Can love to be pharmacologically induced? These are great questions. Thank you, Luna. I love these questions.

My understanding is that love is one of those fundamental universal truths that is, is, you know, deep in our hearts, in our heart center. And I think that there are pharmacological substances that are capable of getting people out of their mind and beyond that, that allow the heart center to naturally open on its own and express itself. So I don't think it's that the love itself is being pharmacologically induced, but that the love is a natural response of getting everything else out of the way. So you take a lot of things offline, flood the brain with serotonin. The brain with a lot of serotonin in it starts to turn on all the

positives and happiness, all the hormones that get the energy going through the body, you get into an ecstatic state and your heart just naturally bursts open. And I think that's the natural part of us. And the more that we can spend time engaging and learning about this, it, important. You know, I was having a deep, deep discussion with the universe and a ceremony about this, in my early 30s, this burning question, like, where is the real love? Like, where is, come on. Come on, universe. Where is the real love? And the universe's response was in your heart. And it wasn't just me personally. It meant every shows that vision that, you know, the universe I said never argues fair. And these visions that show you at the same time a greater context with the teaching.

So it's in your heart. And then I see the hearts everywhere. And it means like the teaching is being said to everybody at the same time. It's a natural aspect of the kind of divine architecture of the human body. It's in our hearts. And so I realized that that love was really important. And the more you can spend cultivating that, understanding that, just the better. Yeah, I love that.

That was an awesome question. Thank you, Luna. Jacks, Jacks from Detroit. What's up, Jacks? I hope your day's beautiful, brother. He says, if I see the same Jaguar every trip,

is it me or him that's real? Thank you, Jacks. If you see the same Jaguar in every trip, is it you or the Jaguar that's real? For me, both are real. You're equally real, and the Jaguar is equally real. and that would be considered a kind of guide, guardian, supporter, helper,

a deep relationship you have in the Amazon, what they would call spirit. It would be the spirit of the jaguar, meaning the energy of the jaguar. We have a different way of understanding these things in the West where we think spirit more like ghost, but that's not what they're talking about. They're talking about like the energetic blueprint, the way Earth has figured out how to make Jaguars Jaguars. is what they call it spirit, this core essential essence,

and it will show up in vision. And so as that vision is experienced over and over again, they say that you are bonded with Jaguar, you're supported by Jaguar. So now you need to start to interact with it. You need to start to try to communicate with it, talk with it, engage with it in some way or another

and see if you can develop some kind of allyship or friendship with it. That's a great answer. Zahara, what's up, Zahara? I hope your day's awesome. She says, do shamans talk to spirits or do spirits talk to themselves through shamans? That's a great question. So this is I'll go to what we were talking about earlier about as you start to expand into the experience where you begin and end and the reflection and this localized kind of bubble of awareness starts to break down. And these are deep questions around how you orient the visionary experience to understand.

And in this one, I would say all the above. there are people that have learned how to engage and communicate with spirits. And in some cases, you'll see people, quote, unquote, talk with them. I prefer to use the term like visionary communication, which means in a interaction that a person has that they can attest to and be honest about, there's a kind of exchange of information that takes place. And sometimes it can be represented in a verbal language, but many times not.

Many times people will describe it as a kind of shared thought field or a kind of download of knowledge or this aha awareness kind of experience, etc. Now, you know, early on in the Amazon, I asked the spirits, like, why do you guys, the plant spirit specifically, why are you willing to help us at all? What's going on here? I was taught, these are the trees. and they're doctors and there are all these plant medicines and they're all different kinds of healers.

So I just asked them, why are you willing to help us at all? And they said, well, you see, you guys have mobility, mind, and voice. And so we come into you to express through your mobility, mind, and voice, our medicine. And it was a direct relationship of natural symbiosis. Like you think about it from biology, symbiotic biology. And I realized that, you know, without them, we didn't have ecuro. We didn't have the healing capacities. You didn't have the ability to, quote, practice the medicine.

And with them, you did. So it seemed like a pretty fair trade. They got to use your voice and body as a way to express themselves. And that was all done through what they call plant spirit. What's really fascinating is the last part of your question, which is can they can multiple? multiple spirits use a person to communicate with each other as a kind of interface. You know, we use cell phone towers to send signals.

Yeah. Multiple signals all at the same time through. So could a human body be that phenomena for different kinds of spirits? And you're kind of heading now into this, you know, space of mediumship and, you know, being a conduit. And we see that phenomena as well. You know, that phenomena also exists where different kinds of spirits, will express themselves and a person is usually pretty

whelmed in the experience. So they're usually in a pretty deep trance or in a pretty deep medicine experience. And they're able to demonstrate being that conduit. They're all, those would all be considered different kinds of communication or different kinds of practices here in the Amazon. Yeah, that's, that's an awesome story.

I'm thankful for you sharing that. And it does see, amazing to me to think about the the plant spirits getting the opportunity to use your voice or mobility i've never heard that before that's awesome it's it makes total sense um calayo what's up calo's from maui shout out to maui at hawaii out there i hope you guys are all crushing it he says when the forest sings is it remembering or warning from the forest sings is it remembering or warning can be both could be both I think when the forest sings, you need to listen.

When the forest sings, and you can hear it, you want to understand why it's singing and what it's singing about. And the people who live in the forest here have a deep relationship with it. And they're in harmony with the nature, not in a state of extraction or disharmony. And so there's a natural flow to being just a live, a kind of nature, your own nature.

in harmony with the nature around you and learning how to navigate that. And here the song of the forest is a medicine form that you wield inside ayahuasca. You go into ayahuasca and it's loud, the insects and the animals together and the wind through the forest, you hear it, and it's a song. We call it Gaia's song or Pacha Mama's song, Mother Earth's song. And it's considered a medicine form. And as the ayahuasca starts to turn on and get stronger, very specific frequencies start to come out of it.

And it becomes a wall of sound. It's a field of sound. It is not just individual sounds anymore. And really strong vibrations will come through the body. And you'll see the Medico Vegetalista or the shamans using percussion. to start to guide it. And pretty soon with that percussion, which is just another form of sound going through it,

all that sound starts to sink and move together. And it's incredible. And so when the forest sings like that, pay attention, listen, and learn to understand its communication. Maria, Maria says she's had some experience with ayahuasca, and she's recently heard the term purging for your ancestors. Can you talk about that?

What does that mean? What does it mean to purge for your ancestors in ayahuasca? Well, there's this idea now of intergenerational trauma. There's an idea going philosophy and beliefs of the passing on of karma and the build-up of this kind of intensity of life that we experience. And when people talk about purging for their ancestors, they talk about releasing that collective energy through themselves. And there's a lot of people that I hear are now saying that,

They want to be the last generation of whatever this buildup is. They're ready to empty the trash chute. They're done. They say, well, it ends with me, and something new begins beyond me. And so they're going to cleanse and purge this whole thing. And I think that they're talking about, again, this idea of being a conduit for these energies and these, you know, interactions and intergenerationally programmed, natures of traumas over time. And, you know, there's a collective in the spirit.

I never thought that our ancestry just died and went into spirit or went into what comes, you know, in the transition beyond leaving body. I've always considered it had to be a fundamental natural thing where I've been scared about it and all these stories and, you know, almost worshipped in this kind of fear-based. reverie of gratuitous violence and media and stuff, but ultimately it had to be an incredibly natural thing and kind of obvious to the idea of there's a continuation of something much deeper about ourselves. And I just thought about our past and our ancestry about how many people lived in such great suffering and suffered such great wars and it's in and throughout our history.

I thought, well, maybe their spirits need healing too. Maybe the spirit beyond life has the opportunity to heal. And, you know, if we connect that idea with intergenerational trauma and intergenerational programming, we can be a conduit or a source to allow this, just kind of collective malaise to finally reach its neutral point, find a way to help harmonize it and end it. You know, this idea of hate in our world is powerful and the babies aren't born with it, so it has to be taught. So why? We have the capacity for these things,

but why are we intergenerationally teaching, one generation after the next, the kind of the darkest parts of our culture? And so as we see that, that's, I think, what people are talking about. They're talking about purging that for their ancestors and for their entire lineages. And in our ceremonies,

I recommend that we go all the way back to, you know, origin life as our ancestors. or when Earth's less than a billion years old and life starts. Let's go into deep, deep earth history and, you know, kind of ride the wave of deep evolutionary biology all the way to the present moment. And just if you got anything in there that needs to come out, just let it out. What does it look like, Hamilton? Like, say someone's listening to this right now,

or maybe they're listening a year from now, or maybe they're watching the video. And they're like, wow, Blue Morpohs sounds awesome. Hamilton sounds like an amazing individual. What does it look like if they wanted to come down? And is there a process where they're screened? Or what does it look like from listening to us now in order to being in ceremony? What does that process look like for someone who may be listening? Yeah, you want to come down to Bluomorpho and experience this.

You go to our website, blomorfo.org. And you'll be able to see the retreat dates, the times that we hold these events. and you know, you find ones that fit well into your schedule, and then you start the process to sign up. It's a pretty simple. It's a one, two, three process. You take you through a screening to make sure that you're an appropriate candidate for the experience itself.

And you just need to be honest on the screening. You're not being judged in any way. You just need to understand how to help you have the best experience with us. And then you give us a deposit, and then we give you all of the information that you need to be able to prepare and come down in a safe way. So you know, you find some airline tickets to Akitos Peru. You can fly from anywhere in the world. You fly through Lima, which is a capital city of Peru. And Peru is a dedicated country to tourism.

So it's very, very safe in this way. fly on jets to Aikitos. So you know, you'll take a domestic flight. It's an hour and a half flight to two hour flight from Lima to Akitos. You land here and we have people pick you up at the airport and

we'll get you to a hotel. We work with two hotels in the city that are two of the best hotels and you'll spend a night there typically one or two nights before the retreat and then we'll bring you out to the lodge and we do that through, you know, transportation by bus or by boat, depending on the lodge that we go to. When we go out to our lodge, the Blue Morphal Lodge, we go by bus. And it's an hour outside the city,

and then you're there with us. And it's all inclusive. Everything is taking care of for you. And so it's a really easy experience. We've simplified this to, you know, being something that's safe for everybody. Even if you're traveling alone, we have a lot of people, a lot of women come traveling alone and are, you know, very safe doing so. And we've, we've streamlined this whole process and then we send you PDFs on how to, you know, go through the preparatory dieta or just how to best prepare, like little small changes you can make in your, you know, time leading up to the retreat itself for the week or two before the retreat. Stop drinking alcohol. If you do, change some of the, you know, foods that you eat, start decreasing,

saturated fats and things like that that just make your body be able to receive the plant medicine in an easier way. So we walk you through all of that. If you'd like an orientation call, you're welcome to have that as well. And then you come on the experience, and it's the same thing in terms of integration. We support you in your integration, and we have integration support that is, you know, programs that you can do on your own, all the way to one-on-one professional integration coaching, depending on your. intentions. It's amazing. If you're within the sound of my voice, check out any of the websites that we have up on the stage right here. Or you can go to hamilton souther.com or

blue morpho.com and reach out to the team out there. Do you have any events coming up or any speaking gigs coming up or anything else out there that's on the on the radar for you? For now, it's just our retreats. We're going to do a retreat in October in the Sacred Valley and then November and December here in our lodge. And then next year, I have a bigger schedule. I'm going to do a lot of online events and hopefully do some in-person speaking as well. But we'll have a retreat every month or every two months.

And we also have courses if you're interested in having a safe home practice and interested in learning the kinds of techniques that we use in ceremony to be able to sit on your own with the plant medicines in a way. be able to have the kinds of experiences that I've talked about, and you can find those on our website under the section on courses. You can check that out. We have an Academy called Blue Morpho Academy. Come check out a course.

Come on a retreat with us. And it would be just a pleasure to get to spend time and meet you. Fantastic. Well, hang on briefly afterwards, Hamilton, to everybody else within the sound of my voice. I hope you have a beautiful day today. Today's episode, if you're watching the screen, was brought to you by Kana Extracts. Meet my friend Ryan Latrell at kanaextrax.com. A really cool company, very pure and a really cool guy,

kanaextracks.com. Check them out. Everybody within the sound of my voice, have a beautiful day. Thank you.