November 1st, 2024
Contributing writer for Wake Up World
When I speak of vision, I don’t refer to your eyesight. I talk about the vision generated behind your eyes and perceived with your mind. Its nature is a mystery that has made people wonder throughout history. Some people have called it a third eye, while others have called it a different name. Regardless of the label, it’s a phenomenon produced using sacred plant medicine.
The concept of the inner vision, or the third eye, is known from esoteric literature and is alluded to by the seeking people who feel deep in their hearts that there is more to reality than meets the eye. To them, self-development is very specific. It means developing the ability to see beyond words, concepts, and matter, to gaze at the ethereal realm of spirit with the inner eye. Throughout the ages, people have dedicated their lives to metaphysics to understand reality.
The alchemists of medieval Europe were after transmutation, which has different levels. Transmuting base metals into gold was only one aspect of it. Transmutation of consciousness was another. Plant medicine shamanism is a powerful form of spiritual alchemy. The alchemy I’m talking about involves transmuting sickness into health, fear into love, and ignorance into knowledge.
What has changed throughout millennia is only a description of the same human pattern, the same urge to experience a higher level of consciousness that supersedes the mundane waking consciousness with which you wake up in the morning and go to work. This quest for higher consciousness is a continuous thread in human history.
Authentic spiritual teachers pointed the way inward as the Source of all knowledge through centuries and millennia. The Temple of Apollo in Ancient Greece had an inscription on one of its walls: know thyself, meaning know yourself. Without it, nothing else matters. If you don’t know who you are, who lives your life? Who decides for you, and what are your decisions based on? If you don’t know yourself, you think and act according to your programming, a code the social programmers embedded in you. I explore this topic in depth in my latest book, UNPLUGGED: Psychedelics, Farming and Crypto, the Three Pillars of Freedom. I don’t mean to spoil your reading by saying too much here. I want to mention this so you know where to look if you’re going to.
Meditation and mindfulness are good techniques for calming your mind and self-reflecting. They help you focus on what’s in front of you instead of chasing the ongoing daily hassle and bring attention to the moment you live your life. The NOW is where life happens.
However, a higher intensity of work is required to make profound changes in life.
If meditation alone did the job, millions of sages would be walking around radiating higher consciousness. You can hardly see anyone truly happy and self-fulfilled, regardless of how often and long they meditate. During nearly two decades of ongoing shamanic practice, I’ve met people who spent many years in India, traveling to remote locations, meditating with gurus and sadhus, practicing Yoga in Rishikesh, climbing the Himalayan mountains, attending Sadhanas and Satsangs. They appear calmer and more mindful than ordinary people, yet the urge for direct spiritual experience is still active in them. The available spiritual tools are insufficient to change consciousness and gain a higher perspective on life. A profound shift in consciousness requires higher intensity and concentration of energy, which we receive from plants. What you can achieve in years of meditation, in terms of understanding, can be completed in one Huachuma ceremony. It would be like comparing a turtle climbing a mountain to a Puma who jumps rocks with ease and precision. Huachuma is a fast track, a spaceport from which rockets are launched into the stratosphere of our consciousness.
Even the sincerest spiritual teachers who perhaps themselves understood the nature of reality and held a profound intent to help others to alleviate suffering and find peace and freedom are unable to do so for the same reason the best psychologists and psychiatrists cannot help you cure depression. It has to do with their methods, not their persons. Words are limited and, for the most part, are least ineffective. At best, they can provide hope for the future.
Although the practices mentioned earlier have their benefits, they come with limitations. If one would encompass all, you wouldn’t have to have any other. It explains the rich buffet of spiritual menus readily available on the market. But keeping yourself busy following any of these doesn’t necessarily mean that you are making progress. I’m sure you have met people who are always busy doing something, yet nothing changes in their lives. Busy and productive are not synonyms. You can be busy with a bunch of nonsense. The same is true in the world of matter and spirit. You can spend a lifetime dancing in spiritual gatherings and singing mantras, restraining your diet and sexual energy, and yet nothing meaningful would come out of it in a spiritual sense. At best, if one is sincere, one would realize that a spiritual awakening has nothing to do with diet, self-restraint, discipline, and austerities.
You can be busy, burden yourself with various ideologies and spiritual practices, and remain confused and unhappy. You might find this accurate if you look honestly at yourself without fearing disappointment. However painful it might be at first look, it is still better than not realizing this and spending the rest of your life believing an illusion and going nowhere. Awakening is initially bitter, but the journey forward is sweetened by exploring your consciousness and new depths of understanding. One realizes that a journey forward is a journey inward. Facing your dark side, weaknesses, and flaws isn’t pleasant, but you must learn, understand, and eventually change.
There is a way to dive as deep as you dare, an ancient way of knowing and seeing with your mind. Plant medicine shamanism, suppressed for centuries by religious authorities, survived to this day in Peru, where shamanic knowledge and practice remained intact throughout the ages.
Every indigenous community in the Amazon has its healers who work with Ayahuasca and other medicinal plants and trees, helping their tribes battle diseases and face everyday challenges from healing wounds and curing the body to healing the mind and spirit using plants. What sounds exotic or scary to a Westerner is the daily reality in the rainforest. It’s how people live and have been living for millennia. A similar shamanic tradition has survived through millennia in the Andes: Huachuma, a.k.a San Pedro cactus, a healer of all people native to the Andes.
This is an open path for curious and adventurous people to walk. But for those who cannot see beyond the stigma, it will forever remain inaccessible, even in their minds. Stigma is simply a socially accepted negative view of ideas or ethnic groups. For example, various indigenous communities are perceived as ignorant and primitive, thus creating a stigma. Mind-altering psychoactive plants are also viewed negatively due to religious or secular programming.
Just remember: your fear is your prison. Escaping it means stepping over the limitations, both societal and self-imposed. The biggest obstacle is the stigma. In my books, I go to a great length to help destigmatize plant-based shamanism, the oldest spiritual practice on Earth.
We can make a small experiment to demonstrate this programming that, like a virus, is running in the back of your mind. If, by thinking about going to Peru to explore plant medicine healing ceremonies, you experience fear, that is simply a reaction to your programming. It’s how it works in real time. Now, try to see through this, gazing into antiquity and the lives of all those people who, just like you, were afraid at first but discovered a whole new landscape that becomes visible to your mind once you step over your fears.
Like us, they wanted to know and understand themselves and reality more deeply. They, too, had to face their fears on the way to self-discovery. Luckily for us, generations of shamans carried the spiritual tradition forward, often at the expense of their lives.
Peru is a hub of ancient shamanic practices open to anyone seeking healing, spiritual awakening, and understanding of oneself and the world in which one lives.
Breaking through fear and stigma is required to find illumination of consciousness, liberation, and transformation.
Fear is the only obstacle between you and real living. Regardless of what you believe in and what you call the higher power manifested through life, sacred plant teachers exist and are available for mature and intelligent interaction. They can connect you to the Source.
Finding healing and direction in life becomes possible when you engage with Nature’s greatest gifts.
Huachuma and Ayahuasca are the master plant teachers highly revered among the Indigenous cultures of Peru. Although different in their approach to healing, they do a similar job of helping people find peace, healing, and guidance in their lives. I wrote five books on this subject for those who want to learn more.
Here, I only make references for people who perhaps heard about it from afar but are afraid to look closer. As someone who is a Westerner like you, who had the fortune to dive deep into the world of plant medicine and turn this into a lifestyle, I can tell you with great certainty that your fear of Nature is unnatural. It’s being imposed on you by societal forces, which, for whatever reason, do not want you to discover your access to healing and direct perception of Divine Light. Perhaps more money is made by keeping you sick, confused, and afraid. A lot can be sold to you in this case.
The fear of Nature was imposed on you from an early age by competing and yet conspiring societal forces designed to keep you away from the healing power of plant medicines. There is no Devil in the woods. The Devil is in your fear of the woods. You were fearing the wrong thing all alone!
My journey from darkness to light is described in my books. Some of you might find it curious how a Ukrainian-born ends up in the Andes healing people with plant medicine native to Peru.
I’m here to share this with you to inspire you to find healing and guidance directly from plants that have no agenda, do not care who you vote for, and are indifferent to your lifestyle and belief system. These plants can open your heart and mind and make you see with greater clarity, inward and outward, beyond your programming. Such an experience has tremendous value; it is truly priceless. It can heal you and change your life for the better.
For those of you who were unfortunate to end up in a cult while seeking enlightenment or still are members of a spiritual organization, you can be helped by interaction with sacred plant teachers. Clarity is so empowering! It’s an effective weapon against fear and confusion. As a cult survivor, I’m telling you this with great certainty.
Take advantage of it, work with plants, open up your heart and mind to receive clarity, and live the life you deserve. In the light of all that is available to us today, ignorance and slavery are a choice. Choose better. Chose plants!
At Huachuma Wasi, our family-owned healing center in the Sacred Valley, we open our doors and our hearts to all who come with sincerity, trust, and respect and do all we can to provide a safe space to work with powerful plant medicines, such as Huachuma and Ayahuasca, bringing healing to people and open their eyes to the real world, from which we are separated by an imaginary wall created by our often confused, fearful, and anxious mind.
It’s impossible to describe the feeling of being free from fears, suffocating ideologies and belief systems, pains of the past, opinions, and others’ judgment. Freedom is bliss, and Huachuma medicine is a safe way toward it.
Please watch our documentary Divine Cactus.
About the author:
Sergey Baranov founded Huachuma Wasi, a healing center in The Sacred Valley of the Incas, Peru. He is the author of Path: Seeking Truth in a World of Lies, The Mescaline Confession: Breaking Through the Walls of Delusion, The Cactus of Sanity: Huachuma in a Time of Chaos, Dancing in Hell with Eyes Wide Open: How to Survive the New World Order and UNPLUGGED: Psychedelics, Farming, and Crypto the Three Pillars of Freedom. Sergey’s passion for life on Earth and its preservation is the driving force behind his work.
All of Sergey’s books result from a lifelong spiritual search and nearly two decades of ongoing shamanic practice.
To learn more, please visit www.huachumawasi.com
Follow Sergey on Instagram @huachumawasi
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