(From my current book, Chaos Shamanism: Reclaiming your Indigenous Soul.)
I feel qualified to say something about what are called Teacher Plants, even though it's not something I really do. This is because they were foundational for me back in 1978, all those decades ago, at the tender age of 20. A group of us found thousands of what used to be called magic mushrooms in the Mendip Hills in Somerset in the UK. We were all students at the University of Bristol. Over the next few months, I was taking them regularly, a lot at a time, 100, something like that. We had dried them to preserve them, and made a tea, which we drank. It had a profound effect on me. I didn't have any kind of guidance or anything like that. I was on my own, which is how it's felt most of my life. I've never ended up with a teacher that I've been able to stick with. It's not like there's people I remember that I'll always look up to. It's more like I got taught stuff, but somehow the Spirits put me on this path where I have to work it out myself, and that's not a bad thing. The teachers I ended up around all had holes that were too big. A good thing about teachers with big holes is that you can develop a critical faculty, it helps you claim your power back. So thank you teachers for the big holes!
Anyway, I could probably have used a bit of guidance with the mushrooms. Over a period of just a few months, the autumn of 1978, these teacher plants - to use the modern parlance - helped me make my metaphysical quest central. They deepened me, friends noticed that I became more serious. They opened me up. Whenever I took them, I ended up in this deep place, though probably the predominant experience was not pleasurable. There were times when I was in the heavenly realms, it was beautiful. But quite a lot of the time, it was dark, there'd be a crashing depression descending on me, and my father's face would appear to me in this sort of demonic form, like Adolf Hitler.
I was always struggling to get away from these difficult experiences, always hoping the next trip would get back to being one of the nice ones. It was decades before I looked back and realized that these so-called ‘bad trips’ are maybe best seen as initiations into the shadow. It was arguably a premature initiation into the shadow for me, because I wasn't able to do anything with it, I was just sort of thrown by it. But even then, it deepened me. The shadow may not be a pleasant experience, but it is a deep experience.
It is a deep experience because we are taken to meet our demons, which tend to live below the surface of conscious experience. We would rather not experience them, because they are painful and because it can feel humiliating to have to own that we have this darkness within us, it can demolish our ‘positive’ self-image in a way that many people cannot perhaps handle. So they remain below the surface, unacknowledged and sincerely projected onto others, who become the bad guys: politicians, parents, exes, neighbours. Maybe they merit being the bad guys in some ways, but it carries an extra charge, we make them worse than they are, we ‘awfulize’ them, it is very personal.
So I was initiated into a consciousness of this darker side of life. Of course my father wasn’t really a demon, he was just an ordinary guy with a marked authoritarian streak about who I was meant to be. He wasn’t even aware he was doing it. But I had spent my childhood subject to that, and here I was aged 20 being shown what it had done to me. It had made me authoritarian too, which I transferred into the spiritual realm, I became quite dogmatic. Being shown: it was the Spirits who showed me the psilocybin mushrooms, it was the Spirits (or you could say, the Unconscious) who then revealed to me my heavenly and shadow sides, and who then prevented me from finding mushrooms in any numbers ever again. People say to me it’s easy to find them, you live on Dartmoor, here is where to look. But there are never any there, and to be honest I’m not particularly bothered. These days I will very occasionally take mushrooms or LSD if they come my way, as a sort of inspirational re-set. I took Ayahuasca a couple of times in the Amazon in 1999. It is never world-shaking for me. I like it, I always have a good time these days, I think because I have a better relationship with my shadow. But I had the deep initiation they can give all those decades ago. It was foundational, and it is still with me.
These experiences gave me a new metaphysical centre. 18 months later I found myself being swept into a Buddhist group, where I wanted to make their practices a full-time thing. The strength of my response, its consuming nature, took me by surprise. I had thought of my metaphysical quest as just a side of me, a serious side, but not as central as it turned out to be. It was arguably something that was going to happen anyway, but the teacher plants certainly sped it along.
They were an initiation for me into what gave deep meaning to life. They opened me up, so that immediately following these experiences I fell in love with a young woman in an entirely consuming way. That was another initiation, coming hot on the heels of the first one. Nothing much came of it, I was heartbroken, but it was for the best: what a projection for an ordinary young woman to carry. It was a tough initiation into my own heart: I needed to be hurt, cauterised, and then spend the rest of my life remembering it, allowing the emotional and imaginative depths that it portended gradually emerge. Oh to have had someone to guide me in all this! But I’m not sure I could have listened. I was far too rebellious against anyone who appeared to be any kind of authority.
I've always felt about these plants that they can indeed be an initiation, but after that comes the real work. They are not an ongoing path in themselves. I was really glad when someone I was doing some astrology for, told me that they'd been working with a teacher in the Amazon jungle. They'd been taking Ayahuasca under his guidance, in a proper traditional way. The teacher said that after you've done your Ayahuasca sessions, the real work begins. The Ayahuasca is just a starting point. I thought good, that's what I've always thought, but nobody seems to say it. It's not a path in itself. It's an initiation, and occasionally we may return to for a bit of inspiration. Maybe it is an ongoing path for some, you can usually never rule anything out about anything. But I’m going to stick my neck out and say that for the great majority of us, it is not an ongoing path. It becomes a distraction if we treat it in that way, or even make a bit of a cult of it.
There seem to be plenty of people at the moment who assume that this is what Shamanism primarily IS: the ingestion of plant medicines. I have had the experience of someone finding out I do Shamanic things, and immediately wanting to know if I had access to plant medicines. Shamanism has its fashions like anything else, and this one will probably pass.
I met an academic researcher into teacher plants, and my impression of him was that he had taken too many drugs in his life! He would talk at length about the profound experiences he had had, as if that was the main thing, and which substances could take you furthest, could take you to what was most ultimate, where this reality shockingly broke down completely, and you saw things as they really are, outside the constructed reality that the brain provides. He had certainly had these experiences, but his emphasis was wrong. They are to be talked about circumspectly, if at all, and as a guide and inspiration for living on this planet, in this material reality. In this reality, he was middle-aged, yet dressing and behaving, in some ways, like a teenage rebel. It is a bit like people who identify with the profound experiences that can occur in shamanic journeying or in meditation. You can end up with arrested development in this reality, however profound your experiences may be in other realities.
There is a regular psychedelic conference in the UK called ‘Breaking Convention’. I’m sure it is a useful event, but the title to me is wrong. It is a counter-cultural cliché to be anti-establishment, to think you know better, and ultimately it goes nowhere. Something like ‘Making Peace with Convention’ would be a genuinely radical title for the counter-culture, and make the point that we need to move towards society, bringing our wisdom with us. It is we who need to change in order to be more part of society, rather than it being society that needs challenging to be more like us, something that will never happen to any great degree.
The emphasis needs to be Incarnation, the West of the Medicine Wheel, because that is what we are here to do. Teacher plants give us an experience of the Fire of the East. That then needs to be integrated; it needs to be used to help us incarnate further, more deeply, instead of using them as an escape, a spiritual bypass. It is a dance. Several years after my experiences with psilocybin mushrooms, I felt myself arrive fully back in this reality. I had been subtly away all that time because of the depth and intensity of what I had been through. I was not aware that I was subtly not here, until I found myself back. You see some people who do a lot of this kind of stuff. Yes, they are privy in an ongoing way to some esoteric experiences, which gives them a sense of validation, and there is often a gentleness about them. But you can see they are not quite here, and there are probably psychological reasons why they do not want to be fully here. You maybe need to be especially aware if you have an addictive temperament. It may be that you need a regular input of non-ordinary reality to stay balanced – the sign of Pisces can be like this – and if you’re not getting it by non-chemical means such as music and meditation and the natural world, you will feel drawn to having that experience by chemical means.
You’re not supposed to say things like drugs and magic mushrooms and psychedelics and tripping any more, you’re supposed to say Teacher Plants and Plant Medicine and Psilocybin. People can get quite serious and religious about it, and in a way that is fair enough, but it can also close things down a bit. There’s a big no-no around doing these substances ‘recreationally’, people look down on that. But I think why not do it recreationally sometimes, just have some fun, don’t be so serious? When we play, things can happen that couldn’t otherwise. When we play, we are whole. The best creativity comes out of play. I try to keep this book as play as I go along, but I don’t always succeed when I have a load of video transcripts to edit. The videos themselves, however, remain a lot of fun.
The psychedelic world, like the Chaos, is feminine. We yield to it, just like we yield in the Sweatlodge. It tempers and broadens and deepens the ego in this world.
My main point about these plant medicines is that they are a deep initiation, they can open you up in all sorts of ways. Some people have visionary experiences that they will never forget; it's like having a big dream or something. You need to keep it with you for the rest of your life, and let it inform you. You've been shown something outside of this constructed reality that we live in. We get these glimpses sometimes, don't we? That is the cognitive side. The emotional side is that the universe is nothing but Love. This reality is just a construction, a shocking construction, but it goes incredibly deep, it seems so ultimately real to us. It's the Matrix, and these plant medicines can take us outside of that. Maybe it's like what happens when we die, because similarly this brain-constructed reality breaks down.
Like all forms of Shamanism, the Teacher Plant way becomes religion to some degree; it is inevitable. The Chaos perspective is the dance around that. Someone came to me who had a traditional teacher in the Amazon. They're had been doing the Ayahuasca and everything that comes with it for some years. There was a lot of practice and discipline around it. It was a whole path, and it was the central thing in their life. At a certain point, this person got the feeling that they wanted to stop doing it, and go back to Europe and do art work and have children. They were in conflict about this issue, which is why they had come to see me for some astrology. Their main doubt was that if they left the Amazon, they would be backsliding spiritually, because they would have left that particular discipline behind, which the teacher emphasised had to be kept up. And leave it to do what? To have children. How could that possibly be as spiritually significant as this profound way they were learning in the jungle?
That's a really interesting point, when the teacher says one thing and your instincts are telling you something else. What do you do? It's a crisis. My answer was, well you always need to follow that thing in you, you're here to learn to follow your own guidance, and that has grown out of all the work you have done so far with this traditional teacher. A good teacher will always guide you to do that. To that extent, I think I'm a good teacher. (I’m probably crap in some other ways!) I just say identify what’s in your heart – and sometimes that can take a while – and then follow it. It is what we are here to do. I don’t need disciples, because I put my trust in Spirit. If there are people wanting to be around me and perhaps learn something, I will trust that and say yes to them. If there is no-one coming my way, I will trust that too, I won’t think there is something wrong, or that I am inadequate. It is a liberating way to be, and the way to be of most help to others, because Spirit can get on with its own designs, without me and my anxieties about who I am getting too much in the way.
I don’t have a particular tradition that I am trying to draw people into. Maybe one day I will start some kind of community around Chaos Shamanism, who knows? I will let Spirit decide that one.
Spirit tends to show itself through what we want to do, often moment by moment. It certainly doesn’t show itself through what we ‘ought’ to do – that, again, is religion. This person’s life in the jungle had turned into an ‘ought’, and the ‘want’ was back in Europe.
So this indigenous Amazonian teacher was limited. He hadn’t created an ethos where his pupil felt free, rather the opposite, and that speaks of his own needs. A lot of teachers are like that, maybe most are to some degree. But they perform a useful function. They provide the initial framework that we often need to get our house in order, cut down on the drinking and all that, and take our first steps. And then they get attached to having us in that pupil position, they feel validated by that. They will all of course say you are free to come and go and do other things, but that may not be the underlying vibe. I banged on earlier about taking indigenous people off the pedestals we often put them on, and this is a good example.
So my advice to this person was, “Follow what's in your heart. I'm not going to tell you what to do, that's definitely not my job. My job is to bring you closer to what's in your heart.”
This is a crucial point that many people reach, whatever path they are on. The teacher has brought them so far, by sailing alongside his ship. But now it is time to take a breath and head out on your own into the deep ocean. It is something you know you have to do, it takes courage, it will give you the adventure of your life, and you will not be at rest until you do it.
The Amazonian teacher reminds me a bit of the Buddhist teacher I once had. He had founded a Buddhist Order, and I read a seminar extract once in which he was asked if there could be positive reasons for leaving his Order. He was a logical, cerebral kind of guy, and he laid out at length, with remorseless reasoning, why to leave was inevitably ‘spiritual catastrophe’. That says it all. It was why I eventually felt I had to leave it, and it was a huge thing for me, because it had become my whole life. So I could sympathise with this person and the conflict they were in.
Like everything, we need a perspective that has room for Spirit to have had a part in the situations we find ourselves in. The whole journey can prove to be exactly what we needed, from the initial supportive framework, to the conflict at the end, in which we learn to seriously trust our inner guidance, because we put it before the guidance and judgement of the person who had been our teacher.
The Plant is a Teacher too, and needs to be treated in the same way. The Teacher Plant gets us going, helps us find that initial vision of life, outside the bounds of conventional ways of seeing the world. But eventually we trust our own guidance, we do not need to get it from a substance any more, however sacred. It brings me back to the earlier point, where I said that Teacher Plants are not an ongoing path. That is a good point to end on.
