by Andrew Rutajit

The truth will set you free…

Searching for the truth is a life-long devotion; it is not something that can be handed to you in a word or a sentence or in a book. Truth is an understanding that only the observer can comprehend. Living your life in love with truth and influencing truth upon others can be quite difficult when popular belief and truth are on opposite sides of the same coin (this is a problem I deal with on a daily basis). Truth is not a word, truth is not a doctrine or a system or a philosophy or a religion; truth is alive, it is a creature in and of itself, it is a conscious being. It has its own beginnings and it has its own ends. These beginnings and endings are what we call "paradigm shifts" and as truth goes through these great cycles, so shall mankind. It is well known that this conscious being that I call truth can pay you a visit; the shaman will refer you to psilocybin or their particular indigenous entheogen.

Do as thou wilt shall be the whole of the law… love is the law, love under will.

Truth is love. Truth is the only door leading to reality. Your dedication to the truth will provide you with truth in return. The shamanic initiation, like many initiations throughout antiquity, is not an intolerable one but there is an initiation involved. The shamanic voyage via entheogens can occasionally become difficult for someone with mental baggage. However, as Terence McKenna would say - The bar hasn't been set too high, just high enough to keep out the insincere, the misguided, and heavy hearted. These entheogenic initiations are not unlike the initiations of the great Eleusinian Mysteries where the "kykeon" was consumed. Many researchers now agree that this "Demeter's potion", was in fact an entheogenic brew.

The mind can be deceived, the body can be punished, but the truth that lives within your soul will live on for many lifetimes. It is this quest for and constant gathering of truths that brings us all closer to our final incarnation (eternity, Nirvana, heaven or what ever term that you wish). Buddha tells us that - "The journey to truth begins with a single step". This single step or the first step is an absolutely unselfish dedicated effort to serve. The Freemasons are some of the most enthusiastic people on the planet when it comes to unselfish dedicated efforts to serve those in need. Yet, at times, this absolutely unselfish dedicated effort to serve is not unselfish at all; it is done simply with the goal of advancing through their degrees. I use this as an example because I firmly believe that you are the judge and jury of your soul after you die; this reflects the shamanic experience perfectly. After all, your body is the temple of God.

The farther we go into antiquity we see that humankind revered everything as alive, or as living entities. Anthropomorphism was a way of life. The sun, the moon, the stars, the sky, the earth and planets; even emotions such as love and hope were given humanlike characteristics. Everything in the world was conscious. This was not a consciousness known to humans; this was a consciousness unknowable to humans; but a living consciousness nonetheless. Consequently, the shaman is compelled to commune with nature by ingesting the parts of nature that evoke trance and visions.

These experiences and the personified plant/sun deities soon became dwindled down (and/or suppressed into) folklore, religion, and mythology. Oftentimes, the experience itself was whittled down to a symbol, or even word. Terence McKenna told a story about a baby lying awake in a bedroom and into the room comes this mysterious, marvelous, majestic, colorful, flying creature. The creature makes beautiful sounds that resemble music repeating in harmony and rhythm. The child is spellbound by this creature. In walks his mother who says "That’s just a bird, sweetie; a bird". All of a sudden, this mysterious, majestic music-making creature is reduced into a single word. The mystery is gone; and by the time we reach the first grade, the mystery of our entire reality is carefully tiled over with words - this is a bird, this is a tree, this is a dog, those are just stars, that's the sun and that's the moon, this is a plant, this is a drug, this is bad, this is good, etc. It is though we lock ourselves into a prison formed with language-barriers, which limit our perception, our ability to communicate, and it even limits our ability to think. What the shamanic experience does is it removes these barriers; this is why you will often hear a Shaman say that the psychedelic experience cannot be put into words.

Words are only symbols for the truth, truth must be experienced.