Amanita the teacher + too much/not enough culture
Riordan Regan discusses the emotional and physical pain of feeling unrooted, linking it to ancestral traumas and the broader issues of consumerism, capitalism, and healthcare in America. He emphasizes the need for community, reciprocity, and respect for life, criticizing a system that prioritizes profit over human needs. Regan highlights the role of Amanita in addressing these issues by working on GABA receptors, helping to manage information overload. He advocates for reconnecting with our roots, indigenous values, and the natural world, suggesting that medicinal practices and syncretism can help humanity expand and awaken.
Action Items:
Explore the use of Amanita and other plant medicines to help individuals reconnect with their roots and inner worthiness.
Develop a framework for initiation, training, apprenticeship, and mentorship to support individuals who are highly sensitive and open to the astral realms.
Observe nature and learn from the self-regulating systems of the natural world to find balance and harmony within the larger system.
Outline
Amanita and the Pain of Unworthiness
Riordan Regan discusses the pain of unworthiness and breaking one's root, emphasizing the importance of reconnection and rooting.
Amanita is highlighted for its ability to work on GABA receptors, helping to manage the flood of information.
The conversation touches on the broader issues of consumerism, capitalism, and over-extractivism, and the need to widen the “I” and let more light in.
Riordan Regan critiques the American consumer culture, particularly the lack of respect for human life and healthcare.
Cultural Programming and Systemic Failures
Riordan Regan elaborates on the cultural programming that leads to a lack of regard for life, including the medical-industrial complex.
The conversation highlights the stress and trauma caused by the healthcare system, which nickel-and-dimes patients and sends unexpected bills.
Riordan Regan shares a personal story of being in the emergency room, feeling abandoned by the caregiver, and the broader cultural issues of narcissism and co-dependence.
The discussion emphasizes the need for a foundation and regard for life, questioning how we can grow up with a regard for life on Earth in a system that doesn't respect ours.
Reconnecting to Rooting and Indigeneity
Amanita is presented as a tool to help reconnect to inner worthiness and deservedness, promoting healthy dissociation and reconnection to the whole system.
The conversation explores the concept of syncretism, sharing ideas and belief systems across cultures, and the potential for expanding human consciousness.
Riordan Regan discusses the importance of regarding one's own life first and the paradox of extreme behaviors leading to a realization of something more.
The discussion touches on the lack of frameworks for initiation, training, apprenticeship, and mentorship in the Western modern tradition.
Medicine and the Antidote
Riordan Regan explains the concept of the antidote being a bit of the poison, and how medicine often involves going further into the pain to find the cure.
The conversation highlights the importance of dissociation in managing pain and information overload, helping to separate what is us and what is other.
Riordan Regan discusses the role of Amanita in regulating GABA receptors and slowing down the flood of information, allowing us to breathe and connect with our inner knowing.
The discussion emphasizes the need for guidance and the potential for learning from nature, the original teachers, to live in balance and harmony with the system.
The Human Game of Forgetting and Remembering
Riordan Regan describes the human experience as a process of forgetting and remembering, dying and resurrecting, and the importance of guidance in navigating this process.
The conversation highlights the role of DMT in activating inner knowing and the importance of grounding and interpretation of experiences.
Riordan Regan discusses the need for balance and harmony with the whole system, learning from nature, and the potential for over-dissociation as a curse and a gift.
The discussion concludes with the importance of Amanita in regulating GABA receptors and turning down the noise to tune in the signal, helping us connect with our inner knowing and the system.
Listen / Transcript:
Amanita for the pain of unworthiness, for add for the pain of breaking your pelvis, your root.
Amanita, what restores us from the pain of unrootedness, breaking my root, letting the pain rise to the surface, seeing our ancestral traumas,
healing the physical pain of the body that manifests itself through things that we're not listening to and our soul is trying to tell us
about reconnection, about rooting and planting and being mycelial again.
Amanita teaches us because it works on the GABA receptors, which relates to the flood of information coming in from this system.
Too much, and not enough of something. It's at the root of the whole thing. It's at the root of consumerism and capitalism and over extractivism.
We gotta widen the “I” and let more light in. We get stuck in these cycles of taking more
than the system can support when we see ourselves as separate,
when it's an I instead of a we, when it's my needs versus the whole system in community, in reciprocity.
We're not taught these things. We're not taught these values in consumer culture, especially not as Americans.
Where human life isn't even respected enough to receive health care
to keep us alive, where, where we have to scrape by without what we need to survive, where we don't even have the expectation
of being provided for in the most catastrophic situation. And so then when it comes, not only are you turning down things you need,
not getting enough of critical care to preserve your life force vitality, but you're stressing through the whole thing,
putting the system through even more trauma when it's supposed to be healing by nickel and diming, turning away the testing.
How much is that pill costing? No, I don't think I need that lab work. How many hundreds of dollars will that be?
Which private contracting company is going to send me a separate bill for 1000s of dollars five months later, when I think the whole thing is over and behind me?
Oh, and that's after I spend four days in the emergency room peeing into a tube, wearing diapers for the first time since I was two,
while the person who I’m living with shows up into the waiting room and asks how I'm going to look after myself once I get out of here,
and I think to myself, well, I thought you were going to help me. I don't know anybody else.
Oh, too much / not enough kids. We're a culture of narcissists and codependents, but it's not really even our fault. We're programmed for it,
because the culture gives us too much of what we don't need and not enough of other things, just like my own parents gave to me.
So how do we have any rooting, how do we have any foundation?
How do we grow up with a regard for any life on earth when we grow up in a system that doesn't regard ours,
that will let you die, literally, because you can't pay the bill to the fucking pharmaceutical medical allopathic industry,
they'll let you die and then send you a bill for $100,000 after the fact to your last surviving relatives.
How are we ever supposed to regard any life on Earth? Of course, we take more and more and more. Of course, it never feels like enough.
Of course, we're a country of hungry ghosts. We grow up being taught that we're worth nothing.
So Amanita can help us reconnect to this rooting by not only connecting us to our own inner worthiness and deservedness, showing us healthy dissociation that can connect us back into the whole system. It can connect us back to our own indigeneity, which shares the same value systems as other animistic cultures and legacies,
where we don't have to appropriate someone else's traditions and we can look to our own bones and backgrounds and belief systems,
and then we see the commonality, and then we see the “I”/eye widened to let more Light in. The eye becomes the we; I need reciprocity.
But we also see the culture is formed by syncretism, which means sharing ideas and belief systems,
which means swapping symbols and practices with other cultures we come in contact with,
and so maybe we can help all of humanity expand and awaken by sharing our medicine traditions.
Because some of these things just work so perfectly together that it wouldn't make any sense why they do unless they wanted to be together.
The key is not to take but to share honor and acknowledge and reciprocate.
But we’ve got to do this with ourselves first. We got to regard our own life first. I guess that's the paradox,
is that sometimes these medicines and extreme behaviors are exactly what we need
to lead us down the path that shows us that there's something more than this.
Pain is too much information rushing into the body at once so it overwhelms the system. The ADD kid is the extra sensitive, extra sensory one, the one most open to the astral, the one who, in another culture, would be a shaman, because their crown is just torn open, and all the other voices from the other side are pouring in, and they can't tell where they end and other things begin,
because we have no framework for initiation and training, apprenticeship and mentorship in this system, in the Western modern tradition, quote, unquote, quote, unquot-tations, and the system where we wrote things down and fixed them and pretended like that was the truth and they were never changing, when really the ones who ensuring those histories were the dominators who had a certain version of culture they wanted to preserve. So the antidote is always a bit of the poison. That's how medicine works, and always has. Ee turned it into taking something to blunt the pain and take away the symptoms. But in fact, sometimes the cure is going further into them,
and sometimes it isn't, and sometimes it's being gentle with ourselves.
The medicine of dissociation helps us maintain a safe distance from the pain that can overwhelm us from so much information flooding in. It can help us slow things down and learn to separate what's us and what is other things. Slowing it down, helping us interpret the different voices coming in. Through the crown and all from all around
and realizing that we're not crazy. We're not hallucinating. It's not like they've told us all these years. We're not witches and black magicians,
or maybe we are, but we're reframing that definition. Really we're just the ones who can listen to the subtle realms of spirit
and the voices that aren't very loud in decibels, but scream and symbols and images,
speak through the vessels that are our bodies, the altars, the prendas, the unique collectors of information and experience
captured for a moment in this thing that we pretend a solid matter, a person that only appears in observation and relation for a passing instant
before it disappears in ether and dissolves in acid again.
abracadabra, hocus pocus. Suddenly, I have a corpus.
Now you see me. Now you don't. shit, I had it, then I lost it. It's okay. This whole human game is just a process
of forgetting and remembering, dying and resurrecting over and over and over again. A
nd it makes sense when you put it in context. It makes sense when we have someone guide us,
but without it, it's really confusing and super overwhelming, too much and not enough of everything it seems,
until someone takes us by the hand and leads us through that darkened tunnel back to the ancestral land, the place where our bones remember and our nervous systems regulate; the forest and the lands of our people. For me, it's the mist that leads us back to the darkness where we see most clearly.
DMT, producing endogenously, third eye activating the real inner knowing,
the kind that you don't read in a book, but feel in your body.
So with someone to guide us and ground us and help us interpret these experiences, we can realize how much we need of certain things
and what others we can live without entirely. And it's know how to live in balance and harmony
with the whole system, but we need guidance, and we can learn from the plants and the fungi
and the trees and the animals directly.
The way we learn is by observing our original teachers: nature, the system that just runs without having to think about it,
the system that regulates itself and balances out. And this is where the impulse comes, I think, sometimes to just tune it out,
to dissociate so far that we can't come back. Because the curse of the ego is awareness, but it's also the gift,
and if we can learn to dance with it, we realize that we won the lottery by incarnating into human existence,
and we see why is the envy of the cosmos,
but it's a lot of information, and that's where Amanita is the teacher to regulate the GABA of receptors and slow down
the flood of information so it doesn't overwhelm us with so much coming in every second, helping us breathe and
get back to what our bones know and we feel in our souls. Turn down the noise and tune in the signal.
dissociation: when the dream becomes reality
(something we can engage with and make magical)
vs depersonalization: when nothing seems real, and it stops being fun
the question isn’t whether you’re dissociating
but whether it’s happening to you
or you’re doing it consciously
voluntarily
going into the night world for exploration vs clubbed over the head by your past self or a substance or an epigenetic pattern or a partner and drug into a blackout
where you wander lost like the minotaur
blinded, bumping into walls
trying to remember how you even got here at all.
ethanol, alcohol, that tricky molecule and compound
the carrier of healing herbs, inspirer of poetry, loosener of verbs
no wonder it both helps and hurts,
it’s the impetus of agriculture, humanity’s greatest blessing and curse
it begins with a fall
GABA can mitigate the flood of too-much information that can overwhelm a system
so we get just enough
maintaining a safe distance between us and other stuff
GABA receptors are a class of receptors in the brain that respond to the neurotransmitter gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA). GABA is the primary inhibitory compound in the central nervous system of mature vertebrates.
There are two main classes of GABA receptors: GABAA and GABAB:
GABAA receptors
These receptors are ligand-gated ion channels that mediate fast synaptic transmission. They are made up of five subunits that surround a chloride ion-selective channel. GABAA receptors are responsive to many drugs, including benzodiazepines, which are used for their sedative and anxiolytic effects.
GABAB receptors
These receptors are G protein-coupled receptors that mediate slow synaptic transmission. They are associated with memory, mood, and pain.
GABA receptors are found on many cell types throughout the central nervous system, including astrocytes. The physiological significance of GABA receptor activation in astrocytes is not yet known, but it may be involved in ion homeostasis and pH regulation.
GABA receptor dysfunction has been linked to a number of neuropsychiatric disorders, including:
Epilepsy, Alzheimer's disease, Cervical dystonia, Autism spectrum disorder, Schizophrenia, and Depression.
Alcohol exposure can alter the function of GABA receptors, and these receptors may play a role in the development of alcohol tolerance and dependence.
Meeting Amanita
I am about to undertake my first proper journey with Amanita muscaria today, after a year of microdosing through my broken pelvis. I meet her with no cacao, no nothing in my system interfering, just me and her; the intimacy I’ve been scared of. Pleasure with a woman—perhaps my greatest fear? We’ll see. I think my greatest fear might be dying alone, or losing my mom, or going crazy, but my stomach is getting sick and churny, so maybe I just nailed it.
Today is 9 Kame, the number of life and nahual of death energy; the day to ask our ancestors for help facing our fears so we know what to have the surgeon of Tijax cut out so that we may be reborn brand new. On Christmas morning, just like the Christ child I always knew I was. But I found that divinity through the forest and the interconnection with the animals, and the trees and plants and birds and I can’t even begin to explain how GOOD it feels to have that connection back again.
I closed the Solstice portal as another one opens for Amanita, I can’t wait to meet her, but I also have a healthy fear. I realized in the woods today that this is sometimes the only way I feel okay, in ceremony or in the forest or usually when I’m drawing something. In another culture I’d be a shaman. Ceremony is my calling.
But how can I make this part of a life supported under capitalism? How can I stop participating in that system, spending money I don’t have on shit I don’t need at the grocery store? Ugh. I got sucked into that black hole again today, as soon as I announced I was going to draw and learn all day. I think I should stop saying things like that. Somehow it makes me less likely to do ti.
So I call upon the Kanti, the Siberian group who engage with Amanita to sing the heroic epic songs of their people. As Ash recommended, I will ask the mushroom to show me through the spirit of the bear and the squirrel and the wren and the robin and the winter ermine how to meet my dreams or visions with courage. How to drop everything like Jung did and just LET GO, face my fears bravely and just LEAP, like I used to with codependency, onl t this time into self-expression, Eros, pleasure; live in Kairos, not Chronos; more Mythos, less Logos.
Let’s go.
—
Ash just slayed me, I’m sobbing at the computer screen, because she just gave me permission, told me I’m not a bad kid. “If we are living in the dream 100% of the time then maybe we aren’t doing our duty as humans in a body—but if you’re a chronic pain experiencer and you have a hard time just wanting to be alive, maybe it’s a good thing to be such a devotee of something like Amanita muscaria.”
i always think i’m bad and wrong and abusing the medicine - but Ama and cacao have made me want to live when I wanted to die - same with psilocybin - WE DO WHAT WE HAVE TO DO IN ORDER TO SURVIVE - AND WE DO IT UNTIL WE DON’T NEED TO ANYMORE - regardless of whether that outlasts the physical body.
*the Nutcracker ALL takes place inside a dream.
Enhance self-esteem! Somatic experience of “I” ness - am I allowed to take up space?
Courage to share what I am meant to share in the world–YES! And it’s ok to receive!
But people w big egos it can get worse!
CAN EMPOWER YOU WITH THE ENTIRE MYCHORHIZZAL RELATIONSHIP WITH THE FOREST - yes this is what I felt this morning! This is inherently ego-checking - bc you are part of an ECOSYSTEM
“You can BE THE MAGICIAN WHO CREATES EMERGENT PROPERTIES BY CALLING IN THE ENTIRE INTELLIGENCE OF THE FOREST”-!!! TRANS EMERGENCE
DUDE! She keeps giving me a break on all my shame feelings and so do the crowd. They are all doing what I’m doing, stacking things on high pain days, ama and psilocybin and LSD and cacao is what I do but I keep feeling like i’m bad and wrong - you DO HAVE A DIFFERENT EXPERIENCE WHEN YOU ARE IN A HIGH PAIN SITUATION - BECAUSE “THE MUSHROOM HAS WORK TO DO” - IN OTHER AREAS
KNOW THY STACK! So i can’t standardize for anyone - it’s about empowering them to build their own.
Lightning strikes of information, this happens, I get the downloads so fast I can’t keep up w it
EYES ON THE PRIZE
As an ADD kid, all I have been craving for is FOCUS, and yet I havent felt i could get a purchase on it. everything was too fascinating, everything also felt like too much pressure amnd respomnsibility, i had to be everything to everyone and everything ust like with mom and dad
but I am finding the healing and it’s trickling down to everything
I got the message on that equinox journey in 2023 - after breaking convention and before nest - it’s about briding the realms of academia and science and spirituality and art and esoteric fuckin shit. i got the message then but I didn’t trust it but it keeps coming back again and again.
IN MY JOURNEY OF NOMADING AND CONSCIOUSNESS EXPLORING - NOMADING TRANSDIMENSIONALLY - I HAVE LEARNED TO FOLLOW THE FEELING, WHEN THE VOICE SAYS SOMETHING ND I KNOW I CAN TRUST IT WHICH IS SO RARE
it told me to BE A STUDENT OF MUSHROOMS AND CACAO
AND APPRENTICE W ASH AND ACACEA
and two years later here I am again
they are my guides but the plants and fungi are my teachers
and I am not rooted yet becase i need to be free to go where the voice takes me
and i am going into the night world because it’s the key to everything
the plants that flourish under cover of darkness like DMT
cacao that blossoms in the night and amanita the fungi of death and transformation
these are my teachers, sacraments, muses and medicines
so i am being called to the night world of berlin and I am submitting papers and presentations for breaking convention
taking classes from ash and acacea and workshops on theatre devising
the art is also costume and set design and nature documentation
let it SUPPORT what you’re doing not distract from it
I want to talk about music because it has been so important to me but it’s also an attachment to stephen and joe and I can’t do everything
i need to let that go for now i think
and focus on amanita and cacao and performance and transness - the music supports it but let others tell it
I FEEL SO FUCKING MATURE MAKING DECISIONS