Welcome to the fifth edition of The Flying Sage Journal. As with all editions, I would like to start off with a direct excerpt from my journal. In a couple weeks I am going to be going on a retreat and I thought it would be interesting to reflect on my experience the last time I was there. This past February I was lucky enough to be invited to this gathering geared towards creating safe containers for deep medicine work. About a dozen of us rented a private riverside property and split into triad groups where we would take turns holding space for one another over the course of a couple days. The following is a snapshot into my 5 gram journey with psilocybin (plus a 110mg MDMA boost).
Feb.28.22
I had a “bad” mushroom trip when I was younger and I confronted some scary imagery. White faced, pale women. Like Samara from The Ring. Being held in such a supported space here at Riversong, I wanted to revisit these entities and determine their origin & just get to know them better. I had the intention of bringing light to dark and in doing so, revealing the light in the dark. Perhaps these entities are friendly. Maybe I just need to get to know them. This was my thought.
So for the first phase of the journey I walked into the psychedelic arena with open arms and an open mind. Marvelling at the cosmic architecture. Tall spiralling lattices made of red and dark-blue velvet. Like a thick spider’s web stretching upwards with tension. Against a backdrop - a sort of void.Within and between these structures danced the entities. Sliding. Shifting. Appearing. Dissolving. Humanoid figures with long limbs and large heads. Typically taking a faceless and dark form. Dark in color but not in character.
These entities did not seem to mean harm. They are powerful but benevolent. Potentially powerful beyond words. They possessed shapeshifting abilities. As soon as I had my finger close to them, they would dissolve or shift into something else entirely. Like the visual embodiment of ineffability. Beyond my mind’s ability to categorize, label or subject to my own meaning making system.
In regards to these entities, I am not entirely sure where I sit with the notion of other and self. I’d have to lean a little more towards other in the sense that I felt witnessed by another. There was a distinct moment when it felt like I was being examined.Through surrendering further, it felt I was continuously adding more of my mind into that space… up until points where I felt a degree of merging with this other; of being held by this other. A very strong vibration settling into my body and spreading from cell to cell. Starting slow and soft and then building up. Reverberations accompanied by a distinct buzzing noise. It felt like it came from in between my ears. This vibration built up to an intense sensation throughout my body lasting 5-20 seconds and then I would get dropped out of it.
During one of these vibrational cosmic elevator rides, it felt like my brain itself was being examined by alien-like entities. The same entities as earlier. The housekeepers. My mind suspended within a frame of impossible shapes that were delicately holding my mind. Energetic probing was ongoing.These entities have a vast intelligence & I felt like a little ant in their presence. I then found myself chasing that vibration and I was able to slip into it multiple times. I kept chasing.
This experience was very powerful for me. It allowed me to bring the light to darkness and confront parts of my mind that I was afraid of. I think the most important factor that allowed me to meet these entities head on was the strong and safe container I was in. I felt supported to venture to the places I had previously avoided.
To anyone out there who has experienced something similar with mysterious psychedelic entities; be curious and allow someone to guide you. No matter your metaphysical identities or beliefs, these entities are a feature of experience you can interact with. Start a dialogue with them and see what happens.
I am excited to be going to this retreat again in a couple weeks and I will make sure to share my experience again with you all here. My intentions this time round are to…
Be the best support I can be
Explore my ancestors and lineage
Explore Stan Grof’s concepts of Basic Perinatal Matrices (BPMs) and COEX Systems.
Spirit Plant Medicine Conference
I am currently writing this right after packing all my things to get ready for this year’s Spirit Plant Medicine Conference. I should definitely be sleeping instead but I had a burst of inspiration to write this edition. I have attended this conference twice before and it has always been an amazing opportunity to connect with some really bright and inspiring people in the psychedelic space. During the first year I met Chris Kilham, the Medicine Hunter whom I really look up to. He is one of the best storytellers I know along with Wade Davis and Jamie Wheal who I also got to connect with a few years back for the first time.
A Conversation on Psychedelic Community Building with Jamie Wheal
One of the things I am most excited about this weekend is my public conversation with Jamie Wheal. Jamie is a big inspiration for me… in fact his book Recapture the Rapture was an essential building block in the formation of The Flying Sage. His philosophies and ideas around Meaning 3.0 and decentralized and anti-fragile community building helped inspire the slogan Democratize Transcendence which we have been using for a while now. I talked about what this means to me in an Instagram video here if you are curious to hear some of my rambles.
Here are some of the questions I have prepared for my conversation on stage with Jamie on Sunday…
How do we ground our pursuit of peak experiences in the everyday?
What cultural frameworks will allow us to situate psychedelics side-by-side with other state-shifting modalities?
How can we balance the desire to open-source traditional psychedelics with the desire to maintain safety and rite of passage? How do we engage with the urgent necessity of these medicines while confronting medieval drug laws?
When you look at the evolving psychedelic ecosystem, where do you see Meaning 3.0 manifesting?
Are you concerned about for-profit entities commandeering this psychedelic ship? How can anti-fragile structures help expand psychedelic use for more people?
Where do you see psychedelics being open sourced? Who is leading the way in this domain?
How can grassroots initiatives (bottom up) work in parallel with policy change (top-down) to make psychedelics more accessible?
If you are going to the Spirit Plant Medicine conference please come say hello! I will be stationed at a Flying Sage booth most of the time or find me floating around like an excited butterfly.
Weekly Member Meetups
Another thing I am really excited about is that we just launched our Weekly Member Meetups here in Vancouver. Every Wednesday during the Fall, we will gather as a community to connect, expand and learn more about one another. Each week we will be inviting local facilitators to join us in offering unique workshops with a different theme. Through these events, we will seek to offer transformation, connection and peak experiences all while providing a container to connect with other like-minded people in the community.
Aside from being able to call this work and attend each of these events every week, I am most excited for the ripple impact I think this sort of offering will have. Instead of paying $60-$90 for a single breathwork ceremony or sound bath, our members will be able to attend all of our events for free, including these member meetups. Not only does this make healing and transcendence more accessible, it also fosters community by inviting people to easily connect outside of the events through our membership platform. I believe that shifting to this sort of community-driven approach allows us to remember what we have forgotten as well; that we are communal beings. When people show up to a Flying Sage event, I want them to experience home and to get excited about running into people they met before. This element of continuation is vital if we want to create support networks that actually nourish one another. I could geek out about this all day so I hope you find it interesting too!
Farewell Until Next Time
I hope you have enjoyed this free edition of The Flying Sage Journal. If you would like to read more things like this, please consider subscribing and sharing this with a friend.
I would LOVE to hear any feedback you have on this newsletter and what I have shared. Please feel free to reach out to me directly: michael@theflyingsage.ca
With psychedelic love and gratitude,
- Michael 🤍