I’ve tried to describe what I did, what I saw, and what I heard during my first plant medicine journey. But that’s not all that happened. The most important part of the experience was what I felt. And the really important part of what I felt was the realization that I was not the only one who felt that way.
WE’RE ALL ON
THE SAME JOURNEY
I saw with perfect clarity that my experience was just one instance of a universal experience. Recognizing that fact was a life-changing moment for me. I saw everything in a completely new and much more insightful way. I knew that from then on, I would devote my life to helping as many people as possible to experience that same level of transformation.
In describing my experience, I introduced the idea that I had become separated from my soul, and the importance of restoring that connection. In this chapter we’ll look more closely at what that means. This is extremely important, because that soul separation happens to everyone, with results that can last a lifetime. Everyone can also learn to restore their soul connection again, with lifelong results that are vastly better.
Let’s backtrack for a moment. Let’s go all the way back to the biblical story of Adam and Eve. As everyone knows, Adam and Eve were exiled from paradise in the Garden of Eden because they ate a piece of fruit from a forbidden tree. Many commentators on that story have wondered whether it was fair. Not only did God exile Adam and Eve from the Garden, but he also sentenced them to a very different life than they’d known in paradise. They were going to know pain and suffering. They were going to work, sweat, and even bleed.
But if God was angry enough to kick Adam and Eve out of paradise, why didn’t he just destroy them? After all, God created them, so he could do whatever he wanted with them. Why didn’t God just say, "The hell with it!"?
That’s a valid question, and here’s the answer: God kicked them out so they could “learn” their way back in. Why did they eat the forbidden fruit? Was it ignorance or greed? Or is greed just a version of ignorance? But how could they be anything other than ignorant when they’d never been anywhere except paradise? Didn’t God understand this? But I think that’s the whole point. They had to leave the Garden to understand what the Garden really was and what it meant. That understanding would not come easily, but God must have known it would come eventually. That’s why he didn’t just destroy his creations. God is a lot smarter than we sometimes give him credit for!
Biblical commentaries teach that Adam and Eve, or their descendants, will return to paradise, and this time they’ll know where they are because they’ve been somewhere else. This time they’ll know what they’ve got because they lost it. When we look at the Bible story in this way, it radically changes the conventional interpretation. Most importantly, it depicts the forbidden fruit and the punishment for doing so as painful, but not really a bad thing. Something good comes of it. It’s something better than what was there before.
People separating from their souls in early childhood is a traumatic event. Between the time we’re conceived and we reach the age of six, a split can happen. We separate from our soul and take on a new identity. We become someone else. That separation can be triggered in different ways. It happened to me when I was sexually molested. For a surprisingly large number of people it happens because they weren’t fed on time. Others have had parents who fought, or there was alcoholism in the family. It can even happen while a child is still in the womb, if there’s a loud argument or a violent incident. Yes, it’s painful and it causes problems, often for many years. But it’s got to happen. The shattering of your early self has got to happen so that you can put it together again, and you gain the power to do that by learning what you need to learn. Something you might think is a tragedy has an opportunity hidden within it, provided you have the strength and understanding to see that.
Does my saying this seem cold-hearted to you? When I tell people that a painful break has taken place deep in their past, virtually everyone can relate to that. If I ask people if there was a tragedy early in their lives, everyone can relate. Alcohol, drugs, domestic violence, car accidents, fatal illnesses, fires, floods, tornadoes, earthquakes: we’ve all had catastrophic experiences that seem to put us out into the cold. I don’t intend to minimize any of that. But I ask you to look at it in a different way. Again, unfair or horrible or tragic as it may seem, those things always happen and they must happen.
The fundamental thing I learned from my first plant medicine journey was that I wasn’t an anomaly. The separation occurs for everybody, and we’re designed that way. That’s what my father meant when he said, “What makes you think you’re so special?” It’s built into the experience of being alive. It’s built into your human destiny. It’s out of your hands. What is not out of your hands is how you respond. Not what you did yesterday, or twenty years ago, but what you do right now. The purpose of this book is to help you see the path that’s right for you.
Originally, we separate to find safety. We think it’s no longer safe to be who we were. We think we’ve got to escape, because we’re not able to survive who we are. It’s the feeling that we’re not sufficient—that we’re not enough. That becomes the default message of your whole life, and you need to keep reminding yourself of it because otherwise you feel vulnerable and unworthy. If something goes right, you will unconsciously find a way to make something else go wrong.
We develop a new set of priorities. Instead of wanting to love, we might want to be rich. Instead of wanting to be loved, we might want to dominate other people. Instead of wanting a sense of community, we might want power for ourselves. Instead of wanting to be joyful, we might want to be seductive or intimidating.
We create separations between people—who’s smart and who’s not smart, who’s rich and who’s not, who’s good and who’s bad—and the motive for all those separations come from the same source. It’s our own separation from our soul, which is who we really are. This is what the moon calls “the keystone lie.” All disease, all addictions, all sadness, all violence, all aggression, all hatred is the result of this separation, which is the keystone lie. At some deep level of our consciousness we always know that. That’s why we try to distract ourselves in every possible way. Money and addictive behavior are two of the most common distractions, but there are many more. Use your imagination. The irony is, most people never even get the distractions they wanted. Most people who want $5 million never get $5 million. People who want the perfect high from drugs never get the perfect high. All they get is the distraction that comes from wanting that.
Even if they did get what they want, they would just have to want more, or find some other distraction. It never really ends.
The amazing thing about the keystone lie is that it’s gone in a second if you shine light on it, and it stays for a lifetime if you don’t. The universe is constantly sending you messages about this. But you’ve got to reach the place where you’re ready to see them. With my financially successful but emotionally disconnected life, I wasn’t too different from many other people who are always going after bigger and better thrills and acquisitions—and missing the clues that were so important to see.
While this was going on, I certainly believed that I was the initiator of whatever was happening in my life. I was the one making it happen. But that wasn’t correct. I was doing lots of big and exciting things, but I was doing them for reasons that I didn’t really understand. The actual reasons came from the separation from my soul, although I was completely unaware of it at the time.
Some events in England during World War II provide a good window into the effects of soul separation. When the major cities of England were being bombed every night, a decision was made to move large numbers of children to safer areas of the country, even though this meant breaking up families for a significant amount of time.
A British psychiatrist named John Bowlby worked with small children who had become separated from their families. Bowlby developed valuable information on how this extreme emotional pain was processed, and it’s closely related to the soul separation we’ve been discussing. In his groundbreaking “attachment theory” study, the doctor described some basic stages of how children deal with an extreme separation crisis. But it’s not a simple progression. People often return to a previous stage, or go back and forth before finally moving forward. See if you recognize any of these stages in your own life.
STAGES OF SEPARATION
Shock and Numbness
Especially in a young person, the sudden pain of a crisis can cause both body and mind to function efficiently, or even to shut down in some respects. In a very short time a traumatic event can be pushed out of your awareness and into the black hole of unconscious memories. This can be a survival mechanism. The pain might be too much to bear with an everyday level of sensitivity and awareness.
Yearning and Searching
This includes wide-ranging emotions such as guilt and anger, yearning for simpler times, or wondering and worrying about the future. Sometimes there’s a tendency to withdraw from other people, even family members, which may continue even for many years.
Disorientation and Disorganization
At first, the pain and loss can seem overwhelming, as if it were the only reality. The rest of life can seem unimportant or even unreal.
Reconnection and Resolution
This last stage can’t really happen until a significant amount of time has passed. That means years—often many years. Unfortunately, for many people this never happens at all. The whole purpose of my work now in Costa Rica—and actually in everything I do—is to open people’s eyes both to where they’ve been and to where they can go in their lives. It doesn’t happen by itself, and it won’t happen until you’re ready. The irony of this is, most people are more ready than they think they are.
Suppose someone had come to me the day before I took my first plant medicine journey. Suppose they said, “Gerry, tell me one thing that’s true and good about yourself and I’ll give you a hundred thousand dollars.” I would have said, “Yes, I’m a drunk, I’m a drug addict, but one good thing about me is that I’m a pretty honest guy.” But the first really important thing that I learned from my soul was that I was a huge liar, especially when I said that I was a pretty honest guy. Because when I said that I was not only lying to other people, but mostly lying to myself.
However, once I admitted to myself that I was dishonest, I stopped being dishonest—because I told myself the truth for the first time.
Somehow, when I did that, I automatically canceled the primary lie I had taken in at the moment of separation from my soul. That lie was the belief that I am not enough. That’s the belief that causes us to separate from our soul, because we feel we’re not enough, and it’s dangerous for us to stay in a situation where we are fundamentally inadequate.
But once we stop living according to that lie, once we stop lying and start being honest with ourselves, then at that moment we really are enough, even a lot more than just enough.
This is what the plant medicine tells you, or even shows you. If you ask the plant medicine, “Who am I right now? Who have I become?” the plant medicine shows you the answer to those questions so powerfully and so vividly that the questions are not just answered, but are eliminated once and for all. You don’t wake up every morning worrying about whether the world is flat, do you? Do you worry about how ships sailing toward the horizon might fall off the edge of the world? You could worry about those things; maybe there are some people who do. But for most of us the question of whether the world is flat has been answered so convincingly that it doesn’t even exist as a real question for us anymore. That’s what happens to a lot of your questions once you’re able to stop lying to yourself. The plant medicine has the power to do that.
Once you’re able to let go of all your distracting questions, you will have an overwhelming intention to merge back with your soul at all costs. Sometimes people have a concern about the meaning of “at all costs.” When I merge back with my soul, will I have to become a monk? Will I ever have sex again, or will I need to become celibate?
But reconnecting with your soul doesn’t mean you become a saint and live on top of a mountain. It means the intentions of your life are different, which may or may not mean that your material circumstances change. It’s just that whatever you have or whatever you desire aren’t distractions anymore. You’re no longer trying to fill up a hole at the center of your being by getting a new car. For the first time, a car is just a car, nothing more and nothing less.
Sometimes people worry that making this change will disrupt what’s been positive and productive in their lives. They worry they’ll be so blissed out that they won’t be able to do anything else. Above and beyond material things, no one who has merged back with their soul has become a worse parent. No one has become a worse business owner or employee. No one has become a worse musician or athlete. The experience of soul connection multiplies. It doesn’t divide.
MANY PATHS TO SOUL CONNECTION
When I say, “this experience,” I mean the experience of merging with your soul. I don’t mean merging with your soul through plant medicine, because there are many ways to do it.
There are an infinite number of ways, and that’s something that has been understood by many of the great spiritual traditions. Yoga, for instance, is a Sanskrit word meaning union or connection, which immediately suggests the concept of reconnection that we’ve been discussing. The true intention of the poses of hatha yoga is not just to twist the body into strange positions. The purpose is to focus attention on the connection between the body and the breath—to show the union between those two realities that we usually overlook. In a similar way, karma yoga, sometimes called the path of unselfish actions, is the practice of recognizing connections in all events of daily life, and seeing those events as opportunities to bring those connections to positive manifestation. Everything is an opportunity for action based on spiritual awareness.
Kabbalah, the tradition of mystical Judaism, regards the loss of soul connection as an event that requires a process of healing (called tikkun in Hebrew) that needs to be undertaken individually by every human being, and also collectively by the entire human species. Like karma yoga, tikkun olam means healing the world in activities of everyday life. Of course, since we are in the world, when we heal the whole world, we heal ourselves as well.
My own path to reconnection was based on plant medicine. That’s a path that many people have followed toward reconnecting with their soul. I want to emphasize again, however, that this worked for me, but it might not be everyone’s choice. I certainly don’t intend to “advertise” plant medicine, or even to recommend it. My intention is just to describe the tools for my life-changing experience and to state that those tools are available in an ideal setting for people who choose to use and explore them.
Whatever path you choose to reconnect to your soul, the essential element is what Jesus said: “Come to me as a child.” Come as someone who has managed to recognize the distractions of modern life for what they are, and who wants to move away from them. It also means believing in the possibility of doing that; I’m living proof of that possibility. “Come to me as a child” means starting from the beginning, and always staying at the beginning, no matter how much time passes. What does a child think of a Ferrari? A child doesn’t think of how people will envy you if you pull up at a restaurant in a Ferrari, or how much the Ferrari cost. Maybe a child would like the red color of a Ferrari, or the fun of riding on the highway with the top down, but that’s as far as it goes. That’s the beginner’s mind, the mind of an innocent child. The beginner’s mind doesn’t happen by itself.
The human ego won’t go down without a fight. Whenever you attempt something that involves fundamental change, there will always be moments of doubt that you must recognize for what they are: they’re your ego fighting for its dominance over your life.
If you try to run a marathon for the first time, there is a signature moment that will occur no matter how long and how hard you’ve trained. A full marathon is slightly more than twenty-six miles. When you’ve run ten miles, or even twelve, you will suddenly get the feeling that you’ve made a huge mistake. You’ve been running for a long time and you’re not even halfway there. Maybe you’re being passed by lots of other runners. Maybe some of them are old enough to be your grandparents. How humiliating. You think to yourself, What was I thinking when I decided to do this? Why don’t I just stop and have a cold beer? That would make a lot more sense.
This is your ego talking. It’s your ego resisting the change that you’re trying to impose on it. Something similar to this can happen with plant medicine. In the first few hours of the experience, you might find yourself disoriented or even panicked. You may think, for instance, that you did something in the past for a certain reason, but that’s not the real reason. The plant medicine, or yoga, or meditation, will show you the truth, but your ego may cause you to misinterpret or even ignore it. Your soul wants you to connect, but your ego can still try to get in the way.