A Master Shaman's Guide To Ayahuasca - Hamilton Souther - #247

**Chris Williamson** (0:01)
Hello, friends, welcome back. My guest today is Hamilton Souther, a master ayahuasca shaman of over 4,000 ceremonies. Psychedelics are kind of like the cool kid on the block in 2020, from plant medicine holidays to recreational DMT trips. It seems like everybody's dipping their toe in at the moment. Today, expect to learn what it's like to learn shamanism from the greatest masters in history, why plants have a place in a medicalized modern world, what sort of a life a full-time shaman lives in a jungle, Hamilton's full-length description of how plant medicines work, what it feel likes, what it feel likes, what it feel likes to take ayahuasca, and much more. But for now, it's time for the wise and wonderful Hamilton Souther.
When people ask you what you do, what's your answer?

**Hamilton Souther** (1:09)
I tell them I do a lot of different things. Mostly I just say that I try to help people, advise people, guide people. But really I'm an entrepreneur and an inventor and a leader for humanitarianism and really the good of all. We focus our work really around positivity and unconditional love for humanity. We believe in a core fundamental principle that everyone is unique and inspired miracle created by the universe itself, in a truly scientifically biological way and also in not explainable, mystical, extraordinary consciousness way, and that those are converged in us ourselves.
Through the different kinds of projects that I work on, the goal is always to have a positive outreach and ultimate support. I'm well known for working in the space of Amazonian shamanism and Amazonian plant medicine, as well as the different consciousness arts. And so I'm most noted for that, but I'm also very interested in technology and new kinds of technology, blockchain technology, and cutting edge tech projects and things like that. So there's sort of the ancestral and what's coming into the future. And I really love the idea of a much larger timeline. I like to think of things, millions and millions of years ago and the millions of years to come. And so I kind of find myself in the middle of that and trying to make as most positive impact as we can while we're here alive.

**Chris Williamson** (2:41)
Yeah, you're crossing all of the streams there, right? Going from the Amazonian traditional shamanic medicine right up to blockchain.

**Hamilton Souther** (2:49)
Yeah, but I think what people don't understand is that shamans were the original technology. Like a lot of people don't know that the buffalo drum, you know, just the circular buffalo drum, and just doom, doom, doom, doom, doom, doom, played at 210 beats per minute, creates theta by neural beats. So shamans 60,000 years ago, we're creating theta by neural beats like you'll now find on YouTube. And they were sitting around just like learning how to trans. That's tech. It's not very like, it's not like crazy complex chips and silicon chip tech. It's pretty simple tech, but it was doing the same thing to consciousness in the brain. And then I think, well, the shamans were there as like original scientists. They were eating the berries that no one else would eat and some of them died. And then some of them ate them and didn't die and had this huge mind-opening experience and went, whoa, language. You know, we can communicate with so much more. So they were sort of like, you know, so deep in tech before I think, you know, whatever's happened in the last couple thousand years of civilization kind of made shamanism go underground and institutions become really, really more powerful than tribes. But the shamans have always been involved in ultimately their own kinds of technology. And I always thought of Amazonian plant shamanism as a kind of different technology.
The shamans had this amazing means of not only communicating with the plants, which is what a lot of our technology recently has been about, it's about these communicative evolutions. They had the ability to directly communicate with plants, which growing up, you heard of some people who hugged trees and that was kind of weird, or you heard of some people that in their garden talked to their plants and the plants grew better and stuff. But these guys literally would say they were talking to the plants. So I was like, okay, as an anthropologist, that was like mind blowing, like, what do you mean you're talking to the plant and the plant can talk back, you know, so that to me seemed like a communicative technology. And then they could also heal people with that, which to me seemed like an even more amazing understanding of medicine. And in my early 20s, I was enthralled with this idea that there were people who still were alive, who had ancient knowledge, and that they knew of medicines that were intermixed with mysticism. And somehow that knowledge had been passed down through thousands of years without being corrupted by the expansion of Western civilization and still somehow could possibly exist in the world. Like, I was enthralled with that idea. And so I met some people in the deep in the Amazon forest who represented these technologies. And so I thought it's kind of natural that they kind of go hand in hand. But most people don't think of it that way.