Check out The Nexian, the first ever e-zine produced by members of DMT-Nexus. It’s a free PDF download with 56 pages of trip reports, horticultural advice, interviews, and DMT-inspired artworks by members of the Nexus community.

One feature that stands out to me is Jungle Stewing: An Interview with Antrocles. Antrocles is Antony Galvan, a DMT enthusiast who runs a healing retreat inspired by his work with the Secoya tribe of the Ecuadorian Amazon. He talks about the relationship between language and the psychedelic experience:

If there’s one thing I’ve really gleaned from these tribes is that if you’re going to work with these plants, do it right. I’ve met too many people who are just in it for the fireworks. […]

For a long time, I never put it together with the visual aspect of DMT, where I was being just so blown away by the visual aspect of it, and the symbolism of what I was being shown- I thought that was actually the important thing. Because I was thinking with the human mind. The human mind, born of this dimension of sound and duality, needs to affix meaning to things… so you go into that place of infinite possibilities and things, and you start trying to lock your focus in on it, one thing at a time, labeling it… and you’re telling yourself it’s important, you’ve gotta remember it — basically killing the momentum of your experience and in some cases, on the deeper experiences, inducing some serious nut-twisting. You know, the medicine shows us pretty quickly, when you start working consistently with the big doses that its gift is the gift of total surrender… not feeling like you have to understand what’s going on, that you don’t need to know what it is so you can bring it back so you can tell so-and-so about it — all of that is forfeit. […]

[pullquoteleft]My greatest work with DMT comes when I just let go completely. I let go of trying to hold anything; it’s all about being empty.[/pullquoteleft]

We default into always wanting to remember stuff to share. We talk away a lot of our life experience, ironically, for the sake of validating it for ourselves. We do not know how to have genuine experiences, and just have them. You know, when the Secoya told me that I couldn’t talk about my experience for a year! That was like a death sentence to me. I would have had a similar response if a judge had sentenced me to the gas chamber or something. My heart sank… there was no way I could hold that in me. There was no way I could not talk that away, and I realized, just in the first handful of days where I couldn’t talk about it… Oh my God, this is what we do, as humans. We talk a lot, because we can’t handle the power of not talking. Of just embodying our life experiences — being the living embodiment of them. You know, rather than telling you about my Secoya experience, if I were a truly evolved being, I would just integrate all of those epiphanies, all of that terror, everything about that experience, and you would just see it in my eyes when I talked to you. You would hear it in my voice when I talked about ice cream. You know, we need to become more the embodiment of our experiences, and less the orators of them. That’s a big lesson that I brought back from them. […]

[pullquotecenter]We talk away a lot of our life experience. We do not know how to have genuine experiences, and just have them.[/pullquotecenter]

Antony with a member of the Secoya tribe in Ecuador

I’m on the Nexus all the time, but I haven’t written there forever, and you want to know why? I mean, there’s nothing I love more than writing about my trip experiences… waxing poetic. But in the end, I wasn’t even touching the surface of them, and according to these dons, I was actually taking a lot of power away from those experiences by putting language to them. That’s been one of the hardest things to integrate.

We’re human beings; we’re reasonable, rational creatures. We want a reason for things. But we’re dipping our toes into a pool that doesn’t even know what reasonable and rational are, I mean, it’s beyond all of that. And …honestly, my greatest work with DMT comes when I just let go completely. I let go of even trying to remember anything, and bringing it back. I let go of trying to hold anything; it’s all about being empty.

If that preview piqued your interest, go take a look at the rest of the issue! Well done, DMT-Nexus team.