Nearly 20 years ago, a veil fell from my eyes and the warm comfort of deep sleep was replaced by stark revelations. I was given a fleeting glimpse of how it all fits together like a perfect puzzle. Ever since that vision tore my soul from slumber, I’ve been digging, and discovering, and sharing.
The Witness – NDE Round Table Lineup
This Fall I’m releasing 4 round table discussions, all of which will focus on a different aspect of the phenomenon of direct experience.
THE NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCE ROUND TABLE
I am very excited to announce that the Near Death Experience Round Table lineup is complete and is as follows:
DR. RAYMOND MOODY, MD, PHD

“In 1975, I coined the term near-death experience in my book Life After Life. For half a century, I have researched some of life’s greatest mysteries. As both a PhD in philosophy and an MD, I have had a strong interest in how medical realities intersect with the ineffable realm of philosophy. In my multiple roles as author, professor, public speaker and grief counselor, I have heard thousands of accounts of near-death, shared-death and after-death experiences. I never expected that my interest in the afterlife would become such a focus of my life’s work, but it has led me to great associations, friendships and insights. Throughout my five-decade career, I have explored themes related to the trans-personal aspects of death, dying and grief. In my book Glimpses of Eternity, I discuss the phenomena of shared-death experiences. I write about my inquiry into past lives in my book Coming Back and share methods for evoking the dead, from Ancient Greece to modern times, in my book Reunions. I also have a passion for language, which I share with my colleague and co-founder of the Life After Life Institute, Lisa Smartt. My PhD in philosophy focused on unintelligibility and my new book Making Sense of Nonsense (Llewellyn 2020) discusses what nonsense teaches us about consciousness and altered states of being. For years, I have imagined a forum in which leading-edge researchers and thinkers could share their most up-to-date investigations into near-death phenomena while also drawing upon the wisdom of the ancients whose practices and customs clearly recognized a life beyond this one. With the help of my friends and colleagues, I will share with each of you all we have discovered at the most fascinating frontiers of life and death.”
DR. MARY HELEN HENSLEY

Dr. Mary Helen Hensley is a chiropractor, metaphysical healer and international motivational speaker. After a Near Death Experience following a high speed car collision in 1991, a lifelong ability to communicate with those in spirit, coupled with the gift to see future events, was enhanced by a new endowment: to touch an individual, “read their past” and facilitate healing. Mary Helen began to realize that her previous skills of communicating with those in spirit had become so much more. She found herself able to “read” the ethereal field of an individual, linking her to the person’s history, gaining insights into how past experiences were creating a person’s present reality, regarding their physical, emotional and spiritual health. Mary Helen has been speaking to audiences across the globe about what it means to live with unshakable faith in the Divine plan of a multi-faceted Multi-verse.
HOWDIE MICKOSKI

After coming across a Nova TV program on Egyptian pyramids that changed his life at the age of 28, Howdie put every moment of his time to study the ancient world. Good fortune brought him to spend time with a Korean Zen monk, several Native Indian medicine men, a doctor of medical Qi Gong, herbalists, and alchemists. He saved what money he had and traveled the world to visit ancient sites in Egypt, Mexico and Europe. He has been looking to uncover less how the sacred sites were built, but why, and how can such sites be used by humans today in positive ways. This wisdom was put into the book The Power Of Then.When he was 36 he fell into a canyon in Western Canada, and had a death experience that revealed the false covering of oneself, and of reality. Changing his effort of study, he delved into the work of Gnostic and Hermetic teachings, stone circles and megaliths, as well as the writings and teachings of Tat Foundation creator Richard Rose. This awakening experience was very hard and confusing for him, included years of near incapacitating illness…forcing one to go the only place we have avoided- within.
LINDSEY SCHARMYN

“I’m the creator and host of Rogue Ways and my goal is to serve others through sharing analog, electric, concentric wisdom via exploration of Conspiracy, Culture, Consciousness, Spirituality, Magic, Questions, Exploration, Freedom, Liberty, Community. I aim to think critically and skeptically about literally everything, following the manifold paths toward deeper wisdom and understanding of this crazy journey called life.”
LISA SMARTT

“My name is Lisa Smartt. Five years ago, I listened in stunned silence as my skeptical and rationalist father described seeing angels in his last days of life. Three days before dying, he announced, “The angels say only three days left now.” He spoke of a “green dimension” and his room crowded with people who were unseen to me. He also spoke in poetic and metaphoric language, describing the big art show that was approaching and the boxes he had to carry for his ceramicist wife of 54 years. I listened in awe as I transcribed his final words that not only painted a world unseen to me but were rich in language patterns that appeared to be unique to end of life. Trained in linguistics, I was deeply curious about the language I witnessed. When I discovered little or no research had been done into people’s final words, I established The Final Words Project”
The Synchratic Method
All 5 of my guests for this discussion have had run-ins with the death experience, either directly or have studied it thoroughly and professionally. The Near-Death Experience has fascinated me ever since I placed my feet back on solid ground after my initial psilocybin experience. I was not in mortal danger, yet my consciousness experienced many of the characteristics that NDE witnesses endure. There are also paranormal experiences and alien contact experiences that mirror the same motifs. My aim is, as always, to build bridges from one type of experience to the next because I strongly believe we are dealing with a unified field. I hope to showcase the incredible synchronicity between these vastly different pathways of transcendence, and perhaps help us move towards a more objective view of perturbed consciousness experiences.
I look forward to sharing these discussions with you all!
The Witness: An Upcoming Podcast Event
October is going to be a big month. I’m currently gathering up guests for an epic, multi-part roundtable event called, The Witness. This podcast mini-series will include 4 separate roundtable discussions: 1. Paranormal experiencer roundtable. 2. Psychedelic experiencer roundtable. 3. Religious/near-death experiencer roundtable. and 4. Extra-terrestrial experiencer roundtable. This set of discussions will work to elevate our understanding of these phenomena and hopefully give us a greater guide to mapping out how these experiences differ, and how they are connected.
If we want to get to the bottom of all of this, everything must reduce down until it cannot be reduced any further. We need to peer beyond our individual experiences and look for the motifs, archetypes and symbolism that permeate this phenomenon of consciousness on a holistic level.
If you would like to be a part of any one of these 4 discussions, please send me an email or hit me up on social media and tell me:
Your name, which discussion you’d like to be a part of, and a story that connects you to the topic.
I look forward to hearing from you all!!!
-AJR
Declaration of Psychedelic Independence
Becoming an adult for me included the first of many psychedelic trips. The ripe age of 18 sent me flying into the ethereal realms through magic mushrooms, LSD, and mescaline. These mind-blowing excursions opened doors in my consciousness I never knew existed, let alone ones I had simply shied away from. From that point on, I could only look back at the life I had occupied previously as a robotic slumber, filled with automated decision making, and a total lack of internal questioning. The experiences that came forth from the psychedelics (and remember, the drug allows the experience, it does not give it) filled me for the first time with a majesty of existential realizations that fit NONE of the philosophies espoused in popular cultures, yet contained little bits of each and every one of them. It was as if we were all, every one of us who ever had a thought about the world was on to something, but just a little off. Another way I’ve come to describe the overall experience is the following: You’re in a dark room; you’ve been in the dark room stumbling and feeling around for a long time. Suddenly someone turns the light on for just a second. And in that second you are able to see in all its glory the entirety of the room and all of the components of the room you’d been bumping into aimlessly, with no reference as to what they were. In that one instance, everything makes sense in such a particular way; all aspects of the room fit together the only way they can. The light is then shut off, leaving you with only a momentary flash of all the exquisite details of the room; left once again in the dark with just a fading, vague image burned into your heart. In this metaphor, what followed for me was years of stumbling through that same darkness, but with the addition of new found “faith” that what I had experienced was in fact completely transformative, completely paradigm shattering, and completely real… But I could not speak it with language or prove what I had gone through in any tangible way. I could only recall the feeling of the knowledge that there was no denying what I was witnessing, but the content itself is lacking definition now – almost on purpose, it seems.
Like so many others, especially the population of dead-head drifters from the 60s, I was a man without a country. There was no online psychedelic community, most of my friends who had also taken them had giggled for 8 hours and discovered nearly nothing, and my family was horrified by my willingness to undergo these chemically-induced experiences. I had nearly no one to speak with on the matter. Decades later, the world is far different than the one I knew as a freshly awakened psychonaut and now there are more alternative communities than one can keep track of. It’s a beautiful thing, but not everyone in the Truth community has the same understanding of my favorite substances. I’m going to try and explain, to the best of my ability, why this has occurred, and why we need to overcome this psychological operation. And I would also like to share a commanding statement I’ve written that can be used as an argument against anyone claiming that the oldest transformative experience in the Human story is evil by design.
The statement I’ve created is for anyone, like me, whose psychedelic philosophy has come under hostility or criticism by those who have fallen for a very specific psyop; a psychological operation in which the observer gains fear, loses faith, or distrusts from the get-go any and all psychedelic experiences, reports of these experiences, and anyone purporting these experiences, due to the U.S. government’s nefarious involvement with these substances in the past, and possibly the present. The reason I’ve created this statement is because my mission is to share my understandings with anyone who will listen. I cannot achieve this goal if the honest stories I tell can be twisted or mistrusted due to the same exact tactic the parasite class uses constantly in every aspect of their agenda. The tactic is mimicry, the style is inversion, and the goal is to deceive, reduce, and trap. And psychedelics have been at the heart of our deception for a long time.
Yes, MK-Ultra was real. Is real. ISRAEL!? It could certainly still be carrying on today under a different name that we would never see until they wanted us to. These parasites have been using the psychedelic experience to manipulate human behavior for a long while now. My biggest question has always been… How? From my long list of psychedelic interventions, the acts of breaking down barriers, dissolving belief structures, unconditional love and unity, and disillusionment of ego are the main focal points of every experience. How are any of these compatible with brainwashing or mind control? Granted, I’ve never been strapped to a chair on acid, fed a bunch of lies and scared shitless into believing anything I was told.
The plot thickens when we consider a number of other historical situations, like the possibility of the entire hippie movement being orchestrated by the CIA. How many rock stars in Laurel Canyon can have parents in U.S. Intelligence at the same time before it’s more than a coincidence? I don’t know about you, but I found out that the Gulf of Tonkin was a lie at the same time that I had a poster of The Doors on my bedroom wall, thinking I was mighty counter-cultural. How’s that for irony? What I later found out was there was a legitimate anti-war movement already buzzing in society before the hippie movement got started. In David McGowan’s book, Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon, it becomes very obvious that the psychedelic-fueled hippie revolution was theatrical in nature; it provided the establishment with a local enemy to scare the public with, and at large – discredited the respectable anti-war movement. This is an exquisite example of how the parasite class mimics truly transformative and valuable ideals and paints them in an ugly light, tarnishing credibility and corralling the sheep towards their own ends. In one fell swoop the entire love movement discredited psychedelics and the anti-war movement. I would say this Truth community is still all in favor of anti-war; however, somehow under the same pretenses, psychedelics have received a much more convoluted reputation among us “seekers”. Plus… there’s more ugliness.
The first book I found after my initial mushroom trip was The Wondrous Mushroom, by R. Gordon Wasson. Wasson and his wife Valentina, little did I know, were the two revolutionaries who brought the magic mushroom to the western public eye. In 1957, Life Magazine featured Wasson’s article, Seeking the Magic Mushroom, detailing his and his wife’s discoveries in Mexico. At the time, the Wassons became my instant heroes; the perfect couple – travelling the world, taking psychedelics, making love and art and telling the world about it! WELP, turns out Wasson’s expeditions had been funded by the CIA’s MK-Ultra subproject under the Geschickter Fund for Medical Research… How bow dat. As far as we can tell, the Wassons were “unwitting participants” in the project. Meanwhile, The Geschickter Fund for Medical Research, which stayed in place until 1967, funded the construction of a brand new research facility at Georgetown University Hospital where numerous mental patients and terminal cancer patients were used as guinea pigs with stress-producing chemicals, knock-out drugs and mind-altering substances. In other words, the tip of the MK iceberg.
Last but not least, I would like to mention something that virtually all of us psychonauts have wanted to come to fruition for so long… psychedelic acceptance in an age of information. As someone who has gained more than I can put into words from the psychedelic experience at large, I have been hoping for 20 somethin’ years to see psychedelics studied and accepted by society. One of the many revelations that came to me during my early experiences was the epiphany that psychedelics so obviously belonged in the realms of cognitive health and science. The aspect of the situation I failed to grasp back then, however, was the same trap that so many of us fall into while stumbling down the rabbit hole. We sometimes forget how vast the net of corruption can be. How many of us at one point got excited at the image of a Cannabis Marlboro Cigarette pack displayed on a magazine cover? I know I did! My young mind saw that pack as nothing more than “normal”, so the image was good enough for me! Psychedelic acceptance (cough cough – peddled by demons – cough cough) coming to a medical facility near you! Like Cannabis, the same thing will be happening with psilocybin. What is it about psychedelics that could be used against us? Well, I’ve already stated my honest ignorance regarding mind control – I really can only assume paralyzing fear was the method. Beyond that though, there is a major theme going on in western culture, specifically here in the states, and that is a dissolution of values and beliefs. This is the only angle to me that is applicable for this fear-based scenario where a psychedelic could be used as a weapon against the people: An already dissonant nation, unsure of its future, being manipulated by every fear-inducing, pleasure seeking corporation on the planet, and add to that an experience that leaves one’s mind naked and afraid in the wilderness… this may go badly.
For those who are freshly awake and only just wiping the sleep from their third eye, the snake oil peddlers come slithering. The psychedelic experience can be an absolutely beautiful, transforming experience, but there is an important reason why every expert from Terence Mckenna all the way back to the ancients believed that “set” & “setting” were massive contributors to a successful voyage. Not only are your mental headspace and your immediate surroundings important, but the inclusion of a guide is paramount as well; someone who has traveled these arenas before, enough to help steer the experiencer away from illusion, and keep them on the straight and narrow to personal discovery. I don’t think I’m alone in my worry that these values could easily be tossed right out an 8th story window – probably thought they could fly – and leave countless people worse off than they were before. Psychedelics are like the Force from Star Wars, in the sense that yes, they have the power to transform your life – but with poor or no guidance that transformation could be terrifying. The last thing we need is a population of failed psychonauts willing to believe whatever they hear. It’s very similar to what happens when a republican President starts cozying up to conspiracy theories and carrals a bunch of formerly-anti-government-citizens into loyal subversives.
I’m going to cut right to the chase now though, because discussing these negative matters in terms of a psychedelic’s legitimacy makes me want to vomit and trip harder. Yes, all of the above mentioned has occurred, in the hands of those none of us trusted to begin with. Yes, here we are in an age of information where the pharmaceutical industry is waning, and natural medication is gaining ground again. We’re in serious trouble when it comes to cognitive dissonance, though. We can’t trust anything or anyone, can we? And when substances as serious and old as psychedelics are so often found in the hands of the evil, I admit it can be difficult to separate the two. I’m not even sure who this lesson is for because I assume that most of you have a good head on your shoulders and can, in fact, tell the difference.
My biggest point here, and then we’ll get to the statement, is don’t fall for the mimicry! Our world is filled with vehicles for our acceleration, our growth, and our divinity. At every pass though, the big bad THEY will lay out a useless, and most of the time harmful mimicry along side of those transforming vehicles. Play with this concept as you will, but the proof is everywhere – healthcare keeping us sick, our food is void of nutritional value, school is indoctrination, sports events are cosplay War, the list goes on and on. Whatever is real, true and transforming, they will work to distract you from. Your true self can sense these valuable parts of life, and that’s why they have to mimic them to the best of their ability. This is why now, more than ever before, we must be teaching and preaching the importance of honing intuition and trusting our gut… we should probably work on gut health as well – ya know, a rather “new” concept in public discourse, oddly enough.
So here goes, this is for anyone who feels like I do about this topic. This is for anyone who is tried of hearing that they’re brainwashed or controlled, just by appreciating and learning from one of the oldest experiences in our Human story:
DECLARATION OF PSYCHEDELIC INDEPENDENCE
These experiences I had independently of any outside influence. It was me and the contents of my own mind-body system. Currently my convictions are straightforward: That the state entered under psychedelics is the oldest experience in human history; it is the most important experience in human history; that any vehicle that will deliver a human being to this state should be considered the sacrament of all sacraments, and all others are either in honor of or a mimicry of. This is an ideal I’ve held since the moment I returned from my first transcendental voyage. The concepts I explore now are the same as the ones imprinted on me from that first experience. All cultural references that indicate the internal experiences I had were only found after I had experienced psychedelics and discovered these ancient concepts buried within my own mind. I do not accept, and I vehemently reject the notion that unity, interconnectivity, and inner divinity are Deep State psyops that were somehow programmed into nature millions of years ago when things like Stropharia Cubensis mushrooms, peyote cactus or Ergot showed up on the planet. Believing THAT is the psyop.
The Psyop of World Peace (preview)
What I’ve come to understand is that the universe is matryoshka – a Russian doll. And within, are matryoshkas within matryoshkas ad infinitum. Another way to say this is scale invariance, of which all manifestations in this physical realm seem to follow. The psyop, for instance, is a great example of this structure. On one level of the psyop, being skeptical towards, or suspicious of, worldly initiatives that claim to promote “unity” can potentially be an honorable distrust depending on who is pushing them and why. Meanwhile, the next level of the psyop shows us that those who have been pushed to distrust these agendas (for good reason), will inevitably throw the baby out with the bathwater and distrust ANY & ALL mention of unity or oneness. This is always the tactic – create a mockery of something pure, true, and transformative in order to give us a bad taste of it. It is ALWAYS about us and our consent. World peace is obviously achievable, otherwise they wouldn’t be working so hard to make you distrust it.