Vladimir

Idyllwild, California - 9/1/2017 - 9/3/2017 Just three days after completing the three-night Ayahuasca retreat with the Colombian shamans, I was already attending my second Ayahuasca retreat for another three nights. This time, the ceremonies were led by Ashley Tomasino, an acupuncturist and practitioner of Traditional Chinese Medicine. They took place in a cozy two-story cabin nestled in the forests of Idyllwild, California. There were about ten participants and three facilitators. The first two ceremonies were very deep, filled with vivid visions, experiences of what felt like the shamanic realm, and an overwhelming current of life force energy flowing through my body. On the third and final night, I decided to go all in. During our intention-setting circle, I asked Ayahuasca to show me my deepest emotional trauma and my greatest fear. I drank two full cups of the medicine that night, and she answered both intentions. It would take me nearly eighteen months to recover from that experience. What was I thinking by setting an intention like that? The way I see reality now is that everything is interconnected. Everything that has ever happened in my life, and everything that has ever happened in the entire Universe, led me to that moment. What made me ask, "Show me my greatest fear," was the brave fool within me, archetypically, Ivan the Fool from Russian folklore. It was my desire to embody love and free myself from the suffering I had endured for so many years. My previous magic mushroom ceremonies, together with the Ayahuasca retreat with the Colombian shamans just three days earlier, had been showing me what true life looked like. They were revealing my Divine potential. Ceremony after ceremony, the life force of love was awakening within me and showing me that there was a Paradise of Love beyond the prison of the thinking mind in which I had been living. In that Paradise of Love, there was endless beauty, infinite creativity, an ocean of joy, absolute freedom, profound peace, and the most beautiful forms of movement emerging naturally through the life force of love. I wanted to fulfill the promise I had made to myself after my 3-gram magic mushroom ceremony: to embody that Divine Love. To put it very simply, I did it for the sake of love. With that intention, I chose love over fear. What truly led me to that intention? Absolutely everything. My entire body buzzed and vibrated with life force energy. I felt as though the spirit of the Great Mother Ayahuasca had awakened within me. Her essence moved through my body like a serpent. I heard subtle whispers in my left ear that sounded like an ancient Egyptian language. She was guiding me and giving me instructions, and somehow I understood them on an intuitive level. The colorful visions continued expanding until I felt like a tiny speck of dust drifting through immense landscapes of heavenly, otherworldly beauty. It seemed that I had to maintain absolute concentration at every moment or I could be swallowed by the energy at any instant. At one point, I reached for the purge bucket as I felt the medicine rising within me. I purged with what sounded like the roar of a lion. It felt as though a dark energy was being cleansed from the area around my heart. The medicine then began revealing my deepest emotional trauma. I saw that it began when I moved from Russia to the United States at the age of fourteen. I realized that I had become disconnected from my roots, from the world I had known growing up in Russia, and, as a result, disconnected from my own heart. I understood that this was the source of my severe social anxiety, depression, and years of blacking out from weekend drinking. I had not felt safe. Beneath all of that social anxiety was a deeply rooted fear. The medicine was leading me toward releasing those emotions by opening my heart. But I couldn't do it. I didn't feel safe being completely vulnerable in front of a group of people, so I resisted and tried to distract myself from going deeper within. Then I felt a strange sensation, the very thing I had feared more than anything else throughout my entire life. The feeling intensified with astonishing speed. I realized I was losing all control. I was being led directly into the very core of my greatest fear, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. There was absolutely nothing left to hold on to. I collapsed onto the floor and shouted at the top of my lungs, "What the fuck is going on?!" Those words came out as my final desperate attempt to hold on to dear life. Then it came for me. The only thing left to do was surrender, completely and absolutely. From the deepest core of my being emerged a primal scream unlike anything I had ever experienced. It was a scream of sheer terror and, at the very same time, absolute liberation. In that scream, all of my social anxiety, every worry about what anyone thought of me, simply evaporated. My entire life seemed to dissolve. The whole universe dissolved. It was a scream into the infinite majesty of the absolute unknown. With that scream, I faced my greatest fear: the fear of death. A moment of complete silence followed. Then began what felt like an endless merry-go-round of terror, a hellish loop in which I confronted my greatest fear: eternal hell, over and over and over again. The loop felt as though it would never end. I felt trapped in it for eternity. I experienced what seemed like the shame, guilt, and fear of every human being who had ever lived. It also felt like a kind of shamanic crucifixion. Meanwhile, while I was trapped inside that seemingly endless loop, the people around me became frightened. They were trying to "bring me back" because Ashley feared that I might die and that she would go to jail for it. Following her instructions, several people carried me upstairs to the second floor of the cabin, placed me in a bathtub, and began spraying me with cold water. As I later discovered, Ashley had also inserted acupuncture needles into my face. I remember feeling as though I were lying on an operating table in a hospital. I truly believed I was dying. Then Ayahuasca showed me something with unmistakable clarity. She revealed that I would have to die for the sins of all humanity and that there was no way around it. My body felt incredibly uncomfortable. I was utterly exhausted, confused, and overwhelmed by the endless repetition that seemed as though it would continue forever. Finally, in a moment of complete desperation, when I felt I simply couldn't endure it any longer, I said, "I can't do this anymore." Shortly afterward, I heard someone calling my name. "Vladimir! Vladimir! Vladimir!" At that moment, I believed I had died and was being welcomed into the next world. Then I opened my eyes. Slowly, my ordinary awareness returned, and I realized that I had been in the Ayahuasca experience the entire time. When I opened my eyes, I could feel everyone's energy. I could still sense the lingering intensity of my scream and the fear that both I and everyone else had experienced during the ordeal. To my own surprise, I began making jokes about what had happened, and somehow my screaming now seemed funny. More people gathered in the bathroom. I felt tuned into what I can only describe as the frequency of love. I felt all of us connected through love. I loved everybody, and everybody loved me. It felt like one big celebration. It felt as though I had awakened in a Paradise of Love. I have seen the Frebird and have caught it's feather - I had yet to capture the Firebird and bring it home.

Sometime during the summer of 2017, I woke up in the middle of the night because I couldn't breathe in my sleep. I had been suffering from what I believed was sleep apnea for many years, most likely due to my poor diet and years of weekend partying with alcohol, during which I often blacked out. Although I had quit drinking after my 3-gram magic mushroom ceremony, about a year and a half ago, where I experienced Divine Love, the damage to my body still remained. By that time, I had already heard of Ayahuasca and had watched several documentaries about it. I also remembered a woman at a psychedelic meetup saying that Ayahuasca was far more powerful than magic mushrooms. Having already experienced heroic doses of mushrooms, I was surprised to hear that there could be something even more powerful. I was deeply frustrated with my sleep apnea. I knew I wasn't getting proper rest because I still felt exhausted even after sleeping for twelve hours. I had also heard that Ayahuasca had the potential to heal people. So, when I woke up gasping for air that night, I went straight to my computer and typed "Ayahuasca ceremonies in San Diego" into Google. The very first result was Origen Sagrada, a group of Colombian shamans who were coming to San Diego to facilitate a three-night Ayahuasca retreat in collaboration with Danielle de Kiserre. The retreat was being held in a Girl Scout camp nestled in the forests of Julian, California. Without hesitation, I signed up. The retreat was scheduled for August 25 through August 28, 2017, and included three nights of Ayahuasca ceremonies. I often think of that night as the night when Madrecita Ayahuasca called me. The ceremonies took place inside a large Girl Scout lodge surrounded by the beautiful forests of Julian. There were about fifty participants in total. Nothing happened for me on the first night. The entire building remained almost completely silent, with hardly anyone making a sound. By the end of the ceremony, I actually began wondering whether Ayahuasca was a sham and whether magic mushrooms were the real medicine after all. Before the second ceremony, I remember one of the shamans telling us that the medicine would become much stronger that night and that it would truly begin to open us. He was right. The second night was when everything changed. The ceremony was incredibly visual. I felt that my previous spiritual practices, including Vipassana meditation, self-inquiry, contemplation, and my experiences with magic mushrooms, had prepared me to navigate the experience with greater awareness and skill. At one point, I found myself immersed in breathtaking, colorful visions. Then a large Black man appeared, swirling within those visions. He radiated Divine Love and beauty, wearing sparkling golden sunglasses. Bursting into ecstatic laughter, he looked at me and exclaimed, "You've made it, Vladimir!" For a brief moment, I felt as though I had caught a glimpse of a higher dimension, a Paradise of Divine Love. Soon afterward, I felt as though I had become enlightened. I opened my eyes and looked up, and the roof of the building seemed to disappear, revealing a magnificent sky filled with countless stars. Although I was already deep in the experience, the facilitators announced that anyone who wished could receive a second cup of medicine. I eagerly got up and joined the line. Filled with excitement over the profound insights that were pouring into my awareness, I began talking with another participant standing near me. I shared my experience of the roof disappearing. A moment later, a blonde woman standing directly in front of us turned around and said something like, "I saw the roof disappear too." She spoke with a distinct Russian accent, so I asked her if she spoke Russian. She smiled and said yes. I introduced myself: "Меня зовут Владимир." ("My name is Vladimir.") She replied: "Меня зовут Виктория." ("My name is Victoria.") That was how I met Victoria during an Ayahuasca ceremony, while we were standing in line for a second cup of Ayahuasca. Not long afterward, Victoria and I began dating, and with that, our shamanic journey of love began. photos: September 12, 2017

My journey with plant medicines began with magic mushrooms in 2016. I was 33 years old at the time and had approximately $500,000 USD saved in precious metals: gold, silver, and platinum. A large portion of it was stored in a safe in my studio apartment, while another significant portion was kept in a private vault in Singapore. For some time, I had been watching the videos of Leo Gura from Actualized.org. He had published a video on his YouTube channel titled "The Amazing Power of Psychedelics: Leo Does Psilocybin Magic Mushrooms," in which he described his experience with magic mushrooms and explained how they could be used for spiritual enlightenment and self-development. The video left a strong impression on me and truly piqued my curiosity. As a result, I decided to order a batch from the Dark Net. I found a dealer on the Dark Net, an underground online marketplace, and placed my first order for 60 grams of dried, powdered psilocybin mushrooms. I remember creating a dedicated email account to communicate with the dealer, which I named "Siberian Winter." About a month later, I received the mushrooms in the mail. The package included a printed note stating that the contents were some kind of "Siberian herb," intended to disguise the powder in case the package was opened and inspected by customs. I was thrilled to receive the mushrooms and excited to begin experimenting with them. I weighed the powder using my precision jewelry scale, but I didn't do it correctly the first time. The total weight came to only about 20–30 grams, so I emailed the dealer asking why I had received much less than I had ordered. The dealer replied, recommending that I weigh the mushrooms again because I had most likely made a mistake. He told me that he remembered the weight of my order very clearly because, when he measured approximately 60 grams on his own scale, the reading came to exactly 66.6 grams, 666, the "number of the beast." Since I was only beginning my spiritual journey at the time, I didn't place much significance on that unusual coincidence. I weighed the mushrooms again, and this time the total came to approximately 60 grams, confirming that the order had been correct after all. During that time, I was living in a studio apartment in La Mesa, San Diego, California, with two of my cats, Wallace and Nari. I began my first ceremony with just 1 gram of magic mushrooms, carefully weighing the amount using my precision jewelry scale. My first experience felt like entering a deep meditative state, similar to what I had experienced during my silent Vipassana meditation retreats. I felt calm, and my mind was peaceful. I remember that my brother Roman stopped by my apartment sometime during the middle or toward the end of my first trip to talk with me briefly. I told him that I was experimenting with magic mushrooms, and he commented that I "seemed chill." I then had another trip, doubling the dose to 2 grams, during which I began seeing subtle visions. I believe it was during this second ceremony that I experienced my first "out of the mind" breakthrough. I remember a vision that seemed to be stuck in the left corner of my mind, as if it were trying to break free. When I finally allowed it to emerge, I felt as though my consciousness had become liberated. For the first time, I became aware that there was a place beyond my thinking mind that was pure awareness, or pure consciousness. These first two experiences were incredibly magical and exciting, so I continued by increasing the next dose to 3 grams of powdered magic mushrooms. That was when the real, life-changing breakthrough happened. I remember lying on my bed with both hands resting on my heart. I saw a brilliant white light and began feeling what I can only describe as Divine Love. It felt as though I was taking my very first breath. Tears of joy flowed effortlessly from my eyes. I felt truly alive for the first time in my life, as far as I could remember. Before that ceremony, I considered myself an atheist, meaning I did not believe in God. While I was experiencing this Divine Love, these words spontaneously came out of my mouth: "Thank you, God, for this Divine Gift." From that moment on, I was no longer an atheist. I felt that this Divine Love came directly from God, and it was the most real experience I had ever had. I knew that this was not merely "a drug-induced hallucination." I realized that I had discovered something profoundly important and extraordinary. During the experience, I could hear the gentle sound of raindrops falling on the roof of my apartment. The atmosphere felt deeply peaceful and serene. I also began seeing connections between the events of my entire life and understood how everything was interconnected. I had the profound realization that everything that had ever happened to me had led me to this extraordinary magic mushroom ceremony of Divine Love. I also saw that every human being in the world is searching for this same Love, doing the best they can with the understanding they have. I felt deep compassion for humanity, and I made a silent promise to myself that I would embody this Love and dedicate my life to helping the whole world come to know it. After this ceremony, I devoted all of my time, energy, and resources to fulfilling the promise I had made to myself to embody this Divine Love. Thus began my shamanic hero's journey of wisdom, healing, and awakening with the sacred plant medicines, which became my greatest teachers and allies.

Get help bro.

These are just abstract concepts that have no grounding. Another definition of non-dualistic absolutism and nihilistic insanity. I guess actualized.org is still far from actualizing all of it's insights.

@Elliott What you're describing is the definition of nihilistic insanity.

I appreciate your words and your questions. Those parts of my journey feel personal, so I’d rather not go into detail here. What I can do is answer poetically: I suffered for the sake of Love. Love is the force that got me through.

I choose wisdom from direct experience and embodied Truth.

I’m pointing to what actually happened in direct experience, which I was clearly aware of. It didn’t come across as a subtle shift or something that could be reduced to a perspective. It felt like a state where everything lost its structure, and then something entirely different came back online, much more open and alive. So even if those distinctions don’t hold at a certain level, the contrast itself was very clear. That’s the part I’m trying to understand better.

@Elliott I get the perspective you’re pointing to with the scale of the universe. At the same time, I don’t see that as removing responsibility. Even if we’re part of something much larger, how someone lives and acts still matters, because small patterns and decisions have real effects over time. On the point about control, I don’t think it’s as simple as either full control or none at all. We might not control everything, but there’s still a level of participation in how we respond, what patterns we reinforce, and how we show up. If that gets dismissed too quickly, it can turn into a kind of disengagement from the practical level of life. The part I’m questioning is when the “bigger picture” stays at the level of understanding. Seeing yourself as a tiny piece of something vast can be true in one sense, but if it doesn’t translate into how you actually live, it stays conceptual. What I’m interested in is whether insight becomes embodied, whether it shows up consistently in behavior, perception, and the way someone relates to others and their environment. That’s what I mean by integration. Not just seeing something, but actually living it.

That’s a good question. When I say “integration,” I'm talking about how the experience actually becomes part of how I live. For me it shows up in simple but real ways: learning to listen to and honor my body breathwork and being more conscious of how I breathe spending time in nature, swimming, nature walks or just being present with the environment journaling and reflecting on what I’m going through choosing awareness in areas of my life that are asking for attention paying attention to dreams working on things that feel aligned with my life moving my body in a more conscious way being more intentional about who I spend time with and the environment I’m in And also in how I respond to life itself. Situations that used to trigger me don’t hit the same way anymore, or I can stay present with them instead of reacting automatically. That’s one of the clearest signs for me that something has actually been integrated. So it’s less about the experience itself, and more about whether it actually changes how I relate to life afterwards.

I'm definitely exploring spirituality through my own direct experience. What I’ve noticed so far is that the experiences that feel the most “spiritual” also tend to have a very real impact on how I live, relate to myself, and relate to others. It’s less about trying to define it, and more about noticing that whatever this is, spirituality is not disconnected from life in practice.

I see what you're saying about spirituality being something infinite and beyond concepts at an Absolute level. At the same time, I don't see it as completely separate from how someone actually lives. Because even if the experience itself is beyond explanation, it still affects a person's life and expresses itself. Like, if nothing at all changes in how a person relates to themselves or to life after something “spiritual,” then there is nothing that distinguishes it from just any other experience. So for me, the integration part isn’t about reducing spirituality to concepts, but more about how it shows up in reality. Otherwise it starts to feel like something that’s completely disconnected from life, and I’m not sure what its significance would be then. How do you see that? Does it have any expression in how someone lives, or is it completely separate for you?

I think I get what you’re pointing to with spirituality being something directly experienced and not really capturable in concepts. How do you see the role of integration after the experience though? Because even if the experience itself is beyond explanation, it still seems like something changes in how a person lives or understands things afterwards. Would you say that stays completely separate from knowledge and wisdom, or do you see some connection there? Also when you describe it as infinite, do you mean that in the sense that it can’t be fully grasped or contained?

What is Spirituality to you? To me Spirituality is - wisdom gained through direct experience and integrated in consensual reality. Sounds smart I know, that's because I am.