Geral Blanchard, LPC, is a psychotherapist who is university trained in psychology and anthropology. Formerly of Wyoming and currently residing in Iowa, Geral travels the world in search of ancient secrets that can augment the art and science of healing. From Western neuroscience to Amazonian shamanism, he has developed an understanding of how to combine old and new healing strategies to optimize recovery, whether from psychological or physical maladies.
MDMA and the Intelligence of Nature
Geral T. Blanchard • December 27, 2022
There is no foundation for a “Man and Nature” conceptualization; we are all integral parts of Nature. A kinship or family of interworking relatives.
Humans don’t have to go outside to find Nature, it resides in us and all things on planet earth. We are a contributing part to Nature’s intelligence and consciousness, as is a jaguar, a crystal stone, and bacteria. So it should be of little surprise that a plant like ayahuasca, or a chemical concoction like MDMA, both products of this earth, might add to our brainpower.
From our pedestal as the “wise ones,” fueled by our singular language, we may have tried to divorce our unit from Nature. The idea of being Number One, above all the rest, allows for no permeability of life forms – how we bleed into our other parts. Even when thinking of our human form we still want to draw lines of separation like mind and body.
Interrelationships are to be seen everywhere. As an example, water. It carries and distributes minerals. It carries, moves, and shapes the ground around it. Water contains oxygen, sufuses the 70 percent liquid human body, and provides oxygen for the human body. It gives life to plants. Separations do not occur in Nature.
Scientists call this interconnectivity Complexity Theory. Don Oscar-Miro-Quesado, a traditional healer from Peru, describes it this way: “The capacity of bees, termites, ants, and even humans to instinctively yield collective wisdom and adaptive sustenance together, in resonance with each other, which they are not able to hold in their individual beings, when separate from the whole.”
Research study after research study have revealed the multiple ways in which being connected to other parts of Nature clearly contributes to human physical health and emotional health. And it is worth noting that not one book has ever been written that has been titled The Stupidity of Nature, just literature on its wonders, among them human beings.
We romanticize but don’t often deeply analyze Nature. As a result we are inclined to miss considerable forms of our shared intelligence that ought to humble us: slime finding its way through a maze, an octopus with coordinated brains in each of its nine arms, sheep that recall faces better than humans can do, elephants who can listen with their feet, turtles that talk, and plants that hear water as well as holding the skill to enhance human consciousness with its brain nutrients or mind expanding medicines. If an octopus has nine brains, three hearts, blue blood, the ability to conceal itself with objects, who can shape-shift into toxic fish and sea snakes, they may have much to teach us about the complexity of life, survival, and consciousness. Another important relative.
Trees and fungi communicate electrically underground, warning connecting life of danger and sharing nutrients. Like the human triune brain – cranial, heart, and intestines – they too are quite an electrical system carrying information bodywide.
If we are disconnected from Nature, disconnected from Mother Earth, we are literally disconnected from our species and ourselves. MDMA notoriously enlarges our social awareness, including our relationship with our large family called Nature.
MDMA humbles and educates those who imbibe and absorb it, bringing us down from our pedestal. Differences get diminished. Long held wisdom from within ourselves is enhanced. It creates an environment similar to a family reunion, one in which everyone gets along despite their perceived or concocted differences. It is called unity consciousness.
Arnold Mindell, author of Earth-Based Psychology, summed it up very well with the following words. “In our deepest experiences, in the world of our sentient awareness and of our dreaming mind, we are aspects of the earth. And we [can] go still further with this nonlocal aspect of awareness: In a sense we are the earth; we are the universe looking at itself. We do not become aware and conscious independently of what and who is around us. Our experiences are intimately connected with the world, with the universe itself.”
Then there are the words of a 37 year-old woman reflecting on her MDMA treatments shared in Through the Gateway of the Heart. She said, “A new wave of light moved in and faces of men who were living among the beasts: there were dolphins and fish and tigers and penguins and every living creature, and they were all born from the same womb.” She got it!
From the same book, slightly paraphrasing a 28 year-old woman reflecting on her MDMA treatment, she said: “We long for the experience of opening up and becoming one with one another. The heart opens so that there is no thing between [any] two bodies now. The experience of joy shall be ours, an upward, spiritual growth, an ever unfolding feeling and emotion. Though I speak of you/I/we/ours, it’s all One. The awakening Christus has the remembrance of all that is inside.”
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Other Topics
Basics of MDMA
Rituals and Ceremony
Brain and MDMA
Trauma
Heart
Energy Movement
Quantum Physics
Native Cosmologies
Nature
Spirituality/Enlightenment
Kogi Tribe
Books written by Geral T. Blanchard
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