The following is a transcript of the film
[Scene 1: Introduction]
Narrator: It’s no measure of good health to be well-adjusted in a profoundly sick society.
Narrator: My sons have had a spiritual allergic reaction to the toxic world that we live in.
– There are no good or bad drugs; there are just good or bad policies.
Narrator: Actually, there are some substances out there that could be part of the solution. One of these solutions could be psychedelic-assisted therapy—and cannabis.
Narrator: Everyone’s always talked about poor drug users. It’s this lack of autonomy. Well, actually, people are using these substances because they’re working.
Narrator: I ended up having, in ten days, three ceremonial doses of iboga. My depression and suicidal ideation had switched off after one evening spent with this medicine. I felt completely blocked. I felt trapped. And after sitting with this medicine, I could see a way forward. Hope returned.
– She lifted my head and held it under my chin and sang in my face. Sang. And I felt a change on a cellular level in my body. The tears changed. Something changed. From pain to love. I understood then that there’s no amount of talk therapy that can touch that kind of stuff. It’s magic. These medicines are magic.
– I would also like to work towards a future maybe where one day we can go out, we can connect to nature, we can harvest our own medicines, and we can bring them back and use them in legal ceremony in a meaningful way. That’s the future I would like to see.
—
[Scene 2: Celebration in Scotland]
Anna Ross: Welcome! What a beautiful spread of faces. We are on day three of our celebration of Scotland’s indigenous apothecary. Yes, it’s a bit of a mouthful. It means plants of the land. My name is Anna Ross, and I, along with Fiona Gilbertson and the other Scottish Psychedelic Research Group team, have put on this event.
Anna Ross: The Scottish Psychedelic Research Group was set up a year and a half ago in recognition that there is no collaborative grassroots research and sort of a knowledge exchange community in Scotland. As it stands, as you’re all aware, psychedelics are experiencing a so-called renaissance around the world. But what we felt when we were setting up the SPRG is that much of this renaissance was coming from the medical community.
Anna Ross: And even when it is coming from the indigenous community, it’s getting streamlined into a medical way of thinking and a medical way of doing it. And being psychedelic users ourselves and understanding the power of this medicine, we know that there are many, many people within Scotland that are currently using these medicines and are acting as healers for their community.
Anna Ross: On top of that, there is also a growing number of people within the therapeutic community that are interested in this kind of medicine. So what we were really wanting to create and what we seemed to be creating going forward is this community voice.
—
[Scene 3: Voices of the Community]
Fiona Gilbertson: As the Scottish Psychedelic Research Group, we are all open about the fact that we take psychedelics. We’ve used them. We’ve used them for healing, we’ve used them for pleasure, and we’re out about that.
Fiona Gilbertson: And then I meet all these incredible people who don’t talk about the fact that certain substances have transformed them as human beings. And hopefully with Scotland, with this organization, we will be able to safely talk about that and not be the lunatic fringe.
Fiona Gilbertson: I want to create some space in Scotland where we can create an equitable cannabis market and bring psychedelic-assisted therapy to Scotland. And not in the way that’s been done in other countries, not where you have big pharma and big capitalism.
Fiona Gilbertson: The people who were in the room yesterday, some of them are creating the most beautiful, thoughtful medicines. They are working underground, taking huge, huge risks to heal people. So we were wanting to create a space where that becomes something that you will not risk state agents bursting in and breaking up and putting people in prison for and removing children for.
Fiona Gilbertson: And I do think… I have a real hope that Scotland could achieve that. And it’s just how do we shape that narrative and how do we change it so that the government sees, and they are. We’ve had a meeting with the Scottish Government Drug Policy Division. They’re really interested and keen to see psychedelic-assisted therapy as some form of treatment for addiction. There are already a couple of trials going on in the Kennedy Tower around treatment-resistant depression.
– If we create a community,
– Yeah.
Fiona Gilbertson: Hopefully, it becomes self-regulating. And the community then holds each other accountable.
– Yeah. So it’s not like what would we like? It’s like, well, the community will guide. Our role is to hold space for the community. We are here to create that space, to hold that space so the community can then create what it needs in order to regulate itself.
—
[Scene 4: Personal Stories of Struggle and Healing]
John: My activism is driven by rage and sometimes desperation, and what took me to psychedelics was I was burned out by it. Like absolutely fundamentally burned out with it. And I realized that rage is not an energy that creates sustainable, healthy change.
John: So when I mixed that with the mysticism and the magic of the medicine, it was like this, there’s two energies created and into something that’s like sacred activism and it feels sacred like I am now a sacred activist.
– Sacred activism. Yes!
John: And that energy was different. Yes. People were angry, but they also had hope. And I’ve not seen that so much before.
John: In Scotland, cannabis was grown for hundreds of years, if not thousands. They found seeds; it was a staple of all of the monasteries, particularly with the Christian Celtic Christianity, which was deeply spiritual. We have oral history. We don’t necessarily have physical evidence yet of the use of liberty camps.
John: But I mean, come on, they grow all over Scotland, our Celtic shamanism is very similar to many of the Siberian shamanistic things. It is without a doubt we used psychedelics.
John: So what we’re trying to talk about is not bringing in a new form of substance use but reclaiming. What I’ve learned from the policymakers and from all of this is you need to create a story. You need to create a narrative.
John: And the narrative in Scotland is very much that we have this exceptional drug deaths. Regarding the harm narrative, the Scottish Government is kind of doing that. They’re kind of addressing the way that they can, where we come in and what we want to do is to actually, psychedelic-assisted medicine, for example, is probably showing one of the most powerful evidence of how to address the trauma, which is not just the childhood trauma, because actually a lot of the trauma comes from adulthood of having to engage in drug use in communities that are criminalized and therefore have these really violent structures.
– Pathologizing drug users has become the norm. Nobody’s questioning it. It has been done over and over and over again, and we often do that in spaces where there are police, police who have done utterly horrific things to people, horrific things.
John: They’ve ruined people’s lives, destroyed students’ lives. They’ve arrested men in front of their children screaming, and they’ve taken them off to prison for six years for cannabis. And nobody says, what happened to you in your childhood that you became part of this terrible institution and you managed to stay in this and torture people for smoking pot, or what happened to you as a politician that made it okay to make benefit cuts to such an extent that people are dying and committing suicide?
John: Those are not the conversations that we ask other groups of people. So why do we do it with people who use drugs? And I don’t think you should ask anybody those questions. I think they’re personal, deep questions that you probably should do in a safe psychedelic-assisted therapy.
– Yeah, we should all be doing that.
John: I’ve had bipolar all my life, and also this is the first time that I’m sharing my story, so I’m trying not to get emotional about it. When I was 11 years old, I was brutally raped. I told nobody and I held that trauma in until my mid-twenties, I think, when I had my first psychotic episode.
John: I then tried to end my life three times over the course of the next few years. Fortunately, I didn’t succeed. It caused immense pain and suffering, not just to me, but to the people I loved—my life, my family, my friends.
John: I was sectioned at one point and traumatized further because I was restrained physically and forcibly injected with something. I think it was a sedative because I lost consciousness very quickly afterwards. I was on lots of psychiatric medication to manage my bipolar. Some of it helped for a while, but also I lost a lot of other things in that process. I lost my creativity. I felt like a robot, often.
John: And I think I got to a point in life in my forties where I thought I just couldn’t go on anymore. I remember walking home and there was a rail line and I thought I’m done, I’m going to check out. I just can’t go on like this anymore. I went up to the train line, I knelt down, I broke down in tears by the side of the train line and thought I’m just going to put my neck on the line.
John: I’m going to wait for the next train to come along. I thought of all of the people that loved me. I said goodbye to every single one of them. I thought of the train driver and the impact it was going to have on them. And somewhere inside of me,
some part of me remembered the early-stage clinical trial that had been done by Imperial College London, and I thought, come on, John, you neuroscientist, surely you can… can you find a way? Is this a last-ditch attempt? Can you try this? Is this going to work for you?
John: I didn’t want to end up taking something that I thought might possibly lead to a manic episode because I’d already had plenty of that in my life. And I should say, up to that point, I’d had psychosis at least once every year of my life. Can you imagine how damaging that would be, not just for me, but for the loved ones, for my wonderful wife, who did her best to support me through many of those episodes, and for my family who were just at their wits’ end, not knowing how to manage that situation.
John: And so I took a leap of faith and I thought, well, I’m going to try this myself. Ever being a scientist, I thought, well I set this up as close to the clinical trial as possible under the circumstances. I had psychological support. There was somebody I’d agreed that I would speak to, a therapist who was comfortable with me talking about the experiences, and I decided to try it for myself. I was terrified.
John: And it came from a point of pure desperation because I didn’t see how I could have a future anymore. I just couldn’t live with the trauma, the pain. And every time I tried to talk about it previously, I would become retraumatized and feel suicidal afterwards. And there was no end to that process for the best part of two decades.
John: The first time I ever tried it therapeutically, it’s no understatement to say it changed my life. There are two clear messages I had from that. The first one was, Damn, dude, you didn’t understand as much about the mind as you thought you did. As a neuroscientist. And the second one was meeting my younger self, who was traumatized. And it was like there was some entity who I thought might have been some version of myself in the future, and that was kind of holding like a safe space for me.
John: And he said, this is going to be really hard for you but you need to go through this, you need to face it. And there was a younger me there, rigid with fear, traumatized, bloodstained. And I had a dialogue with that person and I held him in my arms and I said, I’m so sorry you had to go through that, that we had to go through that. But you survived this because you became me.
John: And at a certain point, I just felt all of the tension go and they just kind of absorbed into me. And then this other entity or whatever it was, however you want to conceptualize it, some part of myself said, yes, a kickadude, isn’t that… it said, This is just the first part of your journey. You need to go to therapy now because you’re pretty messed up. You need to go to therapy and you need to work this process through.
John: So I came back from that process feeling that I’d experienced some really deep healing, but knowing that there was a lot of work yet to do. So I did. I went to therapy. I got… That was hard in itself, but it was also a part of my healing journey. I had subsequent journeys that also tackled other aspects of the trauma that I’d experienced. And over time I came to a different relationship with it, and one day I decided to train as a therapist myself because I wanted other people to experience the healing that I had.
John: So one of the things I do now is I support people with bipolar in that context. And I think about it: what if I hadn’t taken that leap of faith and I’d actually gone through and ended my life? Not only would I have had a devastating impact on my family, on the people who love me, but all of the people that I’ve managed to help since. Maybe they wouldn’t have gotten help. I like to think they would, but I wouldn’t exist if I hadn’t found a way to heal myself.
John: And I should never, ever be in a situation where one has to choose between their own life, self-preservation, mental well-being, and not being a law-abiding citizen under the laws of this country. You should never be putting people in that situation. So my hope is that not only can we have greater inclusion so that people like me can get access to the help that is desperately needed.
John: And I should say that in most clinical trials, the recent one by Compass Pathways excluded… people like me are locked out of this. We are excluded from clinical trials. Nobody wants to help us. Why? Personally, I think sometimes it’s because they’re too worried about their grant funding. Or they say to me, we don’t want to do further harm, but by doing nothing, harm happens. So what I would like to see is diversity so that people like me can get the help they need.
John: But I would also like to work towards a future where one day we can go out, we can connect to nature, we can harvest our own medicines, and we can bring them back and use them in legal ceremony in a meaningful way. That’s the future I would like to see. So thank you for listening.
—
[Scene 5: Reflections and Connections]
Narrator: John, I thought I was going to know what I was going to talk about tonight until I heard your story. And it’s just totally changed completely. My son Jake has bipolar disorder, and to be sitting here on a panel, it just feels like serendipity to me. It’s magic. Thank you for sharing your story, and I’m so glad that you’re still here.
– Thank you.
– Yeah.
Narrator: We tried to get help for Daniel when he was in primary school, and CAMHS [Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services] told us that he wasn’t severe enough, but fast forward to, was he severe enough when he went to prison? Was he severe enough when we went to Carstairs [Hospital] for six weeks? Was he severe enough when he spent a year in a rehab mental health board?
Narrator: So at what point do we go upstream and help people? And this is my problem with the medical model. It’s not helping. So we have to do something different. And if we don’t get the help from the state, we’ll do it ourselves. I’m not asking for permission and I am not asking for forgiveness from anybody to get the help that we need.
Narrator: The trauma that we have taken on board as a family, as a community, we are beginning to realize it’s on us to fix them; nobody is coming to help us. So I think what is happening in spaces like this and what we can take forward into the world is just so important.
—
[Scene 6: Personal Journeys in Sports and Recovery]
Rory: I had a ten-year professional career, played at the highest level of the game and achieved a lot of glory, played at two World Cups, childhood dreams being achieved. But on the other side of that, there was a dark side, a big price to be paid. And that was the effects of injuries and the demands of the game.
Rory: So in my ten years as a professional player, I had 15 surgeries and I was on pharmaceutical drugs every day—opioids, anti-inflammatories—and at later points in my career, benzodiazepines, huge cocktails of different chemicals. And I also, on top of that, was knocked unconscious 12 times. And anyone who has looked into the effect of concussion knows that it can have a profound effect on mental health.
Rory: So at the age of 29, I got a career-ending injury. This was in 2012; it was a broken leg. I was a year later sacked for being injured and unable to heal. And not long after retiring from the game, forced retirement, I had to have more surgeries on the injury and I was put on antibiotics because I got a surgical infection.
Rory: Immediately after the antibiotics, my digestive health collapsed. So at this time in my life, I was navigating the big emotional trauma of losing my job, my way of life—the only thing that I’d ever really known. I dedicated my life from childhood to rugby, to that sport. But here I was, 29 years old, discarded from the game, losing my identity as a sportsperson, losing all my friends, my rugby family.
Rory: Here I was navigating a very complicated situation, emotional pain from the loss and also the loss of my physical health. I lost four stone in four months because I was struggling to eat any food. I had numerous other symptoms that were popping up. I was in a really bad way on a physical level and on an emotional level, and it didn’t take me long to spiral down into a dark depression and suicidal ideation.
Rory: And I was stuck in this state of pain for a year and a half. And I was at the stage of thinking, well, if this continues for much longer, I’m going to have to take my own life, because it felt unbearable. A miracle came through, and that was when I heard Aubrey Marcus’s testimonial on the Joe Rogan podcast back in 2014.
Rory: And he was speaking about his experience with the plant medicine iboga. He was speaking about it for about 30 minutes, and when I listened to that, I knew this was something that was really going to help me. I just knew this was the intervention that I’d kind of been praying for.
Rory: And a couple of weeks later, I managed to get myself out to Costa Rica, which wasn’t easy at the time because I had a broken leg that also wouldn’t heal, so I was struggling to walk. I ended up having ten days of three ceremonial doses of iboga, and I won’t go into the details because, you know, it would take the rest of the day just to go through one journey, but the result was a transformation of my overall outlook.
Rory: My depression and suicidal ideation had switched off after one evening spent with this medicine, and I was given a blueprint for moving forward with my life. And I could see a way through the challenges that I was facing, which I couldn’t before. I felt completely blocked; I felt trapped, and after sitting with this medicine, I could see a way
forward. Hope returned.
Rory: And then also, very quickly after that experience, I was introduced to a couple of Colombian brothers who served ayahuasca. They invited me out to Colombia, and I ventured out with them, spent time with them, and they took me down into the Putumayo region with the Cofán, the indigenous healers down there.
Rory: And I went on this adventure of self-discovery, working with ayahuasca, deepening my healing, deepening my understanding of my life, and integrating the indigenous wisdom, which has been an absolute profound part of my healing journey, the wisdom that the indigenous tribes carry.
Rory: I’ve been really integrating that wisdom, these experiences with these life-saving medicines into my life. I have gone through a radical shift in my physical healing and also a radical shift in my consciousness where I am no longer haunted by the wounds of my past. I am able to navigate the challenges in my life with a lot more grace, a lot more peace, and have really managed to—through working with these medicines and connection with the indigenous—managed to cultivate a life of real joy and connection.
Rory: I really believe that the future is bright and this land needs individuals like each one of you here. We need to spread the message because we know how much suffering there is in this land, with the rate of suicide—particularly across the population, 75% of suicides are men. The work that I do at my health retreat, which I have set up with my partner Shannon, is helping men heal, connect to the heart, connect to their wisdom, their intuition, and to try to change this culture of neglect and damage that’s been going on for too long.
—
[Scene 7: Personal Struggles with Addiction]
Pat: I used a combination of things: I used a lot of cocaine, which gave me focus and energy and made me able to work. I used alcohol to anesthetize. I used nicotine to enforce a message that I wasn’t worthy of being healthy. I used relationships as a way of enforcing that I wasn’t worthy of being in a healthy relationship.
Pat: My drug was feeling shit about myself. My drug was not feeling good enough, not feeling worthy… And somehow feeling that that was my fault. And I deserved this, you know. And I used a whole number of things to reinforce that story.
Pat: You know, alcohol was one of the best because, when you’re full of cocaine and you drink an obscene amount of alcohol, you can remove yourself so far from reality, and you can wake up in police cells with blood all over you. You can wake up with no money after being paid in cash the night before when you’ve got bills to pay. It’s a great vehicle for waking up in the morning and feeling shit about your life.
Pat: You know, the drug for me isn’t the drug. It’s the chaos that the drug brings to my life. That’s what I can sit in all the time. That’s what I need. And the progressive part of my illness was finding more extreme versions because for me to shame myself, I had to become more and more extreme.
Pat: Right? That was my drug. That was the progressive part. And at times in my life, I would come off being a really heavy drug user and had to be in a really dysfunctional relationship where I was using, cheating, and shouting as a way of enforcing that message that I was no good.
Pat: The addiction is to the feelings afterwards. I mean, the substances are great, right? And the orgasm is great. And the obsession to have these things can distract us from feeling shit about ourselves. But really, it’s when we wake up. Oh, that’s the one. I’m fucking rubbish. I’m not good. That’s the drug.
Pat: And that’s the narrative that we work with now. With the medicine. The medicine is just a vehicle for us to get people into a space where we can talk about changing the narrative in one’s life and how we go about doing that with the support and structure and mentorship from others, particularly men in my case, we do a lot of men’s work with psychedelics now because I am one and it means I have first-hand experience of the problems that men are having.
Pat: And so that’s what we do. We create environments for men to be vulnerable, for men to talk about the things that they’ve done as a way of enforcing this really narrative in their heads that was often created in a time that they don’t remember. And it’s just always been like that.
Pat: And then they gravitated towards people, places, and things that have enforced that message. And often people have been through prison or they’ve been in the criminal justice system for a while. And again, that is enforced as a narrative that there’s something different about them when actually they were just young children that didn’t have an environment that was conducive to healthy brain development.
Pat: When I was growing up, when I was an infant, my family had sort of joked that Patrick just stopped crying when he was about two and a half years old, he just stopped crying. No more crying. So I’m in this ceremony with ayahuasca on that first retreat, and I’m not really getting anything from the medicine. There’s no visions. I’ve just had a song sung to me directly from the shaman and yeah, I’m not really getting anything.
Pat: It’s the second night and I’m like, what’s going on? Where are these snakes and where’s the Mother? And I roll onto my side and just start crying my eyes out. I don’t think I’ve ever really cried like this in my life. I’m convulsing, with crying and losing control of my body with crying. And I hear in the background, ‘Pat needs help, Pat needs help’, and it’s the translation coming from the Shipibo lady to the facilitator.
Pat: And before I know it, I have two shamans sitting directly in front of me. One holding my knee and the other holding my other knee. And they’re starting to rock and sing with me in one and I’m crying my eyes out, my head is down and I’m sweating and crying. I shat myself. I’m just a mess. I’m an absolute mess.
Pat: And they’re rocking with me and they’re rocking with me. And it was… And Juanita, this Shipibo lady. This one hand gesture completely transformed my life. She put her hand under my head, which was held in shame. I was in a shame response to the world; I couldn’t receive any of this love that they were giving me.
Pat: And that’s kind of a metaphor for how I’d been experiencing my life. And she lifted my head and held it under my chin and sang in my face. Sang and I felt a change on a cellular level in my body. The tears changed. Something changed from pain to love. And I just started crying the words ‘thank you’ in my terrible Spanish, shitting myself again and just purging and just cleaning.
Pat: And the following ceremonies, I just laughed my ass off that week. And that and some profound experiences with Kambo where, during that ceremony, I was unable to throw up. That ayahuasca ceremony, it was coming out the back door. And then after explaining this to this Kambo practitioner, he was doing some really serious work with me with regards to teaching me how to get things over my chin.
Pat: And it took a three-hour Kambo ceremony with dots all over my arm, fresh medicine, fresh medicine, and the day that we learned to do that was the day that I learned to speak differently. Like there was something fundamentally changed in the energetic system of my body. And I understood.
Pat: I understood then that there’s no amount of talk therapy that can touch that kind of stuff. That’s sublingual; that’s beyond language. It’s on a vibratory cellular level. It’s magic. These medicines are magic.
—
[Scene 8: The Science Behind Psychedelics]
Narrator: And I’ve worked in drug discovery my whole career to test the efficacy of new psychiatric medicines for all sorts of disorders: for addictions, for trauma, for panic, for anxiety, for schizophrenia, for depression. And in all that time, we have come nowhere.
Narrator: So about six years ago, I decided to give all that up and to focus the rest of my career on all the effort I have and all the knowledge I’ve acquired, on working on psychedelic-assisted therapy. The reason that I’ve switched on to psychedelics is that they work. The clinical trials now are showing that they work remarkably well for illnesses that it’s very, very hard for the psychiatrists to treat.
Narrator: So severe depression, treatment-resistant depression where somebody has tried four or five of our currently available antidepressants and has still not responded. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, addictions. What do we have to really help people with addiction? We’re talking about psilocybin, the active ingredient of magic mushrooms, DMT, the active ingredient of ayahuasca.
Narrator: The trial for DMT for severe depression has just read out. You know, those results are extraordinary in that 50% of people were in remission 12 weeks after one dose of DMT and the results with MDMA in their phase three trial for treating PTSD, they’re extraordinary. 67% of people in Rick Doblin’s phase three trial no longer met the criteria for PTSD. That’s absolutely extraordinary.
Narrator: This is a completely new paradigm in the treatment of lots of disorders. One or two high doses with all the assisted therapy; you’re not having a drug that you have to take on the regular at all. Maybe you need a top-up dose in a year, six months. That’s extraordinary. They heal people. Healing is not a word we use in psychiatry.
Narrator: So the drug laws are stopping people from doing research. And that’s just an absolute disgrace. DMT. This molecule that people are using and it’s attached to plants all over the world, you know, they’re—Rory talked about the Shipibo tradition, ayahuasca, the chacruna plant. The chacruna plant needs to be
experienced in its full spectrum.
Narrator: It needs to be experienced with those other alkaloids. It usually needs to be mixed with Banisteriopsis caapi. It needs to be mixed with alkaloids, the harmalines and harmalas. Those are what prolong the effect. It’s an interactive experience. It’s an interactive experience and that is going to be completely missed if we keep going down this road and we don’t start singing and chanting and getting together and doing all those things our egos don’t want us to do.
Narrator: This work has to be done in a group. We are only getting people… When we’re working individually with a client, or individually with someone, we’re getting them ready for group. And I understand that it’s the way that we’re going to have to go, but we have to now at a grassroots level understand that unless we get the voice of the drum into the session, then this will just be lost.
Narrator: Like gabapentin coming from fly agaric mushrooms, like fentanyl coming from opium, like quite crappy cannabinoids coming from a really magical plant. You know, this is what we need. We need the sound of the drum beat and bang, loud, loud, start doing it now, you know, like, yeah.
Narrator: All of this information presented on these graphs has been done for 50 years. We don’t need any more of this. We don’t need any more of this. We need more drums. We need more drums. That’s actually how we heal together. We heal together in a group. With these medicines, full spectrum, full-spectrum human. And I’ll just leave it there. I only had a few minutes.
—
[Scene 9: Closing Remarks]
Karen: Hi! Can I just tell you, Jake just bought a shamanic drum recently. Hook you up. You’re welcome. Hello, everybody. We have been dealing with these mental health and addiction issues for over ten years now, guys. And when I got the opportunity to go to a retreat back in November, I jumped at it because I realized that I had so much unprocessed trauma.
Karen: The experience that I had on the retreat was so empowering, so joyful. When I look at that window and I see all the trees, my first trip was all about trees. It was all about reconnecting with myself. It was reconnecting with my family, it was reconnecting with the earth. And I just sat in commune with a tree for six hours, and it was beautiful.
Karen: I cried. I saw the most amazing colors—fractals, you name it. And I felt peace in a way that I never had before, ever. My way of seeing the world and dealing with the world is just night and day, and I’m so grateful to the community. I’m so grateful to the plants. I’m so grateful for the opportunity to be able to pass on to other people as well because people in our community need this. They need this.
Karen: So that’s… Thank you.
Narrator: Oh, I think having a mother-son hug here, which is lovely. That was a lovely account. Thank you, Karen.
—
[Scene 10: Poetic Reflection]
Narrator: Connected to the spiritual antenna of the dearly missed Terence McKenna. Flow of Attraction for fractions of fractals into fragmented factions and their interactions with you and me in this perfect symmetry, a sacred geometry.
Narrator: There is no poetry that can reconcile me with my enemy because my enemy is me. I see. And how could I look at me kindly when I have been stumbling through life so blindly? Monochrome tone, all alone, eyes wildly searching for something outside of me, trying to recover some broken shards of me when the answer was always at the start of me, always at the heart of me.
Narrator: There is no part of me that would break away and not find its way back again like a jigsaw piece lost for the longest time and then greet it again like a long-lost friend that I had promised to bind to myself until the very end. See you again around that bend, now and then I comprehend that time will bend and I will break and minds will rend and first be slaked that I am I and I am Jake forsaken on the lake of time awakened.
Narrator: For when I opened up my eyes I’m shaking for they will cut ties with lies, heartbreaking. I have spoken; my words are out in the open, play out my heart like Chopin, show me the world like only you can, I’m hoping, spin out a tale like Tolkien, mend the heart that is broken …I’ve spoken …I’ve spoken.
