Deaths in the Underground

re: getting your soul card pulled

She said her soul card was pulled when she met him. Mine was pulled when she died.

It’s been five years since I left the psychedelic underground groups run by a famous LA-based Peruvian guide, and although I’ve tried to put that era of my life behind me, it keeps resurfacing. In the past weeks, I’ve learned of two recent deaths connected to my former teacher. A stroke at a journey in Colorado took the life of a 55-year-old man earlier this month. Facilitators believe the man had high blood pressure and shouldn’t have used the group’s “sacraments,” but, as I’ve written on this blog before, my former teacher was never honest about what was in his pills. This was one of the major ethical violations that caused me to quit the psychedelic underground.

The other death was one of the women closest to the shaman, Dawn Revett. Dawn built the group’s website, created the shaman’s online lecture series, and his facilitator training program. She helped him make millions and lived with him during the pandemic, essentially acting as his servant. Other former members reported to me that she had recently moved out of his house and left the group. My former teacher’s AI message about her death suggested she died from suicide because she “carried an immense darkness.” I am sure she did because the darkness she carried was, in part, him. Because he offloaded the consequences of his ethical violations onto the cadre of beautiful white women around him. He wanted me to be one of them, but I didn’t bite. Before Dawn moved in with him, he asked me to live with him, but I declined. Lately, I’ve been feeling like she took my place and left me here to speak a story no one in psychedelics wants to hear.

Editors and journalists in the psychedelic media ecosystem have received tips about the groups I was a part of for years. Even now that there have been three deaths connected to my former teacher, journalists are afraid of getting sued. Former members are shamed into silence. Many observers don’t realize how vast the shaman’s network is: He has as many as 1,500 facilitators worldwide and one of the biggest underground psychedelic networks in the United States. He’s been leading journeys for more than 40 years. Many of the people trying to quietly distance themselves from him have journeyed in his groups or are currently working alongside someone who was trained by him. As far as the intellectual lineage of the psychedelic renaissance goes, he’s all over it. You might have never heard of him, and you might not know who I’m talking about, but if you work in psychedelics, you are using language and ideas that came from his groups. There is no one working in psychedelics today who has turned on as many people as him. In his groups, I journeyed with prominent psychedelic researchers, psychiatrists and psychologists trained at places like Harvard and Stanford, university professors, Hollywood people, and heiresses from some of the wealthiest families in the United States. I am not talking about a fringe group. I’m talking about someone who has unfortunately set many of the standards in the field.

I recently had an unfortunate interaction with an alleged psychedelic writer who dismissed the survivors of my former teacher’s groups by saying, “Well, then, don’t join a cult!” while at the same time—I kid you not—unknowingly using language I had once heard coming from Dawn’s mouth. Such are the ironies and hypocrisies of working in psychedelics today. The field is full of love and light wankers who will turn around and tell you that you can’t expect psychedelics to be safe. But what you can expect—what you should expect—is the type of informed consent that comes from knowing what you’re putting in your body.

I once took a walk with Dawn and the shaman in Pasadena. She introduced me to the trees along their route that she considered her friends, including her favorite tree, which was a tall oak. Later, she sent me a tiny vial in the mail with bark from the tree. The shaman didn’t pay the people around him a salary—they were all contracted employees who were expected to develop income streams by using proximity to him and their positions at the top of his pyramid scheme. Dawn built much of the architecture to collect money from facilitators in the network, and she wrote the entire facilitator training curriculum. But she had her own creative ideas. She once told me about a board game she wanted to create that she called “Shaman’s Chess.” “What if we all created with chess, instead of being created by it?” she wrote in a pitch deck for the game she sent me in 2019.

Reading Dawn’s old emails is sickening now. The shaman hasn’t left his house much since the pandemic because of his health problems, I’ve heard. Dawn was holed up with him for a long time. Here’s something she wrote in December of 2021: “I am so grateful for all of the growth and creation that has been possible for me during these many months in quarantine, and I am also looking very forward to the changes coming in 2022 as we finally see the arrival of the Novavax vaccine in the U.S., which will allow (the shaman’s) and my return to the huggable world with you all.” Novavax came and went, but the shaman didn’t start traveling again. Dawn described part of her role as “home care” for him. The friends that helped her leave the group said she was suffering from the ways the shaman asked people around him to compromise their integrity.

The shaman turned on more people than anyone, but the closer you got to him the more you were asked to compromise your integrity. The more you got burned. Dawn wasn’t the first woman close to him to become suicidal. It happened to the shaman’s girlfriend at the time when I met him, and it happened to me too. I remember how alone I felt when I first quit his groups. Not only was it traumatic to lose the support system within journeywork—a woman I loved like a mother got me into it and introduced me to the shaman—but the gaslighting around the shaman confused me for a long time and nearly convinced me my version of events wasn’t true. I now hear the same gaslighting strategies and phrases coming from the mouths of people working in psychedelics and people who claim to be psychedelic journalists and writers. They act like what they’re doing is somehow above or different from the shaman while unknowingly using language his groups introduced to the field. No one wants this kind of corruption to be the truth in psychedelics. Trust me, I don’t. Like Dawn, I once harbored delusions of working in this field. Like Dawn, I once thought I’d spend the rest of my life helping people turn on with psychedelics. No one wants this to be truth. It just is. The facts are people are dying.

If you are a current or former facilitator or participant who wants to be connected to the network of defectors, please reach out. If you want to make a financial contribution to my work you can do so here or by subscribing to this Substack.