Alternate Timelines with Ian Vogel

The Truth About Psychedelics, Ayahuasca & Healing | Why Plant Medicine Isn’t the Cure

• Ian Vogel • Episode 14

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We’ve been sold a story—that ayahuasca heals, that psilocybin cures, and that plant medicine is medicine.

But what if that story isn’t just misleading… what if it’s holding people back from actually healing?

In this episode, I break down what these psychedelic tools do—and what they don’t do.

I share my personal journey through hundreds of  ceremonies, the trap I fell into, and the uncomfortable truth that most people don’t want to hear:

These substances aren’t the cure.

They can open doors—but you have to walk through them.

If you’ve ever felt stuck after a ceremony, chased the next “breakthrough,” or wondered why nothing’s actually changing… this video might give you the insight you didn’t know you needed.

Drop a comment below and let’s have a real conversation.

#psychedelics #ayahuasca #healingjourney #plantmedicine #integration #spiritualawakening #entheogens #podcast

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Timestamps:
00:00 Introduction: Are Psychedelics Really Medicines?
02:30 Historical Perspectives on Psychedelics
03:48 The Global Health Situation and Misleading Terms
06:26 The Aubrey Marcus Podcast and Plant Medicine Use
08:16 Personal Experiences and Reflections
11:09 The Role of Integration in Healing
13:31 Challenges with Microdosing and Western Medicine
15:13 Proactive vs. Reactive Healing Approaches
20:11 Final Thoughts and Call to Action

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Hey, I’m Ian Vogel—host of Alternate Timelines. My journey started on a small farm in the midwest, where I always felt a little out of place. After years of skepticism and even a stint as an atheist, a near-death experience changed my perspective on everything. Since then, I’ve explored plant medicine, past life memories, and the mysteries of consciousness. Now, I’m sharing those experiences to help others navigate their own awakening. Through real stories, deep conversations, and wild explorations of the unknown, we’re building a community where it’s okay to question reality. You’re not alone in the unknown. 👽✨

Ian Vogel:

Both ayahuasca and psilocybin mushrooms are often called plant medicines. But if a medicine is defined as a compound or preparation used for the treatment or prevention of a disease, then neither of these substances meet that criteria. And I'm not the first person to point this out. So why do we continue to call these psychedelic substances medicines? In this video, I'm gonna talk about what these substances do, what they don't do, and I'd like to open up a dialogue and have a conversation around how we can talk about these very important and impactful substances in a way that's accurate and doesn't give people a false impression of what they do. What's up? I'm Ian with alternate timelines, and I've been thinking about this for a couple of years now. At a certain point in my journey, it became abundantly clear to me that no, these substances are not medicines. And yes, the words we use to describe them are important, and many people are coming to these plant medicines with the preconceived notion that just by simply ingesting them, that they will have some sort of tangible result or they will receive some sort of healing or medicinal benefit when in most cases, that's simply not what happens. Now I have no intention to try to downplay just how impactful these substances can be. I personally have a deep respect and so much love for both ayahuasca and psilocybin mushrooms. They both had immeasurable impacts on my life, and for that I simply don't have words to describe how much gratitude I feel for each of them. And throughout my journey I've come to realize through my own experiences and through seeing people around me that working with these substances can be kind of like a double-edged sword. So if these substances aren't technically medicines, then what are they? Well, I like to think of them as catalysts for change. They don't actually do the change work for you, but they create a situation either by giving you knowledge or helping you see your situation in a different context in which you are able to then do the change and create the healing for yourself. Neither ayahuasca nor psilocybin mushrooms actually do the healing work. The healing is the responsibility of the person who's taken those substances. This is something that's been recognized by many of the pioneers and early researchers in this field. Stanislav Grof who was the inventor of holotropic breathing and one of the major researchers back in the late sixties, he describes these substances as non-specific amplifiers, and what he means by that is that they don't give you anything. They simply show you what's already there and amplify the signal that is already present. the late and great Allen Watts. He liked to describe psychedelics as diagnostic tools, and the metaphor he often used was that of a microscope, meaning the microscope helps you see what's already there that you can't typically see with your normal vision. Again, not giving you anything but helping you to perceive your situation in a different light. The distinction in these two different ways of talking about these substances is that when you call it a medicine, you're implying that there's gonna be a treatment or a prevention of some sort of disease. You're putting the onus on the substance to produce a result for you. When you talk about these substances as diagnostic tools and non-specific amplifiers, that puts it on you, you are responsible for taking action and doing the healing work. It's a very different dynamic. It may seem like I'm splitting hairs, but the words we use are important. Over the last few years, we've all gone through this global health situation, let's say, and I'm gonna have to speak very delicately around this because there are certain words that if I use them, YouTube will flag my video and it'll get shadow banned and it won't reach as many people. I've seen it and experienced it with other videos. Now we all know that as a result of this global health situation, there was a treatment that was rolled out and it was called a vaccine. Traditionally a vaccine was something that you took that helped prevent you from getting a disease. The smallpox vaccine, the MMR, the polio vaccine, we as a global society understood that word to mean something that prevents you from getting a disease. But the reality is the treatment that was rolled out and given to people didn't actually do that. And if people had understood beforehand that what they were getting wasn't actually technically a vaccine or it didn't meet the definition of vaccine as they knew it, and it was truly something closer to an experimental treatment, then if, if people really understood that, we wouldn't have seen as many people taking it. And there wouldn't have been the broad scale adoption of people just willingly taking the poke. And now we're in a situation where there are a lot of people who had they known what they know now, back then simply wouldn't have done it. And using the word vaccine to describe that treatment played a big role in how people thought about it and their level of trust in that treatment. So we have all experienced and have witnessed in real time in our own lives of a situation where trying to redefine a word to fit a specific narrative has caused some real undeniable consequences for many people in our society. The words we use and the way we talk about these substances is important. Now in our current society, it's become almost in vogue to use psilocybin mushrooms and go to ayahuasca ceremonies on the regular. If these were actually medicines that were effective at treating and preventing disease, the underlying root cause issue that caused the person to seek these medicines out in the first place would be resolved, and people wouldn't have to go back over and over and over again. I'm making this video in the aftermath of the Aubrey Marcus Radical Monogamy Situation podcast that nearly broke the internet. I have no desire to rehash or go over any of the contents of that podcast again, and there was something that a few people pointed out that I thought was really important. When I look at a situation like that, I always try to think, what is the root cause of this? My overall takeaway, if I could sum it up in two words, after watching the podcast and looking at all of the responses to it, was ego and delusion. So for somebody who's such an outspoken proponent of the regular use of plant medicines, psychedelics, ayahuasca, psilocybin. He, he's also into five M-E-O-D-M-T and God knows what else. If these substances were actually medicines, he wouldn't have to continue to use them over and over again. And the ego and delusion that most people who saw or watched that podcast perceived. You'd think that he would have a more grounded and reasonable outlook and approach to life and how he portrays his personal affairs. Most people who responded to that situation could tell that something just didn't feel right. Something seemed off. And there are a few people, myself included, who believe that the root cause of the inability to see reality and perceive things in a grounded and stable kind of a way is probably a result of the plant medicine use or plant medicine use. I'm not here to cast judgment. I've been through my own process and have had my own journey with these substances. I've personally worked with Ayahuasca more than 250 times, and I've sat with mushrooms just as many times, if not more. Over the last decade, these substances came into my life where at a time when I felt really lost and helped give me guidance and helped point me in the right direction and helped bring me to where I am today. And for that, I am truly grateful. Over the last three years, I haven't really touched psychedelics, so very, very little. And if I'm really honest with myself and I look back over that period of my life where I was working with those substances really intensively, it's clear to me that my relationship in the beginning was a more healthy sort of a relationship. There was a clear reciprocation, a lot of respect, and it felt like a very balanced sort of relationship where I was giving and getting a lot from it. But over time, I can just see how my relationship, specifically with Ayahuasca started to change. And it became one of a, initially a relationship that was more empowering and brought me to a place where I was learning how to heal myself to a point that was disempowering. I gave my power away to Ayahuasca and expected Ayahuasca to do the work for me. And believe it or not, I did not have great results in that codependent sort of relationship. And yes, I was having deep and profound peak experiences. I got to the point where I was facilitating ayahuasca ceremonies for one of the largest above ground ayahuasca churches in the us. I was traveling all over the country doing these ceremonies once, usually twice a month, and we were doing three day ceremonies. So Friday, Saturday, Sunday, twice a month, didn't gimme much time to be sober and really integrate the experiences I was having. And despite the fact that I was having these really potent experiences, and people were telling me how amazing my music was and how impactful my presence at the ceremony was and all this and that if I stopped and looked at my life, it would be what you would consider basically the textbook definition of spiritual bypassing. I was going from experience to experience, to experience, to ceremony, to ceremony, to ceremony. And my actual life wasn't changing. I had completely plateaued and stalled out, and this is something that I personally experienced and I've seen it with many other people who are in that space when they're not taking the time to do the integration work and to apply the lessons that they learn from working with these substances to their actual life. Anybody who's done any plant medicine work or inner healing work has probably heard the term integration. From my perspective, integration is the most important part of the process. That's where you actually get the benefit from. The plant medicine work, the journeying, it can help show you what the root causes of your issue, but it's up to you during the integration phase to actually make the changes you need to make. Think about it, if you are in a plant medicine ceremony or you hear somebody talking about the plant medicine ceremony, people often describe their breakthroughs and the epiphanies they have. Well, what is an epiphany? An epiphany isn't learning new information. An epiphany is when you can take two distinct pieces of information or things that you already know and are able to relate them to one another in a way that gives them new meaning, basically gives you a new context to something you already know, which gives you new meaning and a new place to explore and to approach your inner healing from. The truth is that when it comes to the situations in most people's lives that they find most challenging, the majority of us don't know what the root cause is. We spend time focusing on trying to treat the symptoms without actually understanding what's causing the symptoms. If we knew what the root cause was and we were trying to heal the root cause, then the symptoms would go away. But these persistent symptoms that often show up in our lives as what we might call depression or anxiety or any sort of manifestation or maity of disease, if we knew what was causing it, we'd be able to fix it. And when you treat not the root cause of the situation, you get not the result. The reason people continue to relive the same patterns over and over again and maintain, a lot of the same behaviors is'cause they haven't actually gotten to the root of what causes them. Again, they're, they spend time trying to treat the symptoms, which in most cases, it's like trying to put a bandaid on a stab wound and over a long period of time that simply doesn't work and doesn't produce positive results in a person's life. While I was traveling around doing all the ayahuasca ceremonies. I was also selling psilocybin micro doses, and I had dozens and dozens of clients, uh, across the country, and people came to me for all sorts of issues. Symptoms of depression and anxiety, people with traumatic brain injuries, people with neurological disorders, um, people on the autism spectrum, people dealing with cancer like you name it. I dealt with all sorts of people. And that was about the time where I really started to question whether or not these psychedelic substances were actually medicines. Whenever I worked with somebody providing micro doses, it was never my intention to replace one pill with another pill. My intention was always for the microdosing to be a short-term intervention. Every time I would take on a new client, I would do a really in depth 60 to 90 minute long consultation where I would talk about what the psilocybin is doing in their system, how it's producing the results that it's producing, and how to work with it and overdoing many, many consultations, I began to realize that people just think of medicine differently in our Western culture. In our Western society. The majority of us have been programmed from a very young age to believe that if your head hurts, you take the blue pill. If you stomach hurts, you take the yellow pill. If you're feeling anxious, well you take the green pill. That's just how we perceive medicine and healing. It's a almost entirely reactive sort of a relationship we have with the concept of healing. And if you approach medicine from an eastern or more traditional perspective, well that approach is completely different. It's a more proactive approach. If you work with a traditional Chinese medicine doctor or even a, a shaman from the Amazon, they don't wait until you're sick to treat you. They work with you on a regular basis, and when they start to see that something's out of balance. They try to correct it right away before you fall into a state of disease or into a state where you're really sick. It's a process of continually tweaking a little bit here and there, and trying to find a balance, which is completely foreign to myself and the majority of the people that I was working with. When I was providing the micro doses. Despite my intention for the microdosing protocols to only last for a set period of time. I started to notice, and I recognized that many people were hitting me up month after month after month, asking for a refill, and I would have conversations with these people and it at one day, it just hit me like a sledgehammer. I realized, oh my, okay. People aren't seeing this the way that I'm seeing this. People are so used to waiting for the pain and then taking a pill to counteract the pain that that's how they treat the microdosing. They're not taking it in a proactive way. They're taking it in a reactive way, and they're getting the same results that they would get with a Tylenol or ibuprofen or an antidepressant. The relationship wasn't empowering. It was a disempowering, codependent relationship that not everybody, but many people would develop with the micro doses. The same kind of relationships they were developing with the pharmaceutical drugs and the normal Western medical interventions that they were trying to get away from. Not all, but many of the people that I found myself working with were not trying to fix the root cause, They weren't doing the integration work. They weren't taking time away from microdosing so that they could really sit with and try to dig deep and find out what was going on. They were using the micro doses to fix the symptoms and to alleviate the symptoms of the deeper issue that they were really dealing with or not dealing with. Bypassing in many cases. I started to notice that when I set proper expectations and described ayahuasca and psilocybin as diagnostic tools that people could use to discover their unconscious patterns, uh, delve into their unconscious belief systems, or maybe uncover some sort of repressed, unconscious memories, and with the understanding that these medicines weren't gonna do the work, they were only going to highlight the root cause and help you find that when that intention was set and when that understanding was put in place in the very beginning, people tended to have a much more balanced and appropriate and more healing relationship with these medicines. People simply got more tangible results and had more measurable outcomes than when they would show up to the ceremony, or call me for micro doses and say. Give me some healing like that simply did not work, and that led to situations where I'd see the same person coming to the ceremony month after month after month, dealing with the same issues. And again, at some point I had to look in the mirror and recognize that the people around me were simply a reflection of something that I was doing myself, not casting judgment on anybody, I was the poster child for that. My life didn't change and I didn't start to see positive benefits until I took a serious break from working with these substances. I had to really be intentional and focus on doing the integration work, starting to put into practice all the things that I had learned and that I was talking about, and that I was portraying externally, yet not applying to my own life. Not until I did that did I start to make leaps and like really profound changes in my own personal journey and my own personal healing. Yes, I did experience healing as a result of working with these substances, and these substances did not heal me. I had to take that into my own hands and fix my own problems. And this is the crux of the issue that I'm talking about. By naming these substances, medicines, I believe we're doing the people who don't have these sorts of insights a disservice by giving them a false expectation that ayahuasca or psilocybin or whatever you want to call a plant medicine, is going to inherently give them some sort of healing. When it comes to integration and doing that healing work, there are some things that I found to be incredibly impactful. One was journaling, like getting everything out of up here, putting it down on paper. That helps you to notice patterns and dig deeper into your unconscious. When you simply speak something out loud or you're simply thinking about something, you're only using a certain part of your brain. But when you engage your hand and your eyes and your writing on paper, script and words, you're engaging multiple parts of your brain in that activity. So it's a way of using and utilizing more of your mental capacity to examine these patterns and beliefs and your thoughts. Intentionally spending time out in nature was another hugely impactful practice that helped me with the integration work. Nature's Natural Vibration is just health. It's just alive. If you can put yourself out in a place and in a setting where there's trees and life, you start to absorb that energy just through osmosis. Simply putting yourself there is good for you and is going to help you recognize and start to work through some of the unconscious patterns and some of the things that may have come up during your work with plant medicines or see right there. I have been programmed, and in many ways it's easier to talk about these substances and call them plant medicines, but again, that's not really in alignment with how I feel about them. This is something I'm trying to work through myself. So being out in nature can help you integrate the lessons you learn when working with psychedelic substances, for lack of better word, and and I'm not trying to be the word police, I don't wanna be the word police, and I wanna have a open dialogue and conversation about this. So please leave a comment below. Let's talk about it. What have you found that sits well with you? Do you think I'm totally off base? Is it an entheogen? Is it a, a psychedelic, uh, there are potentially many ways for us to talk about these substances. And it's not an either or sort of thing. I can totally see how in some context you might call these substances entheogens, while in other contexts you might think of them as psychedelics. That's totally valid too. But the point is, and my hope is that this conversation starts to become more broad and we start to talk about how we talk about these substances. Journaling, being outside, getting off of technology and being away from your phone is another big way to just be with yourself and develop a meditation practice. I think that's huge, just giving yourself time to be alone with your thoughts is something that a lot of people don't do and can have major benefits. There's any number of ways to integrate and to work on the integration process. There are many good facilitators and integration coaches and people who you can talk to and folks that can help you through the integration process. Lots of resources out there. Uh, I'll link one or two of them in the description below that you can check out. so please let me know what you think. Let's engage. Let's have a dialogue. Let's figure it out. Again, I love ayahuasca and psilocybin. They both are near and dear to my heart. I will always respect and be grateful for my experiences with them. The beautiful ones, the challenging ones, the entire spectrum, and I think we can do better and present them in a way where people will start to work with them and be introduced to them in a way that sets a reasonable expect expectation of the kind of results they can get. I think we owe that to these substances in a form of showing respect and gratitude and knowing how potent they are. Thanks for being here. I love y'all. Until next time, peace.