Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Shamanism, Visionary Experiences, and Holographicosmic Man w/ Matt Pallamary
380 Plays1 year ago
Author, Editor, and Shamanic Explorer Matthew J. Pallamary is an award winning writer, musician, and sound healer who has been studying shamanism all of his life. He incorporates shamanic practices into his daily life as well as into his writing and teaching. He has seventeen books in print that cover several genres.
Mateo has spent extended time in the jungles, mountains, and deserts of North, Central, and South America pursuing his studies of shamanism and ancient cultures.
Through his research into both the written word and the ancient beliefs of shamanism, he has uncovered the heart of what a story really is and integrated it into core dramatic concepts that also have their basis in shamanism.
In the episode we discuss his latest book, Holographicosmic Man: The Holographic Heart of the Golden Mean, which is an amalgam of quantum physics, mathematics, geometry, ancient texts, current research, ancient architecture, beliefs, and myths, astronomy, anthropology, human anatomy, brain structure, shamanism, neuroscience, neuropsychology, indigenous wisdom, astrophysics, neurophysiology, holography, neuroanatomy, neurocardiology, cosmometry, cosmology, biology, and more.
Mateo's links:
Website: https://mattpallamary.com/
Mystic Ink Publishing: https://mysticinkpublishing.com/
HOLOGRAPHICOSMIC MAN: The Holographic Heart of the Golden Mean - https://amzn.to/3oBEk2s
All of Mateo's books: https://mattpallamary.com/writings/
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction of Mateo
00:00:00
Speaker
Hey folks, welcome back to Connecting Minds podcast. Christian Jornoff here. Today we have a returning guest, Matthew J. Palamari. We call him Mateo.
00:00:13
Speaker
friends, I'm honored to consider myself his friend and his friends call him a tail. So we'll be calling him a tail for the duration of this episode. And he's actually a returning guest for the third time on the podcast, which is actually a record. So for the new listeners, very brief overview of who he is, the full bio will be in the description. He's an author, editor, shamanic explorer. He's an award winning writer, musician and sound healer.
00:00:42
Speaker
and he has been studying shamanism all of his life. He spent a ton of time with the indigenous peoples in the jungles, the mountains, the deserts of North, Central and South America, and he's been studying this stuff for decades and through his research,
00:01:05
Speaker
It's both the written word and the ancient beliefs of the shamans and shamanism.
Discussion of 'Holographic Cosmic Man'
00:01:10
Speaker
He has uncovered the heart of what a story really is and integrated into core dramatic concepts that also have their basis in shamanism. He's written, I believe, 17 books, right? So far. The one you have is number 19 and 20 around the way.
00:01:27
Speaker
Jesus Christ. So he's written, he's published 18 books and they cover fiction. Nonfiction is just a tremendous portfolio of books and his latest. So the one we're going to cover today in some depth is holographic cosmic man, which is Jesus Christ. It's an amalgamation of
00:01:48
Speaker
quantum physics, mathematics, geometry, ancient texts, current research. He talks about morphic fields, morphogenetic fields, ancient architecture, pi, phi, beliefs, myths, astronomy, anthropology, human anatomy, brain structure, shamanism, of course, neuroscience, neuropsychology, indigenous wisdom, Jesus Christ, neurophysiology, holography, neuroanatomy, neurocardiology,
00:02:16
Speaker
and cosmology, biology, and a number of other things. If I keep going, I'm going to get tongue tied, and maybe some people's heads will explode.
Shamanic Inspirations and Influences
00:02:24
Speaker
So Mattel, thank you for joining us today, brother. Thank you so much for having me back, Chris. I love being on your show.
00:02:32
Speaker
Thank you for coming back. So let's catch up a little bit. We haven't spoken in about a year and a half. So you published Holographic Cosmic Man in, I believe, November last year. Can you just give us, first of all, for the listeners that don't know you, maybe give a little bit about your background, and can you tell us what compelled you to write this particular book?
00:02:59
Speaker
Sure. As you mentioned, I'm passionate about shamanism and have been studying it all of my life. And the original concept of this book came to me actually when I was in the jungle doing a shamanic plant diet with ayahuasca and a number of other plants. I originally wrote a book called The Infinity Zone,
00:03:21
Speaker
And I wrote it with a tennis pro. We wrote it together. I actually wrote most of it. Um, I probably wrote 95% of it, but, um, he paid me, um, and you know, supported me along with it. So energetically speaking, it was a good collaboration, but it's about perfect form and motion, but the idea for it.
00:03:43
Speaker
has been really rattling around in my head for many years. So I like to call holographic cosmic man, the infinity zone on steroids.
Mathematical Concepts in Ancient Structures
00:03:53
Speaker
And it ties in, it's a play on words. I think I invented a new word, holographic cosmic. And it's a play on words because there's the temple of anthropocosmic man in Luxor, Egypt.
00:04:09
Speaker
And it's a very precise mathematical map of the human body. And many years ago, a Frenchman by the name of Schwaler de Lubitz, he spent like 12 years on site and three more years, he spent about 15 years doing a full on mathematical analysis of the temple. And everything in the temple is based on the golden mean, the divine proportion.
00:04:36
Speaker
every archway, every piece of art, the placement, like there's temples within the temple, there's temples to the eyes and all of that thing. And it's all a very precise mathematical map. And what they say is that it's not only a map of the human body, but it's also a map of the cosmos, with the human body being the microcosm of the bigger picture. But they say it's a map of the cosmos.
00:05:02
Speaker
So I've always been fascinated with that. And somewhere along the lines of my research, it struck me that the golden mean is actually the perfect mathematical representation of a hologram and vice versa.
00:05:22
Speaker
and there are a number of elements, we'll get into as much as you want before you have to rein me in, but it's everywhere. It's like when somebody buys a new car, hey, I got a new car, and then you look out and that's all you see on the road are new cars, right? The car that you got, that's my car, right? But before that, you didn't notice it, so I started to notice how prevalent it was in everything, and I decided to delve into it, and the research uncovered more and more and more,
00:05:51
Speaker
So I kept going with the flow of it and following through. And as has happened with the best books, it ended up writing itself.
Complexity and Subjectivity in Writing
00:06:03
Speaker
It's pretty deep. How long were you researching and writing the book? I probably spent about a year. I did.
00:06:18
Speaker
The research was spread out. Like I was working on another book and I had the idea for this book. So while I was browsing the internet and working on this other book, I'd find an article or a piece or something and I would just throw it into the document. So the research was spread out, you know, it could have been spread out over a couple of years, but I mean, it wasn't consistent, like nonstop. Um, it was a piece here, a piece there, and then sorting through all of it. So then the actual writing and the rest of it probably took about a year.
00:06:48
Speaker
Very cool. There's very little, to be honest, I have not found one sentence that is filler. A lot of books, they repeat and then they summarize. Obviously, it's a nonfiction book.
00:07:05
Speaker
So now the sort of latest, not latest, but the recent trend is telling stories and dumbing down a lot of technical concepts so people can understand them. But in this case too, Jesus Christ, I had to really just shut off everything.
00:07:25
Speaker
Like in my psyche and just focus on this and try to, you know, it's very, very, I mean this in the best way possible. It's very dense, you know what I mean? It's very, very dense. You've compressed, like Jesus, like,
00:07:43
Speaker
I got pains in my jaw just listing the fields and neuropsychology, human and that, all this stuff. Can you tell us, let's start with the golden means since we kind of picked that thread up. What, for the ignorance among us, which I believe I don't really know the stuff in great depth, what is the golden mean and how does that, where do we find that in nature? It's almost more like, why don't you find it in nature?
00:08:13
Speaker
The golden mean, the golden cut, the divine proportion is 1.618. It's called phi, P-H-I. It is everywhere in nature. If you take that golden mean and you work it out, I'd have to show a picture of it, but you'll get the concept of it. If you take it and keep doing it in a circle, an expanding circle of a spiral,
00:08:43
Speaker
it actually follows the Fibonacci sequence. I don't know for your listeners, your audience, the Fibonacci sequence basically goes like this. You start with zero and number one. And then you add one to the next number. So then there's one and two, so there's three. And then you add that to the previous number. So three plus two is five. Five plus three is eight.
00:09:11
Speaker
And it follows that sequence. And most plants, when they grow, they follow that Fibonacci sequence. And in a process, it's called phyllotaxis. Yeah, P-H-Y-L-O-T-A-X-I-S. And it allows the plant, as it grows, as each leaf comes out following the Fibonacci sequence, it allows each leaf to get the maximum sunlight so that it's not blocking it in the initial growth of the plant. Wow.
00:09:38
Speaker
So it follows that. And then if you look, you can look at some really obvious ones. Like if you look at the front of a sunflower and you look inside there, you'll see this Fibonacci spirals. And if you count, you can see those numbers that I just told you.
00:09:57
Speaker
You can also see it in pine cones, Romanesque broccoli. I can go on and on and on. I mean, it's everywhere. A conch shell is one of the most famous ones also. It follows that. And like I was mentioning a little while ago about you get a new car and then suddenly, oh, it's all you see is a new car. It's everywhere in nature. It's in flowers.
00:10:23
Speaker
It's in different animals. It's in different things and it and the human body is rife with it If you look at the human body and this this comes back to the temple of anthropocosmic
Integration of Shamanic Practices
00:10:36
Speaker
man a bit our belly button And our body is at one point six one eight That point and if you if you think about it the belly button is where you were connected to mom. Yeah, I
00:10:51
Speaker
where life, all your sustenance came from in the beginning when you start to form in the womb. And I'm giving you just brief examples here, but there are numerous examples of it. So like this first segment of the finger to the next one, that is the golden mean. Those two segments to the next one are the golden mean. So even that starts to follow the Fibonacci spiral up the arm,
00:11:21
Speaker
It's all over the human face, and the proportion of everything is split up. It's everywhere throughout the body. It's everywhere throughout nature. And it goes infinitely outward, and in many respects, infinitely inward. So in the beginning of holographic man, which you probably got a headache over, I started off with quantum physics, because it applies to quantum physics.
00:11:49
Speaker
And I went from quantum physics into nature, into the human body, out to the planet, out to the cosmos. I followed it like that way because it's all, it's what they call nested. It's all nested within each other in both directions. There's another expression that they use instead of nested. There's the implicate order and the explicate order. And it goes that way and it follows that. And when you look at much of the way life evolves on the planet,
00:12:19
Speaker
you will see the symmetry and the beauty of that. So that's why it's called the divine proportion. And it was a huge part of ancient Egypt. God knows how far back. There's a lot of controversy over when the pyramids were made and when the temple was made and this and that. And as in many cultures, when one culture dominates another culture,
00:12:44
Speaker
They try to destroy the roots of the original culture. In ancient Egypt, a new Pharaoh would come and he would destroy the monuments to the old one and then make them his or put up his own monuments. So there is that, but the roots of this go back. And one of the other things I discovered among a million others is that mathematics is actually a universal language.
00:13:10
Speaker
Any one of us, you could speak Mongolian, I could speak Greek. I mean, it doesn't matter. Both of us, no matter what languages we may have to communicate, we understand proportion when we see it. It's a major part of how the human brain works. So the proportion is everywhere. Even if you look at the shape of the human skull, it follows a Fibonacci spiral. If you look at hurricanes,
00:13:40
Speaker
Many of the galaxies follow the Fibonacci spiral, and you can just find it. The more you look, the more you will see it, and it's really a beautiful, wonderful thing. In my humble opinion, it's the expression of divinity because there's a whole perfection to it. I love that, bro. Actually, one thing I wanted to ask you is, I was going to ask you later on,
00:14:10
Speaker
So I kind of, for whatever reason, I love debating, I love getting into tangos with atheists because I obviously, you know, feel that they're wrong and I want to see where they're coming from. But I often actually like the last episode I published, I was talking to the actually the last two episodes that the people
00:14:37
Speaker
discussing stuff with I brought this topic up but today as I was reading your book I came across a passage let me just bring up the my notes here so very just I'm citing the book now guys so nothing is a concept denoting the absence of something and is associated with nothingness the state of being nothing the state of non-existence of anything or the property of having nothing this is how
00:15:05
Speaker
non-believing atheists characterize any conception of God yet in the paradox of their denial they're unequivocally announcing that they themselves are God as they have made the ultimate judgment call claiming their throne at the center of their universe from this perspective if they cease to exist then nothing else would exist
00:15:25
Speaker
which makes them a creator god who rules over everything that falls under their range of thought and perception and denies existence to any other higher intelligence that might exist outside of them. So basically, I finally found a way to shut them up, right? The atheist. Can you elaborate on what you mean by that, bro? Yeah, sure. That's one of my favorite arguments, and one of my best friends is an atheist.
00:15:55
Speaker
And when I told him that, I confused the hell out of him. And he told me just, we were talking about this like a month ago. And he said to me, dude, you told that to me 20 years ago and it still messes with my head. So really, atheists are really agnostics. And agnostics are like, I'll believe it when I see it. And the reason, my friend still doesn't quite get this, but the reason most people call themselves atheists
00:16:24
Speaker
Not all of them, but most of them is because they they're rejecting organized religion And I don't blame them all that Crap, right? It's been repeated and reinterpreted and you know translated. It's not the real deal whereas in shamanism It's direct experience. It's not about what somebody else said. I
00:16:48
Speaker
So in the end, this was one of my favorite terms and I stole it. I'm a writer. I don't know what's original. I steal everything because I'm a writer and I admit it. But I give credit. So in the end, it all comes down to radical subjectivity.
Gurdjieff's Teachings and Personal Growth
00:17:07
Speaker
That's one of my favorite expressions. Now, you could say something to me,
00:17:13
Speaker
I may get offended, oh God, he doesn't like me, or he's envious of me, or wow, he really likes me, or he thinks I'm brilliant, or he thinks I'm stupid. I have any number of interpretations that I can make from my perception that comes to me from the outside, any number. So when you start to really work on this and you start growing an awareness and you start to realize that how you interpret reality
00:17:42
Speaker
is the truth. And of course, as we all know, truth is subjective, which kind of proves my point in a way. It's subjective. So what do you make of it? How do you see it? So it's all in the interpretation. There can be tons of interpretations about what are you perceiving? And one of the things I've loved about shamanism and visionary experience is that your perception gets turned around six waves from Sunday.
00:18:12
Speaker
You don't know where you are half the time and you're in non-physical realms and this and that and you're having these experiences. But you learn to sort through them and you start to realize that each quote unquote reality or dimension that you're perceiving has a different set of rules. So visions are very close to dreaming. Visions in dreaming are similar to waking, but they have different things. I can be in a dream.
00:18:38
Speaker
And I can fly on a purple horse with pink polka dots and wonderful big feathery wings in the dream. And I'm enjoying myself. I'm not even questioning that I'm flying a horse on a flying horse with all these colors. But in quote unquote, waking consciousness, it's a different set of rules. So in indigenous cultures, in Western culture,
00:19:04
Speaker
We separate, there's waking, there's sleeping, there's dreaming, and there's visions. Those are the primary modes of consciousness that we know of. But indigenous cultures, they don't separate them. They see it all as degrees, degrees of consciousness and aspects of consciousness, but they're all connected. So what goes on with them and what has happened to me over all the years of the shamanic studies and experiences that I've had,
00:19:35
Speaker
In one of my first most profound experiences in the jungle on the diet, my dreams and my visions crossed over into each other. I had a, for lack of a better word, I had somewhat of a prophetic dream. And then the next night I went into a ceremony and thought what came to me in the dream really manifested big time in my visions to where I was actually in rapture. Wow. And the more I did it,
00:20:01
Speaker
In the jungle, doing the 10-day diet to there, the lines between sleeping and waking, they all blur. It all blurs. For me, the dream started filtering into the visions, and the visions started filtering into the dreams, and then both of those two started filtering into my everyday life. My everyday life became more magical, less focused on materialism, so to speak, on what is real and what isn't.
00:20:30
Speaker
And it made my life more magical. And in the end, it gave me a greater freedom. I don't have any attachments. I'll qualify that. I have my books. I love my books. I'm attached to my books like that. I've been a drummer all of my life, so I have a drum set. I'm attached to that. But if I lost them all, I lost them all because it's all just like a dream anyway.
00:20:57
Speaker
And I'm not looking for more things. I don't want, I mean, gee, it'd be nice to have a new car and it'd be nice to have a new house. But those aren't what motivate me in life because I've realized that everything is temporary. It's all transitory. Even different parts of my life now, they're like different realities that I've passed through and all the rules have changed. And of course, as you grow,
00:21:18
Speaker
and you do the work, your perception changes, and you start to see things that you didn't see before, and then you start to see things that other people don't see at all. And when I say see things, sometimes it's a feeling, sometimes it's a perception, sometimes it's an energy, but I can tell things from people when I meet them by their energy, and it's not visuals part of it,
00:21:41
Speaker
hearing what they have to say as part of it, a greater truth lies in what they do as opposed to what they say. But there's just this whole, I know I'm sounding new agey here, but there's a whole vibe. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I can sense the vibe. So then I know a good sense of what's happening with people and how to deal with them and all that, because I honestly believe that I think quite different from most people.
00:22:07
Speaker
And after 24 years in the jungle, if I don't think different from most people and I haven't learned anything, then you might as well just put me out of my misery because it's all been a waste of time, right? Yeah, man. So can I ask you, so did that when what you were describing earlier, did that stay with you, that sort of
00:22:26
Speaker
opening or that energetic change or did it kind of because you know sometimes when you take antiogenic medicines you can feel an opening and then it kind of closes off again and you're back to daily life you know so
00:22:45
Speaker
did that stay with you or do you think is it with your work with the medicines and the
Energetic Frequencies and Personal Change
00:22:50
Speaker
you know the the teachers there that you've just are permanently permanently open your psyche do you have to like do you the another thing i'm curious about is do you still like you know take any substances or plant medicines like or do you feel like after all your work with it you've just opened the floodgates and you're just buzzing
00:23:16
Speaker
That's a great question. Let me do it in parts just a little bit here. One of the things I'm always saying, and I'm always preaching about, is that in a visionary experience like that, you may see something and have a revelation or an epiphany about something. Many, many, many, many people have that experience. And they think, oh, I've arrived. I've enlightened. I made it. Nuh-uh.
00:23:44
Speaker
You've just been shown it for the first time. I like what you said about it opens up in closes. If you see it and you experience it, you need to carry it on in your everyday life because you're going to get tested. Because you've seen it for the first time does not mean you're enlightened. It means you've just seen it for the first time.
00:24:08
Speaker
And I often say that the time between the experiences are more important in many respects than the experiences themselves. Because then you're going to get practice. Let's say for argument's sake, I discover, oh man, I judged these people. Oh God, okay, I figured that out.
00:24:26
Speaker
And then suddenly two weeks later when you're not altered and you're in regular life, boom, that pops up. And of course the judgment pops up because it's on autopilot and the ego's been doing its thing. So it's on autopilot, right? And suddenly you get caught up in it. And if you're becoming aware and you're paying attention, you'll catch yourself and then you'll correct it.
00:24:49
Speaker
but that will happen numerous times in just about the time you think you've made it and just about the time you think you've arrived is just about when you'll get your ass handed to you. And you will get humbled because you have to keep it. So I always like to say that I'm in a constant state of integration 24 seven. If I never take anything again, I don't need to because in another play on words, I'm constantly tripping all the time. So I got to a point,
00:25:19
Speaker
Where I wasn't, I was going to stop. I was like, enough is enough. And there was an old saying from Alan Watts. He would say, um, uh, you've, you've gotten the message. You can hang up the phone now. But right about the time I was ready to quit, I got pushed into more of a leadership position and my primary mentor passed away. Um, he was 90 and I learned from him for, for 24, 25 years.
00:25:47
Speaker
And then I realized the importance of carrying the tradition or as I like to say, carrying the torch. Yeah. Yeah. So I got worked into, uh, leading ceremonies. Now I was leading ceremonies, God was 17 years ago. And then people started turning me into a guru. So I bailed because we're all our own guru.
00:26:14
Speaker
I can help people, I can help direct them, I can help point them, I can counsel them, but I can't heal anybody. We only can heal ourselves.
00:26:22
Speaker
So because my mentors are passing and I've been turning into an old man, as we all are, some of us are further along the path, you know, all my older mentors are leaving the planet. So I feel a great responsibility because they gifted me with the knowledge and the experiences that I've had that really few people ever get to have.
00:26:47
Speaker
Now I've been to the jungle numerous times. I've done 13 extended shamanic plant diets. Plus I spent time at the Chippebo Indians. I spent time in Mexico, all that stuff you read about all the places I've studied. I probably have a total of something like altogether, maybe seven months in the jungle, maybe a month and a half, two months in the Andes. I've worked with all the plant medicines up there or all the ones I could find anyway.
00:27:14
Speaker
You know, I did the whole Huichol, peyote pilgrimage, peyote hunt, and all of that. I've done all those things. And most of the people who were involved, like I said, I'm getting older, they're all leaving. So I feel the great responsibility to pass on all of the experiences and the things that I've learned because they're gone. And if I don't pass it on, it's going to get lost.
00:27:38
Speaker
Is that why you're so prolific with writing the books as well? Do you have a sense of duty in a way? Yeah. Well, I'm obsessed. I'm an obsessive fool if you want to get to the core of it. Yeah. But I've been teaching for 35 years.
00:27:56
Speaker
And I don't know if any of you, you may be, the listeners are familiar with Ray Bradbury, great science fiction writer. He wrote The Martian Chronicles, Fahrenheit 451, The Illustrated Man. I was blessed to get to know him through the writer's conference and he was one of my mentors among many. And I'm an old school writer in terms of craft and doing it and how to do it.
00:28:22
Speaker
And I started teaching at a very young age. I got asked to teach horror, fantasy, and science fiction at the Santa Barbara Writers' Conference.
Sound Healing and Its Effects
00:28:32
Speaker
And I was the youngest workshop leader for 15 years. And I'm still, to this day, I'm pinching myself, like, how did that happen? Because I wasn't intending to do that.
00:28:43
Speaker
but I got to be very good at it. So the whole process of writing and creativity has been a big part of my life. And I've, you know, I've mentored hundreds of writers. A lot of them are doing a lot better than me commercially. But it's the whole process of creativity and the shamanism has dovetailed into it nicely so that I have a book, a fantastic fiction with a pH.
00:29:11
Speaker
And it's a shamanic approach to story structure. And it's based on my experience teaching at the conferences and learning from Ray Bradbury and a number of other big name, well-known successful writers who became first mentors and then colleagues. And I was happy to say that book, first place in the International Book Awards for writing and publishing. And it was based on all the knowledge that those guys had given me.
00:29:40
Speaker
So one of the things I've learned and I've worked really, really hard on that's been beaten into me is trying to say more with less. So even though holographic cosmic man is quite complex in the beginning, but it lays the background. And as you continue on through the book, the concepts come together and it makes more and more sense and gets really clear toward the end. And I mean, that was my intention.
00:30:05
Speaker
And I have other people, reviewers and readers who have told me that's what happened and that's what I had hoped for. So part of it, which you said, and thank you for saying that about me being very concise about what I have to say is that I had to get a lot of big scientific papers. And then I had a, um, I don't want to say dumb it down, but that's the best way I can think about it. I had to simplify it, you know, the average person.
00:30:31
Speaker
Even though even now what you're reading is still complicated, I simplified it and made it as clear as I could because I wanted to get those concepts across. I've been a big fan in the tradition of Rudolf Steiner. I don't know if you're familiar with Steiner or not. He started the Waldorf's books.
00:30:51
Speaker
What's that? I have all of his books. Okay. So you're brilliant. You know, you get it. No, no, no. Let me just caveat. I have all of his books, but I find them very difficult to read. So I'm struggling with a couple of them at the moment, but yeah, it's hard. A big reason for that is he was German.
00:31:11
Speaker
And so many of them are translated. So that adds a little, kind of a little twist to it. But one of the things he really worked on was merging science and spirituality. Carl Jung very much so also.
00:31:27
Speaker
And then I'm also a huge fan of Guruji. I was gonna ask you some stuff about him, but yeah, we can please continue. He's awesome. He's all about shamanism. And he was another one. He was a seeker of truth. And he was all about trying to integrate, you know, for lack of better words, like scientific facts and spirituality. So that's been my path that's gotten more and more focused and intense.
00:31:57
Speaker
about merging those two. And one of the things I'm worked on with that holographic cosmic man with all the in-depth complicated technical stuff is I'm looking to win over the intellectuals and the atheists, if possible, presenting it in a way with facts that they can't argue with because they're proven scientific facts.
00:32:21
Speaker
But there are a lot of gray areas within, and that gets into perception and subjectivity. And even that, one of the reasons I started with quantum physics is the whole thing about observing a quantum event. You can't tell what's going to happen. Is it a wave or a particle? The answer is yes. As soon as you observe it, you change it. And so I've always been very fascinated with that because it all has to do with subjectivity and interpretation.
00:32:50
Speaker
I'm glad you brought up Gurdjieff, right? So I have Ospensky's book, The Fourth Way. And so actually I have a ton of really awesome books, some from kind of older writers, like Steiner, lots of stuff.
00:33:16
Speaker
you know, the Bhagavad Gita, the Upanishads, a ton of stuff, right? What I'm finding is that I'm sure many other people my age, younger, maybe even a bit older, are having this problem is the way these books are written in that more archaic style. Dude, I've got like
00:33:36
Speaker
I've got some seriously, some seriously good books here, like dozens and dozens of books that it's all on my bucket list to read in the morning. And when I'm super fresh, I'll read something like the Caballon or something like a bit more esoteric while I'm still fresh and able to, you know, concentrate. But I'm having serious trouble with Steiner or Spensky. So maybe can you can you give us
00:34:02
Speaker
kind of a crash course in who was Gurjev, what is he teaching now? I know something I just got off Wikipedia there just as I was looking at his sort of biography. So quoting Wikipedia, so Gurjev thought that most humans do not possess a unified consciousness and thus live their lives in a state of hypnotic waking sleep quote unquote but that it is possible to awaken to a higher state of consciousness and achieve
00:34:31
Speaker
full human potential. From what I understand, a unified consciousness is when you're reading a book or listening to somebody and part of your awareness is inside. Am I on the right track? What do you make of that?
00:34:49
Speaker
You're ready. This is going to be a little long. Okay. You're ready for me? Yeah. Fasten your seatbelt. I'm ready. So, Grigif was Turkish and Armenian, but he's considered Russian. He was considered a Russian mystic, but he was Turkish and Armenian. And he was a seeker of truth. And everything that he has written and said in his whole life
00:35:19
Speaker
has been all about, in the end, about shamanism. He studied all religions, traveled to the East, traveled throughout Europe, survived through a couple of wars, and he was a seeker of truth, and he started developing things. Now, according to Gurdjieff, we come into the world as essence, and then we start off as essence, which is relatively clean,
00:35:47
Speaker
And then the first thing we do is emulate everybody around us in order to learn. We emulate, we copy our parents, our brothers, our sisters, our friends, all the people around us in order to learn and develop. So over time in this mode, we're reflecting what's around us. So in this reflecting mode of taking on all the things that everybody is showing us, there are good things and bad things.
00:36:15
Speaker
There may be generational patterns that are unhealthy, but when you're raised up in the middle of it and that's what your parents and your family are doing, then you just fall into that because that's what it is. And that's what's the reality of where they are. So you come in as essence and you develop personality and personality is necessary to function in the world.
00:36:39
Speaker
Problem is we do such a good job of developing personality. And when I say personality, I also mean ego or egos. When we come into the world and we develop personality, I always like to say I'm a cast of thousands. We develop those strategies to cope in the world. Some are good, some are bad. The ones that are bad that are socially unacceptable get relegated to shadow and we deny those aspects of who we are. So the path.
00:37:08
Speaker
is to go from being personality driven back to being essence driven. But the boundary, the impediments to finding that has to do with overcoming the ego or egos or personalities because we create them. We are the creator gods and goddesses of the universe that we inhabit, which is the same thing as the holographic cosmic man and the anthropocosmic man.
00:37:34
Speaker
We are the creators and we create these sub personalities. So you go through life, this average day for a person and an average person, so to speak, they get up in the morning, they're having breaks with the family, you know, everything's great, blah, blah, the kids, I love my wife, blah, blah, blah. And then they get in the car and they drive to work. Well, they may be a total maniac when they're driving to work. They may, right? Totally cycle. And then of course they get to work.
00:38:05
Speaker
And then maybe they're afraid of their boss. So maybe they go from being a psycho to being like, Oh my God, I don't want to upset the boss and this and that. And they become like timid. And then suddenly they're a beautiful woman and work walks by and then suddenly they want that woman. Well, then now they're like, Oh, I want that. Right. So, and, and, uh, Gertrude says this in his own way, but we are multiple eyes and some of the worst ones can take over. One of the things I've observed that I love to
00:38:35
Speaker
see and observe, not that I love it, I actually hate it, but I mean, it's fascinating, is you'll see people get drunk and they'll turn into total idiots and then they'll wake up in the morning and they don't remember what they did. Well, the reason that happens, and alcohol is the worst one, it happens with other things too, but they do that and the alcohol lowers their inhibitions and then the shadow comes out.
00:39:03
Speaker
and it does all these things. And of course, nobody wants to recognize their shadow. So one of the things that the sub-personalities and the shadow does is it recognizes itself in other people and then it projects itself onto them and judges them so that you don't see it within yourself. And it's a self-defense mechanism because we created all these sub-personalities in order to function and cope.
00:39:32
Speaker
So most of us go through our lives working in that way, changing from, as Guruji says, multiple eyes. And you can watch people, if you watch people really closely going through different experiences, and you can actually watch the expressions on their face and change to different people. Sometimes you can do it, you know, 20 times in a minute.
00:39:54
Speaker
Different emotions come up, I'm angry, I'm hungry, I'm hurt, I'm horny, whatever it may be. They all come up and when they take over, you think here I am and this is me and this is what I want. But in reality, it's not the real you, it's the personality that comes out to deal with that particular situation. One of the things I've noticed about myself among other things is how much I use humor.
00:40:23
Speaker
When I meet people or I get in uncomfortable situations, sometimes I've been in some very intense situations where everybody's freaking out. Then the first thing I do is crack a joke. Then everybody chills out and they relax. It's my way of reminding them, hey, you know what? It's not that serious. Lighten up. I had a guy get mad at me one time in a shamanic ceremony because I was making some jokes. He's like, whoa, what are you doing? This is serious work. You're disrespectful. I'm like, dude,
00:40:51
Speaker
You need to chill out. You need to quit taking yourself so seriously. And if you study American Indian spirituality and shamanism, they have coyote. Coyote is the trickster. Great teacher, right? It helps you. And then, you know, I'm getting a little bit off track, but they would have heiokas, which are the clowns.
00:41:15
Speaker
And their job was to follow the warriors around and make fun of them. They would cross dress, they would walk backwards. They would do all kinds of goofy stuff to make fun of the warriors so that they wouldn't take themselves so seriously. Interesting. And in medieval times. Yes. I was just going to say the jesters in medieval times. Exactly. You're right. Yes. Yeah. That's right. See, you're on track because that's right where I was going. Court jesters, that was their job.
00:41:42
Speaker
So the royals wouldn't take themselves so seriously. They wouldn't let their ego inflate too much. Yeah. It was a balancing act because you need to learn to see those parts of yourself and you need to learn to accept them and forgive them if that's the case. Now, an interesting thing happens when you find out something within yourself. In fact, I call this my time travel theory.
00:42:12
Speaker
Maybe, maybe 40 years ago, I got in a fight with a guy who was a total jerk. And so I've gone through my life like, yeah, I got in a fight with that jerk and I sure showed him blah, blah, blah. And then suddenly in all of my spirituality or my surges or whatever, I suddenly realized, guess what? I was the jerk. We were both the jerks, but I was the jerk. And that fight that we got into was a co-creation. So if I go back and I really see that realization and embrace it,
00:42:43
Speaker
then I realized my part in the co-creation and I release it and I forgive that person. And then in everyday, now life, I no longer have that creation and all the energy that I had all those years that was psychically storing that has become available to me. So my perception can widen. So then,
00:43:08
Speaker
I could be going through my life and see someone who reminds me of that person where all my life I judged them. Now I see them and I go, Oh my God, I'm looking at myself, you know, even two years ago or two weeks ago for that matter, right? I'm seeing myself. And then instead of having judgment, I have compassion.
00:43:31
Speaker
So compassion is the gift that you get from facing that within yourself. And that within yourself, which is unacceptable, is the shadow. So it's about integrating the shadow. And the more that you integrate the shadow, the more you become the single I that Guruji talked about. But it's fluid. So I can get really, really deep. I won't get into the complexity of this, but there's a few more things about it.
00:43:59
Speaker
It just goes down more and more. It gets more diffuse and everything. But according to Gurdjieff and according to the shamanic studies that I've done, we have three energetic bodies. We have the emotional, intellectual, and moving. Now in Inca and pre-Inca cultures, they had the three worlds.
00:44:23
Speaker
They had the upper world, the middle world and the lower world. The upper world sky Pacha is represented by the Condor and the color Rose, which is love. The middle world is power, which is represented by the Jaguar or the Puma, and that's an electric blue. And the lower world is a serpent represented by the color gold, which is wisdom. So it's love, power and wisdom, truth, love and energy. And the idea.
00:44:51
Speaker
is to, as I like to say, the idea is to get the whole band singing the same tune. So I'm making this up, but let's say if I'm intellectually centered, I lead with my intellect at the detriment of the other two energies. So somebody could say something, and I could think about it, and then I could get upset, and then I could get so mad I hit him.
00:45:19
Speaker
What did I just do? I went from intellectual to emotional to moving. Maybe somebody says something and I pop off and then I hit them, and then I think about it, and then I feel really bad about what I just did. Then I've gone from moving to intellectual to emotional. It varies, but we generally have
00:45:42
Speaker
One we lean on more at the expense of the other two. Great sports people, great athletes are moving centered. Great thinkers are intellectually centered. Great lovers are heart centered, emotionally centered. So this is ongoing and it's fluid and you never arrive. You never ever arrive. Anybody who tells you that they're enlightened, run.
00:46:08
Speaker
because it doesn't happen. You get better, you get more aware, but one of the beauties of it is that it's infinite. So if you can learn and get yourself to a point where you're responding with all three at once, then you're in that one I that Guruji mentioned.
00:46:28
Speaker
And all the other ones, he called them, I maybe had an expression, just a mechanical man or a mindless man or an unthinking man, because it's all those sub-personalities that take over and they're on autopilot. So most people have no awareness that they're even doing that. They think that it's them. So the idea is to get them all together. And when you're doing some of the work I've done, when you're focusing in on that, you'll get to see this ultraviolet electric
00:46:57
Speaker
color, which is the combination of all three. And that's where you're centered. And when you're in that place, if you're in that place and it gets challenged constantly, but when you're in that place, you can be faced with intense situations and, and have a balanced response and don't go flying off the handle about this or that or the other thing. But it's, it's human nature.
00:47:22
Speaker
We created the sub personalities and they're on autopilot. So in the end is sort of to sum up this little part of our discussion. Um, of course I'll answer more questions, but, um, In the end, you're looking to be centered. You'll find yourself going into the eye of the storm. What happens in the eye of the storm? Nothing.
00:47:48
Speaker
So you move through these things and you become more and more aware, and you move from being head-centered to heart-centered. That's the real path, going back to being heart-centered. And heart-centered is connected with the feminine, and it's tied in with intuition, which is superior to logic.
00:48:10
Speaker
And intuition, you can have 27 things in your mind and suddenly you'll get an epiphany, boom, and you'll realize that it's all this one thing and you get this flash of insight, right? That doesn't happen with logic. Logic plods along, but it's intuition that gets the bigger picture.
00:48:26
Speaker
You know, logic is all ones and zeroes and this and that and, you know, yes or no. There's that whole sort of, yeah, you know, dichotomy, duality, right? Whereas intuition really grasps it. So the more you become heart-centered, the more you become centered. And this last little piece, I mentioned about the temple of anthropocosmic man and the human body. So in shamanism,
00:48:53
Speaker
The heart is the sun, which is the center of our universe. And going back to the anthropocosmic man, if you look at the sun as the center and the life giver of us, and then like the lungs and the kidneys and liver, those are like all the planets. So in shamanism, the heart that is within us is connected to the sun at the center of our solar system. And that is connected to a bigger sun, to a bigger sun, to a bigger sun, all the way back to source.
00:49:22
Speaker
And if you think about the sun and shamanism, shamanism is all about energy. And the sun gives its energy unconditionally. And if we did not have the sun giving its energy unconditionally, we would not exist as we know it. So there's a beautiful quote from, I get mixed up one way or the other. It's either Hafiz or Hafez.
00:49:50
Speaker
excuse me, 14th century mystic. He says, even after all this time, the sun never once says to the earth, you owe me. Look what happens with a love like that. It lights up the whole sky. The other final little piece of that is that if you think about everything being energy and you think about different densities of energy,
00:50:17
Speaker
The sun is made up of the two lightest, fastest moving elements in the periodic table of elements, hydrogen and helium. So in terms of spirit in the matter, or however you want to call it, the highest frequencies of hydrogen and helium, those are the ones that give us light from the sun, and that our heart
00:50:36
Speaker
through, like I said, you know, it's represented in the temple and all that is connected all the way back to source. That is the real path. And it's not easy. Growth is not easy. Growth is painful. Growth is not fun. And most people are afraid to face the darkness. But if you can get through it, the benefits are amazing. One more little thing and I'll stop and let you go. No, please, please, please.
00:51:03
Speaker
What they say in the jungle, and I've been through some real hells in the jungle, and some heavens too, but what they say in the jungle is that all of the discomfort that you go through is what you need to do to prove that you are worthy of the gift of the nods that the plants have to give you. You have to prove it. And when you do this work, and Jung and Guruji, they're really in line with this, you need to face the dark,
00:51:32
Speaker
and accept those parts of yourself that you have rejected because you've abandoned your creations. As a creator, God or goddess, you've abandoned your creations. And we come into the world as it is with an abandonment wound. I can go off on that too, but I can stop here unless you want me to go. I don't want to.
00:51:52
Speaker
I want to give you a chance. No, actually that is kind of where I'd like to take it is I think we may have talked about it on a previous episode. Probably. But it's always worth revisiting because there's so many layers to this even like I feel like
00:52:10
Speaker
I've done in the last three, four years, I've done a lot of shadow work, a lot of internal work, but like you said, you never arrive. There's always some shit that bubbles up that you haven't dealt with or some other conflicts that arise that you can pinpoint to
00:52:33
Speaker
some other trauma or something else. But on the other side of things, it's like accepting the isness of it. It is what it is. So, you know, we are imperfect beings. And if we are able to accept those aspects of ourselves that we think we label or judge as negative, maybe that is
00:52:59
Speaker
a positive step to take that we can live in, I guess, more peace with ourselves. What's your perspective on that? All right. I was going there anyway, so now I'm going to go a little further because I love your questions too, man. I just love your questions. We come into the world with an abandonment wound.
00:53:20
Speaker
You're probably familiar or maybe your listeners are familiar with the work of Stanislaus Graf and the perinatal matrices. In a nutshell, there are four perinatal matrices. In the first one, we're in the womb, we're at one with mom, all our needs are met and everything is blissful and expansive. It's beautiful. Then one day, all of a sudden,
00:53:49
Speaker
The first contraction hits and your wonderfully expansive world that you've only known so far collapses with that first contraction and your wonderfully blissful, pure environment gets polluted with hormones and all these other things. Suddenly your blissfully expansive world is threatening. That's the second perinatal mattress.
00:54:18
Speaker
The third one, you get squeezed into the birth canal, which is even worse. You're suddenly in the exact opposite direction from being expansive to crushed down to an imaginable, fearful, traumatic horror. And then of course the fourth one, you get spit out into the world and usually the first thing that happens is you get slapped in the ass, right? And here you are. So we come into the world with that abandonment wound.
00:54:46
Speaker
And we're abandoned. And all of these things emotionally go back to these four core processes. Now, if you think about it in a holographic manner, one of the things about a hologram among a million others is that if you take a hologram and you cut it up into a bunch of smaller pieces, the entire image is within each of the smaller pieces.
00:55:10
Speaker
So everything is nowhere and nowhere is everything. I mean, it's all there at the same time. So when you come in in that way and you have all these pieces, you've just been abandoned when you came into the world and then you create personalities,
00:55:33
Speaker
they serve you. They're dedicated. They're cunning. Even if it gets really intense, they'll actually kill you or make you kill yourself because they're in fear of losing their existence because you think that that's what you are, but you're not. Those are your creations. But anyway, you go through your life and you
00:55:54
Speaker
Emulate and copy all these people to learn and develop these personalities and then you do the judgment thing Where you see it in other people and you judge them so you don't see it in yourself the point is you come into this world abandoned and Then you create all these sub personalities and then you abandon them Right and you deny them and you and then that becomes your shadow and
00:56:23
Speaker
And the more you deny it, the worse it gets, and the more it will try to come out every chance it gets. I mean, how many times have there been crimes of passion? Why did you murder that girl? I don't know what got into me, right? All of those things come from the abandonment of those aspects that you have created. So you need to work together to make it all come together.
00:56:53
Speaker
responding in a unified way and owning those parts of yourself, good, bad, and indifferent. So you see where you come in abandoned, you make all these creations, you abandon them, you see where it splinters and gets smaller and smaller, and you see where the microcosm is in the macrocosm, which is what a hologram does.
00:57:20
Speaker
So there's a good model for that to follow.
00:57:26
Speaker
So, go ahead. There's so many directions we could... Oh, dude, I'll go all day, you know that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm just thinking. So, okay, we know that psychedelics is one way to face ourselves, face the shadow, or at least bring it up. We can then choose to ignore it, because I know a lot of people can take psychedelics just for the buzz, which is a little bit wasteful.
00:57:55
Speaker
But, you know, you can't judge people for it's better than doing other things, right? You know, watching TV or whatever else. Yeah. What intentional ways, I suppose, other than psychedelics can people use to, you know, do shadow work that you know of or would recommend? God, I just so love your questions, dude. So, really, that's a great question.
00:58:25
Speaker
I worked with a personal coach for five or six years, very expensive. And everybody that she worked with who was trying ayahuas, because she told all of them, don't stop, don't do it. Except me. She encouraged me to keep doing it. And I struggled with what I learned from her.
00:58:48
Speaker
with what I was doing with IOWAS when it took me four or five years to really pull it all together and suddenly I realized it's all the same process. There are just different approaches. So psychedelics are wonderful tools if used properly and respectfully to discover those parts of yourself because it stirs up all of the stuff that's hidden down there within the subconscious and it comes out. But I tell this a lot. It's not for everybody.
00:59:19
Speaker
Some people don't need it. Some people can't handle it. And you can do the work without it. And one of the main things you can do, it's all about awareness. And awareness is all about paying attention and being focused on the moment. Because in the end, the moment is all we really have. So if you are paying attention like that and watching the world around you,
00:59:47
Speaker
you'll come to realize that everybody around you in your life reflects an aspect of who you are. So anything that anybody does that drives you nuts, somebody does something and you just wanna wring their neck, that's your shadow. But you need to be able to see it, you need to be able to recognize it, and then you have to own it and accept it.
01:00:16
Speaker
And that comes back to the whole thing I was talking about earlier about gaining compassion by going through that process. But if you're very observant, you will see that. And if you continue doing the work and you continue on the path in that way by paying attention, a lot of the people in your life will fall away and new people will come into your life. And I believe the reason for that is because you're changing your energetic. You're changing, you know, the frequency that you're at.
01:00:47
Speaker
It's like I was saying earlier, when you get up there and you raise yourself up in frequency and awareness and you start to see things differently, some people in your life will just no longer be compatible. New people will come in that match your energy and you will resonate with the new perception of energy. And just really briefly, more for the listeners than anything else, there's the whole concept of resonance.
01:01:17
Speaker
So what happens is, more so in the olden days, so to speak, a radio station will transmit their show at a particular frequency, whatever it is, AM or FM. When you tune that dial on your radio to that same frequency, you get the show out of nowhere. It's in the air.
01:01:43
Speaker
And when you tune to that same frequency, when those frequencies match, that's called a resonant frequency, and you're resonating with that signal. So when your personal energetic changes, your frequency changes, and it starts tapping into other resonant frequencies, and if you're really working on expanding your awareness and rising up, so to speak, then those kind of people will be attracted to you, and the other ones will fall away.
01:02:11
Speaker
But another little interesting thing happens is that subconsciously your shadow will also draw the dark to you. It's a subconscious thing, but it will recognize the dark in the others and you may be drawn to that and you have to sort that out. But an interesting thing happens is the more that you go along the path and the more you grow like that, you gain a greater clarity and you reach new levels.
01:02:42
Speaker
When you reach a new level, you get a whole new set of problems and you get a whole new greater responsibility because if you've raised your frequency, now you're responsible for that greater level of things that you know. Now you know what you didn't know before, so there's no excuses because you know. In shamanism, it's called the power path.
01:03:07
Speaker
and you become a man or a woman of power, or in the words of Carlos Castaneda, a man of knowledge, you become that. But when you know that, you can't go back to the old ways because you know better. And if you do go back, the consequences are greater because you know. So last little piece of this part, you have, how can I put this? You have levels of consciousness.
01:03:37
Speaker
So like right now we're considered to be in three dimensional reality. But if you think about pure dimensionality, geometry, and a lot of this, this actually comes from Steiner. A point has no dimension. First thing you do with a point, if you move it, you have a line. A line is the first dimension. But guess what?
01:04:05
Speaker
If you exist in the first dimension, then all you see are points. You take that line and you move that line and then you have a plane, which is the second dimension. If you live within the second dimension within it, all you see are lines. If you take that plane and you move it that way and you have a cube, third dimension,
01:04:34
Speaker
If you live within the third dimension, all you see are two dimensions, all you see are planes. So what that means is that we are actually four dimensional beings. We're four dimensional beings. And if you look at a lot of the stuff that's going around these days, new age or whatever, in the Hopi tradition, they say we're coming into the fifth world.
01:05:02
Speaker
In other traditions, they say we're coming into the fifth dimension. And the fifth dimension, if you think about all this dimensionality and expansion that I'm talking about, it all has to do with movement. So the time as we know it is movement.
01:05:21
Speaker
So the fifth dimension has to do with time. And then you start getting into multidimensionality and all those things. And those are some of the things I've experienced on ayahuasca and other people have experienced on DMT and other substances where they have this different perception. But it's different. So we're actually four dimensional beings aspiring to the fifth dimension. And there comes a point where you raise up where suddenly you're perceiving in a different way.
01:05:50
Speaker
You don't look at the world the same way anymore. You see it from this other perspective. And as I mentioned, you have to be in the dimension above the one you're perceiving in. So greater responsibility comes as you go up. And again, it's infinite. Who knows? 60 katrillion dimensions, right? You can't put a limit on it. Until you merge with source. You head towards source, you become heart centered and you resonate with source.
01:06:22
Speaker
It's interesting because you sort of surrender yourself to source, and you think that you're giving up your individuality, but you're actually by surrendering to source gaining more of it. One of the things I've done is, I don't say this a lot, but I'm going to say it now for the benefit of your listeners, but when I've been doing shamanic healings in medicine ceremonies, I found myself, I did some research,
01:06:51
Speaker
I found a tuning fork and the tuning fork is at the exact frequency that the sun is at. It's tuned to the frequency of the sun. I've had people in situations where I was doing healings on them in ceremonies and I came and I hit the tuning fork and I held it to their heart.
01:07:16
Speaker
and I saw some significant changes in healings because I was putting that vibration, tuning them to that, so to speak. Wow, bro. Yeah. Jesus. Actually, I've been listening to this one. I guess they're a band. Technically, they're called Phi Tribe. The music is free on YouTube if you go to Phi Tribe. They have over 100,000.
01:07:46
Speaker
subscribers and the music is tuned to 432 Hertz and it's healing music so they have like these eight hour long recordings that you can play while you sleep
01:08:02
Speaker
And there's like these eight hour recordings that you play during the day. So anxiety relief, PTSD relief, you know, like for your baby sleeping. And it's it's quite amazing. Like I play it there. And my kid, as soon as I play it, she's at like a year and a half, this 20 month stage. And it's like everything is magical. Play the music is just very like just like, you know,
01:08:29
Speaker
Just sounds like very kind of gentle sounds and she'll just start sometimes she'll be like yeah
01:08:38
Speaker
you know just like just really loving it sort of thing hard to describe but um you just the the energy in the in the room in the living room is quite different when we play that music right so yeah dude like I know we talked about it on the first or the second time I interviewed you about you know your sound healing and you know
01:09:00
Speaker
and I've listened to you talk about it a lot and yeah definitely like free even Tesla was talking about uh frequency vibration and what was the third thing he was talking about so these things have you know a tremendous impact on physiology psychology the the morphic field around us even dude watching my dog when I when I play this music like I played in the background my dog dude
01:09:26
Speaker
I don't know am I seeing what I want to see but like this I see in her she's just there with her eyes closed lying down so peacefully I can see this peace and serenity in my dog's demeanor when I play this music man.
01:09:41
Speaker
I love it. Is that a PHI tribe? Yeah. Yeah. I'm going to look it up. Check it out. Yeah. I've had a similar experience in that you may know this, and I don't remember what I said to who and what interview and blah, blah, blah. If I'm being redundant, humor me.
01:10:00
Speaker
But I'm a percussionist and a vocalist, which I do in ceremonies. And I play a handpan. You're familiar with handpans? Dude, I've watched you play it on YouTube. There's one video of you. Dude, it's amazing how you play that thing. Yeah, thank you. So I had that, and I started playing at different events with people. You know, just family gatherings and all that. No medicines, just... I was at a family gathering not long after I first got it.
01:10:29
Speaker
and we're at a relative's house and there were kids screaming and jumping in the pool and dogs running and people sitting and yakking and blah, blah, blah. I mean, just all this family chaos, right? And I just sat down in the middle of it and I started playing and everybody, including the animals, stopped.
01:10:52
Speaker
And they were all just, they were like, they were in a trance. And they were all just like, gaga, totally focused on it. It's amazing, bro. Yeah. And then I've done it in other situations. One of my old friends, he said he was really stressed out and what I play for him. And I played for him and his wife. And then they were thanking me later, like, God, I was so stressed out. And what you did just totally relaxed me. And it all has to do with the sound and the energy of the vibration.
01:11:22
Speaker
So it's a powerful thing. It's a powerful thing. What I've started doing in the evening time is when my kid starts getting cranky and tired and I'm putting her pajamas on, changing the diaper, getting her ready for sleep. There's a big resistance for kids. It's like when you say, okay, it's bedtime, it's like, no, no, no, no, no.
01:11:43
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, starts running around erratically, you know? So I just grab her and then I just like, it doesn't even matter what I'm humming or singing. I say, da, da, da, da, da. As long as like something is emanating out of my throat, my chest, some vibrations. And like I'll put her on the changing table and like just say, just the stupidest shit, dude. Like, la, la, la, la, la, la.
01:12:07
Speaker
going to bed and she just like calms down dude and like next thing it's like i'm enjoying it so much i don't want to now i don't want to put her to bed she's no little cranky i feel like we can hang out there for another five ten minutes so it's it's everything it's like the kibale and i've kind of been rereading that recently you know everything is um vibration
01:12:31
Speaker
And you already mentioned it already, things are not necessarily opposites, they're degrees of the same thing. So if you're in a crappy mood, you are literally just on one side of the spectrum.
01:12:51
Speaker
You're just like a small little tweak in your energetic state to bring yourself from like a crappy mood to almost like an elated mood. If so, you wish. Like for example, earlier today, dude, I don't know why it happened.
01:13:06
Speaker
but I was going through your website just to catch up on your latest work and I started reading about one of the descriptions of one of your books, one of the non-fictions books, I forget which one it was now and I was just reading this and dude I just started getting goosebumps and it happened like it happened at least once maybe twice more I was just I was reading like the synopsis of a story for one of your books
01:13:33
Speaker
And I was just like almost like getting drawn in. I was, dude, I was getting goosebumps. And it's just like how quick and easy it is for your energetic state to be transformed, isn't it? First off, you just made my day. You just made my life. So thank you for that. But here's the thing. And this is true even with PTSD and trauma.
01:14:01
Speaker
maybe a little more so, I think, maybe with domestic trauma, domestic abuse and all that, people get addicted to that feeling. The most abused women, and I've worked with a number of them, in their mind, it gets confused with love because it's all they've ever known. They get that attention, and even though it's messed up and chaotic and ugly and hurtful, and even sometimes physically,
01:14:30
Speaker
They're addicted to that because they think that they're getting attention and they get confused thinking that that is love, but it's not. So one of the things I'm constantly reminding myself, and I'm getting better at it, is I'll be in a situation and suddenly I'm in a bad mood, or it's a rrrr, and then I stop myself. I go, wait a minute. This energy doesn't feel right. It's not right.
01:14:58
Speaker
And then I can shift myself and get myself out of it. Sometimes it's a battle. It also tends to mug you because it's a survival reaction that gets to your deeper core. It's instinctual. And so it doesn't really follow logic. It follows emotion. But I said, oh, man, I'm feeling like I'm just feeling like shit. Where and what is this energy all about? This isn't what I want to feel. Yeah.
01:15:26
Speaker
And, and, and in a few times when I normally in the past might've popped off on somebody, I've learned to just shut up and keep my mouth shut. And sometimes it might take a day or two before I figured it out. But the point of it is, is that I recognize that unhappy, non harmonious energy. And then I know something isn't right.
01:15:49
Speaker
And then I have to go down and follow it down, so to speak, to find out where it's coming from. And the same thing happens, by the way. I've done tons and tons of dream work. So when you wake up from a dream and you're trying to figure it out, what you really need to do is dial into the emotion that you're feeling and then find out where that comes from. And if you can follow it back into your past, and much of this does go back to the womb, to the initial abandonment.
01:16:18
Speaker
But when you recognize it and you follow it and you shut up and give yourself time, you'll figure it out and then you can make the changes in the ships and realize, I don't want that energy anymore. Even though you've had it all of your life and there's a whole instinctual survival aspect to it that's on autopilot because your sub personalities are all trying to protect you. So I have this little thing in my head when they start acting up.
01:16:42
Speaker
And they'll go off for all these different weird little triggers. And I'll say, you, shut up and get in the corner. I'm not listening to you anymore. I do it in a loving way, but I'm very firm about it. I'm not listening to your shit. You get in the corner and shut up. You're out of line. And then I shift it. And so the more you do that and the more you grow in awareness and the more you become aware of how that energy makes you feel,
01:17:12
Speaker
then you can dial in on it and you start to reprogram yourself and you realize that it comes from an abandonment wound for whatever reason and whatever different aspect it is that sets you off that way. One of the examples I love to use is you could be two years old and have this wonderful artistic impulse
01:17:30
Speaker
and grab your crayons and cover the whole wall with your crayons, right? And your parents come out and you messed up the wall and you know, you got it spanking or grounded or put it, you get punished for this artistic expression because you didn't know any better. You could go the rest of your life and never have that artistic expression because it's been stifled going back to that traumatic moment because you didn't know any better, right?
01:17:54
Speaker
So when you learn to overcome those things, you get better and then you realize, okay, it was an artistic expression. I didn't know any better. I was two. And you forgive yourself when you let it go and then you move on and maybe you'll become a great artist.
01:18:07
Speaker
Yeah. I love that. It's so true. And, you know, I have a memory from when I was maybe first or second grade, like seven or eight years old. And the teacher, the art teacher, she was pretty nice young lady. She was kind of cool. And she would, you know, give us tasks to do.
01:18:29
Speaker
So draw a house. So I remember I drew this house and every kid would draw the same stupid house, you know, the one square for the house, triangle for the roof, two sort of rectangles for the two windows.
01:18:45
Speaker
might decorate them a bit and one bigger rectangle for the door and I remember I so I did that done and I had a bit of a knack for drawing and stuff as a kid and um I was bored dude I was bored like minutes minutes passing by you know that's an eternity for a kid so the other kids are still like doing it she's helping them draw lines and shit so I'm like okay what to do here what to do here so I drew a third bigger window in the middle of the two windows and she came around
01:19:14
Speaker
And she started criticizing that, like, have you ever seen that? She's like, to a seven, eight-year-old, have you ever seen a house that has a third window there? And I shit like this. I'm like, if I could go back, it's like, you get back in the corner. I'm expressing myself artistically here.
01:19:31
Speaker
But you know, and I remember then, several years later, we were in South Africa and we had another art teacher who was much more, I suppose, she was teaching us very different kinds of styles, you know, collages, pencil drawing, pen drawings, impasto. She was teaching us, this was maybe 9th or 10th grade, and
01:19:58
Speaker
I remember I would always put off projects till the last moment. So we had to do this collage for magazine cuttings. And I did like a boat in the sea. It was like three or four pictures I cut out of some magazines, you know. And she said, wow, I really like your style. That's called minimalism.
01:20:16
Speaker
You know, so she framed it. All the other kids were like plastering like 3,000, 4,000 pictures on there. And I think it was like this, you know, giant, beautiful mess. And I had like the laziest two, three, four bits and pieces. She's like, but the way it's all about like these early impressions you get. So this person, she, we never, nobody really liked that teacher. She was very strict, but she was a good teacher in that she, she frames your artistic expression in a positive way.
01:20:47
Speaker
Yeah, it's beautiful. So it's beautiful, bro. And there's a lot of tools we can use to go back and revisit these things. So we can use psychedelics, of course. I talked about EFT or emotional freedom technique or tapping. There's internal family systems. There's a number of psychological or exposure therapies. What other ways do you think we can
01:21:14
Speaker
bring up the aspects of our shadow and start working with them. Do you think meditation is one of those? Any other ideas? Yeah, meditation is very helpful. I've been meditating for, gosh, probably over 40 years. In the beginning, for a number of years, I did it every single day, religiously, every morning. Now I do it when it feels right. I've done so much work with the plant medicines and all that that it's not
01:21:41
Speaker
It's a good practice and it gives you good habits that help you. Even when I've been in altered states, in visionary states where things are nuts and get out of control, I can put myself into a meditative mindset to calm down the monkey mind and get some clarity because it's not jumping all around. And all that stuff is the different aspects trying to get your attention. I had an interesting experience. I was down in the jungle back in October.
01:22:10
Speaker
and I was in a very dark place. And I was just in the dark. And in my head, a mile a minute. Oh, my stomach hurts. No, no, I got a headache. No, I think I got to go to the bathroom. No, I'm going to vomit. Oh, no, this is that. Oh, that person. And then suddenly, like out of nowhere, this voice in my head just went, there is nothing wrong. And it all stopped.
01:22:35
Speaker
Wow. It was all this drama. I was all anticipating what's going to happen now or what happened then. It was all had no relevance whatsoever. That voice came in just totally interesting. It was like the voice I was telling you a little while ago about you shut up and go to your room. It was like that. It was like, oh, you go to your room. It came seemingly out of nowhere.
01:22:58
Speaker
And whoosh, suddenly calm. And I was like, wow, nothing's wrong. Isn't that amazing? Jeez, I'm being a drama queen here. I'm trying to find something and make up something to be wrong because I'm so used to having something wrong, but there's nothing wrong, right? And it was really a beautiful thing. The other thing that's challenging, but can be very, very rewarding, I touched on a little while ago, which is in dreaming.
01:23:27
Speaker
When you, so, you know, during your normal everyday life, your left brain is more or less in charge. You got to function. You got to drive your car. You got to do your job. You got to go to work. You got to, you know, do your banking, do your math, all those things. And your right brain gets denied for the most part, less so in women.
01:23:52
Speaker
These are all generalizations. Less so in women because they're more in touch with their intuition and their feelings than men generally speaking. The right brain just gets shut off and if you're a super uber masculine dude, you ignore it. You lose out. You go to sleep at night and at some point your left brain takes a rest.
01:24:21
Speaker
and your right brain comes out to play. And when your right brain comes out to play, it's a different language. It's visual, conceptual, emotional. It's not logical, but it's visual, conceptual, emotional. And it's a very complex, almost alien language where your shadow and your subconscious is coming out and letting you know what's kind of really going on in there. And of course, it comes out in the bizarrest of dreams.
01:24:50
Speaker
often. And then of course, you wake up. And then the first thing that happens is your intellectual mind is trying to figure out what the hell was that, right? And then you go back and you have to almost remember the dream in reverse almost like that, in order to figure out what the hell it was, even just to remember it.
01:25:12
Speaker
And then you got to try to figure out what does it all mean? Which ties into what I was saying about if this emotion makes you feel a particular way and when you're in a dream and you have all these bizarre visualizations or whatever, and you follow that emotion, you'll find out where it comes from. So you can do that in your dreams. And it's another very effective way of inner search to figure out what's going on with your subconscious and resolve it and accept it.
01:25:40
Speaker
For example, if it's a dream that gave you a feeling of fear or danger, how would one go about interpreting that? I love it. So two things. When you're in a dream and you're getting chased and there's fear, if you can muster up enough awareness in that state of consciousness, turn around and face what's chasing you.
01:26:08
Speaker
and say, what do you want? Makes all the difference in the world. I've had horrendous months just coming after me and then I turn around and say, in the dream, what do you want? And suddenly they become my best friend and they're helping me. So I think that the pieces that are chasing you are those aspects of your shadow that are really looking for attention that have been denied the most. So you need to pay attention to those
01:26:38
Speaker
and you need to accept them and then integrate them into it. So that complex language and all that is really challenging to interpret. Now, an interesting thing happens. You go to sleep, your left brain takes a rest, your right brain comes out to play, you wake up and you try to make sense of it. That's an integration of that dream. Well, what happens with ayahuasca is
01:27:08
Speaker
Your left brain doesn't go to sleep and then your right brain gets turned on and the left brain never goes to sleep. So then you're trying to figure out if you try to figure it out too much. I've seen the worst situations with people who I call intellectually centered who drank ayahuasca. And when you're intellectually centered, you're used to using your mind and all that to control your life and things. And that doesn't work anymore.
01:27:37
Speaker
I had a renowned PhD come to the jungle, real brainiac. And he spent his first three ceremonies curled up in my lap in the fetal position because he didn't know how to act. He didn't know how to deal with anything. It was unprecedented for him. It was a new thing like that, right? He didn't know what to do and he was totally freaked out because all of his intellectual strategies that he used throughout his life didn't work anymore.
01:28:06
Speaker
So it gets back to what I said a while ago. In many respects, the time between the experiences are more important than the experiences themselves because that's, you go through these very intense experiences under ayahuasca.
Integration of Ayahuasca Experiences
01:28:21
Speaker
And then when you come back down and your mind, your intellectual mind now is trying to put together the pieces of everything that happened, that's what real integration is about. And that can go on for weeks or months or, you know,
01:28:37
Speaker
years. And there are different levels of that. You know, there's an integration of one ayahuasca ceremony. There's an integration when you do three of them in a row. There's an integration when you do a 10 day shamanic plant diet where you do six or seven over that period. So there's the one ceremony integration. There's the three ceremony integration. There's the 10 day integration. And then I found as time has gone on, even the years have an overall arc of integration.
01:29:05
Speaker
So I can be in a vision or a ceremony when integrating and I suddenly realized, oh, that's what that meant three years ago when I was in that other ceremony, you know, like that. And it continues and it begins to take on a, you know, a life of its own, which is the best thing of all. And all of that is directed toward getting toward that I that Guruji talked about. Are you still leading ceremonies now? Yes.
01:29:32
Speaker
I'm actually I'm leading I'm co-leading the original group that I've been with for 24 years and Then I was asked and asked and I finally gave in I have my own group also So yeah, the original group we meet twice a year Spring and fall three ceremonies in a row each time and Then the other group that is now my group. I'm doing four times a year
01:30:03
Speaker
and three ceremonies each time in a row. So what's that? You mean one every day for three days, yeah? Three days, yeah. We'll do it around the weekends. We'll do Thursday night, Friday night, and Saturday night. And then after each ceremony, we do an integration the following morning.
01:30:25
Speaker
And then the one on Sunday morning after the last ceremony is a bit more extensive because anybody who's done all three ceremonies usually has a little bit more to integrate to figure out how to make sense out of it. So the integration is really important. And I always tell people when they leave,
01:30:45
Speaker
Stay away from the news. Don't watch the news. Stay away from toxic people. Stay away from as much as you can and as long as you can, spend as much time in nature.
01:30:59
Speaker
Because that's healing. You know the whole Japanese thing now, they call it forest bathing? Yes. There's a lot to be said for that. And of course, when you go into the jungle and you do ayahuasca, you're not just forest bathing, you're getting submerged. I like to say it's a tour of the jungle from the inside out.
01:31:17
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, bro. Yeah. For sure. For sure. A couple more questions for you, bro. So now I recently started doing a question. I asked everybody for my Solutions Talk segment that will start getting published at some point.
01:31:35
Speaker
So basically the question is, what are you doing that others can do also to increase their freedom, self-reliance, autonomy, and or resilience to the challenges that we face this decade and beyond? So I'm being redundant here on purpose, but the path is one of awareness. So I've done things in the past.
01:32:01
Speaker
unconsciously following the sub-personalities because I didn't know any better and it felt good. And sometimes when you're, when you're self-righteous, you feel so right. And of course, more often than not, you're so wrong. So it has to do really with paying attention. And when you go through, and then people say to me, oh, you know, you did IO Oscar and you took drugs and this and that, and you altered yourself. And then I'll say to them, depending on who they are, but I might say to them, did you have any coffee this morning?
01:32:32
Speaker
Yeah, I have my coffee to wake up. Guess what? It's an altered state. I tell a lot of people when they're younger and they get into the psychedelics and they're trying everything in the world, and I'm the last person to point fingers because that's what I did when I was younger. But when I was doing it, there was no guidance like there is now. There was no such thing as microdosing. There were really not many precedents to set out.
01:33:02
Speaker
Um, bringing it in altogether and paying attention. I tell the younger people that you've been doing so much stuff now that you should really try stop doing everything for a while because you've been doing so many things that going to baseline consciousness is actually going to become an altered state for you because you're so used to being high all the time. So why don't you try that for a bit? You know, in my case when I was younger, uh, in my very early twenties,
01:33:32
Speaker
First, I was a vegetarian for 23 years and then I went 13 years without doing anything. I wouldn't drink any coffee. I wouldn't take an aspirin if I had a headache. I was totally vegetarian and I went purely baseline for all that time. Then I was exposed to Terence McKenna. I don't know if you're familiar with Terence McKenna or not.
01:33:59
Speaker
Yeah, well, we were friends. I got to know Terrence pretty good. But when I read his best work, in my humble opinion, it was Food of the Gods. I have that book, yeah. Oh, that to me was his best. And when you go in that way and I got the whole idea, you mean to tell me that there's a connection between psychedelics and spirituality? Are you kidding me?
01:34:30
Speaker
So when I read that after the 13 year break at the time, which was like in 1995, I spent a bunch of money and I bought all the stuff. I spent a thousand bucks and I started growing my own mushrooms and I didn't tell anybody.
01:34:48
Speaker
And I went back into altered states with the idea of spirituality as opposed to what's going to mess me up. I want to get high on this. Like you said earlier, I was just trying everything because I wanted to get high, see what it was like. But that was it for the experience. This way, when I saw psychedelics and spirituality, and then I realized all these ancient cultures had psychedelics at their core, the Mayans and all over the world.
01:35:17
Speaker
That was a huge revelation to me. And when I started taking the mushrooms with the intention of spirituality and self-exploration and self-improvement, it was life-changing. And it ultimately led me to ayahuasca.
Psychedelics, Intentions, and Traditions
01:35:32
Speaker
But again, it's not for everybody. I'm what's considered a hard head. I can take big doses. And you know, I've been like,
01:35:43
Speaker
high on pretty big doses and I forget about everybody else and they're all like losing their minds. And then I have to like, I got to recalibrate myself and go, oh, wait a minute. They're having a hard time. I better slow down and watch out for them and, you know, not be flying off like I like to do, you know, until the time is right. So there is that. But once again, and I know I'm being redundant on purpose, but psychedelics are a wonderful tool when used with the right intention in order to grow.
01:36:14
Speaker
But they're not necessary and they're not for everybody. And a number of people who have come to me to do ceremonies, I screen everybody thoroughly. And I turn away a lot of people. And I've shut down a number of people and they actually thanked me for turning them away. So it's not an easy path.
01:36:34
Speaker
But, um, altered States is a big part of shamanism. Yeah. And, um, you can find a number of altered States without doing anything. So, um, everybody's different. Yeah. You know. And what's your take on cannabis in terms of its medicinal qualities? That's a funny subject for me. I have a lifelong love affair with it, um, going all the way back over 50 years.
01:37:05
Speaker
And when I do ayahuasca, I stop. But I'm a victim of what they call writer's crack. And on a good day of writing, I get up in the morning, I have my coffee, and I write for a while. And then I usually make myself wait till 4.20.
01:37:32
Speaker
Now, as the day has gone on, the caffeine is kind of wearing off and you keep drinking it, but it doesn't do anything. You get kind of brittle and edgy. But for me, I wait till four 20 and I take a couple of hits and I get a whole second stage of creativity. And I'll get like another three, three and a half pages that day that I wouldn't have gotten. So coffee in the morning, cannabis in the afternoon. And when I'm, when I'm writing a book,
01:38:00
Speaker
I'm sort of possessed by that book. It owns me. It has its own life. And I'm just, I go, I go, I go, I go. And that's how I get things done. But when I'm getting ready to lead ceremonies, when I'm getting ready to do ayahuasca, I stop both of them. I have self-discipline and I'll stop doing both of them so that I go into the ayahuasca without being under the influence of anything at all.
01:38:25
Speaker
Sure. You don't want the feminine energy of the cannabis to interfere with the feminine energy of the ayahuasca, right? Well said, brother. You know, in the jungle, they sort of say, you know, ayahuasca is the dark feminine and they consider it to be the mother of all the other plants. So basically ayahuasca is saying,
01:38:51
Speaker
Get out of here, you little bitch. This is my territory. I want you to come here clean. I don't want you cheating on me with all that stuff. And that's the tradition that I work in. There are other traditions that use cannabis with it. But the tradition I work in doesn't, and I experimented with it, and I agree. Don't take anything else. It's just like I had somebody tell me, oh,
01:39:17
Speaker
You're, you're going to lead a ayahuasca ceremony and then you were going to do mushrooms after that and five MEL and combo. And I'm like, stop. No, just ayahuasca. If that's not good enough for you, you need your head examined because that's intelligent. And people who do that, I call them rookies. They don't know what they're doing. And I'm kind of a strict traditionalist. I stick with the original ways. And if you're going in.
01:39:42
Speaker
and the ayahuasca is so powerful, why do you want to do anything else? And why do you want to have to go do five MEO or a combo or something else after you do the ayahuasca? To me, you're screwing with the integration. Let that sit in. If you want to do those things, do them as a separate thing if you feel the need to do them.
Lucid Dreams and Spiritual Revelations
01:40:03
Speaker
But I just think it's really bad to do in conjunction with it.
01:40:08
Speaker
Now, when I go to the jungle and I do the plant diets, it's ayahuasca and then a number of other plants. You get a picture every day of a plant or different plants, and I've worked with most of the plants that they have, if not all of them now, and they are all synergistic and related to ayahuasca, and their energies are conducive to it. So in that way, in that tradition,
01:40:33
Speaker
It's it's workable because it's what they've done, you know, since literally since prehistoric times. So by the way, I from Holland, I ordered some sushi wasi and bobbinsana and stuff like that. Yeah.
01:40:49
Speaker
And, bro, I was making teas and stuff like that, but I made some tinctures, right? And the bobbin sauna tincture before bed, the most incredible dreams. The most vivid dreams. In fact, it's going to make me want to take some tonight before bed. I still have some tinctures. Very interesting plants. So for what it's worth, I had the most profound experience of my entire life.
01:41:20
Speaker
with bobbinsana. This is in my memoir, Spirit Matters. But I'll give a brief overview without trying to do the whole way I think. Hopefully everybody will run out and buy my books and buy them for everybody they know and blah, blah, blah, blah. But my first plant diet was with bobbinsana. And bobbinsana grows by the banks of the river and the roots go deep down into the earth.
01:41:46
Speaker
And the branches and leaves and stuff, flowers go up to the sky. And they say that it connects heaven and earth. Wow. So I had the most lucid dream I ever had in my entire life, working with Bobinsana. And I woke up in the dream and I was lucid.
01:42:11
Speaker
And I said, okay, don't take over the dream. Don't try to fly. Don't try to breathe underwater. Just stay lucid and see what unfolds. And I had all these experiences, I'm giving away the end of my book, by the way, but I had all these experiences with Teresa.
01:42:35
Speaker
I had a friend Teressa, there was Teressa this, there was Teressa that, there were beautiful women, there was Teressa was everything. And I started asking people, what's Teressa? And somebody mentioned Santa Teresa de Avila, who was considered like the patron saint of like epileptics and sort of visionary things. I had this profound experience of Santa Teresa.
01:43:04
Speaker
I know who she was. I was asking her on, some people started telling me that. That night, I went into an ayahuasca ceremony and I was in a rapture with Santa Teresa for about four hours. I didn't know Spanish at the time. She was communicating with me in Spanish telepathically and I understood everything she was saying and I didn't know Spanish.
01:43:31
Speaker
And I had the most profound experience. And I even started, I was so in love that I even started having like erotic feelings. And I got all embarrassed about that. And she's like, stop, that's normal. Don't worry. It's okay. It's another sort of expression in this way of love. So I was totally, absolutely blown away by that experience. Now,
01:44:01
Speaker
I got through the diet. I had a deal, my mom's been gone about 19 years now, but I had to deal with my mom as soon as I come out of the jungle to call her. Cause she was worried I might get kidnapped by the shining path or eaten by a jaguar or all those things. You know, as soon as I got back to civilization in the small jungle town, I would call her. So I called her. I said, my, you've got to think I totally lost it.
01:44:29
Speaker
I said, I know you're gonna think I went off the deep end, but I gotta tell you, this experience I had, and I told her everything, like I just told you. And she got very, very quiet. And I said, Ma, you know, you okay? I know you're probably freaking out now that your son's really gone off the deep end. And she says, I've never told this before to anyone in my entire life, but you know that I was raised Catholic.
01:44:59
Speaker
But you know that I never really bought into it. But when we were kids, your grandmother assigned us saints to pray to. And she assigned your aunt, Audrey, she assigned her Saint Joan, and she assigned me Santa Teresa de Avila. And even though I never bought into the whole Catholic thing, anytime I've ever prayed, I prayed to Santa Teresa.
01:45:26
Speaker
Incredible. That did it for me. Incredible. That changed my life. That was a major turning point in my life. And as the years have gone on, I've realized that Santa Teresa, aside from being Santa Teresa, actually at that time was the face of the cosmic feminine for me. Wow. And I got in touch with my feminine, which was non-existent before that.
Writing Journey and Advice for Writers
01:45:50
Speaker
I had no, I went 30 years of my life without crying. It just wasn't there. I was a tough guy.
01:45:55
Speaker
You know, it just wasn't there, no feeling. And I got back in touch that way with my feminine. I went through a couple of years of the stupidest things which set me off bawling my eyes out. You know, one time my mom called me, she said, happy birthday, honey. And it was so sweet. I just, I started bawling. And I'm like, and she's like, are you okay, honey? And I'm like, and she said, just take your time and have a good cry. You know, I must have gone on for 10 minutes. And then I finally leveled out.
01:46:26
Speaker
After that, some of the weirdest little things would set me off. Then after all of that, my intuition just went, and I started having intuition. Through all of that, I discovered my lost feminine, which was suppressing my shadow because I grew up in a tough neighborhood and blah, blah, blah, all that stuff.
01:46:50
Speaker
You know, street fighting. Yeah, guys, listening. Get Mattel's book. He's the first part of his memoir called Spirit Matters. Get that on Audible. It is riveting. It's riveting, guys. I've actually listened to it multiple times, by the way. I don't remember. I don't actually remember all of the details. So when you when you when you told that story, I was like re-experiencing it. But I did back in 2020.
01:47:19
Speaker
I did listen to it multiple times, but it's a very, very interesting, adventurous life you've had. It's almost unbelievable your life. So I'm told. And that's just the first part. I actually
01:47:35
Speaker
I do have pick a floor, but I have not yet had the chance to read it. I'm just going to get the audiobook. Or maybe I got the audiobook as house to have. Anyway, guys, start with Spirit Matters. It's really, really riveting. If you
01:47:50
Speaker
if you vibe or jibe or whatever, vibrate with Mateo, you're going to love it. Thank you, brother. So tell us, as we wrap up, bro, tell us about your, you said two more books are in the pipeline, you said? Yeah, I'm finishing, I'm doing the audio book. In fact, I've been up since about 4.30 this morning. I have to narrate after 11.30 at night and before 6.30 in the morning because of the airport that's near here. Oh, shit.
01:48:20
Speaker
So I'm actually finishing up my third short story collection, which is called The Thinning Veil. So The Small Dark Room of the Soul is my first one. The second one was called A Short Walk to the Other Side. And the idea from both of those, The Small Dark Room of the Soul actually had to do with the shadow, even though I wasn't fully conscious of it when I was writing it.
01:48:46
Speaker
And I have a quote, I'll probably mangle it, but I think it was something like this, countless spiritual disciplines have urged us to seek the truth. Part of that truth lies within a small dark room, one we are afraid to enter. So all of the monsters were human, and it was ultimately about shadow, and I wasn't fully aware of it when I was writing it.
01:49:13
Speaker
So the second one, a short walk to the other side has to do with the fact that you can just take a short step or something and totally change your life. You can have a momentary lapse of consciousness and you can have an accident and kill people. Or some people can lose their mind and end up killing somebody when they just get caught up in crimes of passion, so to speak, and all of those things. So there's a small dark room where it's hidden.
01:49:39
Speaker
And then there was a short walk to the other side where it's just a blip where you can go off into the deep end. So I thought in this third one, the thinning veil, the bondage between the worlds are really getting thinner and thinner.
01:49:56
Speaker
So I followed the similar theme and I came up with 13 twisted tales. They're dark. They have to do with humanity and the shadow and weird things. Science fiction, science fricking horror. So that one is almost done. And I'm in the final stages. I'm getting ready to narrate.
01:50:22
Speaker
The one that's going to come after that is called I am a consciousness incarnate. It's a very in-depth analysis of consciousness. Scientific theories, this theory, that theory, what do they believe? What was this study? How did they try to define it? There's medical descriptions of consciousness. There's death, there's coma, all those things. I really get very deep into what do we think consciousness is?
01:50:53
Speaker
And then as it goes more on toward the end, it gets into mindfulness and meditation and all of that. So the short story of collection is going to be out in August. And then I got a time, I don't want to bring them out too quick. So I'm going to wait a while before I finish up the second one and release it. So there's time because it just gets to be a bit much. Yeah. And that's going to make 20 publications at that point, right?
01:51:22
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. The I am consciousness incarnate will be my 20th, which is scary. What year did you publish your first book? So my first book was that small dark room of the soul and other stories. That was 1994.
01:51:40
Speaker
Right. And it got mentioned in the year's best horror and fantasy and it would have got greater exposure, but it came out late when that came out. So she put it in there like under the honorable mention thing because it was late under the wire. Right. So that was the first one. So 30 years, bro, you've been publishing. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. I don't know where it all went. That is incredible. And they're writing themselves.
01:52:11
Speaker
You know, I kind of have a, I won't say a bucket list or anything like that, but I want to write five books total at least in my lifetime. So I've written one three years ago. It's been more than three years now at this point. So if I write four more, I think I'll be able to die happy. Sure. I love it. I think it's doable. I think it's doable. My money is on you. You have, you have a good background.
01:52:40
Speaker
Yeah, I just need to muster up the courage to dive into the next one. I know what I want it to be about, and it's going to be a short one, so I could probably get it out in a year. But you know how it is. It's a big thing. Even for a small book, you know how it is, bro. So I don't need to... Procrastination.
01:53:05
Speaker
It's not it's not the procrastination. It's more it's always like at least twice as big of a project than you thought it was Yeah, so I'm like can I do it should I do it? You know anyway, it's all about process. Yeah
01:53:24
Speaker
And it's a cliche, but it's the journey. If you focus on the destination, you'll kill yourself with doubt and procrastination and all of that. But if you just get into the rhythm of it, then it will write itself. I always tell my students, puke on the page because that's what editing is for. If you got the flow, don't worry about punctuation. Don't worry about any of that. Just let it come out.
01:53:52
Speaker
Then you can go back and you can edit and you can refine it and all that. For what it's worth, a little tip from Ray Bradbury. If you have a place that you write, it looks like you got a nice office there. If you have a place where you work and you show up every day roughly at the same time to write, your body will click into the rhythm.
01:54:18
Speaker
And it'll get, it'll start to flow. And when you're at the same place every time to do the same thing, it'll start moving and it'll start coming out. And then I play a gazillion games with myself. Like I'll finish a book or a chapter and I'll print it out. And then I'll say, okay, I'm going to go to a coffee shop to edit. So then I go to the coffee shop and it's like, okay, you came all the way here and you got a cup of coffee.
01:54:44
Speaker
So now you have to edit this. Oh, and by the way, you can't leave till you finish this chapter or two chapters, whatever. And then I, and then I, you know, I'll finish up and then I'll say, you know, okay, you finished two chapters or, you know, you want to smoke a, you want to smoke some weed. You can't smoke it till you finish this next chapter, you know? And I, and I constantly do that carrot and stick with myself and play games with myself and I get it done. Yeah. Love that, bro.
01:55:11
Speaker
Yeah. And again, this is 35, 40 years I've been at it, so now it's second nature.
01:55:16
Speaker
Absolutely. I forgot who it was that said I can only write when inspiration strikes. Luckily it strikes every time at 8 a.m., every day at 8 a.m. when I sit at the computer or whatever. I forgot where that quote is from. I
Connection and Upcoming Projects
01:55:31
Speaker
love it. Well, bro, this was an absolute pleasure as I anticipated. Thank you so much for your time and your wisdom and your insights. Please tell the folks about all the places they can find you on the Internet.
01:55:45
Speaker
Yeah. So, uh, the first place, if they go to mattpalamary.com, M A T T P A L L A M A R Y.com. That's my webpage. I have your podcast that I've done with you on there and I have radio and TV and podcasts. I got a whole thing under media. So for people who really like to listen, um, there's tons there and many of them are also, um, on YouTube.
01:56:14
Speaker
They can also find my books all on mysticincpublishing.com. M-Y-S-T-I-C-I-N-K. P-U-B-L-I-S-H-I-N-G.com. They're all there. And then, of course, they're all on Amazon. They are all available as e-books and tree books. And right now, this one I'm doing right now will be my 12th, number 12 audiobooks.
01:56:44
Speaker
All the really, now I have science fiction, I have horror, I have a historical novel, I have memoirs, I have all these things. But all of the stuff that you and I have been discussing, all the spirituality stuff, for the most part, those are my nonfiction books. So they can find me all there. And if anybody goes to my webpage, there's a little contact thing. If they wanna pop me a little message, it'll email me and I can communicate that way also.
01:57:13
Speaker
And I really very much appreciate you having me back on the show. I love your questions. You and I have a real good, we have good resonance, brother. Yes, brother. I believe we do. And it's interesting what you were talking about, inspiration or intuition. I literally
01:57:31
Speaker
I can't even think. I didn't arrive logically. I didn't like arrive, you know, the decision to email you just what I think it was one morning I was here at the computer. It's like, oh, shit. I'm doing like I'm doing the podcast regularly. I should email Mateo. It literally is like that, you know. So I emailed you. It just popped out of nowhere. And it was the same story with like a few other people that I just I'm just going to email this person. It just literally comes out of nowhere almost.
01:58:01
Speaker
Timing is everything. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, we will look. So you said August is the next one. Yeah. Yeah. That would be out late August, mid to late August. Yeah. We might have you back on in the fall. Talk about some other stuff. There's always stuff to talk about, bro. You know how to find me. I love your, your show is one of my favorites.
01:58:26
Speaker
So track me down, hunt me down.
Life Challenges and Storytelling
01:58:29
Speaker
And then as my brother says, whip me, beat me, hurt me, and make me write bad checks. Yeah, bro. I feel like you have so many awesome stories to tell. And I know a lot of people listening, they're interested in plant medicine. So I think they love all these sort of stories in the jungle and experiences.
01:58:51
Speaker
visions because I think you said it before it's like a lot of us we through your experiences we live that so we learn from that not all of us have the ability to go to Peru for you know multiple weeks or months at a time so you know those who cannot do sometimes watch and learn you know so
01:59:17
Speaker
Yeah. People have, people have told me numerous times, thank you for going to the jungle for me. Yeah. It's amazing. And so I appreciate that. And I, and I appreciate, you know, before I wrote my memoir, I'm like, who cares what my life is like? Yeah. And then I thought, well, no, wait a minute. Not everybody has lived a life like I have. Not everybody has had the depth of the experience that I have been blessed to have. So I appreciate you saying that they can, they'll say to me, well, this is that I can't do that. And I'll say to them, that's okay. I did it for you.
01:59:46
Speaker
Yeah and I mean this in a good way but I for one don't want to live the life that you've had because I mean sure yes I wish I could have some of these amazing experiences in the jungle but a lot of like from your memoir a lot of your you know your especially your early life there's a lot of challenges and you know not
02:00:12
Speaker
Everybody is evolved enough to be able to handle those challenges, you know, and they say, you know, God gives the greatest challenges to his greatest warriors per se, you know, so I, I, I don't think I could handle all of that. Maybe I could, maybe I don't know, but I, all those challenges, bro, you know, everybody has their own challenges, but, um, yeah, bro, you, you know, like, again, guys, listen, listen to spirit matters. You, you will understand what we're talking about. There was some,
02:00:42
Speaker
Crazy shit Yeah, no, well like I was just saying I did it for you bro, you don't have to Alright my man, thank you again for coming on Thank you, thank you for having me I'll obviously I'll help you I'll post the heck out of it when it's ready to go