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Plant Medicine Adventures w/ Matt Pallamary - Connecting Minds Podcast Ep32
187 Plays4 years ago
We have a returning guest on Connecting Minds, Matt Pallamary. Join as we discuss his latest book Picaflor, which is his memoir sequel to Spirit Matters. Mateo also shares some his wisdom and learnings gathered along his colourful journey on Earth!
Matt Pallamary is an award winning writer, musician, and sound healer who has been studying shamanism all of his life and incorporates shamanic practices into his daily life as well as into his writing and teaching.
Links to Mateo’s books, website, and social media:
Picaflor: https://mysticinkpublishing.com/picaflor/
Website: http://mattpallamary.com
Books: http://mattpallamary.com/writings/
Mystic Ink Publishing: https://mysticinkpublishing.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/mattpallamary
Amazon author page: http://t.co/wo9nR2vYsf?amp=1
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Transcript
Return from Hiatus
00:00:00
Speaker
Hey, thanks for tuning into the Connecting Minds podcast. My name is Christian Jourdanov. It's been a while since I posted an episode, about four months actually, and that is because I have been out. I just got married a while back.
00:00:15
Speaker
Did the honeymoon thing, took some time off to recharge the batteries. And I am glad that we are back interviewing some awesome people.
Shamanic Journey with Matt Palamari
00:00:24
Speaker
Today's guest is a returning guest, actually, Matt Palamari, also known as Mateo, but by those closer to him.
00:00:32
Speaker
And I am honored that I am one of those people to give you a brief overview of who he is in case you haven't listened to our previous episode with him. He is an award-winning writer, musician, sound healer, and he's been studying shamanism all his life. So he incorporates shamanic practices into his daily life as well as into his writing and teaching. And he's written something like
00:01:00
Speaker
I think even he has lost count of how many books at this point. It's about 16 books, I believe, with his latest one, which is Picaflor, which is the book we'll be talking a little bit about today. And that is, Picaflor is the sequel to his memoir, Spirit Matters. So that's kind of the, this is the second part where
00:01:25
Speaker
events pick up around the year 2000, which is when he went to South America to drink ayahuasca with folks in Peru. And he has been up and down the American continent, North America, Central America, South America, of course, learning from indigenous folks.
00:01:52
Speaker
So he is, needless to say, he knows his stuff when it comes to this sort of thing. So in this episode, we just delve deeper into some
Exploring 'Picaflor'
00:02:04
Speaker
of his adventures, his process writing the book, and then we talk about some other stuff related more to consciousness and other cool topics. So thanks again for tuning into the podcast.
00:02:18
Speaker
I hope that you enjoy the episode and I will see you on the next one. All right. For the second time on the Connecting Minds podcast, we have Matteo. His full name is Matthew Palamari. Matteo, thank you so much for joining us today, bro. Thank you for having me. I appreciate all the good work that you do, especially with the Autism stuff. So it's an honor to be on your podcast with you.
00:02:44
Speaker
Thank you so much, and it's an honor to have you on again. So we're gonna talk about your new book, Pick a Floor, but before we get into that, for anyone that doesn't know who you are, hasn't listened to you on other interviews, can you give people a little bit about your background, please? Yes, sir. I call myself an author, editor, shamanic explorer.
00:03:08
Speaker
And I always make the point, I don't like this whole thing about people calling anybody a shaman. I don't like it when people call me that because there's so much pop culture, guru-itis and so many phonies out there. So my buddy heard me on another podcast and he said, I really did good. So he says, no, you're not a shaman, you're a showman. So I kind of like that. But anyway, I've been studying shamanism all of my life.
00:03:36
Speaker
I've been writing for like 36 years. And this is my, I'm losing track, this is my 16th book. And I've been traveling, I've been going, I've been studying, like I mentioned, I've been studying shamanism all my life. And I've been going to the Peruvian Amazon for over 20 years now, doing extended shamanic plant diettas.
00:04:02
Speaker
I've also worked, I spent probably a couple of months total up in the Andes working with the plant medicines up there. I've done the whole reach old peyote pilgrimage and ritual to wear a kuta and pilgrimage to Mount Kamado. I've been up throughout Canada and throughout the United States studying shamanic practices, both with plant medicines and without, but plant medicines have been my specialty.
00:04:27
Speaker
So I've been to the Amazon a bunch of times, and sometimes I've been with like the Shepebo Indians, but I've done a dozen 10-day extensive shamanic plant dietis with some really good people, and I've sampled most of the plants that they have. So I'm evolving and I'm moving along. Things are developing for me.
00:04:56
Speaker
My original memoir was called Spirit Matters. It actually ended in 2000. Chronologically, it ended in 2000, which was my first shamanic plant dietta, where I had a very profound, life-changing experience. Since that time, I've done 11 more diettas over the 20-year period. And what I did, I would go into a ceremony, all-night ceremony, and I'd come back about, you know,
00:05:23
Speaker
four or five in the morning just before dawn or right when dawn was coming and I had a cassette recorder and I just babbled all the crazy stuff that was going through my mind. So I had a bunch of those. I converted those to MP3, then I transcribed those and then I edited those. And so between all of that and my regular writing skills, the book came out to 327 pages in book form.
00:05:53
Speaker
And now so pick a floor picks up at about the year 2000 up until what point? More or less present day. I went through a lot of life's challenges. And when I was finishing up, the way my life came together when I was finishing up, which I actually finished
00:06:15
Speaker
I finished that first draft around April. It all came together really, really neatly in what happened to me and how basically I found total freedom. After losing everything I had, I found total freedom. So it's a long, I don't want to say it's a sad tale, it's not. It's actually inspiring, but of course I'm biased. So it's pretty much present day.
00:06:42
Speaker
Yeah, that's awesome. So I didn't have time to read the whole book, but I did. So what I did was I started reading the first chapter and then today and last night I just thought, okay, obviously I can't read this book in like a day. So let me dip in in a few places, right? So I just
00:07:02
Speaker
Pulled up a random place halfway through right so I started reading and Next thing I'm like, I'm like sucked into it. I'm sucked into I want to know what happened next But also want to know what happened before that so like I can't I need to go back and read this thing, you know soon so for me
00:07:22
Speaker
So for your first memoir, Spirit Matters, for me it was like, it's almost in some ways a thriller, like a great adventure, you know? But what's really awesome is you just throw in all this kind of like wisdom and all this metaphysics and like in this one I saw in the pickle floor you're talking about sacred geometry. So it's like a crash course in
00:07:50
Speaker
I don't even know what to say, like you could say neo shamanism, you could say like just all matters related to spiritual stuff, right? So I guess with that said, let's start first of all start us off, why did you call it pick a floor and then from there could you maybe give the the listener some kind of hint about what kind of stuff you talk about in the book?
Importance of Oral Traditions
00:08:14
Speaker
Absolutely, so one of the things
00:08:17
Speaker
When my first novel was called Land Without Evil, and I researched it for two and a half years, and it has to do with the Guadarni of Paraguay tribe. I won't get into the story, but the point of it is that their stories, amazing stories, were primarily oral traditions. And so that, to me, was gonna get lost and I wanted to preserve it.
00:08:45
Speaker
So I did a lot of research. I spent a lot of money on really books from anthropologists that are rare to get. So when I go into the jungle, there's a lot of the knowledge that has been oral traditions. And I was meeting like one of the guys
00:09:09
Speaker
I hate to call them shamans, but I may use that just for an easy reference. He said, I am a plant man and my father was a plant man and his father was a plant man before him. And it goes all the way back as far as I can remember. And he was an old timer. So I thought what an amazing lineage and the things that he was teaching me about the plants and the experiences I had with the plants. So we would often go on plant walks and they would describe the plants and how they were used.
00:09:38
Speaker
Now, one of the things that happens in the jungle is you're doing this 10-day diet, which is very restricted. You roughly do an ayahuasca session roughly every other night. And in my case, because I've been at it a long time, they'll also have me do two during the day by myself. And it's a highly subjective experience.
00:10:05
Speaker
So I wanted to catch the experience from a subjective perspective. And by the way, thank you for saying you got sucked right in. That's the best single writer ever wants to hear, ever. But I wanted to get the experience. I wanted to get my subjective experience of working with the plant. And sometimes it was a plant. So you do the ayahuasca session roughly every other night. And then you get a pitcher of a plant or plant mixture that you drink every single day.
00:10:33
Speaker
and you get altered more and more as the days pass and you have really profound wild experiences. So I wanted to show from a subjective perspective how those plants were affecting me. Now in indigenous cultures,
00:10:49
Speaker
So in Western culture, we have dreaming, waking consciousness, visionary experience, and all points in between. And in the Western divide and conquered method, we have those all sort of separated. But in indigenous thought, there's no separation. It's all one continuum. There are just different states of consciousness, but there's no difference. So what happens in the jungle and now is happening in my daily life,
00:11:17
Speaker
is that the dreams and the visions interplay with each other. And then the dreams and the visions filter into each other. And then of course those start to filter into your everyday waking life. So the dreams and the visions get filtered and then, and you know, you can be in a dream flying a purple horse with a pink polka dot and you don't think nothing of it. Yeah, I'm flying a purple horse with pink polka dots and he's got gossamer wings and you totally accept it. So when they start to blur together like that,
00:11:46
Speaker
then your waking life becomes more magical because it becomes more dreamlike. Now, I just mentioned the old-timer Guillainimo, and my second year in the jungle, which was very hard, by the way, all these theatres are not, they're a blissful, ecstatic moments and hellish moments, but they're ordeals. There's no club med here, you know, they're tough.
00:12:11
Speaker
So I was in a ceremony with him, really intense, and I was going into the dark. And then in my visions, I turned into a butterfly, and then I turned into a bird. And I was flying through the Andes, and I had particularly colored spotted wings and all of that. And so I was blown away by the experience. So the next day,
00:12:34
Speaker
I was at my tombo, the open air hut, we call them tombos. And Guillermo came by and I said, you know, señor.
00:12:43
Speaker
Guillermo. Como es la boella? What was the flying? Because when the condor came to me, my legs were crossed and my legs were going a mile a minute, like thumping almost, right? So I said, ¿Qué es la boella? And it gives me this big smile and it goes, el condor. And right when he said that,
00:13:06
Speaker
the vision that I had, the feathers that I saw flying through the ends. I didn't know. I knew I was something flying. But when he told me, then, God, it was like a lightning flash. Like, oh my God. And the fact that he said it, right? I mean, he was just observing me in the ceremony. And then the fact that he said it blew me away. So
Animal Totems and Personal Influence
00:13:28
Speaker
I was with Condor for three, four or five years. And I also joined a two-year shamanic study group. And in that group, we went into the jungle and did plant medicines. We went to the Andes and did plant medicines. We went throughout the United States. We met every couple of months. And I also did a number of solo overnight, solo ceremonies by myself. We all went by ourselves.
00:13:55
Speaker
for two or three days and had experiences with that. So I never said a word, but when I was with the Condor, they chose to call our two-year shamanic study group, the Condors, which tickled the hell out of me. Now flash forward about 2006, I had had flashes of this in different ceremonies, but it would come and go and I really didn't know what it was. And so I was in a ceremony,
00:14:24
Speaker
And I was flying and all of a sudden my legs started going like 10 times faster. And my body was all moving and my head was going like moving forward like that. And my visions turned into high frequency, beautiful neon pastel bliss. And I was going a mile a minute. I mean, I was like really going, really high speed. And I was just blissed out.
00:14:55
Speaker
So the next day, we were integrating. And one of my buddies said, yeah, I knew it was gonna be a really powerful ceremony because just before the ceremony started, a hummingbird came up to me and got right in my face and hovered there. Right when he said that, I flashed on the fact that I was the hummingbird. And in that exact same moment, my girlfriend at the time who was with me, she said to me, you were the hummingbird.
00:15:25
Speaker
like those three things all happen like in the same moment. And I went, whoa. So I was totally freaked out in the best way. Now, pica floor is Peruvian Spanish for hummingbird. Pica is to bite and floor is flower. It's bite or sting. So it's bite, flower, sting, flower.
00:15:49
Speaker
In Mexico, it's Colibri, Beja Flora in Portuguese. Are you Portuguese? I'm Bulgarian. We call it Colibri in Bulgarian. Colibri. Okay, so Colibri is also Spanish. But in Peruvian Spanish, it's Pico Flora. So Pico Flora became my primary totem. And whenever I journey, when I go deep, she comes to me and my body starts flapping. And she always comes
00:16:18
Speaker
when the music is really sweet. She loves, you know, chirango or flutes. And I go into this high frequency, beautiful pastel visions. Now, in the Lord of the Jungle, when you connect with an animal spirit, it has to be on their terms.
00:16:38
Speaker
And then as the lore goes, that animal is seeing through your eyes and you're seeing through it, it's eyes, because you're sharing the same vibration. It's like if you and I were listening to a radio right now and we tuned to the same station, even though we're miles and miles apart, we'd be hearing the same thing. So that's kind of the concept. So I had become Pico Florida and I become more and more
00:17:02
Speaker
connected and associated with it. And I have other friends, deep shamanic people in Peru, who have their own animals that they are very much familiar with. So in those circles, many of them just call me pika floor, because they realize it's that energy. It's beautiful. Yeah. So I feel very blessed by that. And I feel very blessed because in the lore,
00:17:25
Speaker
you don't choose the animals, they choose you. And I feel I'm like, I'm not deserving, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So when the animal chooses you, do they kind of transfer any teachings? Are they there to protect you or is it a combination of things? They are your traveling companion, maybe considered a guide.
00:17:52
Speaker
Um, when I go, right. I tell people, cause I've been leading ceremonies now for almost 15 years. And I tell people, I will go absolutely anywhere in the dark with you. And I will, because I've been there and I can handle it. And I've been doing this work for long enough where I consider that to be my job. So no matter if I go into the dark or the light or whatever I happen to be going.
00:18:22
Speaker
peak of floor is with me. Sometimes when it's the most intense, my legs and my whole body is going a mile a minute flapping. Yeah. And it's just an ecstatic feeling. And I let it, it's no conscious of volition on my part, I let it commit, excuse me, so it's a constant companion. And I think ultimately, it also represents my overall energy.
00:18:45
Speaker
And I feel very blessed, like I said, that they chose me. And I've had, every time I did a wilderness solo, every single time in New Mexico, at some point one would come up to me and get right in my face and just hover there. And I'd be like, oh, thank you, sweetheart. You know, like that.
00:19:02
Speaker
Yeah, I saw I saw a video on some telegram channels a guy had a little flower kind of plastic little flower with I guess honey or syrup in it and the hummingbirds would come to him and he Had a name for his hummingbird. It would just drink out of the little flower the guy had for it like they're such amazing creatures those
00:19:27
Speaker
Yeah, they made a big difference in my life. And as so once you experience an animal spirit like that, or a plant, or plants, they're always with you, you can call on them. So every plant that I've worked with in the jungle, when I when when you're doing ceremony, and you're singing the ikaros, the ikaros are the magical songs, you're singing to the plants and the animals.
00:19:56
Speaker
And you're basically saying, hi, I see you, I feel you, and you're the most beautiful thing in the world. And I'm asking you and I'm flattering you. I'd like you to help me heal or learn new things. There's an expression called whistling through the forest. And the idea is that when you go into the jungle and you're acknowledging visible and invisible, whatever's there, and you're basically saying, look,
00:20:25
Speaker
I know I'm in your neighborhood. I know that you can kill me and you can heal me. And I want you to know that I recognize you and I respect you. And I'm asking you to gift me what you can teach me.
00:20:41
Speaker
And then when you're working with a plant for 10 days and you do that and you have wild experiences, then that pays off. So it's a lot of respect. And when the respect for all the plants and the animals, visible and invisible and spirits and energies, you're ultimately respecting elemental spirits.
00:20:58
Speaker
And elemental spirits go back to the primaries of earth, air, fire, and water. If it's Chinese medicine, they say five and they count metal. But you're going back to respecting and aligning yourself and opening yourself up to the forces of nature. Because what happens when you're in the jungle and you're doing that with a dieter like this, particularly with ayahuasca, you do what I like to say, you're getting a view of the jungle from the inside out.
00:21:24
Speaker
And you really literally sort of become the jungle. You become enmeshed in that wonderful symphony of nature and you have your part in it and you're aware of it. And it's a total blessing and a gift and teachings forever.
00:21:38
Speaker
Yeah. Actually, you mentioned Condor earlier. There's one question I jotted down that I wanted to ask you as an aside.
The Eagle and the Condor Prophecy
00:21:48
Speaker
I've heard some or I've read some stuff about there's Condor people and there's Ego people. Have you ever come across these concepts? Yes. What is that all about?
00:22:02
Speaker
So, a very good friend of mine, Tito Laraosa. I have his album. Oh, you do? I listened to his album, this last one. The Prophecy of the Eagle and the Condor? Yeah, yeah. Tito is a good friend of mine.
00:22:17
Speaker
I've actually performed with him. I know. Actually, the last time we spoke after that's when I discovered his music, as you told me. Oh, great. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So Tito has that CD, which was, he got an Emmy and it was with Mary Youngblood, who's a Native American flautist. Now the myth goes like this. At one time, the eagle and the condor flew together in the sky.
00:22:45
Speaker
and bigger forces separated them. And now in this time, they're coming back together again, and I have found myself to be very much a part of that. Now, the eagle is the sacred bird of North America, American Indians. The condor is the sacred bird of the South, Andean, Keshwa, Inca, and pre-Inca cultures. So,
00:23:14
Speaker
How it's evolved for me, and I've had shamans tell me this in the jungle and all that, is that the eagle is like the intellect and the mind and the condora is like the heart and the emotion. And I found myself going to South, I was down at one point in one of the most powerful times with a bunch of Canadian friends who are very steeped in Native American mythology and lore.
00:23:42
Speaker
And if you think about the whole metaphor of the going from the mind back to the heart and becoming heart centered and the whole path of shamanism is about becoming heart centered and listening to your heart and not your mind so much. Cause your mind has all your, I always like to say, I'm a cast of thousands, all those multiple personalities and those voices, right? And they go on an arm. But when you get to the heart, you're centered.
00:24:09
Speaker
and there's a real stability to it and your intuition and other things all flow out. So they're coming together. Now in Inca, in pre-Inca mythologies, there are three worlds. There's the upper world, the middle world and the lower world. The lower world is represented by the serpent. The color is gold and it's considered to be wisdom.
00:24:36
Speaker
The middle world is represented by the puma or the jaguar, which is, it's electric blue, like electric. The upper world is represented by the condor, which is love, which is rose-colored pink. And of course, when you combine all three of them, you get this ultraviolet electric energy that I've experienced directly. So it's love, power and wisdom, truth, love and energy,
00:25:05
Speaker
Um, it's also the intellectual body, the emotional body and the moving body. Hang on one sec. Easy happened. Sorry. Um, so, um, they come together and it's more of a complete and it's more of a completion of the heart and the mind. So, uh, I found myself to become part of that prophecy going down into the jungle.
00:25:33
Speaker
And the other part of it is that I feel very blessed to have been able to get on there for 20 years. How many people get to do what I did and have the experiences I had?
00:25:42
Speaker
And it's important for me to convey those experiences to others who would never have the chance to go like I did. Yeah. And with the current situation in the world, how are you, I suppose, interpreting what's happening in, let's say, the Western world or the industrialized world, let's say, compared to what are the vibes there? How do you feel them compared to the vibes like in the jungle?
00:26:12
Speaker
That's a big question. Um, I can, I'll go on and stop me if I go on too long. Yeah. But one of the things is the, the people that I know in the jungle and the medicine people are tremendously, tremendously connected to the earth. So like I was saying, when I was doing those diet is and all that you become the jungle. Yeah. You know, you're, you're, you're taking all these plants.
00:26:41
Speaker
You're every day, you're taking plant baths, you're eating a very bland diet, and you actually end up smelling like the jungle, which can make you invisible to some animals like jaguars because they have a highly refined sense of smell and you don't have human smells. I came back one time and my girlfriend at the time said, you smell like the jungle.
00:27:06
Speaker
And I said, I am the general baby, right? Just do that. Now, in the Western world of technology, there's an interesting thing that's been evolving that I've written about. Okay, so originally, all teachings, spiritual teachings or whatever, were told in stories. Jesus was a storyteller, Muhammad was a storyteller, Buddha was a storyteller. When you go back to any tradition, it's stories.
00:27:35
Speaker
You can sit there and say, you know, crime does not pay. And people will say, yeah, great, big deal. But if you write a really great story where you show somebody getting involved and they pay, you know, crime doesn't, you show it, you dramatize it. That's where it's at.
00:27:53
Speaker
So I'm sorry, I lost my train of thought. My writer brain kicked in there. So in terms of in terms of the in the industrialized world. Oh, thank you. Thank you. You got me back. You brought me back. So originally, storytelling was an oral tradition. And the ancient Greeks developed a language, you know, more it started with like the Aramans and the ancient
00:28:22
Speaker
pre-Egyptian cultures and those. But when the Egyptians, I'm sorry, when the Greeks stole from the Egyptians or borrowed or whatever, when the Greeks developed written language,
00:28:36
Speaker
They still went, don't quote me on the numbers, but it might've been a couple of hundred years where they weren't using it because oral storytelling was where it was at, it was performance. And the troubadours, you know, whoever you want to call them, the storytellers would go around telling the stories. And then of course, as each generation moved forward and the realities of their world shifted, they would alter the stories to make them relevant for the times.
00:29:03
Speaker
So when you're telling an oral story, you're sort of telling it in the moment as it's unfolding and it's something that evolves as time moves forward. Now, the moment you write it down, you have frozen it in time.
00:29:19
Speaker
It's not going to go, if I wrote a story in 1895 and I'm reading it in 2021, they're going to be like, what? They didn't know computers and airplanes and all that stuff, right? So in that moment when it's written down, it's frozen in time. And I've realized that in writing, writing is a reflection of reality.
00:29:45
Speaker
Art is a reflection of life, and life is a reflection of art, right? So when you express yourself in that moment, you're catching, for lack of better words, you're catching the zeitgeist of that moment, then, in time. If, you know, here we are now with all this insanity with Afghanistan and COVID, and those are the things of the time, right? Well, that wasn't the same in World War II or prehistory before that, right? So you're frozen in time. Then you had the monks
00:30:15
Speaker
who are copying the books, right? And that went on for however long that went on.
Impact of Technology on Storytelling
00:30:21
Speaker
And then the Gutenberg press was invented and now you can mass produce. So this story or this treaty, so whatever you want to call it, that you have, the writer has frozen in time suddenly is available to hundreds of people.
00:30:37
Speaker
Yeah. Right. And then, of course, as printing evolved, it was available to thousands of people and then eventually worldwide printed books. Then we moved forward and we went into, you know, fairly recently electronic publishing. Now, I could send you my book. You could be reading my book now in under a minute. I could send it to you right now and you can be reading the whole book.
00:31:03
Speaker
Yeah. So from the oral traditions of those things, the storytellers to now instantaneous literature, print on demand, it's available everywhere. Now, as our culture is evolved with the internet,
00:31:20
Speaker
We have video and audio, which we're doing here, right? And we have YouTube and everybody in their mother has a cell phone and they're showing you their cat or their baby's first birthday or, you know, whatever they want. And it's instantly available to everybody. I could right now take a video of this yapping dog here and send it to you. Or you can see it live in real time, right?
00:31:46
Speaker
So suddenly all the doors are sort of busted wide open and all of that is totally available. Now, one of the things I've been doing is I call the internet the narcissistic hall of mirrors because everybody's, people are walking off cliffs taking selfies of themselves, right? And all the stuff that goes on.
00:32:10
Speaker
And it's kind of a two-way street. People will say, oh, well, the government can go in there and hack you and look at what you're doing. Well, that's true, but the hackers can go to the government and hack them. So it works both ways. It's wide open. But what I have been observing is that if you go anywhere, you look, you're walking around the street, everybody's looking at their damn cell phones, right? I've seen videos, one lady walking along and she walked and fell right into a fountain. People walk out in the middle of the street and get hit by a car because they're looking at their cell phones.
00:32:40
Speaker
And when it was first weird for me, I'd be in a social situation, I'd stop and I'd look, and everybody's looking at their cell phone. I mean, here we are together in person, face to face, and they're all looking at their cell phone someplace else. So for me, that technology has created a disconnection from the natural world. And more and more, we are getting disconnected from the natural world. Because we're not here, we're there in the internet.
00:33:09
Speaker
I wrote, I have a nephew, he's a video game rock star. It's a game, he goes by nothing. It's a game called Counter Strike. And they've flown him all over the world with big competitions like Coliseums, almost, you know, big places. And he plays, and he's a rock star. He's one of the top three guys in the world. Well, I talked to him and I wrote a novel about him, but it's a novel.
00:33:36
Speaker
It's about computer-generated dreaming, and him and his team go into the dreams of PTSD veterans to try to help them solve their traumas. Well, I talked to him and his older brother, and I goes, will you guys read this for me and take a look? And I want to make sure I'm accurate.
00:33:56
Speaker
And they were lagging and they were lagging and I waited a month or two and they were lagging. And I finally got the older brother and I said, I said, Jacob, what's up, man? This is my book. No good or what? He goes and looks at me and he goes, sorry, Uncle Matt. We don't read. And then it dawned on me. Video gamers don't read. Yeah. They're playing video games. Yeah. So now I discovered as it's become more available that audio books
00:34:27
Speaker
are what's happening. You and I are doing this podcast. When you're done and you release it, I'll be promoting it. The different groups that I'm in and the other radio shows and videos and TV stuff I've done, they're recorded. I get them out there and people are listening. People love the podcasts. They can drive in their car. They can do whatever they want. If they don't read, they can listen, right? So now here I am.
00:34:55
Speaker
doing, I got all this gear I showed you. Here I am recording my audio book, right? To listen. Well, the whole thing has come full circle from the original storytellers, right? Dude, that's brilliant. Yeah, yeah. So it just blows me away. And my audio books sell pretty well compared to my other books, you know, and they're increasing in popularity.
00:35:22
Speaker
So you actually just brought it, you did just bring it full circle. That is, I think that's what people really crave is a good story, you know, and it's like they always, they have, there's like books on parenting with a story and selling with a story and leading with, you know, it's all about
00:35:44
Speaker
Like you said, the lesson is, let's say the lesson is to be it's good to be good. Violence is bad. Do not kill. It's like if you give people commandments, you know, especially left brained kind of people that are dominant with the analytical brain, you think that's what people want.
00:36:03
Speaker
But more and more we find that that's not what people want. People want a good story with a few gems of wisdom in there, which is actually exactly how you seem to be writing at least your memoirs. Now, obviously, if it's a science fiction book, maybe you could take a different direction. But it seems like, for example, I haven't read Land Without Evil. I have it on my Kindle. But you seem to cover
00:36:31
Speaker
in that book you seem to cover a lot of history, culture. So it's in a way someone reading that book would actually learn a lot about the culture, right? Absolutely. As a matter of fact, when I first started writing, I was writing for inspirational magazines and they soon were featuring me as a writer. And I thought it through and I dawned on me, okay, I'm writing for inspirational magazines.
00:37:00
Speaker
but I'm preaching to the choir. There are already spiritual people and I'm preaching to spiritual people. And it dawned on me that drama, dramatizing the truth is far better like I was telling you earlier. Jesus and Buddha, Muhammad, all those guys were storytellers. So when you tell a story and you make it real, so if you're doing your job as a writer, you put the reader there.
00:37:29
Speaker
Like again, thank you. When you said you got sucked into the story, it's my job as a writer to put you there. So you or anybody who's reading it or listening can live vicariously through me so that they can know, Oh, that's what it's like or get a sense of it. You can never do ayahuasca experiences and articulate them fully because it goes beyond words. It's beyond rationality. It's beyond normal experience.
00:37:57
Speaker
So you do your best to make it accessible to people. So, you know, when you do that and you are creating a story and dramatizing your truth, then you're reaching people and it's making a difference. And all of my stories have, for lack of better words, they have morality tales hidden within them. Even the science fiction, the horror, you know, horror is about truth.
00:38:26
Speaker
And horror is about the things that maybe people might not want to look at or experience, but it's about that. I don't know if you, are you familiar with the Twilight Zone? Very vaguely. Well, in a nutshell, it was a TV show in the United States. It went from about, I don't know, 1960-ish to about 1963.
00:38:52
Speaker
there's like 100 something episodes. They're all morality tales, every one of them. And I grew up watching that and I've watched it now at least twice full through everything. And it's been a major, major influence on my writing. So to take what you want to say and tell a story where people can get it by living vicariously through those experiences,
00:39:17
Speaker
is how you can convey the message as opposed to being a preacher, so to speak. Absolutely. I love it. I love it. Um, so someone, let's say middle aged or whatever, that has a couple of kids and they know they will never be able to do ayahuasca or whatever mush mushrooms, LSD, and
Spiritual Dimensions Beyond Entheogens
00:39:39
Speaker
I believe a large chunk of those people have never had a mystical experience that's not entheogen related, let's say. What would you say to them? How can they tap into some dimension beyond just their physical and their thoughts and their emotions? How can they get a little bit of a taste for this expansiveness? Yeah, I'm always fond of saying that
00:40:09
Speaker
For one thing, these medicines, these entheogens are not for everybody. And all paths lead to Rome. So there are other ways through meditation and yoga and other things to reach those states. But for me, I'm what's considered a hard head. Whether I like it or not, I've always been a kamikaze.
00:40:28
Speaker
from the very beginning. I was talking to somebody a while back. I've got 50 years of experience with LSD and other things. So I have a long history with it. And people would always, they would thank me for going to the jungle. And at first I was like, what? And they'd say, yeah, man, you're going for us. You're going for me. And I eventually realized what they were saying.
00:40:56
Speaker
So I tell people, yeah, they go, oh, you went to the jungle and you were puking and you had it coming out both ends, right? And I says, yeah, so you don't have to ever do it. I did it for you. Now, so one of the keys of this whole thing, one of the definitions of shamanism is a bridge to go from one reality to another and make it accessible.
00:41:21
Speaker
And I discovered through my writing that the key is metaphor. So metaphor, probably your listeners know, but just for the sake of it, metaphor is a comparison. So if I say to you, it was black as coal, everybody's going to connect black with coal. They're going to know, they're going to get it immediately. So what I've struggled with all of my life is to take these non-rational visionary experiences
00:41:51
Speaker
and write them in such a way that somebody else who would never get to experience them and never get to go to those places can read and get a real sense of it. And it's also sort of a teaching method, so to speak. And the key is metaphor. And I've struggled to take a non-rational experience and then string it into words in a logical serial expression, one word at a time, from something that has multiple, multiple
00:42:18
Speaker
feelings and emotions and all that. It's a real challenge and I'm told I'm getting really good at it.
00:42:23
Speaker
And I like to think so after 36 years of troubling, you know, struggling to do that. Do you know what I noticed? Actually, this is something I was thinking last week when I started reading Pick a Flow, right? You have this, for some reason, reading your writing is, it makes more sense to read it fast. You get me? If you read it word by word, like for example, I have a bunch of
00:42:54
Speaker
stuff on anatomy, physiology, natural medicine, all sorts of metaphysical bits and pieces, right? And philosophy, for example, you can read, but to really, I suppose, what's the word I'm looking for? To really digest or assimilate the material. Yeah, to really grasp it. You have to go really word by word and then sometimes reread the whole thing a little bit faster. But what I noticed
00:43:21
Speaker
With pick a floor is this is why I'm really looking forward to to listening to the audio book and that's why I really loved Spirit Matters is you got to just go go read the whole fucking sentence, you know, you read the whole sentence and it's like a it's like a bubble pops into your head boom and then you go you take a second break and boom and it's like the the concept
00:43:47
Speaker
The whole thing is the concept, not the words, you know what I mean? So it's very strange. Very few authors do that. I suppose that's a real talent of yours. Thank you. You're making my day. I won't be able to walk out the door because my head's going to be too big, but I'll deal with that on my own. One of the things I've learned about writing, there's a few things I've learned. One is when I do my edits, I take out all the passive voice,
00:44:14
Speaker
you know, 99% of it, and I use active verbs, which actually energizes the writing. I also try to keep it, even though I've been known to use bigger words, I try to keep it as simple as possible. And for me, one of the cardinal sins is that if the writing starts to draw attention to itself, then you're blowing it.
00:44:39
Speaker
I know other writers who are just showing off their words and this and that. And for me, it's like masturbation. Oh, look at me, I can do flowery things. Eh, let's get to the point and let's keep it moving. And in fiction, and I also apply this to all my other writing, but in fiction, there's the concept of suspension of disbelief.
00:45:04
Speaker
So if you're going to write a science fiction story, you have to do world building and you have to do it in such a way that it's believable. So years ago, I was in a writing workshop and a woman was reading the science fiction story and the alien guys came in and pointed his blaster at another guy and shoot him. And then she said she burned him to a crisp and it smelled like roast beef.
00:45:31
Speaker
Well, that drove me nuts because the metaphor of roast beef totally pulled me out of the story and put me in the kitchen. Right. So to me, that was breaking the rule of suspension of disbelief. So you have to do it in a way where people are going to accept the reality that you are creating.
00:45:52
Speaker
so that there are not any misconceptions. I know you're familiar with Star Trek, who isn't? If anybody wants to write for Star Trek, there is what they call, and this is for other shows and universes or whatever, there's the Star Trek Bible. And you have to go by the rules of the Star Trek Bible.
00:46:15
Speaker
So, you know, Klingons only make love 18 times a day. You know, you can't have a Klingon making love 50 times a day because that's too much, but 18 times a day. And they only do it on the full moon and you may have to follow the rules to stay within that shared reality. So it's important to be consistent. And for me, I like
00:46:39
Speaker
I work hard to make the writing invisible so that the person isn't caught up in a messed up sentence or a messed up punctuation or a metaphor that pulls them out of there. I want them to get pulled into the dream and forget where they are and be living that reality. And if I'm doing my job, I'm accomplishing that. That's what I strive for. And so how many editors do you work with usually? I don't work with any anymore except copy editing. I can get it.
00:47:07
Speaker
because I've been teaching for about 32 years. And I've had people try to help me. And it's almost like they're trying to make up stuff because they want to help me so bad. But they can't because they don't have the experience. And most of my mentors have passed. Ray Bradbury was a big mentor of mine.
00:47:33
Speaker
I was blessed to be mentored by him. There were a number of other ones, but all my bigger mentors were passing and I'm carrying the torch. Most people don't know what I know. I can't find anybody reliable to help me do what I do. I had somebody help me copy editing and they bailed. The last couple of books, I had to do it myself.
00:48:02
Speaker
With Peacoflor, I have a friend who worked in newspapers for 15 years, and he was a very good copy editor. I could always use copy editing. But in terms of the content,
00:48:14
Speaker
content editing and the story and all that, there's nobody that can help me. And I guess that's attributed to my geezerhood. But I think that's probably why you said you're sick of the book by now. How many edits you must have done? It must be dozens and dozens at this point. It's true. And for lack of better words, I outed myself in the book and totally told my story with honesty.
00:48:41
Speaker
Not out in myself, like coming out of the closet, not like that. But I mean, I really gave up my story, and much of it was very painful. And when I was writing it and going through it, and I was like, God, you really were dumb. Or what a moron you were. You did that? Oh, my God. And you're going to tell people about this? You know, like that, right? So it was very, very hard, because I went through some pretty dark stuff. It was very hard initially, really hard to get the first draft out.
00:49:11
Speaker
Oh, wait, wait, wait, hold on, hold on. So wait, so you went, I thought all the dark stuff ended in spirit matters. You mean there was dark stuff after that too? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. That was only the beginning. Oh, my God. Yeah. And there were life experiences that happened to me or that I brought on myself. And, you know, one of the things I always say when I'm into my darkest moments is look,
00:49:39
Speaker
Every choice, every decision you made brought you here. So you got to own it and you got to take responsibility for it, which is what I did. So the first draft was tremendously painful. And then I was like, Oh God, now I gotta go through it again because I did the second draft and I had to suffer again. Right. It's, you know, like I don't believe this strategy, but in the old days they'd say, Oh, the dog pooped on the floor, take him and rub his nose in it.
00:50:06
Speaker
Right? Well, you know, I gotta get my nose rubbed in it. So I did the first draft and then I spent a month on the second draft. And then I did a third draft. Then I did the initial layout. And then I went up to my buddy and he did a copy of it because he couldn't, it holds together. I mean, after all these years, you know, aside from the fact that I've been teaching for 32 years,
00:50:35
Speaker
all of my writing students, and there are hundreds of them, they come to me with their writing problems. So when I went from writing to teaching, my writing suddenly jumped up bunches of levels because I was also working on all their stories, which ended up improving things for me. So when I do three primary drafts, but I used to do like over a dozen.
00:51:01
Speaker
But now I've combined all the steps into these three and each time I make a pass, I'm looking at it with a different set of eyes and refining it to the point. And then it's a matter of looking for typos and, you know, copy editing to clean it up. But there's nobody who can help me now at this point with all the writing that I've done.
00:51:24
Speaker
I think the same goes for the plant medicines and all the psychedelic journeying. I don't think there's many people that you can learn from at this point. This is why at a certain point you have to start, as you say, carrying the torch because the youngins need some help as well. Dude, that's really a great observation.
00:51:51
Speaker
I got to the point, people say to me, oh, this so-and-so is person speaking, and that's person speaking. I'm going to this, and I'm like, great. I don't want to go to any speaking events, unless I'm the one that's speaking.
00:52:04
Speaker
because I have more experience than most people. I had some young guy a while back message me and he says, well, have you ever had any experience with LSD? And I wrote back, yeah, for 50 years now, why? And he's like, oh my God, right? And all the experiences that I've had in between and I've done all this stuff and most of my mentors have left the planet.
00:52:31
Speaker
So I'm the authority, I'm carrying the torch, I'm carrying the tradition. And there's an old thing about you spend the first half of your life reflecting, and then the second half of your life radiating, right? So in the beginning, you're learning from people, you're reflecting, you're absorbing all of that, and then you gotta get to a point
00:52:58
Speaker
where you start to radiate and you start to give out. So I'm at the point now, I feel blessed. I feel like the message that I have is tremendously important. And I feel like it's coming from someplace else. I'll write something and all that. And then I'll look at it like a month and a half later and I'll be like, who wrote that? Or I wrote that? Or wow, that's really good. I wrote that?
00:53:24
Speaker
You know, like that. And when I'm in the zone like that, I like to think of it as channeling. It's just coming through. I'm tapped in and the words come and the experiences that I have just come through. Like you're asking me questions right now. You can ask me anything and somewhere in there I've got to
00:53:44
Speaker
in my head, a tapes filed away and I'll hit the play button and boom out comes that riff.
Commitment to Teaching and Wisdom Sharing
00:53:49
Speaker
Right. And that's from my experience. So I can't do a lot now. I don't want to go listen to so-and-so talk and all that because probably I know more than they do. Yeah. The exception to that would be somebody who's a good friend of mine where I would go just to support them. Um, like, uh, I don't know if you've heard of Jim Fadiman.
00:54:11
Speaker
But he did. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He's a very good friend of mine. He did the psychedelic explorers guide. Yeah. Yeah. I know. I go listen to Jim in a heartbeat because he's a bro. He's a buddy. Yeah. And I would go more out of respect than anything else. And just to listen to him and he was telling me what I already know.
00:54:27
Speaker
But it's okay. He's my bro. I want to support him. So I'm good like that. But there's just not much that anybody can show me anymore. And it's time for me to share everything that I've learned and all the dues that I have paid because I've been blessed to have a life of experience that hardly anybody ever can get to do.
00:54:46
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's so important to share that stuff because right now, the biggest influences on people growing up and when I say people growing up, I mean, even like in their 20s, you know, like in my 20s, I was pretty damn stupid. I have to admit.
00:55:08
Speaker
And I did a lot of stupid things and most of my time was wasted. So there was a lot of learning to do. And you get to your 30s, now I'm 35. And now I'm like, some days I'm like, I know some stuff now. I know some stuff. And then a year goes by and I'm like, oh my God, I was so stupid a year ago. I was like still so stupid. But
00:55:31
Speaker
I think there comes a time when you start, and some people obviously do it earlier than others, but you start to open up and look to teachers, and we need more teachers that don't have an agenda, like a political, medical, whatever agenda, or is it just to support their own ego identification and their own goals, whatever, be it a musician.
00:55:59
Speaker
author doesn't matter. So we need people sharing the wisdom of the wise people, of the wise traditions, of the wise plants and animals for those that can channel into that. So I think it's really important work. And I kind of, I forgot, I lost my train of thought now. That's all right. I can pick up on it. Yeah, go ahead. One of the things that drives me really insane now
00:56:28
Speaker
is what I call guruitis. And there are so many people out there who I'm the authority, you know, I will guide you. And I'm like, you know, let's get real people. So I see tons of things that nobody else sees. And when I say see, not just visually, but I see, I sense, I said, I can see something and I can know what's happening. But if somebody's not ready to help themselves,
00:56:58
Speaker
and not ready to see, then I'm wasting my time trying to tell them something because they're not going to hear me because they're wrapped up in whatever they happen to be wrapped up in. So I make it my mission to try to give out really good information. There's a show called Coast to Coast here in the United States with George Norrie. It's been on for 43 years.
00:57:25
Speaker
and Terrence McKenna got us start on it when it was Art Bell was the host and I got on with George last month and I was totally tapped in and I was just gone and when the show was over I got calls and messages from people and they said oh man you really you really nailed it you did a good job you spoke the truth so I don't have any agenda if I have one agenda
00:57:51
Speaker
Truth. Yeah, I love that. I love that. Yeah. And for me, everything that I put out, everything that I write, everything that I say is an offering. So because it's an offering, people can take it or leave it. I don't care, but here it is. You want to take it? It's for you. If you don't, fine. I'm not going to argue with you. I'm not trying to prove any point. I'm just telling you what I've learned from my experience.
00:58:21
Speaker
And you can run with it or not. And I always, yeah, and I always preface it to say that absolutely everything I say is true in my universe. Do you want to be in yours? That's fine. Not in everybody else's. That's okay. I'm not imposing mine or all that. But if you want to take a glimpse at what I learned and experienced, here you go. Yeah.
00:58:44
Speaker
Actually, something I wanted to ask you going back to, I suppose you had a lot of interactions with the Shippebo people, but it's a more general question in case you do know the answer. What is the, I guess, the governance structure of those folks there? And so do they have like a chief in the tribe? Is the shaman kind of like a leadership figure? What is it all about? So the Shippebos are one of the first
00:59:14
Speaker
tribes that were sharing Ayahuasca knowledge. One of the more modern ones, there's an anthropologist by the name of Michael Harner, who wrote a book called The Way of the Shaman. And he was one of the first people to spend time with them. So they have an interesting structure, which is evolving and changing because of contact with modern times. But there's usually a chief
00:59:44
Speaker
chief slash shaman. But they're in ayahuasca culture. And ayahuasca in Peru is considered a plant sacred plant medicine protected by the government and sanctioned by the government. Right. So within a tribe, you could have a dozen shamans or more. Wow.
01:00:04
Speaker
especially with the influx of people. But they have some interesting things because they are tribal. I was just telling somebody this the other day. I probably spent a month and a half total with the Shippebos. You know, two weeks here, three weeks there, all that. And one of the things I noticed is that everybody takes care of the kids. So when there's a kid, they could be with the big brother. Five minutes later, they're with an aunt.
01:00:32
Speaker
10 minutes later, they're with the mother. 20 minutes later, they're with some other relative or somebody else. So all the kids get shared equally. So there's no jealousy, no favoritism. It really kind of evens out the playing field, which I found wonderful, really, really fascinating. And then they do things communally. They have the traditions, but I've noticed that
01:01:00
Speaker
impinging Western culture has influenced them. Like they obviously want to sell you stuff all the time, which is good because they can use the money. But in some respects, connecting with you and the interaction of the exchange is more important than actually selling you something. Right. Although they want to sell as much as they can. But they're still sort of figuring their way around money because
01:01:30
Speaker
you know, it was prior to that, they were growing everything or finding in and trading with each other and all that. So that's been shifting. Yeah. So how does the chief come into power? Is he elected or is it lineage? You know, that's a good question. I'm not so sure about that one. I suspect in a lot of tribes it is lineage, but also sometimes it's what is the most practical?
01:01:59
Speaker
Right. I don't know specifically for them. That's a good question. That I don't know. I know the last chief I was on hanging out with, he was, God, he had to be 93. He was like a walking skeleton, but he was revered and
01:02:18
Speaker
revered for his wisdom and guidance. So there may be more of a practicality to how they choose people, but that's a good question. I'll dig into that and see what I can find out, but I don't know specifically. The reason I'm interested, right, is I'd love to know how small communities
01:02:40
Speaker
govern themselves or self-govern because obviously we can see right now we have a massive government. You could even argue a worldwide one, you know? And I just want to know at what point does a community get to the size where now we need an institution? Now, you know what I mean? This is very, very interesting to me because like it seems like
01:03:07
Speaker
Up to let's say 100 150 people it would very it would very easily be like No rulers no slaves type of thing to and it would be easy to for people to live in peace like that You know, that's why I'm wondering Yeah, you know, they're like American Indians like the Sioux I believe the Sioux and I want to say the Cherokee hmm the women Pick the chief. Well, he's a male, but he's picked by the women
01:03:38
Speaker
So in different situations, that's a good analogy about the size that you made there because the rules change with different sizes. What happens in some cultures is you get to a point and then you're competing for resources. A lot of the tribes were raiding each other, fighting each other. I know in Inca, pre-Inca times, there were the farmers and that.
01:04:08
Speaker
And then there were the warriors. And the farmers basically would feed and pay the warriors to protect them. So it was a mutual thing. When the Inca Empire grew rapidly, they would basically come to a town or a village, and they would say, hey, look, we're taking over. You can just join us and become part of it, and everything is good.
01:04:32
Speaker
or if you want to fight, we'll fight, but you're going to lose because we're way bigger than you. So you're a choice. Many of them says, okay, we're on board, we're with you. And that's one of the reasons why they conquered so much so fast because they would make that offer. So when you get into different situations, even what's going on in the world and globally now, it's competition for resources.
Global Competition for Resources
01:04:55
Speaker
And we're burgeoning population-wise,
01:04:59
Speaker
So you have the few elite people with the money who are living comfortably, living off the backs of all the poor people who are struggling just to exist. So there's that whole thing that's resources that are out of balance. And of course, whoever's got the most, history is written by the victors, right? Whoever's got the biggest weapons and the most powerful, they're gonna win, and then they're gonna write history. Totally.
01:05:27
Speaker
But it's interesting then, it's not just a mental illness of the white man, the Western cultures, then if it's a competition for resources, I used to live in South Africa, we would learn a bit about Zulu history. And if you read a little bit about the fierce Shaka Zulu and how he trained his men and what he did, it seems like maybe that's a part of
01:05:57
Speaker
being on this realm, the Earth School, maybe the end goal isn't ever going to be peace and utopia. Maybe we're here to experience all of these, let's say, beautiful and violent spectrums of the 3D reality. Yeah, you think about it, you think about capitalism, and you think about communism.
01:06:27
Speaker
Well, maybe pure communism would be a wonderful thing, but it's never going to happen. You're going to have people in power, you're going to have corruption, you're going to have resources being diverted to whoever needs or wants or has some more money and give the best deal. And of course, pure capitalism is doomed to failure. Keynesian
01:06:54
Speaker
I learned that in the ninth grade and I heard that. I'm like, what? You kidding me? You guys are nuts, right? And what happens now, there's the budget and trillion dollar deficits and this and that, and it's totally crazy.
01:07:08
Speaker
I think maybe the Scandinavian countries have done pretty good with the socialism, with a little bit of capitalism and social services and the basic stuff. There's a balance. Generally speaking, humans are messed up. Everybody wants to be the boss or who dies with the most toys wins, right? Yeah. And so human nature screws up all these wonderful concepts.
01:07:34
Speaker
Yeah. I totally agree. Anyway, it's a huge topic. In fact, I'm listening to a great book on Austrian economics at the moment. And the guy talks about Keynesian economics and stuff like that. Basically, yeah, like, I mean, a ninth grader would get
01:07:56
Speaker
that that is going to cause a lot of big rifts in society in terms of balance of power, balance of resources, but it's a huge topic. But speaking of kind of, I suppose, conflict, did you ever get into any kind of conflict or any dangerous situations when you were in the jungle?
Navigating Dark Energies in Shamanism
01:08:17
Speaker
And I don't mean it with animals, but, you know, like maybe sorcerers or, you know, any kind of any other misadventures there.
01:08:26
Speaker
Yeah, you know, interesting because among a lot of the people in the jungle, particularly, people will say, oh, I'm going to go out to Shabibo tribe, and they're spiritual masters because they drink Ayahuasca. Well, no, there's petty jealousies. There's envy. There are sorcerers who are jealous of each other. There's dark magic. I have been very blessed to be connected with people who have integrity.
01:08:56
Speaker
So everything that is done is done with integrity and there's lots of protection being done on different levels. And energetically, it keeps things safe because these guys have some mojo and people aren't going to really mess with them. Although, are you familiar with the work of Pablo Amoringo? A little bit. Yeah, I knew Pablo. He passed away 10 years ago. He was the ultimate first
01:09:26
Speaker
ayahuasca visionary painter. I've seen some of his work here. Yeah, I'm good friends with his son. As a matter of fact, the cover of Pico Flor, that hummingbird that's on there, I commissioned from one of Pablo's most well-known proteges. Wow. You know, Fredo Zacateca, Zacacita. I always get his name mixed up. But I commissioned that he's an ayahuasca painter. Pablo was an ayahuascaero and was practicing
01:09:54
Speaker
And then he was getting successful and big and other people, dark sorcerers were sort of attacking him, for lack of better words. And he finally stopped doing ayahuasca because of that. Now, you can have dark sorcerers who are attacking you.
01:10:16
Speaker
You can also have a dark sorcerer who goes out and flattens all the tires in your car or you know what I mean like that. There are other levels of hostilities that go on. A lot of the people throughout the jungle, there is a lot of envy. And I got caught up in the middle of that a little bit and I've dealt with some dark energies. But now that I've been through everything that I've been through and I've had the experiences, I can honestly say that I'm fearless and I'm okay.
01:10:44
Speaker
Now, if somebody came up and put a shotgun between my eyes and cocked the trigger, you bet I'd be scared, you know, like that. But I mean, generally speaking, I'm fearless. I'm very conscious of the energy that I'm putting out. And I'm very conscious of the energy that I'm attracting. And the more I've been along the path, the clearer that gets from me. So I understand how to deal with situations. And I feel like I have been going with the bigger cosmic flow of things.
01:11:13
Speaker
So I feel I have protection because I give it the ultimate respect. And if I don't and I croak, then hey, what's next? I'm ready to go, but I'm not in any hurry. So, but can, can someone, so is it true that someone, can someone hurt you energetically from a distance? Is it possible? Yes and no, because if you're in that system of belief,
01:11:43
Speaker
and you believe it, then it can happen. There's the, one of the things that's throughout South America is called the evil eye. I think it's L-O, L-O-O model, you know, it's the evil eye. And there's somebody that says, I curse you with the evil eye. And then of course you're deeply entrenched in that system and you believe it. And you can have experiences like that.
01:12:13
Speaker
I have been shown plants, there's one palm, I think it's called Supaikasha, where they said that you can take that medicine, take that plant and develop dark black magic. The problem is, if you do that, there's no turning back. You're committed.
01:12:37
Speaker
So there are people I've come in contact with, there are dark sorcerers and you can feel their energy because if somebody's wrapped up in the dark, whether it can happen or not, it's still bad energy. Now there's a belief in the jungle and ayahuasca circles of that distance. They say that they can do psychic virates. Virates are darts. Yeah, so they're like invisible poison darts in the
01:13:06
Speaker
ethers or other realms that can be directed at you and things can happen. But, you know, everything is subjective. If you're in that tradition and you live in it and you go on and you believe it, then as you all know, you can make yourself sick. Yeah. It's like you can heal yourself with a placebo. Absolutely. Right. So it's kind of a gray area about what happens, but I think ultimately it ties in with what your system of belief is and how vulnerable you may find yourself.
01:13:36
Speaker
One of the things that always fascinated me about ayahuasca and other things is that there's an agreed upon psychological landscape. People have talked about the Crystal Castles or Terrence McKenna's talked about the self transforming machine elves. So there's that agreed upon reality that everybody experiences to some degree or another when they go in it. So I think there are places I think you can draw negative energies to yourself.
01:14:04
Speaker
I know for a fact that if you have some dark stuff buried in your subconscious, you can draw people to yourself without realizing it. In my case, in my younger days, I grew up with a lot of violence. I was a street fighter. And even when I stopped, fights would still come to me. Even when I thought I was really doing good, the violence would come to me.
01:14:28
Speaker
And I realized after working with a coach that I was, I had all these mannerisms and coping mechanisms that were very deeply buried in my subconscious. So I was drawing that stuff to me unconsciously, without realizing it through my subconscious. So, you know, it's kind of a gray area there. There's no, you know, specific black and white answer, but those things do happen, are known to happen.
01:14:53
Speaker
people fear them, people experience them, you know? Yeah, I've read in, I forgot which one of Stan Groff's books, some case studies, you know, where there was a guy that he had, it all started with birth related trauma. And I think it had to do with the cord being wrapped around his neck or some type of, and then he was, it got to the point where he was getting himself in situations where like,
01:15:19
Speaker
he would get other men to tie him up, strangle him, and torture him, you know? And with LSD psychotherapy, he re-experienced his birth trauma, those perinatal levels, and he dissolved that trauma, and he stopped attracting those, and it was obviously hundreds and possibly, I think, 10,000 plus case studies similar to those, you know, not as extreme, of course. That's bang on. I have a bit of graph in my book.
01:15:48
Speaker
Nice, that's awesome. Yeah, and peak of floor because the perinatal matrices really tie into this work. Yeah, yeah. It's a very good model. And so what would you, let's say some ways under the influence of an entheogen and they start to feel dark energies. What would you, because you lead ceremonies, like if they asked you for guidance, what would you guide them to do?
01:16:16
Speaker
I would first say, I'm here with you. And let's see if we can follow back to see where the darkness is coming from. So when you have Stan Grob's a good jumping off point, when you have an initial trauma, especially because if something goes back to birth, when that's happening to you at birth, you can't even articulate it. You can't even, you know, it's, it's an emotional
01:16:46
Speaker
you know, instinctual thing that is pre-language. So to articulate it and put an aim on it is difficult. So we carry these traumas from birth and early life. We have habits and things that we do that we developed because we were presented with a trauma or a difficult situation. And we either copied something from somebody or we blacked out or whatever we did to cope with it.
01:17:16
Speaker
We have those things. And when they happen, it's unprecedented. In extreme cases, we will totally block it out and forget. PTSD or women who have been raped and abused, they'll totally black out. It's one of the coping mechanisms because it's unprecedented. There's no way of knowing how to deal with it because there's nothing to compare it against. Flash forward to where you're doing this work.
01:17:45
Speaker
And you're going back to those moments, except now you're going back with what I like to call witness consciousness or awareness, or as I often like to say, mommy or daddy's home. So then you can go back and relive and re-experience that whole thing, except now you have this awareness that you did not have the first time. And if you relive it and re-experience it emotionally, then you can,
01:18:14
Speaker
let it go by living through it again, instead of holding it within energetically, you can let it go. So I'm willing to go there and I will encourage people to go to the dark. The dark has secrets and the dark is actually a wonderful teacher because what are you afraid of? Well, you're afraid of what you don't know. So if you go into that dark, what you don't know, but you go in with some awareness
01:18:41
Speaker
And me being there as somebody who's facilitating it and I'm like, Hey, I'm right here with you, man. What's happening? Right. I've been there. I know that space. Here's what's happening. I often will use myself as an example. Um, yeah, you know, when I, this is all it was for me. And then when you do it in that way and use yourself for an example, then you're disarming people from being defensive. My old coach used to say, tell your secrets.
01:19:10
Speaker
So like, I don't know, a little few minutes ago, you were talking about, oh man, I was dumb when I was 30 and I did stupid stuff and this and that, right? Well, guess what? You were also talking about me, right? I'm the same way. And you know, who isn't, right? So when you do it in that way and you use yourself as an example, then you disarm them. And then there's no defensiveness, there's no pointing a finger, you're just saying, hey, look, here's what I did.
01:19:38
Speaker
What about you? And it opens the door to free them up, to go through the experience. I've had some wonderful experiences. Just a couple of years ago, I was working with a guy in Florida and he had some serious PTSD for military service. And we got him out of it. Wow. And he was thanking me and I was like, you know, hallelujah, man. Good. I'm doing something right here. You know, this is what the work is really all about. Yeah. That's amazing, bro. Yeah.
01:20:09
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I think that's where the best work is done. I think a lot of people, they think, oh, I'm going to go take ayahuasca or I'm going to drink San Pedro. And they think it's like taking ecstasy or something.
01:20:28
Speaker
And from stuff I've read, I think I was telling you about Chris Beyche. He's written a book on his Hidos LSD sessions. Great guy, I had him on the podcast before.
01:20:43
Speaker
This book covers 20 years of his life, 73 high dose LSD sessions, you know, five to 600 mics. And for the most part, it's suffering, you know, it's suffering. It's just unbelievable suffering and experiencing death multiple times, different ways, just the most horrific things you can think of.
01:21:11
Speaker
That was the bulk of the experiences with some gems here and there. Obviously, I'm summarizing it very, very briefly. Whether that is, are we tapping into the collective unconscious of humanity and there's a lot of unprocessed trauma there and are we downloading some of it and processing it, whether it's our own fears that God knows we are just unconscious of,
01:21:37
Speaker
But I think a lot of the work, it seems like anything that is worth, that has a, it's like going to the gym, climbing a mountain, you know, writing a book. It seems like a lot of suffering to get to that bliss at the end. Yeah, I agree. Growth is painful. Doing the work is painful. The jungle diet is our ordeals, but the results are amazing.
01:22:07
Speaker
So for me, I spent a lot of years working on my own stuff. And when I got more clear with that, then I started going more into the collective. And it will take you to different levels, depending on your experience and where you go. One point I want to make that you just reminded me of is that people will do an entheogen or a ceremony and they'll get a revelation. Like, oh, I realized I'm this way because of what happened to me. And then they think,
01:22:37
Speaker
that they've got their problem all resolved, but they don't. They've glimpsed it and they've seen it. Now they have to take that into their everyday waking life. That's really what integration is all about, is taking those revelations and things and then applying them in your everyday life. Because if you have a deeply ingrained habit or a thought or whatever it is, emotion,
01:23:00
Speaker
They're gonna, it'll mug you. If you feel threatened, you'll instantly go into that mode. It's totally rapid mercurial high speed before you even know it. And suddenly you're angry or pissed off or upset, and it's because of something that, and it will keep testing you. So if you can have all these revelations and experiences and things, but you don't put them into practice,
01:23:27
Speaker
Then you're wasting your time. And I see that a lot. There was a woman in the jungle years ago with us. We were doing five ceremonies. She did three. Didn't do any more.
01:23:39
Speaker
And then she wrote this book about ayahuasca and everybody was like, oh, and I'm like, ah, you don't even know what you're talking about. And so you get a lot of young people now or they do one or two ceremonies and suddenly they're the guru and they're enlightened and, you know, follow me. I know everything because I have been, you know, in the presence of God, ah, you just cracked the door. You know, but I think this humility, you kind of have to be slapped around a little bit by life to learn it even
01:24:08
Speaker
Again, from my personal experience, I was very cocky about many things in my 20s, and now I'm learning about certain subjects, and there are certain subjects that I know I know more than, let's say, 99.99% of the entire population of the Earth.
01:24:32
Speaker
I still wouldn't even dare to say I'm anywhere near an expert on these topics, right? I just do not have it in me because the people that I learned from in my eyes, they have forgotten more than I will probably ever learn about those topics. You know what I mean? So it's like, yeah.
01:24:56
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, I agree and I have to walk the line. But as I mentioned, most of my mentors have passed on. Yeah. So I like to think that their energies or their spirits sort of live in me. And I'm carrying on what I learned from them. Of course. To make it available and passing on. Of course.
01:25:18
Speaker
you know, to preserve it and share the gifts that I was given. I feel an obligation to pass it on. And, you know, if I was saying this when I was in my 30s or 40s, I would say it's ego.
01:25:30
Speaker
Yeah. But at this point now, it really is more experience. And I've been humbled and humiliated enough. You read Pick a Floor, you'll find out. Yeah, yeah. All right. So you're currently you are recording the audio book of Pick a Floor. So when you have that done, what's what's next for you, bro? There's a few things I'm going to record. I've had I have seven audio books right now.
01:25:59
Speaker
I recorded Spirit Matters with help. And then there are six others I use different narrators, but I have other books in print. So I've got five more books that I'm going to narrate moving forward.
Visionary Insights in Upcoming Works
01:26:14
Speaker
But I'm also got the first parts of the next book. We're going to call it Pica Flora Sita. And I'm going to start off with my visionary experiences of Pica Flora.
01:26:28
Speaker
And then I'm going to move into all the mythologies about it. There's Peruvian mythologies and Aztec and Mayan mythologies, right? I'm going to get into all those mythological stories. And then I'm going to move from those into the facts and figures, like the fact that compared to their, they have the biggest heart in proportion to the body than any other animal in the whole animal kingdom. I think their brains are bigger too in proportion to their size. You know,
01:26:56
Speaker
the fact that their wings move into figure eight. The fact that they have massive memories and can you remember where every flower is and how often they're going to go to connect to all of those wonderful facts. So I'm going to go from my own personal, for lack of better words, my own personal mythology into the cultural mythologies, into all the amazing facts and figures of them and put it out like that.
01:27:22
Speaker
So that's my next project after all this other stuff. And here I was thinking we're just going to take a break from writing, but that's preposterous. I'm an obsessive fool, man. I can't help myself. I'm in my happy space when I'm writing. Awesome. I do take breaks. When I finish a book, in fact, when I finished Pico Florida, the first draft, I put it away for a month.
01:27:46
Speaker
and forgot about it. Then I hit the next draft and I spent a month on that and then I put it away again for another month, month and a half. So I do do that and I do take breaks and I do have a life of other things here and there. But I really feel driven as I like to say, I'm on a mission from dog and I've spent my life working on getting in touch with my inner dog and getting that out. And I feel, you know, I'm now
01:28:16
Speaker
I'll be 66 in November. And now I know that most likely what time I have left is a lot less than what I've already done. So I feel very driven to get out what I have to get out and get the word out from everything that I've learned and experienced for younger people. And one of the things I say in Peacock Floor is that among other things, this book is a map. So maybe you can learn from my experiences
01:28:44
Speaker
maybe you can learn from my experiences and not have to go through them because I already went through them for you. Maybe you can take that and instead of all that crazy stuff that I went through, you can read it and get it and then take it to the next level. I feel like I'm taking what I learned from my mentors to the next level, not only to the next level, but the fact that time has moved forward and as the world has evolved and changed.
01:29:11
Speaker
Just like I was talking about the oral storytellers changing their stories as the generations move on. Yeah. I'm doing that and putting out the best I can. So somebody who's younger can read it, maybe get it right away and then they can take it to the next level. So I feel really, really that's critical and important to me. Yeah. Love it. Yeah. Were you going to say something? I think I interrupted you. You're going to say, and then after pick a floor, pick a floor seat. Oh yeah.
01:29:39
Speaker
So the working title of the next book will be the anthropocosmic man. Anthropocosmic. Yeah, so that's the working title. There's a temple of anthropocosmic man in Luxor, Egypt. It's a very precise map of the human body.
01:29:59
Speaker
Every archway is mathematically exact and precise. Every part of the temple, there's a part for the brain, this and that. It's all exactly precise. And what they say is that it is not only a map of the human body, but it's a map of the cosmos, which makes it holographic. They didn't know what holographic was back then, but it's holographic. So I want to take all that and I want to tie it into the earth.
Earth's Consciousness and Cosmic Connection
01:30:28
Speaker
Interesting. So I just was just watching a wonderful documentary about how the mycelial network that grows underground allows the trees to communicate with each other and pass on information and nutrients back and forth. It's a whole network. Yeah. And so for me, I know beyond a shadow of a doubt through my experiences of being in the jungle and becoming the jungle that the earth is a living entity. And if you look at things like, you know, the fact that
01:30:59
Speaker
the branches and the leaves of a tree, right? If you turn them inside out, you have human lungs. And human lungs take in carbon dioxide, I'm sorry, take in oxygen and give off carbon dioxide, and the trees take in carbon dioxide and give off oxygen. So I want to take that whole thing of the earth being a conscious entity and then tie it into the cosmos.
01:31:28
Speaker
So if you look at a spiraling galaxy, it looks just like a freaking hurricane, right? And if you look at some galaxies, they look just like an eyeball. And if you go down through the levels of what's happening within us and all the cells that all work together to make a unit, they're all connected in the same way that the Earth is connected and the Earth is connected to the galaxies. So I'm gonna really spend some time exploring that.
01:31:57
Speaker
Damn, that's fascinating. If I'm still alive by the time I get to that book. Well, you know, I will say a prayer that you are, because that sounds fascinating, brother.
Where to Find Matt's Work
01:32:11
Speaker
All right, Mattel, one final question. Can you please tell the folks listening where they can find your work on the internet? Yes, thank you. I have e-books and tree books and growing audio books. They're all on Amazon.
01:32:27
Speaker
If you want to order direct, you can order direct from Mystic Inc Publishing. So it's https colon forward slash forward slash m-y-s-t-i-c-i-n-k-p-u-b-l-i-s-h-i-n-g dot com.
01:32:47
Speaker
And then I have matpalamari.com where I have podcasts, pictures, audio, video, lots of stuff. So those are all the places. And anybody who goes there, if they go to my website, there's a contact form. If they fill that out, it will email me and we can communicate there.
01:33:07
Speaker
And I'm on, you know, I'm on a bunch of social media stuff, you know, Facebook, blah, blah, and all that. We'll have your links. Michigan Publishing and MattPalamary.com are the two primary places. And of course, everything's available through Amazon. Awesome, brother. Yeah, listen, I wish you every success with continuing to put out these important works that you are. And definitely we'll sync up and have you back on for the next one. Can't wait.
01:33:36
Speaker
I'm always at your service, sir. I appreciate you indulging my madness. And, you know, I really have a lot of respect for the work that you are doing. Thank you. Thank you. And so it's nice to be associated with you and to be spirit brothers. Yes. And to have these great conversations. So thank you so much service and rattle me anytime you want, man, and hit my button and you'll have to shut me off at some point. All right, brother. All right.