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48. Interconnection, Dreams, and Myth
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In this week’s episode, we discuss new and old philosophies, myth, symbols, dreams, Jung vs. Freud, and much more. The conversation launching point is a discussion about what’s called the Gateway Experience. The Gateway Experience is an easy to follow series of video tutorials geared toward showing you how to start experiencing natural altered states of consciousness that can open the doors for deep meditation and astral projection. Joe has given this a try with great results and since recording this episode I have it a try as well. I did the introductory video, which is the first of I think 32. I definitely see its potential and want to dive deeper, but as I mentioned, Joe has tried it and describes his experience here.
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Music By Nathan Willis RIP
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Transcript
Introduction to Philosophies and Myths
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Pursuit of Infinity. In this week's episode we discuss new and old philosophies, myths, symbols, dreams, Jung versus Freud, and much more.
Altered States and Meditation
00:00:12
Speaker
The conversation launching point is a discussion about the gateway experience. The gateway experience is an easy to follow series of video tutorials geared toward showing you how to start experiencing natural altered states of consciousness that can open the doors for deep meditation and astral projection. Joe has given this a try with great results and since recording this episode, I have tried it as well.
00:00:36
Speaker
I did the introductory video, which is the first of 32, I think. I definitely see the potential and I want to dive in deeper, but as I mentioned, Joe has tried it and describes his experience here. But before we get to it, for all things Pursuit of Infinity, visit our website, pursuitofinfinity.com.
00:00:55
Speaker
There you'll find all the links to the many places you can find us. If you want to support the show, the easiest way to do that is to give us a follow or a sub as well as a 5 star rating and a review. These have a huge impact on those pesky algorithms and also helps to expand our reach. You can also show us some support by heading over to patreon at patreon.com slash pursuit of infinity.
00:01:18
Speaker
If you didn't know, we have a YouTube channel. All of our episodes are always posted there in video format, as well as an array of shorts that we have been putting together on a regular basis. With all of that out of the way, thank you so much for listening and I hope you enjoy this week's discussion.
The Gateway Process and Hemi Sync
00:01:48
Speaker
So have you ever heard of the gateway process? The gateway process? I think I have. Is this like a meditative type of experience where it's like a lot of electronic sounds and things like that, like weird soundscapes that allow you to meditate in a productive way?
00:02:11
Speaker
Yeah. So the Gateway process, Gateway, it's like a package of audio files, basically. There were tapes at the time. They're called the Gateway tapes. So the Gateway tapes are basically Hemi Sync, which was created by Robert Monroe from the Monroe Institute. And he created these tapes to, initially, he created Hemi Sync to try to allow people to induce out of body experiences.
00:02:41
Speaker
And so through his institute, he made Hemi Sync, which is basically just binaural frequencies that, you know, set your brain up in a certain way to allow you to have an out of body experience. So through working with this institute, he eventually, you know, got better with making these, you know, he hires scientists, you know, he was a rich guy, he was a radio broadcast executive. So he had money to open up this institute.
00:03:08
Speaker
And after creating Hemi Sync, he ended up making this gateway process, which was even more than just to induce out-of-body experiences. Its process is
00:03:24
Speaker
it's supposed to induce just altered states, basically. So it's not just to get you out of your body, but to experience different realms, entities, like all sorts of, you know, insane things. Part of it can be an out of body experience also. But um, so basically all the gateway tapes are it's like,
00:03:48
Speaker
Binaural frequencies and a lot of them, they'll have like the sounds of like the ocean waves in the back too. And it's also a guided meditation. So there will be somebody instructing you to do certain things in your meditations. Like, you know, they'll have you breathe a certain way at one point or
CIA's Exploration of Psychic Abilities
00:04:08
Speaker
you know,
00:04:08
Speaker
But anyway, the gateway tapes, they're awesome. Also, the CIA got involved with this too. During the time where they started investigating psychic abilities and stuff, when they were doing the remote viewing and all this, and they declassified these CIA documents about gateway. And it's crazy, dude, these documents are insane. So they sent some of their people to
00:04:36
Speaker
you know, mess with this gateway process and then, you know, report back. And people had, you know, wild experiences. Like if you look at the documents, it's, they had, you know, experiences of God, oneness, like, entity, anything you can imagine, it sounds like they were doing psychedelics all the time. But the gateway process is
00:04:59
Speaker
it's like a tutorial, it's teaching you how to do it. So by the end of it becoming a master of using these tapes, you should be able to get into these states without the tapes. But with the tapes, it just plays these frequencies in your ears, it has the instructions.
Personal Experiences with Gateway Tapes
00:05:14
Speaker
So it sets your brain up in the way and the right way to put you in these, you know, different altered states.
00:05:20
Speaker
And I found out you could get those tapes on YouTube. I was like, oh, sweet. I was talking to our buddy, Josh, and he he was using. So I was like, all right. So I tried one two nights ago. I tried the first tape and dude, it was fucking cool. It really worked. It was just and there's forty two. I know the the playlist is forty two. Uh.
00:05:45
Speaker
The playlist says 42 tracks or whatever. So I thought that there was 37 tapes. So there's at least 37, there might be 42. So it's just a steady instruction. It's just teaching you. So I did the first one and I was, I know I've heard like good things about it and you could even look at the CIA documents. Like it's legitimate. And with Monroe, he's, you know, he's a legitimate dude as well who created it.
00:06:12
Speaker
And, uh, still I was like a little skeptical, just like, eh, I'm going to do this and maybe I'll just get a little relaxed. I don't know what's going to happen. But I, with only doing the first tape, I had a pretty good experience. Um, I didn't have like some wild spiritual experience or anything. Um, basically it has you visualize, uh, a box in front of you and then you're supposed to, you know, put your body into it and all your fears and anxieties, just trying to get you into a state of,
00:06:42
Speaker
to get you out of your head, out of your body. And it did get me to a state of like almost having no body, you know? It was like I could see how I believe now. I think that these tapes are going to work to provide me with some wild experiences because even with that first one,
00:07:03
Speaker
It was like 33 minutes. And by the end of it, I was, uh, I had to move my, my fingers to make sure that like they were still there. It was like, I, after being still and listening to these sounds and doing the instructions, it was like, my body isn't even there anymore. Like nothing was there.
00:07:23
Speaker
And it freaked me out a little bit. So I moved my fingers. I'm like, oh, I'm right here. It's good. But I'm going to probably do the second one tonight. And I'm going to work with these and see where it takes me. And after looking at the CIA documents, it's really crazy at what people experience with this. And it's like I said, it's more than just out of body experiences, which is crazy. You know, it's synonymous with astral projection. Same thing.
00:07:51
Speaker
Um, but people, you know, experience spiritual awakenings, anything under the sun, really. And I'm a believer just from doing the one I was like, all right, this is legit because, and I, I'm going to practice the first one again. I'm going to, the first few I'm going to do multiple times to kind of get like the fundamentals down. Cause like, I, you know, barely got started. It was incredible though. I don't know. I just, uh, I'm excited to do those again.
00:08:21
Speaker
Yeah, Josh actually sent me, uh, that playlist as well, which is why I answered your question initially with, yeah, I've heard of it, but I wasn't too familiar with it. Um, and you mentioned hemi-sync and as far as I understand the concept there is that these specific frequencies help to sync.
00:08:40
Speaker
the hemispheres of your brain so that you have this like experience of oneness in your mind and like this experience of calm that allows you to, you know, have an amazing meditative experience. But I'm kind of interested in the CIA documents because
00:08:55
Speaker
You would think that if the CIA is doing research into this stuff that it would really be something legit.
Universal Truths and Missing CIA Documents
00:09:00
Speaker
So can you talk a little bit about maybe some of the more specifics of those documents and what they said? There's a lot in the documents actually. I didn't like go through them too intensely.
00:09:13
Speaker
The gist is that it basically says some groundbreaking shit. It's like they discovered that reality isn't material, that matter doesn't exist. And it's funny, there's this page 25, the infamous page 25 of the document. It was one page of the document that went missing. And then 15 years later or something, the Monroe Institute had said they had it in their databases and they put it out.
00:09:43
Speaker
and it was basically page 25 like affirmed things about like all the world's religions and said that this if people knew this stuff it could like unite all the religions into one and speak the universal truth of all of them and
00:10:00
Speaker
Yeah, it's really wild stuff. And all from, you know, no psychedelic involved, just laying down, listening to these frequencies and putting your mind into like a state that allows you to do it. And yeah, I don't know, it's really crazy. What I think is so odd, but maybe it's not very odd, is that you can introspect
Introspection vs. Scientific Methods
00:10:30
Speaker
And with your own mind, you can discover the nature of reality more accurately than if you look out into the sky or into space with a telescope or measure things with mathematics or, you know, the physicalist scientific sort of paradigm that we've all grown up in. And it like, it delegitimizes the entire enterprise of what we've been doing here.
00:10:59
Speaker
because you would never think that.
00:11:03
Speaker
With your own biology and with your own neurology, you can discover something more accurately than if you use like the tools of science. Yeah. I mean, dude, for the first 18, probably more years of our lives, you got to think it's literal programming. That's all it is. You know, we're being programmed from infancy to adulthood. You know, we're put in a stringent system. We're being programmed on how to think and what things are.
00:11:32
Speaker
So it's so deeply ingrained in us to think that materialism is true and that reductionism is the way to get to the bottom of all things. So it's deeply ingrained in us now to think that if we look outward and break everything down, that we can discover truth through that process.
00:11:54
Speaker
So then when you say to somebody that, no, actually the truth is found within, it sounds goofy or corny, or it just doesn't sound like it could possibly be legitimate. But I've found that that's it right there. The truth is within. It's the only way you can actually find anything that's true. It has to come from within. And that's because when you try to describe truth,
00:12:22
Speaker
you're trying to describe it based off of something that it's not. So if I try to describe your microphone right now, and if I go into what it means to be a microphone, I'm basing all of that on what it means to not be a microphone, because that creates the context in which the microphone exists, but that all exists within the field of consciousness.
00:12:50
Speaker
So like when you try to describe something through the physicalist paradigm, you're stepping on your own foot in a way. And although I did say just before that it's so unbelievable that you just look inside yourself or you can experience reality in a more accurate way than science can tell you.
Creating Personal Philosophies
00:13:11
Speaker
It's kind of simple because you can, you can, you can use these same sort of concepts if you look outside of you as well, but you just have to like skew the paradigm just a little bit, just a little bit away from what we've been taught and what we know. Um, I was listening to a podcast on the way up here, actually, uh, it was Bernardo Castro and he, he just so eloquently describes it. Um, there was a question that was asked to him.
00:13:41
Speaker
kind of surrounding what I just said, where it's interesting that you can look inside yourself to find a more accurate representation of reality. And Bernardo went on to say, no, that's actually not completely true. You can look externally and see it just the same because it's very obvious that
00:14:01
Speaker
If you break something down far enough, I think he used the analogy of a car. He said, okay, so like you need the spark plugs in the car or the car won't run. You define the car based off of like the components that it has in order to run or in order to move. So you need the spark plugs in order to have it move. Okay, cool. Um, and you can, you can use that idea for all the parts of the car.
00:14:26
Speaker
But then you need the road, you need the earth to provide the ground in which the car is moving. And then, well, you actually need the air because the air cools the engine and then also provides oxygen for combustion. Then you also need the atmosphere and you need gravity and you need all these things. So really,
00:14:46
Speaker
The more you break things down, the more you can see that this is just one giant unity and you need all of the parts of it in order to define one. So when you start to break down each part, all you're doing is just defining the parts. You're not actually getting to what the base foundational nature of reality is.
00:15:06
Speaker
Yeah, I'm glad that you actually brought that up. It's like a perfect example how you mentioned the spark plugs and stuff. We talk a lot about and value raising consciousness and becoming more aware in all this. And a lot of times it sounds like maybe raising consciousness is just having psychedelic experiences or altering consciousness itself.
00:15:33
Speaker
which is a huge part of it. But what you just mentioned in my opinion is another huge part of it. It's to have the experiences but also to contemplate reality and use what you're seeing outside to understand the inside more. And I think one exercise, which it sounds like that's what you just described, one exercise you can do to help, you know, raise your consciousness
00:15:57
Speaker
is, you know, try to connect everything together. Basically, like in that instance, you pick a car, like just a simple object, and then you break it down into how that connects with one, how it connects with everything. And that is something that I like to try to do. And I think how you put that, that was like a perfect example of that. And I think it's important
00:16:19
Speaker
for people to try to do that because I know for a while, for me personally, in the beginning, I was so enthralled with simply altering my consciousness and having the experience, which I still am. That's still my favorite part of doing the work. It's just because it's so amazing.
00:16:38
Speaker
But doing the contemplation work like that and the one exercise, as I said, and you just described, connecting things together into the interconnectedness of reality. Because you can do that with everything, every single thing. Because everything is connected and essentially at its fundamental level is one.
00:17:06
Speaker
But yeah, there's more to it than just the altering consciousness. There's the contemplation, the introspection, and the philosophical work too.
Critique of Educational Approaches
00:17:16
Speaker
Because a lot of people, when you talk about philosophy, it's kind of – I don't want to say it's died out.
00:17:24
Speaker
But it has in the sense, in my opinion, in modern day, seems that philosophy has turned into like just an armchair pursuit. Like you think of guys with their pipes sitting in big fluffy chairs just talking about things that will never actually come into contact with real life. That's kind of the...
00:17:44
Speaker
in my opinion, the way it's viewed and practiced even too a lot of it like you take a psychology or a philosophy course in college, they don't teach you to philosophize, they teach you philosophy, you know, they teach you what other people philosophize. So like it's turned into this amalgamation of just what other people had said in the past, instead of actually
00:18:09
Speaker
philosophizing and doing the act itself. And then it becomes more than the armchair pursuit with the contemplation, the introspection and all that. It starts to apply to yourself, your inner being and the world around you. So, you know, you're not just talking about something that Carl Jung said or, you know, pick whoever you want.
00:18:34
Speaker
you're finding out what's true for yourself. And in doing so, it changes your life. It changes everything around you. So it doesn't have to just be a theoretical armchair pursuit.
00:18:46
Speaker
And although it is super important to research and understand the ideas of people in the past so that you can sort of build off of that and then create your philosophy based off of the knowledge that you've obtained. But it's this pervasive issue with our education system that's been happening ever since the dawn of this country, which has been teaching you what to think as opposed to how to think.
00:19:13
Speaker
And you would think that in a philosophy course, like if you're a philosophy major at the end of that major, you would be very well equipped to think for yourself and to form your own philosophy. But maybe this is just because we've sort of like hit the ceiling of our potential for how we can philosophize, but it seems like there haven't been very many new philosophies
00:19:42
Speaker
as of late you know it's like you're either a stoic or you know you're a religious philosopher or something like that you're a scientific philosopher like there's always some sort of remnants of a past discovery or a past mode of thinking that inspires
00:20:02
Speaker
the philosophy that we come up with now. And again, you know, that is a good thing because you do need, it's like mathematics. You have to learn the basis of mathematics and the foundations of it in order to build upon it so that you have the skills to then be creative with it. I like to think of it too, if you're drawing or if you're painting,
00:20:26
Speaker
In order for you to truly be able to express yourself creatively on a canvas or a piece of paper, you have to be skilled enough in the technique so that your mind is not bogged down by the process of making sure your technique is good. That way, your mind is able to just manifest a creation of its creativity.
00:20:51
Speaker
Yeah, it's like, you know, you learn the styles of, you know, all the greatest artists and then you become a great artist. You learn different techniques in painting, how so painted, how Van Gogh painted, and then you have all these and you're good at them all.
00:21:07
Speaker
It kind of allows you to then create your own. It gives you the technique, the skill, and ability for you to actually come into your own. And that's kind of going along with the philosophy too.
00:21:25
Speaker
It's great to learn, you know, the philosophers of the past and there are a lot of brilliant people and, you know, you could learn many life lessons and it could make you think a lot. But I think the issue with it there is the next step and how you mentioned there's not a lot of new philosophy going around. It's I think, especially over here in the US, it's because of our schooling system. I mean, the way that
00:21:53
Speaker
that we teach these things is just, I think you're getting a lot of people that are learning about philosophers and then not philosophizing. I think they're picking one of the philosophies they like best and then going deeper into that rabbit hole rather than abandoning them, like abandoning all the techniques of the other painters and then creating their own.
00:22:16
Speaker
And because the truth is this, if they really taught a philosophy course just on how to philosophize, you could do that in a... It doesn't take that long to teach someone how to philosophize really.
00:22:32
Speaker
But people spend a lot of their time just going deeper and deeper into a specific philosophy or theory that they like and then identifying with it rather than abandoning it and then creating their own. Yeah. You see people who call themselves Jungians or call themselves Platonists.
00:22:55
Speaker
And it's like, well, if you're calling yourself that and you're identifying your, your system of philosophy on another person. I mean, I understand it because yes, you may resonate with that philosophy more than others and you may base whatever you're thinking on off of, you know, that philosophy that was built by that genius, which is great and it's fair.
00:23:19
Speaker
But some people get too caught up in the label of I'm a Jungian, so I have to adhere to the Jungian ideology in order to create a philosophy that is whole or holistic. Yeah, like you said, though, by definition, though, then it's not your philosophy. You know, you're just kind of.
00:23:38
Speaker
just finding something that aligned with you and then diving into it. I think the point of philosophy is to make yourself come to the answer, you know, yourself, you know, not reading that someone else said it. If you read that someone else said it and you believe it and align with it, it's really easy to just be like, yep, that's it, I'm this, because this resonates with me on a deep level, so now I'm a stoic.
Developing Unique Philosophical Ideas
00:24:03
Speaker
And then, you know, you just dive into that philosophy.
00:24:06
Speaker
Whereas I think spending the hours of contemplation and just always, it's like a curiosity that you have to always be looking for yourself. And then you have an insight that, you know, sparks in your brain. You're like, okay, now, now I understand it. Cause there's only so much you can get out of, in my opinion, out of reading someone else's work. It's not the same as getting an insight of your own.
00:24:37
Speaker
And you can get very many insights from reading books that are written by people who are way smarter than us, you know? And I do it all the time. Let me ask you, let's flip it around. If you were to say,
00:24:56
Speaker
what kind of ism or ian or whatever young ian stoic pyrameticist like is there a is there a combination of things that you would describe yourself as or at least sort of ground yourself in i mean i guess you could say uh
00:25:20
Speaker
like I agree with idealism I mean it's like a huge like it's not so specific it's just that reality is mental rather than physical so I would say I'm an idealist but as far as
00:25:35
Speaker
I don't identify with any specific philosophy. Plato is brilliant and I like a lot of the things he said. I've learned a lot from a lot of these guys. Carl Jung is awesome.
00:25:50
Speaker
I can't say I am a Jungian or a Stoic or any of that. I think there's truth in all of them and they're all fantastic, but it just feels dirty saying that in my opinion. I just don't like it because I'd be lying if I said any of it. If I said I was a Stoic, I'd be lying. The only thing I could say is I like Stoicism and I love Carl Jung and all that.
00:26:14
Speaker
But I don't like identify with any of them or think one is particularly true over another. All I can truly identify with is what I come up with on my own and what I – the way I see the world. So yeah, I don't – I wouldn't identify myself with any of them. I don't know. What about you?
00:26:38
Speaker
I mean, I can't really identify myself as any of them either. But I could say that, you know, again, Carl Jung has been a big inspiration. Hermeticism is really cool stoicism, like a lot of these things. So maybe that is like the new philosophy is
00:26:54
Speaker
learning about what resonates with you and then sort of basing that, like having that be your foundational starting point, you know, and then using maybe psychedelics meditation or some sort of experiential methodology to expand upon that and make it personal, make it individual. Because that's where the discovery comes. I mean, you can read and read and read. But you have to experience to a certain degree in order to properly philosophize, in my opinion.
00:27:25
Speaker
Yeah, see basically what I love to do is because I don't know if I'm naturally left-brained or right-brained but what I'm trying to do because in the past I thought I was more right-brained than I thought I was more left-brained and then right-brained and now I think maybe left-brained you know it goes back and forth so rather than thinking about it I'm trying to just
00:27:46
Speaker
Cultivate both like me sink. Yeah, exactly. You know had me sink them but I want to like kind of master both and Just be in that that zone where I am neither really I don't have to say like I'm only a analytical and I'm not creative that much or I'm just a creative and I hate analytics or whatever
00:28:10
Speaker
So what I like to do is work kind of the left side of my brain with contemplation and really just kind of philosophize and think about things and kind of do the exercise I was talking about with connecting one object to everything else in existence.
00:28:29
Speaker
you know, deconstructing dualities, all this type of more logical analytical type thinking. I do that kind of to work the left side, you could call it, and then next I would say, you know, just trying to alter consciousness. I think doing the contemplation and the introspection to work the left side and then the altering of consciousness to work the right
00:28:55
Speaker
by meditating, breathwork, psychedelics, dreamwork, and now this gateway tapes that I'm messing with now, things like that to try to alter consciousness and get the right side flowing and moving. And then other creative pursuits as well, music and art and that as well.
00:29:23
Speaker
The only thing I think those are good for is, you know, it's good to bring happiness for, in my opinion, to do the arts and play music. Um, but we mentioned this on a previous podcast. I found that some of the best thinking or insights occur while doing, you know, any type of music or art, something like that, that puts you in a flow state. Suddenly you might have your greatest idea you've had or,
00:29:48
Speaker
or have a moment of hurrah like oh that's like I get it now um so that happens a lot while uh doing you know I guess you'd say working the right side of the brain but personally right now it's just the the altering of consciousness part is what I'm focusing on heavier now because I've
00:30:11
Speaker
been doing a lot of contemplation for the last couple months and I haven't, you know, done psychedelics in a while or been as heavy on my meditation. I've been doing it just, you know, not as heavy as I want to be doing it and how heavy I've been doing it in the last like two weeks. So I'm gonna try to hit that side a little harder because I've noticed even just in the last two weeks
00:30:35
Speaker
is that after trying to go hard with the contemplation and introspection more, I feel like it kind of rolls over to the more creative side of me. My meditation has been better. I don't know if it's because I took a little bit of time off maybe, but I think that working the left side helps the right side as well.
00:31:02
Speaker
It's a duality, which ultimately breaks down into a unity. You have to cultivate both sides because they both have power and they both have power in their own individual ways and they give context to one another, as we talk about a lot. This conversation is making me think of, I've been reading this book by Carl Jung called Modern Man in Search of a Soul.
Jung vs. Freud on Dream Analysis
00:31:25
Speaker
And the first chapter was on dreams and dream interpretation and Carl Jung's basic principles of dream interpretation are.
00:31:38
Speaker
So first of all, take dreams seriously. He has a lot of principles. And again, taking dreams as fact, as something that has actually happened to you is very important. But the foundational aspect of Jung's philosophy on dreams was that
00:32:00
Speaker
you can't be too dogmatic in the way that you're thinking about the dreams. And what he means by that is if you have a particular philosophy of what dreams mean, like Freud, he always thought of dreams in a way where whatever you're dreaming about can represent anything that has a slight similarity to it in the world. But Jung's interpretation was look at each individual part of that dream and ask yourself why?
00:32:30
Speaker
Why that detail? Why this detail? And when you start to dive into all of that,
00:32:38
Speaker
You know, also while not allowing yourself to be bogged down by a dogmatic philosophy of how you're looking at dreams, you find that the best way to interpret them in terms of like a patient or client type of environment is whatever is resonating with them, whatever resonates with the dreamer. So.
00:33:04
Speaker
If I'm trying to analyze my own dream, and I'm looking externally at a Freudian or a Jungian philosophy on how to look at dreams, and they don't resonate with me, I can cause destruction to myself if I try to map their philosophy onto my dream, if it's not resonating with where I'm at and what I need.
00:33:29
Speaker
So the real way to go about it is to understand as broad of a context as you can, as many philosophies as possible, and then break the dream down into a way that benefits you and that resonates with you. And that works with if you're a clinician and you're working with a patient, you know, it's really detrimental to the patient's growth.
00:33:51
Speaker
If you're going to tell them what their dream means, they must discover it for themselves. And that sort of idea to me is a beautiful philosophy on how to contemplate everything in the universe. Yeah, I totally agree with that. Like you can't.
00:34:11
Speaker
That's the way I look at my dreams honestly like kind of the Freud thing never really resonated that much with me or so I take dreams as reality and then I look at also at reality as a dream.
00:34:27
Speaker
So basically, in my opinion, if reality is dreamlike, then dreams are reality-like basically, you know? So I take them seriously and I'd never really broke them down too much in the way of Freud. Like, okay, so if I see a tiger, it must represent all of my fears, that type of thing.
00:34:51
Speaker
For me in my dreams, I've noticed that they are, it seems like kind of like a training ground or something or like a moral battleground that I get put to the test and then see how I respond in my autopilot state that I, you know, I'm normally on in my day-to-day life. And then if I improve myself in my day-to-day life, then my autopilot state in the dream improves and then I behave better in the dream.
00:35:16
Speaker
That's kind of how my dreams have been working for I came up with this about a year ago I would say and I just because I had a week of dreams that were really I kept waking up really disappointed in my behavior I was like ma'am a piece of shit like I keep like stealing and like I get it I'm like in the dream given an opportunity to steal and then I would steal and
00:35:39
Speaker
Or I'm put in a situation where I could either fight with the person, like argue with them, or just let it go, or be kind, or something. Like, I noticed it was like a really tough week of really vivid dreams of me being put to the test. And every time, I would wake up disappointed because I did the clearly like the wrong thing. And it was, you know, I always did whatever I shouldn't have.
00:36:06
Speaker
So I woke up and I'm like, man, why do I keep doing this? And I came to the realization like, well, I have, that's me, that's what I did. So if I improve myself in real life, in my waking state, and improve how I behave here, that will carry into my dreams. And it has, you know, so like, if I, if I'm more strict with myself and my behavior,
00:36:31
Speaker
And I get into an autopilot in waking life of behaving well and just trying to be more kind. In my dreams, I don't do as much, you know, terrible shit that like makes me feel bad when I wake up or in the dream. It's like, because these dreams I was having were very long and vivid. So I was waking up.
00:36:57
Speaker
out of a dream of like really brutal like arguments and fighting like hours of that and I'm waking up like headache and like that was horrible like it started my day off bad like I gotta change this so that after that I've realized like okay so these dreams are actually affecting my waking life and my waking life is affecting my dream life so I have to find a remedy for this and I think it was you know just a lesson being taught to me
00:37:22
Speaker
I wasn't breaking it down based on any type of symbols in the dream, but I do think of that a little bit. But I feel like in my dreams, the symbols are a little more direct. The symbolism seems to be pretty direct. But yeah, that's the way I've looked at my dreams and started to work with them in the last year.
00:37:44
Speaker
Yeah, that's a great way to do work with your dreams. Because I do find that dreams are like a direct reflection of what has been going on in your mind as of late. And speaking of like, looking at some of the symbols or the details, Jung used an example of someone dreamt of like, say a blackjack table. And
00:38:07
Speaker
Freud would say, that table could say represent your desk at home. You have a table at home, so you're dreaming of a table.
00:38:17
Speaker
And maybe you work from home. So maybe that dream is saying that, yo, you're going to win at your job or something like that. Whereas Jung would say, no, no, no. There's a reason why you dreamt of a specific type of table, a blackjack table. So what does it mean that that was a blackjack table and not just a kitchen table or a desk? So again, there's so many different ways.
00:38:44
Speaker
to go about the interpretation of dreams, the interpretation of reality, but ultimately it does come back to what resonates with you, what works for you. And it seems that the way that you're doing it, I think personally seems like one of the most effective ways because you're actually changing what you're doing in your waking life.
00:39:07
Speaker
according to what your dreams are telling you. And then you're seeing the results in your waking life and also your dreams. So you're getting that feedback loop coming back into your awareness, which is actually causing real change. Yeah, the dreams are actually pleasant. Like I haven't really had a negative dream in a while now. Once in a while, maybe a little bit, but
00:39:34
Speaker
I haven't had like, you know, I felt like that week I was describing was like a real lesson being taught to me because it was like a week of brutality, like, because I've just I have very vivid dreams. And they and I've always, you know, over the last couple of years have taken them seriously. But, um,
00:39:55
Speaker
It seemed for a while like it was more of just a playground rather than a school or like a learning facility. But I totally align with I would say more of the Jungian interpretation.
00:40:13
Speaker
found too much that I align with with Freud. But when I look at something in a dream, I don't try to really interpret it too deeply, like you would say, kind of in the Freud aspect. It's usually more in the Jungian sense, as you described, like, you know, with the blackjack table, I wouldn't, you know, think, okay, that must be my coffee table at home. Like, that's not the way I think about it.
00:40:41
Speaker
Yeah, I think that would be called free association where, you know, it's almost like you allow your philosophy to step in the way of what the dream is trying to tell you. And then you're mapping your philosophy onto the dream in order to project really yourself onto your patient. If you are someone who is a clinician, helping a patient to interpret dreams, which is the way that you are going to be reading a Jung or a Freud book because they were clinicians. So.
00:41:09
Speaker
They base their philosophy on dream interpretation on how to help someone grow or get past certain neuroses. Yeah. And cause you know, you'll see like those dream interpretation books.
00:41:24
Speaker
And I've opened one up before. I'm like, this is just insane. I mean, it's all projection. Like I do not think that you can interpret another person's dream at all. I think you can like, kind of as you were saying, give them some philosophies and methods to begin to look at a dream, but it's up to the individual to break it down themselves and see what it means to them. They're the one that had the dream. They had the experience and they have all the past experience that created the dream.
00:41:51
Speaker
There's no way I don't think another person could really interpret it for you because that other person is projecting so much onto it. Like you said, that person might really love Freud and then project all that on your dream. And I'm sitting there like, I don't think this is right. You know what I mean? So that's kind of the beauty of being
00:42:15
Speaker
I wouldn't want to say ignorant or naive, but I think this is kind of what I'm getting. I think there's a point where if you go too deep into other people's philosophies, it can kind of hinder your own. I think you were kind of getting at that before. Like if I was just so obsessed with Jung and I was just like,
00:42:37
Speaker
Self-identified union and then maybe it would it would definitely alter the way I interpreted my dreams and worked with my dreams whereas now I kind of just have a loose understanding of some different aspects of dreaming and then really just use myself to
00:42:59
Speaker
I can only project myself onto it. I don't want to project anything else onto it. So I don't know. I think there is a way that maybe you could negatively affect some of the work you do with by learning, you know, maybe too much of something else. I don't know. Yes. And that goes even deeper when you're talking about trying to interpret, say, a psychedelic experience.
00:43:24
Speaker
It helps when it comes to dreams and psychedelic experiences to understand mythology, to understand symbols and what they mean and what they've meant in history. Because there is a philosophy of dreams and psychedelics that says you're sort of tapping into an overmind or like a morphogenetic field of sorts where there is a knowledge base or
00:43:53
Speaker
a knowledge base that's sort of broken down into symbols and myth. Because if you start to look into myth, you realize that every single thing we do, all of the stories that we tell, they follow specific myths that break down into the foundational archetypes of how we think, how we move, how we survive, all of that. Just look no further than the hero's journey. Every single story that we've ever told
00:44:22
Speaker
follows some type of hero's journey arc, movies, TV. You look at the modern myths of our day, Marvel, and you can find very specific symbols that coincide with the myths of ancient times. These things are there for a reason, and they have a lot to tell us, and they have a lot to inform us on in terms of how we go about philosophizing what certain things are.
Universal Symbols in Cultures
00:44:51
Speaker
And honestly,
00:44:53
Speaker
What it means to know, epistemology in itself is to me based off of symbol and myth because that's how we understand the world around us.
00:45:04
Speaker
these myths and symbols have been ingrained into our DNA. It's just like a part of the human psyche, the human experience. If you look thousands of years into the past, all over different parts of the world, they're telling the same stories with different symbols or maybe different characters, but it's always the same story, which is mind blowing. It's like these fundamental archetypes and myths that somehow pop up
00:45:33
Speaker
in cultures and peoples that are supposedly uncontacted. They never talked to each other, they weren't aware of each other, but they're somehow talking about the same things and a lot of times the same symbols, sometimes different symbols. But a lot of symbols like the pyramid, it pops up all over the world. There's something
00:45:56
Speaker
something special about the pyramid and the human being unless aliens built them if you believe that which is possible yeah but um but no actually it's just it the pyramid is a perfect example of a symbol that is somehow ingrained in humanity because you see them on every continent and in a time where these people were on uncontacted or you could argue that maybe they were contacted maybe there was a global civilization
00:46:26
Speaker
But who knows? Yeah, I mean a lot of the myths of the time and the, like you said, the characters and the stories that were told.
00:46:37
Speaker
They all coincide with one another. A lot of them have like a godlike figure that comes to them from the sea and tells them the ways and how to make this and how to make that, how to survive the coming apocalypse. And that, you know, we can bring up Graham Hancock and some of his
00:46:57
Speaker
ancient theories on how an advanced civilization could have imparted their wisdom and their knowledge on primitive civilizations that coexisted at the time. But that's another podcast, I would think.
00:47:13
Speaker
And speaking of Graham Hancock, a lot of his work revolves around, like you were saying, different stories and different things that were being told from different parts of the earth that had no contact. And also if you look at art, whether it be cave art, all kinds of art, you can see these symbols as well and these similarities.
00:47:34
Speaker
Yeah, and it seems to – a lot of it from the past, it all seems to connect to altered states of consciousness, which is interesting because it seems like when humans alter their consciousness, there are universal symbols and properties that happen to them. There seems to be therianthropes.
00:47:56
Speaker
Part animal part humans you know aliens are something that occur you know people will see different types of beings and people from all over the world. Have contacted these entities in altered states of consciousness and then you know painted them or you know depicted them in some type type of art or writing.
00:48:16
Speaker
So I think that's another interesting thing is that psychedelics really brings that out of us too because we all have you know like some type of switch in us that can we can you know change our consciousness to a different channel and interact with the same thing so it makes you wonder if.
00:48:35
Speaker
you know, is it just like some symbol that's in our psyche that we all have? Or are we actually turning the channel to something real where these beings exist? And the reason we're all seeing them is because they're actually real, in a sense. And it's not just, you know, figments of our imagination, that they're real entities, real beings that we can all see and interact the same way, you know, we can all see and interact with, you know,
00:49:02
Speaker
the great pyramids if we go there. You know, it's like a real thing. It doesn't have to be physical or material, but these things could be real and existing in a realm that we have full access to if we just kind of alter our consciousness a little bit. So the question is, if I take a sufficient dose of mushrooms and I start to see Egyptian hieroglyphics and certain symbols that I can recognize from ancient cultures, did my mind
00:49:32
Speaker
influence my consciousness to experience those symbols in that trip or my accessing the same thing that the Egyptians accessed back in ancient times when they created these symbols.
00:49:46
Speaker
And I don't think that's really an answerable question, but it's an intriguing one. It makes you think like, what are we potentially tapping into when we go into these altered states of consciousness? As you said, a lot of the religious and philosophical concepts and symbols of the past are based in altered states of consciousness. So to me, it has to mean something that we're all experiencing a very similar thing and
00:50:17
Speaker
That's also to say that when you're under the influence of psychedelics, if you ask somebody else also like what they experienced during their experience or during their trip, a lot of the stuff, whether they be lessons, whether they be stories and archetypes or symbols,
00:50:35
Speaker
are very similar, you see a lot of the same things. And on DMT, a lot of people report seeing the same entities like I'm sorry, I'm talking to the degree that they are like, detail for detail, the same. And these things are not
00:50:52
Speaker
from children's books, they're not characters from movies, they're very specific deities or entities. I know one that is often seen as this purple lady, have you heard of this? Yeah. Where you're in the DMT flash and this entity approaches you and it's this purple-skinned woman that looks the same for a lot of different people. Personally, I saw a Mother Mary figure during a DMT trip.
00:51:20
Speaker
So that begs the question for me, like I am not a Christian at all. I don't have any sort of Christian imprinting in me. We never went to church when we were younger. I mean, I guess there's a bit of imprinting on us because we grew up in a Christian nation, but for me to see an entity of the Virgin Mary or Mother Mary makes me think like, am I accessing the same thing that the philosophers of the ancient times accessed when they created this figure?
00:51:52
Speaker
And if so, what does that mean?
00:51:55
Speaker
I mean, but even so, like say, we're not Christians, but maybe you could think about it. Where did the Christians get that image from? Where did this image come from when there's this lady or merry mother type of woman who is associated with so many different cultures and it's always attributed to altered states of consciousness.
00:52:21
Speaker
So like you could say the same thing on DMT. People, a lot of them will see like mantis alien type things. On ayahuasca, people will say like see like gray type, the grays, like that type of alien. People will see these things on DMT.
00:52:36
Speaker
And then you could ask yourself, oh, did the Hollywood movies, did they affect my mind? And then I just projected it out. And I think the more likely scenarios, these images came from experiences of altered consciousness. I don't think we just came up with these powerful images out of thin air, and then we just project them outward. I think that altered states of consciousness
00:53:06
Speaker
are so powerful and we pulled these images out and then tried to project them into our physical world. And you could say the same from ancient Egypt. You see all the gods that are theory and tropes. They're part crocodile and then part human, whatever. Because even Graham Hancock, he wrote about in one of his DMT trips,
00:53:33
Speaker
I think it was Ayahuasca maybe, but he had contact with an entity that had the head of a crocodile and then a human body, which is, you know, you see that in Egypt. And he said it was the same thing. It was like the exact same thing. And then a lot of ancient cultures that use DMT and Ayahuasca
00:53:54
Speaker
they all see the same type of figures that we then see painted on the cave walls or you know in different types of stone art all around the world. So it's like I think that these things they must exist in a sense and it's not just simply a human projection.
00:54:14
Speaker
spoken like a true idealist and I agree completely and I think you have to have some of these experiences to really grasp the concept because I think the foundation of the philosophy that we're pulling these things out of the psychedelic experience as opposed to projecting our own beliefs onto whatever we're seeing in the trip
00:54:39
Speaker
I think that the foundation of that is based on the feeling of interconnectedness of all things when you experience that under a psychedelic. That I think is one of the most profound and transformative experiences that you can have because it does recontextualize the way you think about everything. Yeah. And, you know, with the psychedelic, it changes everything in a way that
00:55:10
Speaker
like the reason I was saying that I don't think that these things are just like projections of a human psyche it's because often I don't if you haven't done a psychedelic it's hard to understand but doing a psychedelic or having any type of altered state of consciousness it's like a lot of the things you can experience are so far beyond the human psyche it's beyond what my ego my ego mind could ever create I don't
00:55:38
Speaker
in this form, in this ego-human mind, I don't have the capacity to create these powerful things that you experience. It's beyond yourself, at the same time being yourself. You know, that's the interconnectedness of it all.
00:55:54
Speaker
But it's not just, you know, you have a transformative experience and then you come back and just say like, whoa, that was crazy. I projected that all and it's like, that was all me that my ego did all that. It's like, no, it's nothing like that. It's so far beyond you that you, in the end, you realize that you are more than what you thought you were.
00:56:18
Speaker
Because in order for that to have happened to you and to merge with that, you know, whatever transformative experience you have, the only way that's possible is that you are more than what you thought you were. It's feeling yourself as an individual and as the collective at the same time. The way I like to describe it, and I got this description from
00:56:42
Speaker
a friend of mine, Jay Nelson, who I talked to with his wife, Lindy, in episode 27. In his book, they represent the psychedelic experience or consciousness as the two faces on either side, and then in the middle, they make the vase. So it's like, if you're looking at that,
00:57:02
Speaker
and you've never taken a psychedelic. You're looking at only the vase and you can only see the vase. And then when you take a psychedelic, it allows you to see the two faces as well. So it's like you're seeing something that's always been there, but you're seeing it as a whole. You're seeing both sides of it, the individual and the collective. Right. Like when you have spiritual awakenings,
00:57:30
Speaker
It recontextualizes reality. You still see the same reality that everyone else sees. It still looks the same, I should say. You're not seeing swirling colors everywhere. But it's recontextualized in a way that you're seeing something entirely different than what everyone else is seeing. Everyone else meaning your standard physicalist, scientifically-minded Westerner. So with a spiritual awakening, like you said, you're able to see the two faces now.
00:58:00
Speaker
and you can see reality in an entirely different way. I can look around the room and instead of just thinking like, okay, I'm on a physical planet Earth, this and that, I can view it more in the sense of like, as a dream. That's kind of the best comparison I use and the way I think about it is that this is like basically a mental world. It's just mind, it's a dream, it's fleeting.
00:58:26
Speaker
And it recontextualizes everything in the sense of, I don't think that, you know, everything I see is just its smallest parts. Like you can see the meaning in each individual thing as it is. And in my opinion, having those experiences, it allowed me to see more beauty in things and more purpose instead of being, you know,
00:58:52
Speaker
I found myself being a little cynical and nihilistic, you know, years ago because I was confident in my way of thinking. I was like, okay, so human beings have established this knowledge, the knowledge that I was taught. I was like, we have established this. So this is how things are. And moving through the world with that knowledge thrown into my head or, you know, pseudo knowledge, you could call it,
00:59:19
Speaker
and moving through things it could it seems like and it was for me that you can become very cynical and nihilistic pretty quickly but one experience with a psychedelic kind of can flip that all on its head and then you could see like okay that wasn't what it was at all and now you can look at things and see them in a way that it gives more meaning and purpose
00:59:43
Speaker
Because you're seeing things in relation to other things. You're seeing them as a necessity to something else. It's like before traveling down this path of psychedelics and philosophy and all the shit that we've been doing, I wasn't able to see things in relation to one another.
01:00:03
Speaker
I wasn't able to understand that death implies life and nothingness implies everything. Black implies white, you know, like these, these contextual opposites that you need one to have the other because well, before this.
01:00:19
Speaker
I would look at a person who is on the opposite side of maybe the political spectrum or the ideological perspective, and I would say that person is wrong. They are killing the country. They're the issue and all of this judgmental attitude toward people who didn't think the same way that I did.
01:00:42
Speaker
But when you have these types of experiences, you realize that you need those people. You need everyone because the way that they're looking at you is the same way that you're looking at them if they are as uninformed as you are.
Empathy and Moral Growth
01:00:56
Speaker
But if you both come from a perspective of compassion where you realize the importance and the interconnectedness of all things, you can appreciate the other person for at absolute least giving your views context.
01:01:12
Speaker
Yeah, and now you can empathize with people as well. It can show you the relative nature of reality also. It's like you said with another person politically, you could be like, oh, well, I'm right. He's wrong. He's the problem on the solution. But then you understand relativity and then you're like, okay, well, actually,
01:01:36
Speaker
If I were him, it would be the opposite. Like, if I were him, he's saying the same thing. So which one is right? And the answer is that there's no right, you know? Everything is relative. So when you're just feeling so confident in your opinion, and you're thinking that, you know, you know what's good for everyone,
01:01:53
Speaker
what's good for everyone is what's already. Whatever is already, what already is, that's the highest good. There's no, you know, your ego mind isn't going to, you know, twist reality and bend it to your wants and needs. So it's like, it's helped me with empathizing with others and not taking myself so seriously, because I find myself for a while, I found myself
01:02:17
Speaker
you know, being, you know, getting wrapped up in the political news and all that and kind of thinking like, oh, how dare you and all that type of stuff. And then you think about it and you're like, well, none of it is actually the way my ego wants it to be. You know, it's, it's, it's all relative and everything is okay as it is. So the only thing that we can do is move forward with two basic philosophies.
01:02:48
Speaker
that of love and that of learning. So instead of attacking a problem from your philosophical perspective, attack a problem by learning the opposite, by steel manning the opposite. That way you can find the flaws in your own philosophy and also find the strengths in the other one's philosophy. Based in a foundation of love, that's the only way to move the world forward in a positive direction, in my opinion.
01:03:16
Speaker
Yeah, I agree. Yeah, I find the most important thing for me at least is to stop identifying with ideas and ideologies and opinions, you know, just stop identifying with it.
01:03:33
Speaker
because like it's really easy to find an opinion you like and then really make yourself you become that thing and then you defend it like it was your own life and I've stopped trying to do that because I know deep down I know that it's relative and it's not right like
01:03:51
Speaker
I could, you know, in my head create the perfect world and like with all my heart know it's perfect and like this everybody you know will be doing this and that whatever it's just perfect in every way that I can create and to me it's like oh it's a perfect world but for someone else that will be their hell you know what I mean there's no perfect it's it's too relative you know what seems perfect like we're taught in it seems like in the western world
01:04:20
Speaker
We think that our values are righteous and even just innate. They are what's true. This is the way it's supposed to be. So let's say we look across to the Middle East and we're like, it's horrible that they don't let women drive or whatever you want to say.
01:04:37
Speaker
whatever it is. We think that we have to put our values onto everything else because we have it right. But it just as we've seen multiple times when we're trying to country build overseas and all that, it doesn't work because our values aren't absolute and innate and everything. They're relative. So we can look at something and see it as horrible, but maybe to them it's not horrible. I don't know if women driving is the best example, but, um,
01:05:06
Speaker
There's tons of just—there's so many cultural differences that we see that they're maybe horrible, but it's not necessarily so that they're horrible. It's just we think our relative way of life is absolute, and it needs to be—we want it to be absolute for the world because everybody needs to be correct, because we are correct. But in truth, it's just—it's all relative.
01:05:32
Speaker
So there's no—you don't have to have this burning desire inside you to push your beliefs and your values on others. Yeah, we consider ourselves a moral authority in the world, and that is a flawed perspective because you realize that morality is a matter of perspective.
01:05:54
Speaker
If you just look at the different religions of the world, they base themselves in their own ideas of morality. And some of them differ so dramatically that you could never find common ground between them. I mean, the way I look at religions, I do believe that they're all pointing toward the same thing, ultimately. But the fact of the matter is, you can't base the way you think the world should be on your position in the moral hierarchy as being on the top.
01:06:22
Speaker
That's why I say the only way to move the world toward a greater state of progress would be with those two foundations, love and learning.
01:06:34
Speaker
You can't go wrong. Love is always pointing in the right direction. And learning is the only way you can contextualize yourself and position yourself in the world and to truly understand as wide of a breadth of philosophies as possible in order to act in your waking life.
01:06:57
Speaker
Yeah, and I think another important thing is kind of to just even accept the chaos, too. Because, you know, the ideal is great. I agree with everything you just said, and it's probably the best ideal, you know, you could really put out there. But the thing is, it's an ideal, and the ideal is never going to be. It's just not the way things work. And even if we would hypothetically reach that ideal, that still might be like a hell.
01:07:25
Speaker
Because you need the balance, you need the conflict, you need an opponent in a sense. There needs to be something there to fight against. It's necessary. So I think it's also important to just find acceptance in the chaos and even brutality. Basically, my view is not to
01:07:53
Speaker
add to it you know don't join in on the brutality but you have to in some way accept it because a lot of people and I see this now with smartphones it's like it's unprecedented what we see now as far as world news
01:08:11
Speaker
It's unnatural for a human to be able to look at all the horrible things happening in the world in such a short period of time. Like with my phone, I can just really look at some horror and terror that I would never be aware of. And so now you see a lot of people just thinking the world is an awful place.
01:08:30
Speaker
And it's really, it's not an awful place, you know? You have to just accept that, you know, things aren't exactly as your ego wants them to be. And then kind of just pursue love and compassion on top of that. I mean, accept the way the world is and don't, you know, kill yourself trying to fix it. And the thing is a lot of people, they're getting upset like they're trying to fix it without even trying to fix it, you know?
01:08:58
Speaker
Yeah, with order comes chaos. And any idea of utopia is bound to fall victim to eventual chaos because it reminds me of the Buddhist cosmological views of rebirth and reincarnation and how there are different levels of life to be reborn into.
01:09:25
Speaker
Like there are God realms where you think of a utopia and it's a God realm, you know, you're in the God realm and you're experiencing everlasting love and beauty and oneness. Eventually that's going to get boring.
01:09:40
Speaker
That's why the human realm is known as one of the greatest realms to be incarnated into because you experience the highs of the gods and the lows of the hungry ghosts in the animal realms. You experience all of it. And what that essentially boils down to is context.
01:10:00
Speaker
You have the highs, which give context to the lows, which give context to the highs. So you're able to experience the entire gamut. You're not only experiencing hell for eternity. You're not only experiencing love and everlasting compassion for all of eternity.
01:10:17
Speaker
you're able to experience all of it, which is the beauty of being a human. And what that means is that there is probably no such thing as a utopia. And if you're trying to build a utopia based off of your political or theological ideas, then you're probably going to run into a stalemate at certain points in time.
01:10:42
Speaker
And you're going to put a lot of people in hell too. You're going to create a lot of suffering. Yeah, the idea of utopia is still relative. But also what you're saying made me think of Robert Monroe because he wrote about in his book.
01:10:58
Speaker
So he started having the out-of-body experiences and just having insane journeys, just spiritual in nature and meeting with different entities and beings and learning so much. And it changed his life purpose. It changed him.
01:11:19
Speaker
so many ways you know because he was just he was 40 years old when this started happening to him and he had no spirituality like he was just kind of like your average type of business type guy you know and started happening to him and then through time he's like
01:11:34
Speaker
His entire purpose was in his head to go home, kind of what you're talking about, to the God Realm. Through his travels in the Astral and these different realms, he discovered that there was a place that you can get to that is home, that is perfect. It's the Utopia.
01:11:57
Speaker
So he spent so much time like making that his life's mission to work in these realms and get to that place. And eventually he met some really like some higher being that said that, you know, I'll take you home. I can allow you to go there. And, you know, he was like,
01:12:16
Speaker
finally and I've been working so long and hard for this like just I needed this so bad and he was taken there and it was the most beautiful thing there clouds of all colors and he was basically like formless and he was flowing through it all and it was the most beautiful thing ever there was music playing that was like just you know pure ecstasy pure
01:12:38
Speaker
your perfection heaven and he's home. He's like finally I made it home like this is it. This is all he's been working for and he spent all this time there. It felt you know like a while and he's watching the clouds and hearing the music and he watching was like oh just completely blown away and then he saw a cloud go by that looks familiar.
01:12:58
Speaker
It's like this is amazing is like i saw that cloud before. And then he knows the music is starting over like it's the same note that he heard before and the clouds coming by where the same clouds that he saw already is like.
01:13:13
Speaker
And then he was hit with this deep sadness. He's like, this is why I left here. It's like, it gets boring. It's like, this is why you leave home. This is why you leave the God realm. Like, I can't be here anymore. I have to go. And then he left and, you know, came back to his regular life and he was shattered. His whole life purpose was to get home. He got there and it was the most amazing, beautiful thing
01:13:38
Speaker
But he had to leave and now he's kind of lost. He had the purpose to go home and now he's like, what's my purpose? And he continued working through these realms and discovering his purpose. But there's no such thing as something that is even the best thing ever. There's a reason why we're here. I'll put it that way. We're here. If we wanted to be there, we'd be there.
01:14:04
Speaker
And to bring it back, it's the call to action of the hero's journey.
01:14:09
Speaker
So again, you can map all of these types of experiences right back to myth, right back to symbolism. It's all connected. It's all one. That's why I get frustrated a little bit now. And I think back to how I used to be, like the atheist, you would shit on religion and, you know, just be a complete dickhead. Just like pure scientism and think religion is a joke.
01:14:37
Speaker
And now that I moved past that and I really respect religions and I watch other people so flippantly disregard them and speak. Oh, you believe in fairy tales. It's like you have no idea. It's like it's those stories are so powerful and meaningful and they are literally played out.
01:14:54
Speaker
infinitely, it's always happening. The hero's journey is just one example of one of those stories that just has been on repeat for all of eternity. I think back to when I was just like all the people that I see now and get frustrated with. It's interesting.
01:15:15
Speaker
And that's the thing. It's like when I start to find myself getting frustrated with people like that, I just look at them and I, I see myself in them because yo, I was the same way. We're all on our own path.
01:15:31
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, and it's funny cause like at some level, I mean, that is you that you're looking at that you were that at a different time in a sense. And if I'm looking at them in a negative way, it's your, I'm projecting myself onto them. I'm projecting my shadow onto them speaking in Jungian terms.
01:15:54
Speaker
Yeah, but it's just you, you know, that's it. That person is you. And they're doing what you would do. And in a lot of ways, they're doing exactly what you did, meaning the ego you inhabit now. Yeah, it's really crazy stuff, man.
01:16:11
Speaker
Yeah, it's interesting how it all just seems to wrap itself up in a beautiful circle. And when you take psychedelics, that's why I'm kind of feeling like I want to take a journey soon because it really puts it right in front of you. And you could see it perfectly.
Psychedelic Experiences and Learning
01:16:35
Speaker
on my DMT experience when I, yeah, it was like the third time that we did DMT. You mentioned a circle. It really showed that to me in kind of a circle and it was really everything. It was like a shape of a circle and there was life and death happening and basically everything happening within it and kind of all coming together as one.
01:17:00
Speaker
And the imagery and the meaning behind it, it just allows you to understand. And there's, I just don't know if there's any other way to get that understanding. So like I'm right now I'm going to be trying that.
01:17:14
Speaker
the gateway process and lay down work with that. But I'm, I don't know if I'll ever have an experience just like that again, but I feel like I'm seeking it. Like I'm trying to see if I can find that again, that I didn't, I know there's more too. So it's interesting, you know, there's just, it's never ending and it's, it's just like a crazy adventure. It's all mystery, you know?
01:17:39
Speaker
It never, ever ends. Because the more you learn, I've noticed this, like the more I learn about reality and myself, it's like you learn more and then on top of it, it adds more to learn. Like it's ever increasing. It's, it's infinity. So it's like you learn so much. You're like, Oh, I know everything. And then, but I know nothing at the same time. There's so much more to learn. It's crazy. With every answer comes a new question. Yeah.
01:18:07
Speaker
The question is never what you thought it would be. It's like the answers are always so radical that you couldn't have even contemplated the question before getting the answer. The question provides or the answer provides the question. You needed that answer to even contextualize the question that you have after. And a lot of times the answer comes in the form of a question.
01:18:33
Speaker
So there really are no answers when you try to pin down an answer, you realize that it's futile. It's all relative. There's just an endless amount of answers. And the only way to truly answer a question is to experience the answer. Like I'll bring up real quick. Uh, the last mushroom experience I had, I was able to ask the mushroom intelligence, any question it told me, it said, ask me anything. I'll answer any question you have. And I was like, fuck.
01:19:00
Speaker
Yeah, I'm gonna ask it all the burning questions I've ever had every question I would ask it would give me a little wink and it would say I Can't answer that question in English for you. Why are you asking me in English? But I'll give you this it would give me an experience. I
01:19:18
Speaker
And I would experience the answer. And I can't tell you the answer to the question because it wasn't an answer, it was an experience. And I'm not sure if that makes any sense, but to me, it makes perfect sense because I felt it. I felt the answers to the question because when you ask a question in English, you're breaking it down to a relative sense based on mouth noises that we use to describe our environment that we see with our senses.
01:19:42
Speaker
But that's not how to contemplate and answer a real question, a real existential question. You have to experience it. And that's why, like we said earlier in the episode, you can read and read and read and you can philosophize and you can do all that. But ultimately to gain the perspective of seeing the vase in between the two faces, there needs to be an aspect of experience there.
01:20:07
Speaker
Yeah, man. I think that that makes perfect sense because language can never give you the answer. I mean, our language by design is dualistic and relative. Every word is based off of it's relative to something else. And it's dualistic because it can't be non-dual or we'd just be silent in all knowing. So like it's exactly what it is. And that's the same thing that happened with my DMT experiences.
01:20:36
Speaker
I um started to panic a little bit because it comes on so hard and fast like oh shit and then i started just thinking death like you know it just seems to happen and like because you know the fear of death it's pretty powerful so i'd be like i started thinking about you know oh no i'm gonna die everyone is gonna die everyone i love is gonna die what am i gonna do this is horrible death death death and then it you know it showed me the answer it was like
01:21:06
Speaker
No, you don't even know what death is, you know, you're just projecting this concept. And then it showed me it gave me an experience of eternity and infinite love. And then I merged with the thing like I became it. So like, there's no and you know, I'm throwing words out there to try to, you know,
01:21:28
Speaker
you know express the experience but it can't do it even you know a fraction of justice but that's the way the psychedelics work it's like it gives you an experience that shows you the answer you can become the answer
01:21:43
Speaker
but you can't take it back. You can't take it back to this realm because in this realm you only have the tools of your language and your dualistic faculties and your relativity.
01:22:00
Speaker
But that's why it's all of it for me. I think it's so important is to get the answers as you were just getting at. You have to alter consciousness. That's what it is. That's like the key altering consciousness and then doing as I was talking about earlier to the analytical work and the contemplation and introspection doing that
01:22:24
Speaker
brings more, it's more tools you have when you enter the altered consciousness states. So like you do those types of things and then when you're altering your consciousness with psychedelics or whatever methods you might, then you have more tools and understanding when you enter those states.
01:22:42
Speaker
And there are many ways to get there. One of the very first things that psychedelics showed me was that, and this is kind of counterintuitive to any sort of method that you would think is trying to convince you to continue to use it, but
01:22:57
Speaker
It kind of just proves the non-addictive nature of psychedelics. They showed me that there are endless amounts of ways to get to this place. You just found a streamlined shortcut and you know, even understanding that I'm still not convinced that there's a better way. My personal preferred method is psychedelics, but there really are just a multitude of methods for you to experience like the altered state of consciousness.
01:23:26
Speaker
Yeah, I think I'm pretty convinced actually just based off of that one experience that I had the other night that I think this gateway thing is able to do it. I really think it is and there are plenty of accounts of people that no undoubtedly had, you know, these types of experiences and
01:23:49
Speaker
but psychedelics are, I agree, that's like, I think it's the most intense, like, Daredevil, adrenaline junkie, nutcase type of way to do it, like, it's like the hardcore way, I mean, because it's, you know, you smoke DMT, it's like, it's not, because like, you can call it like a shortcut, or whatever you want to call it, but it's not, man, it's like, it just throws you in it, you know, you don't have the time to prepare, it's like, even like a,
01:24:16
Speaker
high-dose mushroom trip. It's like, it's not like you're gonna take this and then I'm just gonna give you some answers. You're gonna go through hell and you're gonna have to fight your way out of it and the fight out of it is where you get the answers and then, you know, you surrender and you're in it all and it feels amazing at that time but it's not just like a quick shortcut, easy, here you go, the answer is it's all fun and games. It's like,
01:24:40
Speaker
I think a lot of people look at it like it's simply a shortcut and it's not um you didn't have to put in the work but you know I find that in doing psychedelics it's it's a ton of work it's just condensed into a short period of time it's like I heard somebody say they smoke DMT and I think it was on the documentary the spirit molecule and the guy was like
01:25:03
Speaker
he smoked or he they did it intravenously i guess they ivied it and he said that in the 15 minute trip it's like he gained 10 000 years of knowledge or something and it's like that's what it's like it's like when you're in in the realm of of eternity and there's no time there's nothing easy about it you know it's it's not short it's not anything
01:25:29
Speaker
So I think for me, I haven't found a method yet that can compete with psychedelics, but I do have a feeling that this gateway process is going to bring me to some type of place similar.
01:25:45
Speaker
Maybe completely different though. A lot of the, uh, experiences people have with this process is, you know, out of body experiences and, uh, you know, meeting entities and being formless, all sorts of strange things. It's going to be different, but I have the feeling that it will work and I have at least the belief system to make it work. You know, I'm not going to be fighting it and thinking it's bullshit. So that's important.
01:26:13
Speaker
Yeah, there are many avenues to take, but yeah, I mean, giving it some more thought as you were talking, like in all reality.
01:26:22
Speaker
In my little world, I really don't think there's any, any other way to get to those particular spots of psychedelics get you, which is why these ancient cultures have been using them for millennia. Like it's, there's something special about these chemical gateways into the realm of the unconscious, the God realm, whatever you want to call it. I just.
01:26:45
Speaker
I don't think there's any other way to truly get that experience. These experiences are so incredible. Well, dude, I, I, I agree with you in a sense, like in a sense. Well, cause there's a part of me that wants to agree with that. Cause that's my experience. But dude, if you read the experiences of people that have done this gateway thing, it's insane. And see, I've read, I've also read, uh, Robert Monroe's books and like, dude, his experiences are.
01:27:14
Speaker
insane, like straight up psychedelics. Some of them are crazier. It's like, that's why I think for me, I think the methods are, and these are the ones I love, so good for me, I guess, psychedelics and dreams, like dream states and that kind of, I want to lump in the gateway thing with it because it, what happens with, um,
01:27:40
Speaker
the gateway process is you're doing the uh the method and you'll get these clicks what will happen is click and then you'll your consciousness will you won't be there anymore you click into a different realm or sometimes we'll click
01:27:56
Speaker
a person will click out of body and then you'll be in the astral or moving around but some of these this gateway process it's not just for out-of-body experiences out-of-body experience can happen but what will happen for people is they'll click and then they will experience something purely psychedelic like they'll be in a different realm they'll click out of existence basically
Comparing Gateway and Psychedelic Experiences
01:28:21
Speaker
and then they'll click and then be brought back and then they'll be hearing the tape like 10 minutes later like they'll have missed 10 minutes of the tape because they clicked out they clicked into a different state of consciousness completely that's not you know the human state that they were just in
01:28:38
Speaker
I'm gonna have to try this stuff, too. Well, yeah, dude, try the first one. It's 33 minutes, dude. I say you just lay down, put your headphones on, and just... Like, just... It's very easy. This one, like, really was, like, just relax me. And, you know, I didn't have some crazy psychedelic experience, no crazy visuals or anything, but what I did have was a state of, like, my body isn't here. Like, it was like there was no body. It was so still and, like, relaxed. It was, like,
01:29:07
Speaker
I was fully present and aware because it was almost like a hypnagogic state, but all my, my faculties were there. So I was more aware than, you know, the hypnagogic state where you're kind of like almost asleep and awake at the same time. This was like, I'm fully awake, but my body is, it didn't feel like it was there. I had to move it to make sure I was like, I'm sitting there with my eyes closed. I'm like, am I floating outside of my body right now? I don't feel my body at all. And then I moved my finger. I was like, oh, my body's right here.
01:29:36
Speaker
But I was having, I had a little bit of visuals also of myself floating out. So I was like, am I floating out? Like I can't feel my body, but I was still there. And it, but it was, it's powerful for me just doing a quick test run. So I know, you know, working through with that and, you know, going through 42 tapes or whatever and, and practicing them. I think that.
01:30:01
Speaker
And based off of what I read because I've read a lot of stuff about this but you know Robert Monroe stuff I've read a lot of his writing and I've you know read stuff on just the gateway project in general and people have come to the same realizations that we are talking about right now without ever having touched the psychedelic.
01:30:22
Speaker
So that's what it is. It's like you're able to access the same places, to learn the same lessons, and come to the same realizations, whether or not you're experiencing the same thing. Because I think when people say, oh, you can get to these places without psychedelics,
01:30:39
Speaker
People like me tend to think like, Oh, you're going to have a DMT experience with just your breath. And it's not that they're saying that I think what they're saying is that you're going to go to these other realms or you're going to go to these other places where you're going to learn the same types of lessons. You're going to have the same outcome, you know, as you would, if you were to take a high dose mushroom trip or have a DMT trip, not that you're going to have the same exact experience. So that's where I think the disconnect would be.
01:31:07
Speaker
Yeah, I don't think there will ever, because even all of those things are never the same exact experience. So I think what you can get though is an equal, even like I know how powerful DMT is, but I do believe and I think through my belief it could happen is that you can have an equally powerful experience without the DMT with just your consciousness because you can put yourself into a state that is totally non-human.
01:31:36
Speaker
Robert Monroe, he experienced pure formlessness. He's no longer a form. He experienced telepathy, he experienced all the things we talk about with psychedelics without the psychedelic. But it's not like he was in his human body experiencing it. He wasn't like here and like, I'm a human experiencing this stuff and learning lessons. No, he was a consciousness completely different when he experienced these things. Same way you are when you take a psychedelic.
01:32:04
Speaker
I don't know, I'm gonna go through with this gateway shit and see where it takes me. Yeah, we'll see how it goes. I'm gonna give it a shot, too. And maybe we can have, you know, another episode where we discuss it and kind of talk about our experiences. But the next time we meet, dude, is episode 50. Can you believe it? Uh-oh. Are we gonna celebrate with something?
01:32:28
Speaker
Yeah, we're gonna do something special for the 50th for sure. Uh, we won't really reveal it. We kind of almost did at one point a little bit, but we'll do something special for the 50th. Yeah, the 50 will be a banger.
01:33:45
Speaker
you