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38. Perpetual Flow Of Foundational Change
66 Plays2 years ago
In this week’s episode, we go all over the place. The conversation in retrospect has a lot to do with change, and the fact that we are living a world in which everything is happening here and now. Understanding that the present moment is the only thing that’s happening, and its everything that’s happening, has been a very important staple in our paths.
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Music By Nathan Willis RIP
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Transcript
Introduction and Theme
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Pursuit of Infinity. In this week's episode we go all over the place. The conversation in retrospect has a lot to do with change and the fact that we're living in a world in which everything is happening here and now. Understanding that the present moment is the only thing that's happening and it's everything that's happening at the same time has been a very important staple in our paths.
00:00:22
Speaker
But before we get to it, for all things Pursuit of Infinity, visit our newly published website, pursuitofinfinity.com, where we have all of our episodes and links for everywhere you can follow us. So if you like what we do, head on over there and show us some support.
00:00:38
Speaker
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00:01:02
Speaker
Check us out on YouTube. The channel is up. All of our episodes are there, so if you prefer some visuals and to put some faces to the names, subscribe and keep up with us over there. We're also on Instagram at Pursuit of Infinity Pod, so give us a follow. Again, all this can be accessed at pursuitofinfinity.com. And without further delay, thank you so much for listening, and I hope you enjoy this week's discussion.
Philosophical Questions on Identity
00:01:49
Speaker
I was listening to a podcast the other day and they were talking about what's called like the boat or the ship allegory. Have you heard about this? I think so.
00:02:01
Speaker
So the allegory is that if you have like a wooden ship and over time you replace each part of that ship after say 10 or 20 years, not a single part of that ship is the original part. Like none of the wood that is used on the deck, none of the paint, none of it is the original boat or the original materials used to create the boat. So the question being, is the boat the same boat?
00:02:32
Speaker
Yeah, that's a weird one because I could see it go either way. I would think like first what pops into my head is no, it's obviously not because it consists of all new pieces or you could kind of think of it as yes, it's absolutely the same ship, just like an evolved form of it because at one point, at least one
00:02:58
Speaker
piece that's on the boat would have touched the quote unquote original boat. You know, the final new piece that you replace on the boat would have been a part of the original. Oh, I like that. Yeah. Or even like the very first part that you replace would have been surrounded by the original parts, right? Yeah. That I don't know. What would you say would be the answer to that? I mean, probably it's both.
00:03:28
Speaker
It's like one of those paradoxes of language, because then you have to ask yourself, what do you mean by the original boat? Do you mean it has like the original soul of the boat? Is the captain and the crew the same? Is it taking the same voyages? Like what do you consider it the same?
Memory, Consciousness, and Dreams
00:03:46
Speaker
Does the same mean that it has to be physically the same? Because if you look at our bodies and ourselves,
00:03:54
Speaker
Um, apparently every seven years or so or something like that, not a biologist, but they say that every about seven years, every single cell in your body will have transformed and, um, gone through, what do they call it? Is it mitosis when a cell divides? So you don't have any of the original cells that you had from seven years ago, making you like a different human every seven years.
00:04:22
Speaker
Yeah, I've heard that too. And clearly you would say that you are the same person, but same as the boat, it is a slow process. It's not, it's not like it happens overnight. Like you said, it takes seven years.
00:04:37
Speaker
And with that regard, we consider ourselves the same person materially as we were seven years ago. But then also, if you're thinking in like a non-material sense, we clearly aren't the same people that we were seven years ago. Like materially, you want to say yes, but spiritually, psychologically, experientially, we aren't that person.
00:05:04
Speaker
Is it just the memories that make us think we're the same person? Like the memories that we carry with us, is that what it makes us think? That even though we are technically different in every single way that we feel like we're the same person.
00:05:22
Speaker
I think, yeah, the memory is basically it, really. I mean, think about it. It's strange. It's kind of like a dream. Like when you wake up in your dream, you already have a story. You're in the story already. There's already a narrative happening.
00:05:37
Speaker
And it's like the same thing in real life. You wake up and immediately, there might be like a brief moment before you're fully aware of who you are and what's going on that, you know, you don't feel this, but boom, then it's like suddenly the narrative, the story hits. And then all of a sudden, you know, the life you've lived and you know where you're supposed to be.
00:06:00
Speaker
And it's just, it's all your memories just coming to you at that time. And then that it's just like now you're back in the story. We would never know it. But this is gonna sound kind of weird. Like if, if you look at time as a nonlinear dimension, and
00:06:22
Speaker
Uh, if you look at time as everything is happening at the same time, all the time, like it's all just one continuous happening, then you would never know if like.
00:06:34
Speaker
You wake up every morning and your consciousness wakes up into a different time every morning. But when you would wake up, say I woke up and it was 2030, I would wake up having all of the memories of my life up until 2030, which means I'd have all the memories up until the night I went to bed before I woke up. So.
00:07:01
Speaker
You would never know if every time you go to sleep and you wake up, you wake up within a different time in your biological life. Yeah. And even you could wake up as a different person. Cause like I said, when you wake up, it's like the story begins. Suddenly you become your memories and um,
00:07:23
Speaker
It's just crazy because it's impossible to prove anything in the past really like through your experience. It's like almost the same type of thing when you think about you can never prove that anybody but yourself is conscious. Like I can sit here and talk with you and same same way with the dream. Like I can infer that you're conscious that you're having the same sentient experience as me.
00:07:51
Speaker
Or in reality, you could actually just be like a dream character who's not experiencing anything. And I'm just projecting you into the world, kind of like a solipsism. It's just these weird things that you think about and it's kind of just exists out of the possibility of proof. And that kind of brings back something that you said in our last episode, which was if you're looking at your dreams,
00:08:22
Speaker
Which brain is dreaming the dream? Is it the brain of the, of the character or of you in your dream? Is the brain of that thing experiencing the dream or is the dream being experienced by the brain of the sleeper?
00:08:38
Speaker
And I think that's an insane question to ask. I think about that question daily, ever since you said it. And it kind of centers me. It makes me think about what I define as reality or what I define as knowing or like epistemology. It brings that into the forefront. It's very, very cool. And so I got to thank you for asking that question.
Meditation and Perception
00:09:04
Speaker
Yeah and I think because I personally find brains to be overrated basically the credit we give them because if you wake up you assume that your brain is doing all the work but when you wake up in your dream you assume your brain is doing all the work. It's the same thing and so you got to ask which brain is actually doing the work or is it just like fractal in nature?
00:09:31
Speaker
That's why I think that's a good analogy to think about because for me, it brings into question materialism and physicalism. That's why I say brains are overrated because in the dream, like we're talking when you're dreaming,
00:09:48
Speaker
The person that's in the dream has a brain that they think is creating the reality. And you can extrapolate that out to this reality. And I always say I think reality is mostly like dream-like in nature. So this is the dream as well.
00:10:05
Speaker
This is the dream of our egos, of who we are in this dream, in like a physical time and place. And we believe that the brain is what is allowing us to perceive this quote unquote material reality. But I think that all went out the window when you have an experience that is beyond your body. Like you can experience something outside of yourself in this form.
00:10:34
Speaker
your consciousness is able to experience something outside of time in a whole different form. So for me, that just kind of smashed the whole materialism thing and made me think about kind of how many assumptions we have about understanding, especially with dreams. What pops into my head is
00:10:58
Speaker
If there is a consciousness or some sort of a field that exists outside of our brains, because, I mean, you and I can pretty much agree that our brains, in our opinion, do not create consciousness or consciousness does not originate in the brain. So is it, is it that the ego is a system that is created by the brain in order to filter and sort of keep
00:11:27
Speaker
and maintain control over like an overflow of consciousness if there wasn't a system like that to do it? I mean, I think it could be looked at that way. And that does make sense in a way. But I would look at it as more of as you are consciousness. And you are dreaming the dream of a human. And in this dream world that you're imagining,
00:11:53
Speaker
Brains are what drives the character. But you could, that's not actually what it is, it's just the dream. And in this dream, brains are important. That's why we think they're important. That's why in this dream, if I bash your head with something, you'll still have an effect on your brain. And someone will be able to look at your brain and say, oh, his brain's damaged, now his consciousness has been changed.
00:12:16
Speaker
But that's just because it's an aspect of the dream. So like, just like a dream, when you go to sleep, there's like different rule sets to each dream you have. There's always consistencies. So one of the consistencies of this dream of who we are right now is that our brain is important to our function and our perception of this dream. So as this reality that we're in right now speaking in exists outside of
00:12:44
Speaker
The dream reality, what do you think exists outside of this reality or this dream reality? I don't think that, I think that's the thing. There is no, it's not like anything exists outside of this dream reality. This is, this is it. So does that make this dream reality more important so to speak than the dream reality that we have when we go to sleep?
00:13:08
Speaker
No, I think it's the same thing. Just the same way when you wake up into your dream, you have the whole narrative arc behind you. And that's why people never know when they're dreaming. So basically, we could be dreaming right now. When you dream, there's a reason why you run away from monsters or run away from a bear or something. It's because you believe it's real and the narrative behind you tells you that if you don't get away from the bear, you're gonna die. So all that exists, and even us talking about the dreams,
00:13:38
Speaker
It's just part of that narrative that we woke up with this morning. So you can get lucid in a dream and you know that you're dreaming. Do you think there's a way to become a quote unquote lucid in this reality to know that this is a dream or this is an illusion to maybe psychedelics being a tool for that?
00:14:01
Speaker
Yeah, I think for sure. I mean, that's kind of, that's what I think the whole gist of it is, is to understand what this is. And I think, I mean, a dream is just the best thing I can compare it to, to what this seems to be, because there's nothing else like it. I mean, when you just experience reality as it is,
00:14:24
Speaker
It's pretty crazy when you just drop yourself down into this moment and look around and try to erase everything from your mind and just experience everything at once like what is happening. It's just those story arcs that we have when we start adding concepts and memories on top of it that you know it starts to make sense logically to us. Makes me think of meditation as a way of
00:14:53
Speaker
quieting the chatter that creates the stories that take our minds on a ride. And if you ever meditated before, when you first start meditating, you really do get caught on those thought streams. And, uh, just start by just telling yourself a tiny little story and then you'll just get caught in that thought. And before you know it.
00:15:15
Speaker
You'll, you'll be in a state where you're realizing that your, your thoughts have taken you away from the present moment. And that's when you get back to your breath and you can, you can continue your, you know, your meditation, even though people think that when that happens, they're not doing it right. That is what meditation is for. Um, and it does seem that that's.
00:15:39
Speaker
Probably one of the best tools to break yourself free of what we think we're stuck in here in this world. Yeah. And it's not easy to do those meditations. And it's funny, I hear so many people say, if you bring up meditation to them, so many people will say, oh, I can't do it. I think they have ADD or ADHD or something.
00:16:04
Speaker
No, it's not supposed to be easy. That's how it is for everybody. It's a hard thing to do. So when you say, oh, I can't do it, it just means that you have to practice more. It's hard. I mean, sometimes it's easier than other times. I've noticed that doing breath work before meditation is, I mean, it changes it. It makes it so much easier for me personally. But it's not supposed to be easy, at least when you start.
00:16:32
Speaker
Yeah. It's like going to the gym or something. You know, I can't bench 250 pounds, but I could, I went to the gym for two years straight or something like that. I could, it's just like you have to build up using the tools around you with the strength to achieve the goal. Cause nothing in life is easy and nothing in life just comes in an instant to you, especially the things that are worth working for and, and, uh, and worth having.
00:16:59
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, anything that's worthwhile takes time and effort, no matter what it is.
Embracing Uncertainty
00:17:07
Speaker
One thing that I've like started to do more consciously is practice the art of not knowing, which would mean like it's like pretty extreme, but it's really helpful. So like an exercise that you could do would be like
00:17:25
Speaker
to sit here right now and close your eyes. And then when you close your eyes, you want to forget the past and pretend that it doesn't exist. And then try to forget that there's a future ahead of you. And try to relieve yourself from all of those thoughts of your past and the future. And then you got to take it even further and forget that you're in this room.
00:17:56
Speaker
And beyond that, don't just forget that you're in the room. Realize that you actually don't know if you're in the room. Not like conceptually. If you're sitting here with your eyes closed, you actually don't know if you're in the room and you don't know that you're on the planet earth. You don't know anything with the eyes closed. Um, and it's about forgetting all these assumptions that you have and
00:18:23
Speaker
It's actually a practice, not just like a conceptual exercise that you practice that you don't know what you think you know. It's like an epistemological exercise. So like, for instance, we're sitting in this room right here.
00:18:37
Speaker
And to practice the exercise would be for me to actually not know what's outside the door. See, I can tell myself the whole story of what's out there and I can assume it's all out there, but I actually don't know what's out there. You know, I could assume who's upstairs or you could actually just not know. And I think that's a powerful exercise to practice yourself. There's a meditation that I heard
00:19:06
Speaker
I think it was Ram Dass or somebody, I don't know who it was, uh, was, was like guiding it. And it was this like meditation where you, you breathe in and then as you breathe out, you envision that you're breathing out golden flakes. Then you breathe them back in and you see them come in and then you breathe them back out. And as you breathe them in, you notice at the bottom of your, of the pit of your stomach,
00:19:32
Speaker
There's a tiny, tiny little Buddha that is being formed by these golden flakes. So every time you breathe them in, the Buddha gets a little bit bigger and a little bit bigger until the Buddha is eventually taking up like your whole stomach, then a bit bigger. It's taken up your whole chest.
00:19:51
Speaker
bigger, bigger, bigger, it takes up your body. Then it gets bigger and it takes up the space of your whole house. Then your whole town, then your whole city, then your whole state, then your whole country, the whole world, and then eventually up into the galaxy and all of the cosmos. And I think it sort of relates in a way to, to the meditation you just described because you're taking your perspective of in this case, big and small.
00:20:20
Speaker
and you're erasing that perspective. You're envisioning yourself and you're experiencing yourself as very tiny when you're inside of your body with this Buddha. And then you're also experiencing yourself as the entire cosmos, which is all that we can conceive of being our physical reality. So I do think that it's like similar in in methodology to what you just described. Yeah, it's like also that makes me think of
00:20:49
Speaker
the understanding that size doesn't actually exist, absolutely. Yeah, I've heard of that meditation before, and I tried it very briefly. I've never actually practiced it. But I've heard of that, and I did try it. But something like that, I think I'd need to really invest my time and practice into. But conceptually, it sounds great. It would work really well.
00:21:15
Speaker
Yeah, it's amazing how many forms of meditation are out there.
00:21:21
Speaker
And it's like, they're all psychological methods to get you to do the same thing, just to get you to stay within the present moment. And it's almost like with each of these methods, like you're tricking your default load network, or like you're tricking your ego into shutting itself down so that you can be in the present moment. And that's why I think some of these methods might sound weird to like a lay person or someone who hasn't really been entrenched in this, in this world.
00:21:50
Speaker
But they do seem to be like tricks that you play on yourself to get yourself to be in the present moment. And also there's like you said, there's so many different methods of meditation, but there's also a concentration, which is basically another method of meditation. But it's kind of the opposite where like a lot of meditations you're trying to empty your mind. Like a concentration practice is
00:22:16
Speaker
There's so many different ways you can do it, but it's just intense focus on one thing. And I find it harder to do for long periods of time. It's actually pretty strenuous.
00:22:29
Speaker
The way I do it is just sitting down like I were to meditate and close my eyes and I touch my index finger and my thumb together on each hand and press them together. And then what I do is like 110% of your focus goes into that feeling and that's what you concentrate on.
00:22:52
Speaker
And you can do this concentration method with like anything. You can envision an apple in your head and just focus on that. Or you can even do it with your eyes open and just focus on an object, like a bottle of water. You could just stare at it intensely and just try to put all of your concentration onto it. And very soon you'll realize like, wow, this is difficult. It's not as easy as it sounds. Um, but I like to do the fingers, um,
00:23:21
Speaker
it's hard to do but once I've noticed you get to this spot where what I kind of end up feeling the sensation I get is like I am the feeling you know because by the time you're focused on it so hard that the outside thoughts on the
00:23:41
Speaker
story, narrative of your past, all the invasive thoughts you have are so focused in on the finger that all that exists is that sensation. For me, the feeling of touch works best for concentration exercise. I found it even harder to just use a mental image or an object.
00:24:03
Speaker
I liked the sensation of touch and it gave me a, that's the only one that worked really well for me and like getting me to a state of just being the touch. But I recommend doing that. I would only do it for, I started doing it for two minutes at a time. So I never got, I don't know how long the longest is that I've done it, but it's not like meditation in the sense that it's way harder to do it for a long period of time.
00:24:30
Speaker
Is the result the same or do you find that there's like a little bit of a difference in the result? I think I feel like yes and no. I mean, it's also what I would just call like a different experience. The result is like similar.
00:24:48
Speaker
But it's different, you know, it's more active rather than like a do nothing meditation where you just sit there, do nothing, watch your thoughts pass by and just sit there. It's more active and it's harder. But the result is powerful.
00:25:06
Speaker
It's not quite the same, though. Like I said, the best it's worked for me was it did clear the mind. And I ended up not even identifying with the touch, like feeling it. It's just that's what it was like I was being the touch, basically. And it I couldn't even feel like the rest of my body, you know, I'm just feeling that sensation. And when you have your eyes closed long enough,
00:25:32
Speaker
You know, your body kind of starts to fade away, especially if you're sitting very still and you just sit and then all I could feel in my body was just this touch of my fingers. And, but it wasn't even like my fingers anymore because I wasn't thinking about the body.
Psychedelics and Meditation
00:25:49
Speaker
It was just the sensation of what it feels like to touch your fingers together. It's interesting. I think the lesson from that type of a meditation and the way you described it,
00:26:03
Speaker
is that, and you said it was that you're not identifying with the feeling, but you are the feeling. And I think that's the major message behind that meditation in general is that like you are everything and you can focus in on your body or an inanimate object. Uh, or anything, anything within your grasp or your aspect mentally or physically, and you can feel that same feeling of I am this, like you are being it.
00:26:33
Speaker
Yeah, like with that same concentration exercise, it's like they were kind of stages to it. But like at one point towards the end of the exercise, I did have that. I was in that spot with, you know, pressing my fingers together. And this was after doing it for a couple of minutes and kind of my ego and everything started to fade a little bit. And
00:26:58
Speaker
I was so immersed into the sensation that I started to like identify with it of like kind of just, Oh, that's me not saying that mentally, but like just knowing that's what I was. And then it just, which I think was the coolest part was the next level. Like I went beyond that after another minute or so.
00:27:19
Speaker
And I just let go of that idea and was just purely being the feeling like this is just what is rather than the thought left of identifying with the feeling and then just knowing that the feeling was what all there was in that moment. You know what I mean? It makes me think, what are these people who are like meditating in caves for days straight experiencing?
00:27:49
Speaker
Yeah, who knows, dude, there's people that like will just sit and stare at a wall for two weeks. And that's kind of like concentration. I don't know how you do that because with that exercise, it is concentration because these people, like it's different, you know, sitting in a cave and meditating insane. But with the staring at the wall is they're actually staring at the wall. So they are concentrating. But I mean, you got to imagine.
00:28:14
Speaker
meditating in a cave for long periods of time like that, first off, you're immersed in darkness. I mean, in that type of meditation, you're going to experience some psychedelic effects for sure. I mean, if I meditate, you know, just for half hour,
00:28:32
Speaker
and I'm just sitting, you know, in my room or something, I start to get, um, some kind of like closed eye visuals and that, you know, you start to see some things, not like as intense as like, you know, a peak of a psychedelic, but you do get like a little taste of that. So if you're, you know, doing it for such a long period of time, I feel like the effects will be close to that of a psychedelic or something in, in that ball pit, at least.
00:29:02
Speaker
Dude, have you ever heard of the darkness retreats that people do? You ever hear Aubrey Marcus talk about it? Yeah, dude, that's, that's terrifying. But he described as DMT visuals that he thought DMT was being released from his brain because he was seeing things that were indistinguishable from a DMT trip.
00:29:20
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, even if you've been in a pitch dark room for even not even that long of a period of time, you'll start to like see stuff. And same like if you've ever been outside at night and there's no like moonlight, it's just pitch dark and you're outside. You'll like think you're seeing things, you know, and I would imagine it's just a very intensive version of that. I think that's why
00:29:48
Speaker
Like Terrence McKenna would advise taking mushrooms in silent darkness and darkness being a pretty important part of that because you're able to see the full breadth of you, like the mindscape that the psilocybin is creating in your brain. Yeah. It's, it's like, um, at that point it's pure mind, you know, there's no distractions. It's a whole different experience.
00:30:18
Speaker
when you just sit there with your eyes closed, when you're taking a psychedelic because it's easy to get distracted or immersed into something and it will be profound, but it's not quite as profound as just the pure mind state.
00:30:33
Speaker
I've never done psilocybin in silent darkness. That's a whole other aspect that I haven't really ever explored, like auditory hallucinations or the auditory experiences. I've always listened to music and for me I really enjoy that and I am curious what it would be like to actually experience the silent darkness.
00:31:02
Speaker
Yeah, cause he says like, you know, don't listen to music. It creates its own music. And it's like, I really wonder, you know, I wonder what it would be like to have the auditory hallucination hallucinations of just a pure mushroom experience. Cause I've never done that either. I'm quite frankly terrified to try that.
00:31:23
Speaker
I mean, I thinking about it, I'm rarely ever in silent darkness. I mean, even when I go to bed, there's usually some type of noise, maybe the TV or a fan or something. It's not easy. And plus, you're going to sleep. So, you know, you're gonna fall asleep shortly. It's really not easy to sit alone, like even with meditation, sit alone with your thoughts and darkness and quiet.
00:31:47
Speaker
So I can't imagine doing it full of energy on psilocybin, just forcing yourself to be alone with yourself. Nothing to distract you. Nothing to even think about or look at other than within yourself. That's got to be really intense. It's something that I want to do. But every time I end up doing mushrooms, I think like,
00:32:12
Speaker
The experience that I want to have isn't that, you know, it's that, but with music basically, you know, and, but that makes it a totally different experience. I could imagine totally different. Yeah, I would think, and I think that that would be very dose dependent as well, or at least it would be dose dependent, um, as to how difficult it would be to stay still. Cause I know that at a certain dose.
00:32:35
Speaker
whenever I've taken like pretty high doses, it really just like it lays you out. And like, I don't want to move most of the time. Yeah. And I'd say that happens pretty shortly. Like when it comes to dose, like, you know, even as soon as you get to an eighth, I'd say that happens. Um,
00:32:54
Speaker
And that's one of the things I really like about mushroom. I've done acid only a handful of times. And for me, it was different in that aspect. When I did acid, I didn't really have the same chill sensation of just kind of laying back.
00:33:12
Speaker
For me, acid is more of an energized trip and more interactive and creatively driven than for me the mushroom experience, which is chilled, laid back, introspective, and feels more natural in a sense. I think that was a beautiful description of both. I think in a nutshell, that's exactly right. And then DMT is like, I don't know, some sort of rocket ship that just dwarfs them all or something.
00:33:38
Speaker
Yeah, DMT is just shut up and listen. It's gonna take you out of this reality or put you in it so deep actually that you're gonna have to question everything.
00:33:53
Speaker
Interestingly enough though, it's funny. I was talking to in the episode that I just released, actually Adam Tabarro. He was telling me, uh, he brought up a pretty interesting point that is like a pretty obvious, uh, but that LSD acid is like way, way more potent microgram per microgram than DMT or than any psychedelic. Because I mean, think about it. You take it in micrograms like.
00:34:19
Speaker
Tiny, tiny, tiny amounts are psychoactive. If you took like 200 micrograms of DMT, nothing would happen. You couldn't, you probably couldn't even measure that out in like normal free based DMT. Yeah, that's true. I wonder. I mean, it was created in a lab. So I wonder if that has something to do with it. I mean, it's maybe just purely potent. I don't know.
00:34:47
Speaker
I think you're right. And I think a lot of these research chemicals that were created in labs probably share a lot of the same attributes. And it's just like my weird bias that doesn't make any sense actually, but like I love mushrooms because it's natural. I mean, but what does that even mean? Um, but that's my bias. But when you think about it, everything in existence is natural.
00:35:12
Speaker
You know, the lamp sitting in front of us is natural. You know, we like to, as human beings, put ourselves outside of everything and tell ourselves that we're unnatural and anything we create is natural. But a beehive we consider natural, even though the bee created it. It just used the, um, it used its surroundings and whatever it had available to it and created something. And that's the same thing we're doing.
00:35:41
Speaker
Have you ever heard the, um, I think it was Maria Sabina and some of her people, her followers that said after she gave, uh, our Gordon Watson, or as she said, the white man, uh, the mushroom, and he brought it back to America. It stopped working. Like, uh, we took the God out of it or something like that. Um,
00:36:03
Speaker
And that begs the question, is there a difference between ingesting, uh, like lab grade synthetic psilocybin or silosan, or is like, is it better than like the mushroom itself? I know when it comes to dosage.
00:36:20
Speaker
I think it's better because you can hone the dosage in way more than with mushrooms. Mushrooms, you can weigh out the grams, but you don't know how potent each of the mushrooms are that you have. If they're from a different batch, if they're from the same batch, I've seen some that come, that came from the same batch that were like, there was no psilocybin or no psilocin in it. Like it almost was, it almost didn't work. And then others, uh, from the same batch were just insanely potent. So I think in terms of dosage, you can.
00:36:50
Speaker
get a better idea as to what you're getting and what you're giving yourself. Um, but yeah, I don't know, man. I really do love the idea that, uh, like the system of earth brings about the growth of the mushrooms as opposed to like, you know, synthetically creating it.
00:37:07
Speaker
But at the same time, the system of Earth brings us about, which brings about our synthetic shit too. But either way, I still have that same bias.
Fear, Love, and Ego
00:37:20
Speaker
And as far as dose, I found it very interesting too. Of course, the potency, it's real and it really matters. But I've noticed also, it's like your mindset also creates the potency too.
00:37:36
Speaker
I've noticed since I was meditating more and kind of doing the work outside of psychedelics a lot more, I was getting way more powerful experiences on smaller doses. And I believe that's because what I brought to it and my outlook going into the trip. Prior to me really getting into any of this, I could take an eighth
00:38:04
Speaker
and, you know, have a pretty, you know, potent trip. But now I feel like I could take a gram and a half to two grams and have a more potent trip than the eighth would have given me. Um, same potency mushrooms. You know what I mean? It's, it's weird. I've also taken mushrooms when I wasn't really feeling like the trip, like I didn't really want to that much. I wasn't like super engaged and I didn't,
00:38:32
Speaker
have very much enthusiasm and it kind of, I think, dulled the experience altogether. It decreased the potency in a way. I think our minds play a major role in even the potency of the trip, clearly.
00:38:51
Speaker
And I think fear, um, being an aspect of the mind that has a big part of it as well. Like if you're getting bogged down during an experience by fear, you're not allowing yourself to explore like the depths of the potential of the experience. And of course, fear is something that is natural when you're taking a psychedelic, but there's a difference between feeling the fear, witnessing it, seeing it, understanding it.
00:39:19
Speaker
maybe maybe turning toward it in a way to understand it. And the difference between that and
00:39:30
Speaker
allowing the fear to dictate how you're going to react. Um, and usually that manifests itself in someone who's just refusing to submit and surrender to the experience, because I think that's, that's a major, the major role of surrender is to, uh, diminish fear or maybe to not attach yourself to fear so that you can like immerse yourself in the experience.
00:39:58
Speaker
Yeah, because all fear is it's all because of your attachment to the ego. So the only reason you're afraid is because you're afraid of your your ego to be hurt or like to die, you know, all that. And it's interesting, like paradoxically.
00:40:16
Speaker
The more you like, like you start having a fearful experience, unless you just submit to it and surrender, you end up falling into it deeper. Like it's like misery loves company, that kind of thing. Like the fear will grow and on a psychedelic, it can hit levels of fear that
00:40:38
Speaker
are so beyond anything that you experienced in your day-to-day life, the average fears that you feel in your normal life. The fear on a psychedelic is existential and really deep and horrible.
00:40:56
Speaker
counterintuitively, if you just like look into it and surrender, it turns into, you know, majesty and like you can. And that's for me, like when the kind of ego death happens, it's just the moment when you surrender to the fear and understand that you aren't that thing that's afraid. There's nothing that can hurt you because you are, you know, the infinite, you are the dreamer, you are the thing that
00:41:24
Speaker
is, you know, imagining the ego. And I think going through that experience and understanding that fear is a transmutable emotion that doesn't actually have any longevity to it. You can translate that into your daily life. And when you're in a situation that normally you'd be scared in, instead of igniting that fight or flight mode, you're able to rest in the present moment and sort of analyze the situation for what it is.
00:41:52
Speaker
because you're not allowing that fear to get the best of you because you know that that fear isn't real almost. It's like it's something that doesn't last and it's something that when surrendered to vanishes. Yeah, it controls. It can control you. Like fear is all of our number one enemies. Like that's the number one enemy of a human being is fear and to live fearlessly is to live in love.
00:42:22
Speaker
Yeah, that's not to say that we don't all still experience that fear, even though we have that experience of transmuting it. We still experience the fear. Yeah, you'd have to be like some guy sitting in a cave for weeks to, you know, get rid of that fear. But to understand it is important.
00:42:42
Speaker
One thing that helps me with fear is the teaching or understanding that everything is love, not just that like stereotypical hippie phrase like, oh, it's all love, man. Like, you know, not like when you really break it down to everything being love, like all of your emotions are actually love. And that's something whenever I'm feeling a quote unquote negative emotion, what happens for me that is very helpful
00:43:11
Speaker
is that I try, you know, if I'm being conscious and mindful in the moment, I stop and realize the emotion that I'm actually feeling is love. And then you have to ask yourself, well, what are you loving? So like, if I'm, you know, feeling angry at someone,
00:43:29
Speaker
then usually what it is is actually I'm just loving myself, like the ego in a prideful way. Like if I'm in an argument with somebody and I'm mad at them, really I'm just experiencing love for myself that's so deep that they are threatening it, you know, in that moment. And every negative emotion you feel is that. It's just usually love for your ego or your ideas that you identify with.
00:43:54
Speaker
And fear is the same. It's usually an intense love of the ego that you're afraid to let go of that's threatening your ego and all the things that you identify with.
The Nature of Love and Reality
00:44:06
Speaker
But in actuality, it's all just love in different twisted forms. And that's another thing on a psychedelic, when you have that
00:44:16
Speaker
ego death, I think that's why you experience like pure love. Because you can realize if you're not identifying with yourself as the ego, then every emotion that exists is only love. And I think that's one of the strongest experiences I've had on a psychedelic like with the DMT trip, it was more of it was understanding that all is love.
00:44:41
Speaker
And you can, you know, rationally get there too. I mean, the experience is everything, but you can logically, you know, if you're being mindful and conscious in your everyday life, and if you can stop yourself every time you are feeling a negative emotion and ask yourself, why are you feeling it? And what am I actually loving?
00:45:02
Speaker
And is that the right thing to do? And usually what I find is that most of the time it's the dumbest things. It's that I'm loving an idea that I'm arguing for, or more importantly, an idea that I'm identifying with.
00:45:18
Speaker
Like we identify with our biases, our preferences, like it's ourselves. And you will fight to the death over these things. And you will let this rule your whole mind and your emotions. And you just take a step back and then know, because I know that's not what I am. I know my ideas are not me. And then why am I loving them over something else? It's like the relief of all biases.
00:45:46
Speaker
And then, you know, transcending all emotions to love. When you surrender to all those emotions, or if you surrender to love, that's what you, what you realize is like you experience, um, all of the emotions that you thought were you and all of your preferences, you see them melt away and dissolve into the foundation for everything. And the foundation for all of your emotions, which is love.
00:46:16
Speaker
And, you know, we always talk about this and it's not necessarily that we're saying like, you know, a love between two people necessarily, you know, this is, this goes beneath that what you define as love is not necessarily the same thing that we're talking about. We use the word love because it's the only word that comes close to describing the feeling of merging with that thing.
00:46:44
Speaker
But that's, again, it's a problem with language that makes these things hard to describe and hard to understand. It's one of those things that you have to experience to really understand.
00:46:59
Speaker
Like if you traveled outside the atmosphere into space, there's only one way you can experience the specific emotions that engulf you when you look at the earth and you can see the entire planet. Like that must be just an insane experience that again, you can only get from doing it yourself.
00:47:22
Speaker
Yeah, that's true. I mean, all of this stuff is things that it all needs to be independently verified. And the experience itself makes it real. That's the thing. See, the experience is what led me to this. You know, I had the experience kind of
00:47:44
Speaker
I've had these experiences with psychedelics, not really asking for them, but once they began, then I, you know, wanted to go further and further. I'm glad that you brought up the difference between the metaphysical love that we're talking about, what we mean by love rather than a romantic love. And you kind of described it as a foundation.
00:48:10
Speaker
And it's not just the emotion. And I think that's important to realize, which is why, you know, when I say like fear is love and hate is love, it's not like when you hate, that's a different emotion. So the, the, the love that is all like the basic substance of reality and what we're experiencing isn't anything close to your happy feelings, you know, and it takes the experience of,
00:48:40
Speaker
of basically an ego death, I think, or just separating yourself from what you think you are to experience love for what it actually is. And that is what we call, it's unconditional love. I feel like you have to have a divine experience to know what unconditional love is.
00:49:01
Speaker
Because while we're in this form, in this state of consciousness, you could love someone or something so much, but it's still not unconditional. It can't be until you experience unconditional love for what it actually is. Because you can unconditionally love your family, or you can think that it's unconditional.
00:49:25
Speaker
But if you chop my dick off and killed mom, I probably wouldn't love you unconditionally anymore. There's always conditions to our love, even in the people we love most. But if I'm not me, if I am love itself, that's all there actually is. Kind of just talking in circles.
00:49:46
Speaker
Language can't do it justice because language by nature is dualistic. It's all relative. It's all comparative. And you can't use dualistic language to articulate the non-dual, the one, which is love.
00:50:03
Speaker
Um, but a good way to think about it is even your, your angry emotions and your fearful emotions are still love. Just twisted in a different way, which is why I like how you put it. That it's like the foundation because underneath it all, it is all love. It's the foundation of reality itself. Not, you know, a happy emotion or, you know, a romantic kind of thing.
00:50:28
Speaker
I think it also exists, like it's, it exists as a foundation, but I also think it exists like outside of everything too. Like I have this, this thought that like love is what drives quantum mechanics. Like it, it's like the same thing we're tapping into. Um, when we discover like the mysteries that quantum mechanics offers us.
00:50:53
Speaker
And it's also what we tap into when we explore what consciousness is. Cause I think that consciousness, love, like all of this stuff, they're like the same thing, you know, but we're just.
00:51:06
Speaker
When we talk about it in different circumstances, we use different words. We'll use love when we're talking about it. When it comes to emotions, we use consciousness somewhere. It's when we're talking about it in terms of, you know, maybe what exists outside of, of us and what exists outside of our physical paradigm. And we also use consciousness when we talk about it, when it comes to our brains and what it means to be alive and what it means to be aware.
00:51:31
Speaker
But again, I think awareness is love. Consciousness is love. It's all the same thing. And it sounds insane. Like you could say, like I would argue that love is the substance of reality. It's what reality is. Like you said, quantum mechanics, like love
00:51:50
Speaker
is what this is made of and that's why I'm always so strong against the materialist paradigm and materialism, physicalism in general because if I say this table, what it's actually made out of is love. That's just the most dumb thing you would think I could ever say coming from the materialist paradigm.
00:52:13
Speaker
Because as a materialist, that's not it because your mind is conditioned to reductionism. So for some reason, reality supposedly works bottom up from that perspective. So this table, what it actually is, is just the sum of its smallest parts. So the further we go into it, to its smallest parts is supposedly the most fundamental aspect of it.
00:52:41
Speaker
which it's not true at all. It works the opposite way, goes top down.
00:52:47
Speaker
But we think that zooming in on something is getting close to some material that will define what reality is in a specific substance. But in actuality, it's easier to understand the table for what it actually is or for what everything is, which is love. That we're talking about a metaphysical type of love, not a material in any sense, because you can come to realize that reality itself isn't actually material.
00:53:17
Speaker
Physicality is a property of this state of consciousness and consciousness itself is infinite love. So all this is also surrounds infinity. There's a lot of synonyms here. Like you could say reality is God, which is also love, which is infinity or eternity. They're all.
00:53:37
Speaker
They all are the same thing. So I think love is the best word of what I could describe as the feeling of reality, the pure being of it, but it also is God or just pure existence itself.
00:53:54
Speaker
awareness, just like you said, all those words work together in the same way. But as long as you're looking at reality as a materialist, you could never even allow yourself to start to, you know, entertain that as a possibility. It just doesn't make sense. And, you know, a left brain, logical way of thinking that we are just like indoctrinated into. Yeah, I think there's a reason why
00:54:21
Speaker
When you ask yourself the very deep fundamental, the biggest questions you can ask, you can't answer them with.
00:54:32
Speaker
Language, you can't answer them with the language that has been developed using the same methodology that describes the table as a, as a set of its smallest parts. There's a reason why. And that's because like you said, it, it is like a top down type of thing. You can't describe love in terms of its atomic structure.
00:54:53
Speaker
And you can't do that because it exists, in my view, outside of the atom. It exists outside of all the physicalist paradigms that we use to break things down because you can't break something into its smallest parts.
00:55:10
Speaker
observe those parts and how they interact with the rest of the parts in the world and assume that you know what you're looking at and why this thing functions. The only thing you can observe is what it's doing, how it's interacting with the other things that are doing stuff in the world, um, which is the literal definition of relative.
00:55:33
Speaker
Yeah, and it's also one of the reasons why, you know, we believe this is actually the truth.
00:55:42
Speaker
this materialist notion. It's because, like you said, what we do is we observe the behavior and we look so closely at the thing and we think we understand it more like it's actually telling us something true. But what it really does is just allow us to look at it closer and manipulate it more. So we have all this technology from that mindset of that reductionism and, you know, bottom up, um,
00:56:11
Speaker
And, you know, we mistake technology and our manipulation of this reality as a knowing of anything or coming any closer to truly understanding ourselves or those unanswerable questions. Like, or, well, I should say answerable questions, but like you would ask me like two, three years ago,
00:56:33
Speaker
Um, any of these big existential questions, like what is reality? Why are we here? Any of this stuff coming from the mindset that I had, the reductionist, um, atheist type of mindset, those were actually impossible questions to answer. And if you'd ask me, I'd tell you that I'd be like, we're human beings. Those aren't, it's not in our brain capacity to know we can't answer that. It's not possible.
00:57:01
Speaker
And that's all a part of this indoctrination that we've went through through this materialist, physicalist way of looking at the world. If you truly see things that way, then you can't answer those questions. I first had to realize that it was possible to answer those questions before you can start getting answers.
Limits of Knowledge and Belief
00:57:25
Speaker
There's a paradox that exists within that too, because if you ask yourself, can you know the all? Can you know the absolute? Can you understand it? That answer to me is yes and no, because you can feel it and you can experience it. So you can, you can get an understanding of it.
00:57:49
Speaker
But I don't think that we have the capacity to understand the all for what it is or for what again, but the problem with that type of vocabulary is that when you try to understand what the all is, then you are automatically creating something that exists outside of the all, which cannot be. So it's like.
00:58:14
Speaker
This is the all what we're doing is the all there is nothing else to do, nothing else to explain and nothing else to discover. But then there is so much to discover. It's like this, this world and this reality is such a mindfuck of paradox upon paradox upon paradox that like, if you're not cool.
00:58:35
Speaker
with like answering things and understanding things in the form of paradox. And you're just, I don't know. I don't know what to tell you for me. It's like, I still have a hard time with it because I think fundamentally when it comes to what a paradox is, it's an under, it's an un you can't really understand a paradox because there's no rational way to make sense of two things that are.
00:58:59
Speaker
the same, but are different, you know, it's like, you can't make rational sense of, of duality versus like the one and the all, because you're trying to describe the all again in like a dualistic sense.
00:59:11
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, it's something like to realize that rationality isn't truth, that rationality is just a human concept. And as far as like knowing the all, I guess in a sense, like I would agree that you can't know the all, but you are the all. So what you can do is be the all. But in a human state of consciousness of rationality and concepts, you can't know the all without being the all.
00:59:43
Speaker
In a human state of consciousness, like the standard human state, which you are experiencing right now, you can't conceptualize the whole thing. Because our idea of knowing is, you know, to place everything into boxes and just divide things more.
00:59:59
Speaker
So the closest thing that you can get to knowing it is strictly to be it because you have to ask yourself first off, what does it mean to know something at all? What does it mean to know something and can you know something without being it?
01:00:19
Speaker
But yeah, I guess that would beg the question of what it means to know something. Do I know that Mike Tyson once knocked somebody out in eight seconds? I would say you don't know. Because I haven't seen it and witnessed it. All I can do is look at the information that I can intake from who said it happened, correct? Yeah, and this is the importance of not knowing, like I had mentioned.
01:00:43
Speaker
the power of not knowing and why it's a useful exercise. It just makes you ask questions and get deeper to the fundamental aspect of what is true in existence. And I would argue that we don't know if the earth is round or flat. That's a good example I use for everybody because it seems so clearly obvious and yet there's a debate about it. And I would tell you, I believe that the earth is round, but I don't know that it's round.
01:01:12
Speaker
and I can't know it's round unless somehow I observe it as round and experience it as round and be that or
01:01:21
Speaker
If somehow I could independently verify it through an experiment that's never been done, that I'm not copying someone else's work, that I fully understand myself, then I could get closer to knowing it. But it's funny because as things that we claim to know, almost all of it is just a faith-based belief. It's just that we put our faith in somebody that figured it out and then believe them and then tell ourselves that we know it.
01:01:51
Speaker
and it's funny you have a planet of human beings all running around claiming to know things that they actually don't know that they just believe and for me that was a powerful realization when i started to understand that i actually know nothing what i know is this room right now i know what what what is happening the experience of reality right now is what is known
01:02:17
Speaker
Um, but I don't know what's outside the door. I can assume and put together a little narrative in my head of what's out there and believe it with all of my heart, believe it enough to tell you that I know it, but I don't know there could be anything outside that door. But I quote unquote, no, there isn't and there probably isn't, but I don't know that. I just believe it. And that's, that's what we do for almost everything. Everything that you think, you know,
01:02:46
Speaker
is actually a belief. Yeah. It brings to mind like, uh, is it like a classic movie and TV show scene that illustrates this like perfectly to me? Like I think about the walking dead, uh, like the very first episode when Rick Grimes wakes up, not like, you know, assuming he knows what's outside of his hospital room, you know,
01:03:07
Speaker
And then he goes outside the hospital room and he sees like absolute chaos or like the classic scene where like there would be a crazy disaster somewhere or whatever. And like maybe in like New York city or something. And you open up your office door, like you're at work, you open up your office door and instead of seeing the hallways and like a nicely put together structured place with a bunch of people and meetings and stuff. What you see is a decimated world around you with, with, you know, destruction and everything that you know and love is gone.
01:03:37
Speaker
Meanwhile, before that, you're thinking you're just going to open your door into what is known. But I think that particular type of scene in movies and TV shows really helps to bring that home and illustrate that fact.
01:03:51
Speaker
And yeah, it is a fact and that's, that's, those are good examples. That's so true. And like an example that everybody has probably experienced is like, you know, when you walk into a room, your room and you know, you go to turn on the light and you've done this thousands of times and you put your finger on the switch and you flip it up and you know, the light's going to go on, but it doesn't go on that the light bulb has died. And you knew.
01:04:19
Speaker
You don't even have to ask yourself, you just knew the light was going to go on. But it doesn't, you know? You didn't know and you never know. Every time you flick your light switch, you don't know if the light's going to go on. I mean, that, you know, it makes sense, but I'm just saying it goes...
01:04:33
Speaker
to even it, it applies to even the most basic things, you know, when you go to, you know, do something on your phone, you know, or like I go to grab my phone out of my pocket and it's not there, something like that, anything. Or did you ever like, uh, you ever look at like a gallon of water or milk or something and like out of the corner of your eye, like you think it's like three quarters of the way full. So it's like, when you grab it to pick it up, you fucking like you've,
01:05:01
Speaker
launch it up to the ceiling because of how how like strong you like went to lift it. But in reality, there's like an inch in there. I think that that's kind of a cool example of it too. But I think yeah, the the lesson being like, you don't know till you know. And what we don't take into account when analyzing all these types of things is
01:05:23
Speaker
The fact that everything is moving and changing and flowing and just like the boat allegory, you know, uh, it's nothing stays the same. And even after years and years and years of small incremental change and small incremental flows, some things might seem understandable. They might seem like you can define them as what they were.
01:05:46
Speaker
Um, but everything is changing. That's what this reality is. It's like a constant happening. And the only thing that can happen is change. You can't have non, non change. You can't have a reality that's stagnant and still everything is moving. Everything is flowing. Everything is interacting and everything is changing. Yeah. The only thing that's permanent is impermanence.
01:08:43
Speaker
you