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A Shamanic Approach to Story w/ Matt Pallamary
267 Plays1 year ago
Author, Editor, and Shamanic Explorer Matthew J. Pallamary is an award winning writer, musician, and sound healer who has been studying shamanism all of his life. He incorporates shamanic practices into his daily life as well as into his writing and teaching. He has seventeen books in print that cover several genres.
Mateo has spent extended time in the jungles, mountains, and deserts of North, Central, and South America pursuing his studies of shamanism and ancient cultures.
Through his research into both the written word and the ancient beliefs of shamanism, he has uncovered the heart of what a story really is and integrated it into core dramatic concepts that also have their basis in shamanism.
In the episode we discuss his latest book, Holographicosmic Man: The Holographic Heart of the Golden Mean, which is an amalgam of quantum physics, mathematics, geometry, ancient texts, current research, ancient architecture, beliefs, and myths, astronomy, anthropology, human anatomy, brain structure, shamanism, neuroscience, neuropsychology, indigenous wisdom, astrophysics, neurophysiology, holography, neuroanatomy, neurocardiology, cosmometry, cosmology, biology, and more.
Mateo's links:
Website: https://mattpallamary.com/
Mystic Ink Publishing: https://mysticinkpublishing.com/
HOLOGRAPHICOSMIC MAN: The Holographic Heart of the Golden Mean - https://amzn.to/3oBEk2s
Phantastic Fiction: A Shamanic Approach To Story: https://amzn.to/44giaCu
All of Mateo's books: https://mattpallamary.com/writings/
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Transcript
Welcome and Introduction
00:00:01
Speaker
Welcome back to the Connecting Minds podcast. Christian Jardinov here. Today we have a returning guest, Matthew J. Palamari, AKA Mateo. It's his fourth time on the show, so I'm sure some of you or quite a number of you already know who he is. So with that said, Mateo, welcome back, bro.
00:00:19
Speaker
Thank you for having me back, Christian. I love being on your show. I can't believe it's four times already. Four times, record holder.
Highlights from Santa Barbara Writers Conference
00:00:27
Speaker
So tell us now about your, what have you been up to the last few weeks since we last spoke? Yeah. So I'm just returned a couple of days ago from the 50th annual Santa Barbara Writers Conference. And I've been with them for 35 years.
00:00:44
Speaker
And it was a very intense week. I taught five workshops in the morning. I did a presentation on social media and web pages. And then I did a panel on podcasting and audio books. And this conference has a very long, intense, very rich history. I'm giving my age away here, but Ray Bradbury is a famous science fiction writer.
00:01:14
Speaker
He kicked off the conference for 37 years He did something wicked this way comes Fahrenheit 451 The Martian Chronicles The Illustrated Man He wrote the screenplay for the one of my favorite movies of all time Moby Dick from from back in the 60s and He was one of my mentors. He kicked off the conference for 37 years and
00:01:40
Speaker
And then we've had tons of famous people from the 20th century writers and movie stars. It's really kind of high profile. And it's a week long. It goes all day and all night. They have pirate workshops that go from nine o'clock at night until the wee hours of the morning. Wow. Yeah. That's hardcore. It's a real special place. It's family for me. How big is the conference now?
00:02:05
Speaker
We had, uh, we just about sold out, um, I think total probably three to 400. Nice. Uh, they started doing things like it used to be just you come for the week, but now you could come for one lecture or you can, you can have a one day at the conference for, you know, a hundred bucks or a couple of hundred bucks or something. Um, and you've been with them 35 years. So have you been doing workshops there since, since, uh, 35 years ago?
00:02:34
Speaker
Yeah, so I started off, my first year was 88 and I went and didn't know anybody and didn't know anything and I got totally destroyed. And then I went back the second year and I actually won a fiction award. And it was for a story about a guy who didn't listen to what the shaman told him and he took some visionary substances and he lost his mind. Dark straight up horror story.
00:03:05
Speaker
I won a big fiction award for that. And I wasn't even going to go that second year because I was having some financial issues. And somebody insisted that I go and they sponsored me. And then the science fiction geek guys that I know asked me to lead an unofficial workshop, which I did. The conference, they said it's okay, you can do that. But it wasn't part of the regular offerings. And I had a big turnout.
00:03:30
Speaker
So they ended up hiring me. I was the youngest workshop leader for 15 years. Wow. And now I'm a geezer.
00:03:38
Speaker
But, uh, been at it for a while. So now I'm, I'm really deeply involved with it. I help with the planning of it and you know, a lot of the execution of what happens and all that. That's so awesome, bro. I love that. Yeah.
Shamanic Traditions and Writing Influences
00:03:51
Speaker
When, just when, when did you start going to South America and then, you know, with, uh, with the, you know, the Spivos and all the other folks? Excuse me. I started going in 2000 was my first year. Okay. Okay. My first.
00:04:08
Speaker
Exposure to any of that was 1998. I went to the Enthio Botany seminars in the Maya ruins in Uxmal and spent a week there. And then I had been, I had been researching ayahuasca on my own for, for maybe 10 years. And I finally found somebody who was involved with it and they were a reliable person. So the shamans used to come up here all the time up to the United States and they were coming twice a year.
00:04:37
Speaker
And we would do three ceremonies in the spring and three in the fall. And then I got myself involved. So my very first jungle dieta was in 2000. And just this past October, I did my 13th dieta. Wow. I've also spent a lot of time with some people, Indians, I stayed in their village for probably a month and a half. And I've been all through the Andes working with the plant medicines up there too.
00:05:02
Speaker
Yeah. So you've been writing like well before, well before going there. You said 88. You were already writing, getting published. Yeah. Well, I was just starting to get published. I think I started writing in like probably 82. And I started off, first I was writing for inspirational magazines.
00:05:29
Speaker
And I came to the realization that when I'm writing for inspirational magazines, I was basically preaching to the choir. They were already kind of there, but I started writing for some inspirational magazines, one in particular. And then I got to be, they were featuring me and commissioning artists and all that. And then I realized that to quote unquote, speak a truth, you really need to dramatize it.
00:06:00
Speaker
If you study spiritual literature throughout, Jesus spoke in parables. Buddha told stories. Muhammad told stories. They're all storytellers. And all of the traditions of the world prior to the written language were actually oral traditions. So I made it an effort to capture the oral traditions, especially some of them that are disappearing.
00:06:25
Speaker
um, to preserve them. And because otherwise, if you have people that are telling stories and oral traditions and they start dying away, there's no record of it. So I've made one of my efforts has been to try to preserve that. Yeah.
00:06:43
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's so important because a lot of these tribes people are just so marginalized. And even if you look at the folks in the hunter gatherers in Africa, they just keep getting pushed away. Their hunting grounds keep getting smaller. They're more westernized. They're eating more of the western way and they're getting sicker now as well. So anything you can do to preserve some semblance of the culture of their ways, you know, this
00:07:13
Speaker
It's a, it's a great, um, you know, good on you, bro. Yeah. Thank you. It's my novel land without evil. I wanted to capture that. Cause the other thing I realized is that, um, history is written by the victors, whoever is the conquering culture. They're the ones that write the history and they actually make efforts to undermine, um, other cultures at their roots. Yeah.
00:07:36
Speaker
to try to erase them. It happened repeatedly in ancient Egypt and also in Maya and Aztec cultures and Inca cultures, whoever's in charge would more or less try to wipe out what preceded them and make themselves the flavor of the day, so to speak. The others were savages or whatever. Yeah. This ruler did that.
00:07:59
Speaker
No, now it's going to be me. So let's take his name off all these great feats and let's make them mine. You know, a lot of that stuff on on they, they change the inscriptions and wipe them out. Yeah. I think that's why studying history now is a little bit, you're like studying falsehoods. Like Napoleon is said to have said, history is a set of lies agreed upon. Yeah. Yeah. I agree.
00:08:25
Speaker
And
Storytelling Techniques and Metaphors
00:08:26
Speaker
the whole idea of oral storytelling has evolved over the years. It's come full circle now. Yeah, with podcasting and everything. And audio books. Yeah. I love what you said there earlier. If you want to tell the truth, you need to dramatize it. Now, I wrote my book in 2020, when I published it, then it was very
00:08:51
Speaker
it's nonfiction, obviously, it's on autism. So it was very information based, just presenting, you know, science, what to do about certain things, testing. So I've been, I've had an idea for a second book that would be shorter, more readable, and would, would incorporate a little bit more storytelling and less technical stuff. And I feel like
00:09:17
Speaker
You do that and you're likely to reach people more. Even though you're giving them less data and information and facts and figures, the less information you give them will be actioned upon them much more so.
00:09:34
Speaker
How does one approach a fairly dry or technical or touchy subject and incorporate this shamanic storytelling that you talk about in your book Fantastic Fiction, for example? Yeah. The key is metaphor. Metaphor is one thing
00:10:01
Speaker
that gives you an idea of something by describing something else. You could say, her eyes were as black as coal. Oh, okay, that's how black they were, because you can relate to seeing coal, right? So one of my challenges all of my life has been to take visionary experience, which is not rational, which is not necessarily, you can't describe it like you can describe a sunny day,
00:10:31
Speaker
unless you want to throw in all the psychedelic patterns and colors and things that go with it. But how do you take an experience like that that defies description and put it in a way that people can get some sense of that experience without having had it themselves? And the key is in metaphor. So when you find really good examples and you use them judiciously, you can get people to understand
00:11:01
Speaker
just how something can feel and get a sense of it. As a writer, more so in fiction, but even in nonfiction, but in fiction, you want to put your audience, put your reader there in the middle of the experience. It is more challenging. You know, like my last book was Holographic Cosmic Man, which is very scientific and sort of technical.
00:11:29
Speaker
I've been walking this line for some years now between spirituality and science and trying to take spiritual concepts and then apply the science to it so that people know they can relate to it in that way. I'm always going after the atheists and the intellectuals.
00:11:50
Speaker
just to show some proof that, hey, look, this is how things are. You can argue with it if you want. And I'm certainly not trying to convert anybody. We're all entitled to our own sense of beliefs. But to put it in a way that when you do something that people relates to, even in fiction, if you have a character or even a bad guy, if you have a bad guy and someone was reading about that bad guy and relates to it and thinks, wow, I know how that person feels.
00:12:20
Speaker
then they know how it feels to be a bad guy. And that makes the bad guy even more evil in a lot of ways because then people can go, oh my God, I could be like that myself, which is true. All the horrible things that go on in the world, we're all humans and we're all capable of all of those horrible things because we're all humans.
00:12:40
Speaker
So, you know, all bets are off, but just to kind of circle back, the key is in metaphor. And what is one thing compared to another? And that's how people can understand and put themselves in that place to grasp it. And you want to do it artfully in such a way that you're not beating them over the head with it. It's a very fine line that you need to walk in order to get it across. I've been doing good with it. But, you know, I've been honing my craft for all these years now. So.
00:13:08
Speaker
You know, if I'm not any better now, I better give up. No, I think you're you're definitely are getting better. You you just published. Well, I saw it earlier. You just published The Thinning Veil. So you published one more book now since we spoke last, right? Yes, sir. Just came out. So what's your what's your what is the reason what draws you to these shorter story formats?
00:13:39
Speaker
There's a number of things. I had written my first novel. I think I spent five years on it. Wow. And I decided to take a short story writing course to learn how to write tighter and to be more succinct and to refine some techniques.
00:13:57
Speaker
And the other really great thing about short stories is you can experiment with different points of view, different environments, different plotting. You can really do a lot of things. Once you're committed to a novel, you're committed to a novel. And you got to stay within the parameters of that writing. But with short fiction, you can experiment in all kinds of different ways.
00:14:17
Speaker
The other thing was back in the 80s when I was getting started, a lot of ways to get discovered was to write short stories and be published maybe with bigger name writers, or maybe if you're lucky, I got lucky and got hit in, published in some very big magazines with big readerships. So it was also a really good way to break in. But there's an entirely different art to short stories than there are to writing novels.
00:14:43
Speaker
So my very first short story collection, The Small Dark Room of the Soul, was published in 1994. And actually, it was my very first published book. And that was the one that Ray Bradbury gave me some blurbs for. And he never used to give out blurbs. So that was an extra special honor. And then the feature story was
00:15:08
Speaker
was put in the year's best horror and fantasy. It would have got a higher profile at the time, but it was late to the game when they were publishing it. So they threw it in there under an honorable mention because it was like a last minute thing. But to experiment with all those different things, Ray Bradbury, by the way, was a masterful short story writer. He started off doing that.
00:15:29
Speaker
And he used to write regularly for the, they used to call them pulp magazines. The whole idea from the movie, pulp fiction had to do with those things. So, you know, there were horror fantasy and science fiction, amazing stories, fantasy and science fiction, weird tales, a bunch of those. So you could get exposure and try different things.
00:15:50
Speaker
So the theme of the small dark room of the soul, I'll probably mangle my own quote here, but it says something like, throughout the centuries, countless spiritual disciplines have urged us to seek the truth. Part of that truth lies within a small dark room, one we are afraid to enter. So that was the theme. And I realized afterward that not only were all my monsters human,
00:16:18
Speaker
But that the story, all of the stories were actually an examination of humanity's shadow. And then, I don't know what it was, 10 years later or something, I came out with a second one called a short walk to the other side. And that has to do with the fact that it's only one step into madness.
00:16:41
Speaker
You
Creative Processes and Overcoming Blocks
00:16:41
Speaker
can be living your life normally and happily in one little thing, one little event, one thing can happen, can change your life completely. That one stepping off the abyss into madness or that one moment, that crime of passion. So my fans have been bugging me for more fiction because I've been cranking out these nonfiction books because they just keep coming. So one of them, my biggest fan probably, is begging me for more fiction. So I came up with 13 stories.
00:17:11
Speaker
And how long does a book like this take you to write? This one might've taken me, let me think about that. I had a few stories in the can from before that were published in other places, but typically maybe nine months because there were times like I was stuck on a plot point for like three days because when novels go on, the novel takes on a life of its own and then you go and you're going.
00:17:40
Speaker
But with short stories, you got to be as original as you can be. You got to make it happen. Pop. It's got to be you really want to try to do something different. And I get into a lot of my short stuff can be science fiction horror or just weird science fiction or horror or just weird consciousness stuff.
00:18:04
Speaker
So keeping it original and coming up with new ideas for 13 Stories was really, really a challenge. And then I have another new book coming out. I'm going to delay the publication for a while because I don't want to have too much come out too fast. But I have a new book that's almost done. It's called I Am Consciousness, Incarnate.
00:18:26
Speaker
Which is all about consciousness. So I get stuck on the short stories and I'd say, I'm bailing on that and just throw them aside and forget about them and work on this book for a while. And then the ideas would start to come, then I'd go back. So I was actually writing two books at the same time, but I would sometimes take a week or two off with the short stories because I was just stuck. Do you ever take a day off during the week?
00:18:54
Speaker
Yeah. You do, yeah. Good. I allow myself, I don't push myself like I used to, like, dude, give yourself a break, take a breather. To hell with riding, let's go take a bike ride. There's a whole thing that goes on. You may have heard me, we may have discussed this on one of your shows, but what I've learned in shamanism is we have three energetic bodies.
00:19:20
Speaker
We have the intellectual, the emotional, and the moving. When you get stuck, there's really no such thing as writer's block. If you're a pro, you can't afford anything like writer's block. That's just for rookies. So what happens is you get stuck in a story. I don't know where to go with this. And then you start to freak out.
00:19:45
Speaker
Oh my God, I don't know what I'm doing. I can't write this. Why did I even start this? This is all crap, blah, blah, all that stuff that goes on. So you get stuck in that spot and you get stuck between those two energetic bodies. Well, the key is to move. So you go out and forget about it for a while. Go take a walk, ride your bike, go to the gym, don't think about it.
00:20:12
Speaker
And you've probably heard a million stories about you suddenly in the shower and you get inspired or you wake up in the middle of the night and there's your, there's your, you know, you, you solved your problem. Um, and you write it down. So it's a matter of shifting it and not getting yourself all spun up and just letting go and forgetting about it and let your subconscious do the work. And it will surprise you at how much it will deliver. Yeah. I've seen that myself in the last months and years for sure. Yeah.
00:20:42
Speaker
People don't realize it, but, you know, even just getting in the shower and just the water hitting your body, suddenly it shifts everything because your attention, your focus has changed. Yeah. Even yesterday, I started working at 7 AM on the computer here. And by, I think, was it six o'clock in the evening? I mean, I took a couple of breaks, but my eyes were hurting. I was getting a headache.
00:21:06
Speaker
My neck was stiff and I had a general feeling of unhappiness because I didn't feel like I had accomplished anything. So then I left the house, went out with the dog. And as soon as I went out and kind of saw some trees, my eyes suddenly didn't hurt. My head stopped hurting. I felt good. And I came back and I came up here. I turned the computer off and I said, you know what? I did a hell of a lot today.
00:21:34
Speaker
a hell of a lot. It's about not what's undone, it's about what's done as well. You can't just focus on what's on your to-do list. What did you check off on the to-do list? I definitely resonate with what you're saying is to unstuck the
00:21:54
Speaker
emotions in the intellect, you got to move the body. And that's one thing I think a lot of writers, I was talking with an author friend of mine actually yesterday. And he said like, he would just be there all day at the computer writing, researching, and doesn't get to eat anything. Like he eats one meal a day, you know, just just writing all day. So it's a very good strategy. This
00:22:19
Speaker
Yeah, you really got to move, even just, as you know, you're lower back for Christ's sake, sitting in a chair all day, right? Oh, yeah. You just got to get up and move around. And I'm always telling my students, it's the journey, it's not the destination. Yeah.
Refining Writing and Providing Feedback
00:22:36
Speaker
You know, when I teach in the workshops, I take a sampling of everybody's writing and we do an analysis of a sampling. It's like a snapshot. And I have them read five pages.
00:22:48
Speaker
And then we do an analysis of those five pages because like if they're using too many adverbs in five pages, then they're using too many adverbs in the rest of the book. Sure. And all the little things I call them ticks that you pick up on and you help them to refine their work and they get better and better and better. Keep working at it. Cool. I like that. I started reading your book, Fantastic Fiction, which is the subtitle is a shamanic approach to story. Can you tell us what is,
00:23:19
Speaker
What, because there's a lot of books on how to write. What is the shamanic approach to story that you talk about? I've only read it like 20, 30 pages of the book, so only getting into it now. But can you give us your sort of viewpoint of it? Yeah, I can give you a number of riffs and then rein me in if I go too long. But all of the great stories,
00:23:48
Speaker
All of the great stories follow the hero's journey, which was really brought to the forefront by Joseph Campbell. He wrote a number of books, but the most famous one is The Hero with a Thousand Faces. And he found that all of the great stories and all of the mythologies in the world follow the hero's journey. Now, there are very specific things about the hero's journey, and I'm gonna just give a brief overview of it, but in the beginning,
00:24:17
Speaker
Everything is good in the hero's life. And they're not a hero in the beginning. And then something upsets the balance. Then the hero's journey is to reset the balance. So then it starts them off on a quest. And then on that quest, they meet allies and they meet their opponents, the antagonists. And they move forward and they go through a series of events
00:24:47
Speaker
that shift the narrative going forward, ultimately bringing them to a moment of transformation where they become the hero. Star Wars, Harry Potter, the Lord of the Rings, every one of those follows the hero's journey to a T. If you sit there and you're really paying attention, you can see at what point
00:25:14
Speaker
in the story that particular ships and characters come in and transformations happen. They all follow that. Now, what I've discovered through all my research is in shamanism, worldwide, there's the shaman's journey to the underworld. In some cultures, they get decapitated. In some cultures, they get their bones removed, you know, metaphorically and replaced with quartz.
00:25:45
Speaker
different things, but they're all the same thing. They basically get down into the underworld where they get destroyed or dismembered, and then they come back as the new person and become the hero. That journey is everywhere. I mean, it's in remote tribes in the Amazon, it's in Eastern cultures, it's in Western cultures, even Christianity, right? Jesus went and died and on the third day heroes again, right?
00:26:11
Speaker
It's very deeply embedded in our cultural psyche. So I realized that actually that shamanic transformation was the core of the hero's journey. Aside from that, everything in shamanism is energy. Everything is energy. So when you look at a story going forward, every single word
00:26:41
Speaker
In every single sentence, in every single paragraph is energy. To
Energizing Storytelling with Active Language
00:26:46
Speaker
make a statement is using energy to even speak, whether reading or orally or whether it's being heard or whether it's being read, it all has to do with energy. And one of the things among a million others that I teach my students when I'm teaching this is when you're writing, particularly infection, you want to use active verbs instead of passive voice.
00:27:10
Speaker
When I say passive voice, I mean like was and were. If you say something like, it was a hot day, big deal. But if the sun blazed in the sky, and blazed is an active verb,
00:27:31
Speaker
And it actually energizes the writing and carries it forward more so than just say, it was hot. I mean, that's like lazy. It just doesn't work. So when you use active verbs, you're energizing the writing. And when you look at the whole structure of a story going forward, you're manipulating energy.
00:27:52
Speaker
with the words, and the words are creating pictures in the mind. And I always like to say that the act of reading is actually an act of co-creation between the reader and the writer. And it's the writer's job to pick what we call significant details to give enough. I like to think of the mind as the palette, and the words are strokes of a brush. But it's dynamic. It's not static, like a portrait. It's a movie.
00:28:22
Speaker
And so to be a good writer, you want to put those details in there that your reader can latch onto and then provide the other half of the reality from their own mind. So you can write a story and you can have eight people read it and they can get eight different meanings out of it, depending on what they bring to the story when they read it.
00:28:43
Speaker
People don't realize that co-creation and newer writers tend to overwrite everything because they want to make sure you get what I'm trying to say. They're not giving the reader credit. For lack of better words, it's just more of a rookie mistake. They don't know any better. They're trying to learn. They're trying to be effective, but less is always more. Making every word count and making every word carry its weight, that's really where the key is. Some writers are famous for it. You may not be as familiar with it, but
00:29:14
Speaker
He died a few years ago. I got to know him a little bit. There was an American writer called Robert B. Parker, and he wrote a series called Spencer for hire. And there was a TV show, Spencer for hire, and it was set in Boston. So I'm rewatching it now. I loved it because I grew up in Boston and I get to see, you know, all that stuff, right in Boston. But he was a master at dialogue.
00:29:39
Speaker
And his dialogue would just carry the story along, and you're not getting as much description, but you don't care because you're so caught up in the story. Another famous one, and they were friends, was Elmore Leonard. He did get shorty that was made into a movie, and he did tons of other ones. And he always said, when I go through my edit, if that word's not doing anything, I get rid of everything that's not carrying the story forward. So you really have to be ruthless about it.
00:30:05
Speaker
but less is always more. And when we're newer writers, we don't realize that we want to get out there and get out those flowery words and all those adjectives and adverbs that don't really add to anything. It's more of an insecurity as a writer. For sure. You work at it and you're honing and refining and polishing and making it better and making it really have impact.
00:30:30
Speaker
Yeah. I have this, this is more fiction related. I read this book called writing without bullshit. And that's what the guy I have, I'm just looking for it here. Oh yeah, it's right here. I keep it next to my, um, so 10, 10 writing tips and the psychology behind them. So basically this is again for nonfiction and business writing and stuff. But he says, write shorter.
00:30:55
Speaker
shorten your sentences, rewrite passive voice, eliminate weasel words, like, you know, just to give you an example, for example, may, could, perhaps replace jargon with clarity. And a lot of people, like insecure writers, for example, even myself, you would use jargon new words,
00:31:21
Speaker
to show how smart you are, how much research you've done, and then people can't understand you, and they give up on reading on you. Then it's stuff like use I, we, and you, move key insights up, cite examples, and give signposts. That's again non-fiction, but a lot of what you said actually relates to this. Yeah. There's a litany of sins.
00:31:50
Speaker
The was, were, just, you just mentioned some of them. Was, were, just seems as if begin to, you don't need them. And when you take them out, it's a big difference. If you say he was angry, who cares? If you say he put his fist through the door, God, I guess he's angry, right? And it's action.
00:32:20
Speaker
And the other thing I'm always beating up on students for is it's a fiction writer's creed, and that is show, don't tell. So you don't want to be telling me, we call it reader feeder. And newer writers tend to do it more in their beginnings because they're trying to get all across, well, you know, he has a PhD from Harvard and blah, blah, blah. Eh, let that come out in the story.
00:32:50
Speaker
You know, let it evolve naturally and show me, don't tell me. And there's another thing that newer writers need to learn that I'm always preaching. And that is that you can hook people in the beginning more by what you don't tell them. You know, the best examples are cliches. But the example is your typical mystery story, you know, especially old school. What do you do? You start out with a dead body.
00:33:17
Speaker
There's a question, how did they get to be dead? Then of course, the whole story goes forward and explains to you why they got dead. There's even famous one, I think it's called movie, Sunset Boulevard, old movie, Black and White. It starts off with a guy, a dead body floating in the pool. It's a voiceover and he says, hi, I bet you're wondering why I'm dead floating in the pool.
00:33:46
Speaker
And then the story unfolds and you get all the way through the whole story. And in the back of your mind, as you're watching the story unfolding in your mind, you're thinking, well, how the hell did that guy end up dead in the pool, right? And that, you know, you finally find out. The other one, there's a million of them, but that's one of my favorite ones. The other one, if you ever heard of the famous Japanese filmmaker, Akira Kurosawa. Yes, yes. His Rashomon.
00:34:14
Speaker
tells the story of a robbery and a murder. And he tells it from three points of view. And one of them is from the point of view of the dead ghost, right? And there's so much that you can do like that, you know, being creative. The other thing I'm telling people, this is more toward fiction, is that when you're in charge, when you are the god or goddess of the universe that you are creating, you're in charge of time and space.
00:34:43
Speaker
and you're in charge of everything. So you can say, you know, he left his wife. And then you can say, these are all bad examples, by the way. For the next 20 years, nothing happened. In one sentence, you just passed 20 years of time, right? You can also take a situation that could be mundane, and you can spend a lot of time on something that may only take place
00:35:12
Speaker
in minutes in real time. And you can spend pages describing it if it validates having that much intensity in that moment, that much focus. So there's lots of things you can do. There's millions of techniques. I was really blessed when I got with the Santa Barbara Writers Conference because I had Ray Bradbury to mentor me.
00:35:40
Speaker
or my other primary mentor who started the conference, Barnaby Conrad, he's passed away some years now, but he was just a real master at his craft. And he took me under his wing and he showed me lots of things that you don't learn necessarily even in an MFA program.
00:36:06
Speaker
You know, and then, like I said, there was Ray Bradbury and Charles Schulz, Charlie Brown Peanuts. He was a regular. His son, Monty, now owns the conference. He took me under his wing. And Chuck Champlin, who was at the time the leading LA Times movie film critic for 25 years, those guys took me under their wing and taught me and showed me and, you know, schooled me on the best way to be an effective writer.
00:36:36
Speaker
No, but Barnaby in his day, he was the only American to fight bulls in Spain and Peru and in Mexico. Wow. Yeah. And he was a bestseller at 29. His book was called Matador was the last day in the life of Spain's most famous bullfighter, Juan Belmonte. Um, but to be a young guy like me going in there, not knowing anything and to have those guys really take me under their wing.
00:37:04
Speaker
and school me. At the time, I was one of the only people writing really, really weird stuff.
00:37:11
Speaker
So, um, they had asked me to start teaching, which I did. And like I mentioned, I was the youngest workshop leader for 15 years. And what a blessing that has been. Yeah.
Influences from Mentors and Colleagues
00:37:21
Speaker
You've had, you know, we talked, we've talked at length about it, but you've had a very eventful life with, and you were friends with Terrence McKenna and you, did you know Sasha Shogun as well? Yes, you bet.
00:37:38
Speaker
I love those guys. That's incredible, dude. That is absolutely incredible. My historical novel, Land Without Evil, which I kind of touched on, the first contact between the Jesuits and the Indians in South America, but it's told from the Indians' point of view. I had already known Terrence, and I actually gifted him with my first short story collection, Small Dark Room of the Soul. He really liked it because I knew him from the Enthio Botany seminars.
00:38:05
Speaker
And then the last thing he did before he died was the All Chemical Arts Festival in Hawaii. And I couldn't go because my book was just coming out right at that time. So I worked it and I had a friend of mine personally deliver the copy.
00:38:23
Speaker
And Terrence got the absolute very first copy of the hardcover printing of Lamb Without Evil. And it may very well have been the last book he ever read. I'll never know for sure. But I was happy to be able to do that. And I got to spend time with Anne and Sasha Shoga. And I used to love sitting with them. Me and Sasha used to sit there and just trade bad puns all day, go back and forth. And his wife, Anne, who just passed away
00:38:48
Speaker
recently, like a year or two ago, she's the one that encouraged me to really dig into writing about the shadow. So, you know, they were like my psychedelic grandparents. Sasha really was more like a wizard. You know, Terrence was there, and Paul Stamets was a regular. Gio Gio Samarini, he was the expert in Iboga. All of these people would come
00:39:15
Speaker
to the Enthio Botany Seminars and they were held at the Maya ruins. I went for four or five years. And that was, they all like Paul Stamets, I gave them all copies of Lamb Without Evil also, but Terrence got the very first copy of it. And he's been a big, big influence and an inspiration.
00:39:34
Speaker
So what was Sasha Shogan like? I mean, I've seen some lectures and him presenting and speaking. He looks like a fun guy. But what was he like to sit down and or party with or whatever? Great, great, great best ever sense of humor. And he would mess with you and tell you. And he had his whole gaggle of young chemists.
00:40:04
Speaker
who followed him around. There were his acolytes, whatever you want to call them. When he would get up to lecture, he would get up there with the big whiteboard or the big piece of paper and he'd say, I'm going to draw you some dirty pictures. He'd draw the DMT molecule and then he would draw the 5MeO DMT, and then he would get into the plant and his process and how he made his discoveries. Anybody who doesn't know,
00:40:31
Speaker
He and his wife Anne wrote two books, P. Cole and T. Cole. P. Cole is, Thena Thela means I have known and loved. And T. Cole is Tryptamines I have known and loved. And as a matter of fact, he published those books and what he would do is he would create these novel substances and then he would try them on himself.
00:40:55
Speaker
And then in these two books, he wrote out the recipes and his experiences and his experiences with Anne, his wife, and he published them. Well, the government screwed with him and went after him and tried to sue him. And he was in court. So my very first entheal botany seminar was in San Francisco in 1996. And I didn't know anybody at that point. That was when I first sort of rediscovered the tribe.
00:41:25
Speaker
Anne was there when they had a little table and saying, this is the legal fund for Sasha because they're messing with them. I didn't have any money. I think I gave her 20 bucks. I might've only gave her five, but I think I gave her 20. Even though I didn't have it, I gave it.
00:41:44
Speaker
Two weeks later, I got a two page handwritten letter from Ann thanking me for the 20 bucks. Wow. And then I was like, I love these guys. Right. And then I would see them regularly, like I say, at the entheobotany seminars when they came and we'd get to hang out and have dinners and lunches and breakfast together and go to the lectures and we would tour the ruins together.
00:42:07
Speaker
And he was just like the big, big psychedelic grandfather, you know? I always like to think of him as a wizard. I could almost envision him wearing the big wizard hat, you know? Yeah, like Gandalf or something. Yeah, totally. Totally. Probably in the past incarnation he was. Maybe that's how through the morphogenetic field accumulation, he was able to become so adept at this stuff. Yeah. Yeah. He was really a guiding light.
00:42:38
Speaker
People I knew had done a lot of research with him prior to me ever even showing up on the scene. I didn't know. I went through tons of psychedelics when I was younger. Then I was a vegetarian for 23 years and I spent 13 years totally baseline. I wouldn't even take an aspirin if I had a headache. I wouldn't drink coffee. I stayed that way for 13 years until I discovered Terence McKenna.
00:43:07
Speaker
and Terrence McKenna, Food of the Gods. In fact, I'm going to back up a second to tell you a really quick story without going on too long. But that story I told you about my first fiction story that I won a fiction award at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference, which was in 1989. And the workshop that I was in, the woman who led the workshop would read the story.
00:43:36
Speaker
And nobody knew who wrote it because she would read it. So then you could get really honest criticism because nobody didn't know, you know, anybody was. And she read that story and I got a standing ovation and I was just blown away. And I was like, Oh my God. Well, after the workshop, all these old asset heads came out of the woodwork.
00:44:00
Speaker
And one of them was a sweet lady, Marjorie Livingston, PhD. She was 78. She had done some of the original LSD. She had a paper published in the Hawaiian Medical Journal in the 50s about LSD research. And she had this bright blue eyes.
00:44:17
Speaker
And she said, I can't relate to anybody of my age, of my generation. They have no idea. And I really love your story. This is my article. I'd like you to have it. And can I please have a copy of your story? And I'm like, hell yeah. So I gave her the story. So like, I don't know, three weeks, a month later, I'm at home and I get a box in the mail of cassette tapes. And I'm like, um, sorry about that. Um, it was, um,
00:44:48
Speaker
I open the box under these tapes and I put them in and I listen and I hear this voice, well, you know, I want to tell you about. And I'm like, who is this weirdo? I mean, you know, the joke is it sounded like Mr. Rogers on acid, right? And then I started listening and I'm like, oh my God, this is profound. And that's how I discovered Terrence McKenna. And then I went and got food of the gods, which changed my life. And then I can tell this now, I won't get in trouble.
00:45:19
Speaker
I went off and I spent a thousand bucks. I got all this stuff and it took me three tries and failures and then I was growing my own mushrooms. And then I was on my way. And then I was walking past a head shop in San Diego here and I saw High Times magazine and I said to myself, High Times magazine, that thing's still around because I remember it from the seventies. So I went in.
00:45:48
Speaker
And I opened it, flipped open the magazine. And right there where I flipped the page open was an advertisement for the Enthio Botany Seminars. And there was Terrence McKenna and Sasha Shogan, all these people I had independently researching on my own were presenting. So I just got out my credit cards and I went and became part of all that. And it's, you know, evolved all through the years now to where we're at now. That's absolutely.
00:46:15
Speaker
Amazing.
Psychedelic Salon Podcast and Community
00:46:16
Speaker
The Psychedelic Salon, the podcast, is where I found you first. That's where I... What's the dude's name? Blanken? That one's it. Lorenzo? Lorenzo, yes, sorry. I haven't listened to it in ages. And Lorenzo would play these old recordings of Terrence, you know, doing lectures and stuff like that.
00:46:39
Speaker
And that's, I definitely fell in love with the dude listening to him through the psychedelic salon and yourself. That's why I reached out to you, you know, three years, it was three years ago at this point. Wow. Gosh. Yeah. First off, thank you for that. Second, when I went to those entheobani seminars, I would bring boxes and boxes of cassettes.
00:47:05
Speaker
I recorded the lectures of everybody. I recorded Sasha. I don't know if you're familiar with Christian Reich. He just died about not even a year ago. Christian was Germany's leading expert in shamanism. What a great guy. Christian, as an example, Christian lived with the Lakandan Indians who live around the Maya ruins. You can go
00:47:31
Speaker
tour the Maya ruins and listen to the tourist guides and blah, blah, blah. But the Lacandonne who had been living there all this time know the real stories. Yeah. And Christian actually lived with them for about three years. So we were walking through the ruins in Palenque and I was recording it. And I recorded boxes and boxes. So Lorenzo and I are good friends. And when he told me he was going to start the psychedelic salon, I handed over boxes of tapes to him. Oh, wow.
00:48:00
Speaker
And I helped them start the psychedelic salon with all the recordings that I had. Amazing bro. Yeah. And then I was on there like eight or nine times. I don't know if I lost track anymore. Um, and, um, then I found out back then where there were iPods. Um, he got an exciting letter from this kid. This kid from China went to the ruins, had his iPod put in the head.
00:48:28
Speaker
headphones, and he walked through the ruins listening to Christian Reisch's lecture on the ruins of Palenque on his iPod, right? And then we realized, wow, here it is, this lecture that I had recorded two or three years before, and here's this kid from China, getting the full thing of this knowledge that would have been lost, right? That's incredible, dude. So that started it, and then they used to call Lorenzo the Podfather.
00:48:55
Speaker
because he was really one of the first to do it. So I was a regular on that. I've done interviews on there. I interviewed Jim Fadiman, who's another good friend of mine. Yeah, yeah. I listened to that one. Yeah. So it's all tribe. It's all family. And they say find the others, right? Find the others, baby. Man, I love that, bro. I love that. Yeah, you know, I think, bro, I think I'm going to wrap it up here this time around.
00:49:25
Speaker
because I want to let you recover from putting on five workshops and all the other stuff in the lectures. Thank you so much for your time. Before we let you go, please let the listeners where they can find you on the internet. Yeah. Okay. All of my stuff is on Amazon.
00:49:50
Speaker
And then I have all my stuff on my own Mystic Ink Publishing website. So it's M-Y-S-T-I-C-I-N-K. P-U-B-L-I-S-H-I-N-G.com. And then also, you'll probably post this anywhere, but mattpalamary.com. M-A-T-T-P-A-L-L-A-M-A-R-Y.com. That's my website. Your podcasts that I did with you were on there. Radio, TV.
00:50:19
Speaker
Other podcasts, interviews, photos, there's tons of content on there. And if people want to reach out, there's a contact thing on the form, they can say hi and it'll email me and we can connect it that way. There's some pictures from the jungle there as well. Yeah. Oh, absolutely tons. Yeah. And I really appreciate you having me on and having me back. I love your show. I love what you're doing.
00:50:41
Speaker
Aside from what you're doing on the podcast, your regular work, I have a lot of respect for that. Thank you, bro. We love you as well. We love this. For me, the reason I really enjoy having you come on is I think in a sense similar to what you're doing to carry the torch of your mentors in the writing field, in the plant medicine shamanism field, for me,
00:51:10
Speaker
this podcast is it's a privilege to basically get folks like you on because you were folks like you you're the modern day elders now you might not see it yourself like that but us younger folks definitely see guys like you
00:51:32
Speaker
Even though you're probably only 25 years older than me, that's not a huge age difference. But we see guys like you as the elders, and there's a lot we can learn. There's a lot of wisdom that we can learn from these guys. And if we can record it, then we're doing a service to others. So I love that. And it's a great honor that I am one of the many conduits for this through the podcasting game.
00:51:58
Speaker
Thank you for doing it. Much appreciated. Thank you. Make it all worth it.