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Ep. 2 - Cave Consciousness with Eileen Hall
213 Plays1 year ago
Once upon a time, a scientist and an artist came together to open magical, wondrous portals into the underworld, and now they want you to come explore the labyrinth along with them!
In this episode of "Midnight Water: Dialogues in the Labyrinth", author and research scientist Katherine MacLean interviews her longtime friend and collaborator Eileen Hall, who is the book's cover artist and also one of its main characters. Eileen shares about her connection to nature growing up in Ecuador and the creative and spiritual awakening she experienced after her father's death from cancer.
Learn more about Eileen's work with the Tayos Cave at www.tayos.org
The Scientist: Katherine MacLean ~ www.katherinemaclean.org
The Artist: Eileen Hall ~ www.eileen-hall.com
The Music: Kate Fleur-Young ~ www.katefleuryoung.com
Podcast Editor: Josh Leonard
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Transcript
Introduction of Dialogues in the Labyrinth
00:00:31
Speaker
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Dialogues in the Labyrinth, which is a series of mind-expanding conversations inspired by Midnight Water, my debut psychedelic memoir. I'm a research scientist. My name is Catherine McLean, and I'm in conversation with my dear friend, who is an artist and adventurer named Eileen Hall. She did the amazing cover art for my book.
00:00:59
Speaker
And together over the past 10 years, we've explored so many portals and wondrous psychedelic dimensions of life.
Exploring Psychedelic Dimensions
00:01:08
Speaker
And it occurred to us that we wanted to do a series of conversations both between the two of us and with selected guests that's inspired by all of our adventures. And so we join you to explore these mazes, these labyrinths with us. And today we're turning the table. So in the first episode, Eileen interviewed me about my book.
00:01:36
Speaker
And it was a deep dive into many of the themes in Midnight Water. And today, I'll be interviewing Eileen about her adventurous life and how she came to become obsessed with the natural world, the spaces of liminality, how she expresses all of that in her art and her vision for the future saving Mother Earth.
00:02:01
Speaker
So thank you, Eileen, for being with all of us today. We're coming to the end of summer and the fall is usually a very precious and sacred time for you, a lot of anniversaries.
Inspirations from Ecuador
00:02:17
Speaker
I wonder if you could start by sharing with us a little bit about
00:02:23
Speaker
how you became first inspired to explore your consciousness and to create art. So kind of take us all the way back to when Eileen Hall was a little girl in Ecuador. All right. Hi, everyone. It's a pleasure to be here. So yes, okay. So
00:02:45
Speaker
I grew up in Ecuador, which is in South America, and it's a country that when I was there, it was still quite wild. I think it has something like 30% of its original forest left and is kind of made up of the Andes that come right down the middle. It's got a beautiful coast. It's got the Galapagos, the Amazon rainforest, and also the cloud forest.
00:03:10
Speaker
as well as a number of Indigenous communities, Andean communities, Afro communities, and it's just this massive diversity of culture and wildlife that it contains in nature, natural landscapes. It also has wild weather and me, especially as a child, I think I've probably connected with the weather first, the most, especially rain and water. It's a very wet country.
00:03:38
Speaker
And my dad, my father, Stan Hall, was also an explorer. He was a Scottish explorer that married my Ecuadorian mother and he loved being in Ecuador and would take us out to different places, out to different forests, mountains and beaches, and we would explore with him and our family together. And so my connection to nature began then. And as I mentioned, because it's got this wild weather, Ecuador has these storms, electrical storms that are there a lot of the time.
00:04:08
Speaker
I remember just feeling nature so intensely, the power of it from a young age. Ecuador gets El Nino, storms and currents. Parts of the country get flooded on a semi-regular basis. There's landslides. I think it has the highest amount of active volcanoes per square kilometer in the world. I grew up right around a bunch of active volcanoes and earthquakes. There was no really ever a dull moment in terms of nature in Ecuador.
Art, Nature, and Mysticism
00:04:38
Speaker
And in terms of my art practice, my parents gave me a sketchbook, I think at three years old, and I just started drawing then and never stopped drawing. It wasn't until actually when I was older and I was
00:04:53
Speaker
at university, I kind of drew a bit less, but yeah, I've always just been involved in something artistic. And especially as a kid, I like to look at patterns. I always would get transfixed by patterns on curtains. I remember spending just
00:05:10
Speaker
ages and ages at people's homes, figuring out patterns, like floral patterns on curtains, or I would stare at clouds, I would stare at things that just moved me in that way, and I just remember being entranced by them, as well as, again, when it rained and it poured and it was just so electrifying to watch the rain, I kind of, again, would stare at it for hours, and now looking back, I can
00:05:35
Speaker
See how that was also a way to meditate with the elements and it's where my kind of interest and the intelligence of the elements and animism and all of these topics started to really emerge. I was also a big dreamer since I was born. I had dreams all the time, very powerful dreams. A lot of them involved nature and especially water. So all of those things kind of mixed together and made for quite an interesting
00:06:05
Speaker
Uh, yeah, childhood filled with, with textures and color. It almost sounds like you were a natural mystic that, you know, some of us, well, I think maybe many of us have a little bit of that glimmer in the beginning. And then it's very quickly trained out of us, either through our families or, um, formal religion, formal education, um,
00:06:29
Speaker
And so many people are adults when they first remember in some way a reconnection to that. So I wonder, starting off from such a powerful foundation, I wonder how you kind of maintained that stream through education, through the kind of different transitions in your childhood. And I know there were a couple that kind of stand out
00:06:57
Speaker
And so I wonder if you could share that a little bit, like the balance between like having this natural mystical consciousness and then, you know, our culture, which is quite anti mystical. I think it's coming around, but at least for the last 30, 40 years, it has been quite anti mysticism.
00:07:12
Speaker
There's two things to that. Number one, because I learned to read also at a young age, I just have this very curious mind. My education just became books quite an early age. I think my mom tells how I read 10 encyclopedias when I was four or something. I was just incessantly needing knowledge all the time. I did end up getting obsessed with animals and dinosaurs I think at the time, but animals especially,
00:07:41
Speaker
I'd read everything I could about them. I'd watch them on TV. I just had this ongoing obsession with the animal kingdom. And second to that, I also think, so say to people that Ecuador, because of its wildness, and it's also a relatively poor country that didn't have access to lots and lots of culture, money to make films or theater. I didn't grow up going to the cinema or theater. Our entertainment was
00:08:07
Speaker
uh meals with our family or going for walks outdoors or because there were so many power shortages like whole cities would just halt in silence um on a regular basis like there wasn't this kind of incessant ongoing never stop speed that the west has so I reflected on that a lot and also you know
00:08:28
Speaker
When I grew up in Ecuador, people spend three hours every morning cooking lunch. There's also this slowness to the culture in Ecuador that was still there when I was around, which means that you're always just taking your time at the time you did when I grew up. It generally gave way for a meditative state to be around me. Again, I didn't realize that until I was older, but the fact that people still made their own clothes,
00:08:55
Speaker
they made a lot of their own food, they were still a lot of farmers, you know, that was still mainly a kind of a farming country and a lot of people would work the land, then there, yeah, there was just a sense of like making as a practice and creating your own domestic culture. This is the term I love using is because we
00:09:17
Speaker
We didn't have a lot of external international culture coming towards us. We just make it as we go along with all the tools that we had learned with our hands. And then again, my parents were very good at encouraging me. So they would just keep buying me art materials, encourage me to keep going. And I also learned to play music, which was another artistic, expressive
00:09:44
Speaker
space for me. And I always kept that going also because people just seem to do well. And I always got good marks at art. So that that kind of helped. And then I went on to study architecture and art at university. So there was never really a big break for me in terms of like, I never really stopped just creating because I come from a very, an inherently craftsman background in my family in Ecuador.
00:10:12
Speaker
So when I met you, we met in London at a psychedelic conference. And I kind of became aware of your Ecuadorian ancestry and where your life started at a later point. But I met you as a Scottish woman. You sounded Scottish. You looked Scottish. I met you in London, the United Kingdom. And I think over the course of our friendship, I began to learn that there were kind of two, at least two Ileans.
00:10:42
Speaker
this kind of more Latin American, indigenous, spiritual, kind of like backward in time, in a good way version, and then the kind of Western, fast-paced, city-living, world-traveling,
00:11:01
Speaker
very comfortable in these male-dominated, capitalistic settings, Eileen. I wonder if you could talk about the age at which you came from Ecuador to the United Kingdom, to Scotland, and how that consciousness shift was for you, and at different points, how you were aware of those two aspects of yourself.
00:11:29
Speaker
Yeah, it's kind of a mad trip being from two different, very different cultures.
Cultural Duality: Ecuador and the UK
00:11:35
Speaker
It has been for me because I always felt an outsider, an Ecuadorian in a way in a sense. I love being an Ecuadorian. I grew up only knowing how to be an Ecuadorian.
00:11:45
Speaker
But there was always something about me that was just a little bit kind of not fully Latin, because I love to read. I wasn't your normal girl. I just like to read. And I was actually a bit serious. And it wasn't until we moved to the UK, I could see why I wasn't as full of like, I'm not as full of Latin person as I you'd imagine. I'm actually in a sense also quite, quite British. So I came. So once we moved over here, I started to discover this other side of me that was more analytical, in a sense more
00:12:14
Speaker
kind of mind-based, I would call it, a little bit stricter, less loose, less kind of open in many ways, and also more individualistic. That was the main difference for us. The main shock was going from a very
00:12:29
Speaker
community-based, family-based culture where you spend most of your time with your family for most of your life, actually. You party with your family, you make things with your family. That's the foundational piece of being an Ecuadorian to then come into this culture, which is just about, you know, kind of in my impression then, I don't know if I would still say that fully now, but
00:12:51
Speaker
chasing the successful individualistic, less familial-based, less nature-based, less food-based, like everything that was to me part of a good life in Ecuador had been cut off over in the West. And that was a really big shock and actually took a long time to integrate that. It took a long time, especially since I didn't speak English.
00:13:17
Speaker
And so I would love for you to, you shared, you know, about your, you know, your mom's influence and she's still a huge influence in your life. You know, you're still very close with your mom and your sister and you've kind of, I think recreated that Ecuadorian like family based lifestyle in, you know, in Scotland. And then your, your dad was kind of this enigmatic and very powerful figure as well. And so I wonder if you want to talk a little bit more about your dad.
00:13:45
Speaker
and the influence he had on you. What was he like as a person? What was it like growing up with him and kind of where you see that influence now, I guess, in your life? Yeah, so my father was one of my favorite people to be in my life. He was the Scottish engineer that turned explorer from
00:14:08
Speaker
his kind of research and work and obsession with ancient history and the missing history of especially South America. And that's how he ended up over in Ecuador meeting my mom. I would say fundamentally, he's someone that really loved life. He actually grappled with it and to me in a great way, he enjoyed it. He loved people. He even, he, because he was fundamentally an explorer, he came with this attitude that like obstacles and fear are part of it and you work through them.
00:14:38
Speaker
So I never felt lots of fear from him. He was just a very solid, rounded man that was always an integrity in what I could see. He didn't like lying, he didn't like secrets, and he really believed in
00:14:53
Speaker
grind in peace on this planet. He really was very concerned with rooting out violence and lies and untruths that keep us all stuck psychologically and spiritually. So that was really the foundation of his work. But unbeknownst to me, he'd had some interesting experiences as a kid, some what you would call mystical altered states.
00:15:12
Speaker
that had also put him on this path of kind of mystical path that most people wouldn't have known, like we didn't even know about until he died because dad just kind of appeared like this normal
00:15:25
Speaker
gentle, giving, generous person that wanted to make a difference, but it's when he died that I ended up kind of discovering all these extra things about him and it explained so much about his nature, his powerful presence, that as soon as it was gone, it was very hard for us to lose him for that reason.
00:15:47
Speaker
And so, folks who are listening, if you happen to have read Midnight Water, a lot of the book is about death. When my sister died, which is kind of where the book launches, she was only 29, I was only 31. And I didn't know it at the time, but I learned that the death space was kind of more
00:16:16
Speaker
more comfortable for me than for other people. Like being with her as she was dying felt very special to me. It felt beautiful. It opened my eyes up to lots of new ways of understanding reality.
00:16:28
Speaker
And when we met Eileen, so this is in chapter, I think chapter four of the book, we kind of realized that we were both grappling with something similar, that one of our favorite people, most loved person had died in a tragic way from cancer. And it opened us up to a new understanding of reality. So at the same time that we were grappling with grief,
00:16:51
Speaker
We were also trying to understand this beauty, the mystical consciousness that had opened itself up. In a way, it's like we passed through a door and we were still mourning what was on the other side that we had left, but that we're still like, wow, we can explore what's this new terrain now that the door is open.
00:17:15
Speaker
I don't know if you could take us back to, um, if it's, you know, the parts that feel like not too hard, you know, you can decide, I think, but take us back to what it was like being with your dad and maybe some of those first openings or those glimpses that you had into that new world, you know, as he was dying.
00:17:37
Speaker
Sure, so 2008 was the year my dad died and it was a really interesting year because at the beginning of it I kind of had discovered that I was really unhappy and that I had spent many years just not really feeling like I've fitted in anywhere, like I belong, they still culturally didn't feel British and so I couldn't make sense of my life and that had brought on a lot of anxiety and stress
00:18:04
Speaker
And that's when I decided to go back to Ecuador that year to reconnect with nature. I just remember thinking, you know, I can't be from this country that has all these wild landscapes and not explore.
00:18:19
Speaker
I went back to Ecuador and that's where I also received the news that my dad was ill and they discovered some back pain and we didn't know it was cancer at the time and then that started unfolding and from time of diagnosis to death, it was three months, it was a really quick kind of very shocking summer of watching my father kind of
00:18:43
Speaker
slowly, but slowly and quickly disintegrate before my eyes without knowing how to manage it, how to handle it. And because I that year wasn't, you know, I was questioning being a university, I wasn't sure about being doing architecture, wasn't sure about where I should be.
00:19:00
Speaker
As my dad was dying, this kind of this interesting, intuitive, stronger heart voice, as I call it, started appearing that year. Number one, it told me to start going to nature more in Ecuador. And the second thing it said was, someone needs to keep your father's work alive, and that probably needs to be you. And so again, I started kind of, you know, listening to these voices because I,
00:19:25
Speaker
I had listened to what I thought was the path to success or happiness from our culture, and I wasn't happy, and I was very aware of that. So I just thought, what is there to lose if I just start paying attention to this new voice that appeared? That seemed to just also be softer and gentler. It just had this quality to it that felt just nice to me. But one of the biggest breakthrough moments was actually the last week of my father's life when he put him in a hospice.
00:19:54
Speaker
And by then my mom had spent months caring after him and she was exhausted and we didn't know he was dying. They told us he had years to live, but that they were going to put him in a hospice to look after him for a bit. And I said to mom, you know, go home and rest and I'll be there for my, for dads. And so I ended up being in this hospice.
00:20:15
Speaker
every day with him, half conscious. And I just remember kind of having moments in the self surrounded by people that were dying. And I started thinking I could hear his voice talking to me and it reassuring me. And I kept questioning that, but then I started feeling kind of altered. I don't know how, you know, I think I've reached spaces like that when I'm in deep meditation, when things just feel a little bit more liquid, less solid. And you start just hearing
00:20:44
Speaker
your own intuition and your inner landscapes more clearly, that's the kind of space that started opening up and it started, I felt kind of high, but also confused because I was like, am I going crazy? Is this what happens when someone who's close to you is very sick? You just start going crazy. I had no, I'd never learned about meditation, altered states, I knew nothing about mystical states.
00:21:07
Speaker
But there was just so many moments where I could clearly hear my dad's voice talking to me that I, again, I decided to surrender. And then what happened after he died was I stayed in this kind of altered state. I remember for about six months after he died, I didn't really know, I didn't tell anyone because I just, I honestly thought I was going insane because I was in so much pain. I was so sad. I was so confused about life. It was the same year that the economy crashed. I think that was the economic crash.
00:21:35
Speaker
And so all the structures that had been solid in my life, like the economy, my studies, where I thought I should be living, my father just crumbled all the way in one, the space of one year. And the only thing that was left from that crumbling was you need to go into nature and you need to follow your dad's spirit. That's the only two messages that go up from that. And those two messages have shaped everything since then.
00:22:04
Speaker
I then started exploring jungles in Ecuador with my then boyfriend who was an ornithologist. And I then continued to have visions, altered states, mystical experience happen on a semi-regular basis soon after my dad died.
00:22:48
Speaker
Wow, I mean, it's also, you know, these are conversations, as long as we've been friends, I've never heard you tell some of these, you know, details of this story with your dad. And it's just shocking to me how much was similar, you know, that with my sister, it's like the first
00:23:05
Speaker
You know, a couple weeks in the hospital felt like, okay, she's sick. We're going to treat her. These are the doctors saying she's got years to live. She's not dying. And then it's like at some point the dying person and the person or people closest to them cross a threshold.
00:23:24
Speaker
And then you know that you're not in the living terrain anymore. You are walking toward this death space. And it is a real, it's a walk. It's an adventure. It's a slow progress through this liminal space.
00:23:39
Speaker
And at least with my sister and what you describe is like your consciousness starts shifting along with the dying person. And what I think that is, is that the, that your dad, I think chose you and my sister chose me to accompany them through that liminal space. Like we couldn't die with them. We couldn't go all the way into the land of the dead, but we could walk, you know, that in between zone.
00:24:05
Speaker
and how actually amazing it was that we were chosen to do that because we could have just completely missed the opportunity. You know, we could have missed the invitation.
00:24:16
Speaker
And so I guess I would love for people listening who have close loved ones who are sick, maybe they're getting mixed signals from their doctors, maybe they're alone, go spend time with that person because who knows what could open up for you. We can't promise it will be pleasant. It might be the hardest thing you ever do, but I don't think either you or I would go back and say, I wish that never happened.
00:24:41
Speaker
Our lives have become so much more profound and interesting since that crossing. Absolutely. The way I felt life through that has never left me. And I call it the best and the worst thing that's ever happened to me. It's tragically beautiful. It's tragically beautiful.
Liminal Spaces and Death
00:25:00
Speaker
And again, yeah, there's this liminal space that opens between the worlds is undeniable for me, it was undeniable then. I thought, like I said, I thought was going crazy because I didn't know what was happening. But now looking back, I'm like, wow, I do believe like you're right. There's certain
00:25:15
Speaker
people that get chosen to guide those to the other side. And there's three other details of that that I always come back to. Again, that guy did so much of my journey. Number one was spending a lot of silent time with my dad. He could hardly speak with all the drugs. And again, it's the first time I just lay there with someone's being like he was just present breathing.
00:25:36
Speaker
I remember putting my head on his chest one day as he was on his way out, and I heard his heart really pumping so hard. I was like, wow, I've never paid attention to the heart in this way. And it just felt so much stronger because he was leaving the heart just pounded like this extra, with this extra intensity that, again, has never left me. It's like this thing is alive. It has life. And before you know it doesn't,
00:26:04
Speaker
The second thing was I started feeling that he was worse than the doctors were saying. So I was convinced that, and I remember calling my sister in hysterics and saying, you have to get back now. Dad is not OK. And the nurses and doctors were not saying that. So all of a sudden, I just knew something wasn't right. Three days before he died, I started feeling this anxiety, this sense of unease, and I could not pinpoint it.
00:26:32
Speaker
And then the night before he died, I felt this chill. I remember looking at him on the bed and I felt this chill of wind come through me, which felt like a wind I've never felt in my life when I was like, something is up. And then the next day he died. Like I always think that the wind told me that he was, that it was coming to get him, you know? Wow. I'm also just, I'm, I'm, I have goosebumps all over as you're describing this. And I just,
00:27:01
Speaker
I think there are a couple things that are coming up for me. One is that you've used the word crazy and sane. You thought you were losing contact with normal reality. And in a way, you have to get crazy to follow someone through that space.
00:27:16
Speaker
And I think it's a disservice to dying people that we refuse to let go of consensus reality to serve them. So it's like, I think we have to get okay with these states of consciousness are not bad. They're not dangerous. We call them psychotic and crazy because we don't know what else to do with them. But the dying person needs us to go there. It's like they need someone to be willing to go a little crazy.
00:27:43
Speaker
until then you realize there's nothing that strange, right? And so the way that
00:27:50
Speaker
Your senses were enhanced. You know, hearing voices. You know, your intuition, the wind. I mean, these are all things that if someone started feeling that out of nowhere at work, they would think they were, like you said, going crazy. They would check themselves into a psychiatry hospital and say, I'm hearing voices. And yet, maybe there are times in life, in transitions, in ritual spaces, death, birth, illness, where that kind of consciousness is what's called for.
00:28:20
Speaker
And so again, you were a natural at it. You'd been practicing it since you were a child. And I think in a way, your dad knew that about you. And even though he couldn't communicate in a normal way, he could trust that you would show up and eventually get with the program, like get on that frequency. And then the final thing I want to draw people's attention to is the wind.
00:28:46
Speaker
So there are different spiritual traditions that talk about this and you've experienced it, I've experienced it, but this physicality to something changing around death that we still don't understand, but it's not a psychological experience. It's very physical and that feeling of something there and then that transition and then something leaving.
00:29:12
Speaker
a lot of people describe as a physical sensation. So you felt it as a wind. I remember with my sister, I also saw it as a movement of birds over water, or that kind of shifting energy, which I guess you could also imagine birds could disturb the water like wind does. And so it's interesting to think about that energy that has been carried in someone's body and then is moving. Where?
00:29:42
Speaker
I know, I know, it's mad. And the other, you know, the other thing that happened was, you know, my dad, I grew up with my dad talking about every single one of us carrying a light inside us that knows where to go. It knows how to guide us and it knows how to be in goodness. He always spoke about us and I never quite understood. I was like, what do you mean that?
00:30:04
Speaker
Then the night before he dies, there's this massive, big, fiery sunset. I've got photos of it. I started taking photos of all these sunsets the week before he dies. I was like, what is up with the sun? I think it was the week he was in hospice and soon after.
00:30:23
Speaker
I could not stop looking at light reflecting on water, on water droplets, or on water in general. And I never thought it was as beautiful as it was in that time. I just remember thinking, again, how is it that I've never seen light and water this beautiful in my life? I've never seen them as being this beautiful as I do now. And I was like, is it because I'm in so much pain that my mind is grasping for beauty in order to get through this?
00:30:52
Speaker
I was like, even if it is, I'm amazed at how beautiful this light is. So I feel that my dad, I really genuinely feel that because my dad was all about this light, that he transitioned into light and continued to talk to me. I just for ages thought my dad was still in contact with me through light and light reflections.
00:31:15
Speaker
I mean, it's amazing, Eileen, I think, I mean, I believe that that's true. And, you know, I think it changes over time. Certainly, I can resonate with the, you know, six months after my sister's death was the most intense. And I felt her kind of presence all the time, that altered state of consciousness, the beauty. And then it kind of slowed down, it kind of dissipated, it changes. But, you know, her visitations and the way she shows up,
00:31:44
Speaker
is so distinctly her. And I just wonder if each of us has a signature like that, you know, like our life has a certain essence, character, something very, yeah, essential to who we are. And that if maybe death is also an invitation to get to know someone's essence so that then they don't leave, you know, you can keep finding them.
00:32:07
Speaker
And that kind of spirituality or personal belief system can really sustain us through quite a lot of pain. And I think that's another big theme in the book is pain.
00:32:23
Speaker
And you and I have talked about this many times, and pain is relative. The pain that you and I have experienced doesn't compare to being in a refugee camp or genocide or in the middle of a war zone or certain kinds of illness that are just absolutely debilitating. However, even moderate pain can make life not worth living.
00:32:48
Speaker
And so it's interesting to introduce this concept of beauty as an antidote to pain or as a way to navigate pain.
00:32:59
Speaker
I haven't heard many people talk about that, but certainly artists know that, writers know it. You know, musicians know it. It's like, if you're not going to create beauty out of pain, man, like, good luck, because what else can you do? Right. And how many music genres have come out of painful periods, like the blues or, you know, rock and roll comes out of a bunch of frustration and anger, I'm assuming, you know, like, there's, there's amazing art that has come out of that. And as an artist, you know,
00:33:27
Speaker
As a kid i was transfixed with color and texture and so the way i see pain and beauty and goodness are all these things are textures and colors i can i no longer see them as good and bad because of what i would shown like that was the because i was in so much pain at the time of losing my father.
00:33:45
Speaker
I find everything extra beautiful, like anything, which has moved me to tears. And I was like, what the hell is wrong with me? But that hasn't left. It's something I can come back to time and time again when I forget to be grateful or when I forget. We come with this consciousness that requires to make meaning out of our existence.
00:34:08
Speaker
It requires a story. It's like, if you don't have a story to channel your consciousness through, it goes into disarray. It just does. It does for me, at least. So I saw a crumbling of meaning in my life over many years. It just had nothing to grab onto that made sense for my life. And so I ended up in this darkness, in this underworld, as I do think. I ended up in a cave of sorts. And when dad died, I started seeing light again.
00:34:37
Speaker
Wow. Because I'd been so sad, I'd been sad for like, since I moved to, I mean, I was did not like the UK for 10, you know, I moved to the UK for 10 years, I hated it, and then my dad dies. And it was just like, as dark as it got for me. But it was like, it was like his death got me out of this cave and little by little these kind of
00:34:57
Speaker
glimpses of light, glimpses of beauty, each of them kind of built this ladder out of this darkness that I could like bit, you know, little bit by little bit, pull myself bits of beauty pulled me out of that. And you know all about this. I mean, it's also amazing to think about, you know, I think sometimes people assume that death is the start of grief.
00:35:22
Speaker
And, you know, we've even, we see now that they want to pathologize extended grief or prolonged grief as if like grief that lasts longer than a couple months is something, you know, psychologically abnormal. You and I know that's not true, but most people don't. But the more important point is that the grief and sadness does not begin with the loss. The lost exposes and reveals the level of sadness and pain you've been carrying probably your whole life.
00:35:51
Speaker
You know, and suddenly it all comes to the surface and you're like, what do I do with this? It's like, have I really been living this way? And I think for you and me, especially like, you know, my sister's death for me was like a wormhole back to my childhood. It was like this time travel back through all these moments of loss.
00:36:15
Speaker
moments where I really needed her or someone to see what I was going through. And so in a way, it's like grief is not just about that person, it's about you. And the best thing death can do, like you said, is show you a way out of that.
00:36:34
Speaker
And so I want you to kind of like, yeah, explore that a little more for people because it's just a different way of conceptualizing grief that it's not this event that begins with death and then ends after a certain amount of time. It's like, it reveals the arc of your life, I think. Yeah. Oh, I love that. Yeah. 100%. I've said, and I say this to friends every time they lose someone.
00:36:58
Speaker
is say prepare to be gifted some of the biggest healing you've ever had. I let them know that they should prepare to receive as much beauty as they do the pain and it works every time and they get it and people start clicking in and they notice this stuff. Again, it's the intelligence of life is this kind of contrast between also like what is death? I don't know if there's endings anyway.
00:37:22
Speaker
I remember when dad died, I couldn't believe he died. My sister will still say this. She's like, I don't think dad died. Because he lives in our hearts, he lives in our memories, he lives in the works that I do. It's like, what is that that we call death is the first thing. And it's just a transformation. You just go, it's like, this is why water is such a good metaphor. It goes from being ice to being liquid or to being gas.
00:37:52
Speaker
I do think our consciousness does that through different evolutions of being physical, less physical, like elemental, like I don't know this. It's how I perceive it in my own little weird way. And I totally agree with you that we then, when something like death happens, it forces us to open the basement of everything we've kept hidden all of our lives.
00:38:17
Speaker
That very painful thing that pierces through you right into your heart, also pierces into all the stuff we have to repress, all the unintegrated pain, that was the experience for me. I realized that I had all these demons, all these things that I just had not made sense of. Actually, taking time I left university, I left my life. I took time out of my life to just deal with this.
00:38:44
Speaker
And again, it was one of the best things I could have done because I'm so happy that I followed these messages, these voices. I even joke to people sometimes that I realized sometimes I genuinely thought I was going crazy, but I refused to take myself to a doctor because I did not want someone's diagnosis on me. I was like, there was moments I was like, oh, my God, maybe I am a bit crazy, but I'm just going to keep following what these voices say or what these signs do. And let's just see what happens because I left. I was like, I mean, the system's crumbling.
00:39:14
Speaker
The economic system crumbled under our feet. I was unhappy having this successful Western life that everyone was chasing. Nothing made sense to me in the way I had been cultured. And I was like, are the voices really as crazy as what I've been swimming in? You know, so it was actually I realized it was
00:39:34
Speaker
good for me to have that much kind of pain going on existentially around my own cultural making, my own existential gnosis. And then actually it's like my dad's death ignited that part of me that remembered I'm here to make a better story for my life and I'm here to really pay attention to the meaning of everything instead of thinking it's meaningless or it doesn't matter or there's no purpose to my life.
00:40:03
Speaker
Well, and also, as you said, our system that has been created over a very short period of time is already collapsing it on itself. It's not sustainable. We're killing, well, the planet will be fine, but we're killing humanity. You know, humanity is going to come and go in a blip. And so what I've observed in you as well is
00:40:25
Speaker
both a fascination and a commitment to preserving the natural world. You and I are both obsessed with trees, with nature. We go into places where there are many fewer people than animals and plants.
00:40:42
Speaker
The mushrooms themselves speak in voices to humans who are willing to listen. So if you think about it, maybe there are some people who are willing to still listen to nature, who are willing to still listen to the plants and animals and the earth herself.
00:41:01
Speaker
materialist scientists may say that's just your imagination. Well, thank God I have such a nice imagination. Yeah, right. Because it helps me focus on the things that are that are truly going to last. After everything crumbles, and it will, you know, it's just a matter of time. But like what things will still be here? You know, what what aspects of wildness and nature will still be around after humanity's experiment has, you know, concluded?
00:41:31
Speaker
Yeah, 100%. And again, I've watched you do this as well so beautifully. And again, one of the images or metaphors that has really helped me is to see all of this kind of, let's say the grieving, the processing, the integration as creating compost for your new garden, right?
00:41:48
Speaker
If me and you at the time had known that, like, I'm crumbling, it's all falling apart, I'm going crazy, it's just the decay happened. Like, there's a soil that needs the worms to come in, like, things to just decay in order to bring new life.
00:42:03
Speaker
Because it does take a while sometimes, but then me and you were able to plant these new seeds that came in many forms, like in beauty and art and new friendships and new ways of thinking became these seeds that then grew into these gardens that me and you can now so securely say that we've planted and we're happy to harvest from. And it's why I don't think we could have had this discussion.
00:42:25
Speaker
like back then. Me and you have been in this decaying composting process for so long, and now that we're finally seeing the mushrooms pop through and we're like, oh yeah, no, there's definitely magic, you guys. And it's helping me also see the world crumbling in that way. Maybe the world is dying and it has to go so that it can create compost for a new world. I also have less of a reaction to things falling apart nowadays because of these different
00:42:55
Speaker
death moments that have been through, not just with death dying, but with changing my whole life or getting sick. Death can teach you so much about general transitions and how you can evolve your whole being by becoming compost and letting that happen.
00:43:28
Speaker
I love that. So I wonder, speaking of compost and dark places and the underworld, I wonder if you can share a little bit about the heart of your own labyrinth, an actual cave.
Transformative Jungle Experiences
00:43:43
Speaker
Can you take us into the cave? And I'll just say this, there was a moment, I think I didn't include it in the book.
00:43:52
Speaker
but there was a moment in our first mushroom experience together where you said that you were looking for treasure.
00:44:01
Speaker
And I thought you meant like gold coins, like money, like material treasure. And then like over time I realized that you were talking about something else. So I wonder if you can talk about this, the cave and treasure and these kind of the metaphors of these places that you've both physically explored, but also they turn into these grand metaphors.
00:44:23
Speaker
Yeah, right. Okay, so the cave that Catherine is referring to is called the Tyus Caves and it's located in the southeastern part of the Amazon of Ecuador in the border with Peru. It's guarded by the Shuar tribe that have been there for a long time. And in 1976, my dad led what's still to date the largest scientific cave expedition of all time to this cave.
00:44:50
Speaker
alongside the British and Ecuadorian governments, joint special forces, and astronaut Neil Armstrong as honorary president. The reason my father wanted to go to this cave was because of a tale he had read in a book by Eric Van Daniken called Gold of the Gods, in which he details a treasure, a large metal library that was supposed to be housed within this cave.
00:45:14
Speaker
possibly containing our missing history, possibly containing the origin of our species, and if it was real, it would be the first such written text to be found in Latin America. By then, my father had become convinced that a lot of our missing history could be found in the Americas. This was before
00:45:35
Speaker
We knew of all these kind of, there was some discoveries then that were starting to be dated older than the pyramids, for example, in Egypt. And so the new world had, in my dad's eyes, become the old world. And he wanted to find real, tangible evidence to back up the research of not just him, but other interested explorers.
00:45:56
Speaker
with this whole interesting kind of ancient aliens tale behind it. And the governments also wanted to map these, where the cave is, is also one of the most biodiverse regions on the planet and at the time was unmapped territory. So they went in with some top scientists and cavers at the time and kind of find hundreds of new species of flora and fauna.
00:46:21
Speaker
They also mapped about five kilometers worth of cave system. Now, this isn't just your normal kind of claustrophobic cave, this this cave, this Taos cave is a chamber after chamber that are the sizes of cathedrals. These are massive spaces that kind of are just so, so grand in nature and beautiful and are connected by different tunnels.
00:46:46
Speaker
and all sorts of formations that are found there. Neil Armstrong compared being down there with being on the moon because it looks like a different world.
00:46:57
Speaker
Now, they didn't find any treasure, but they did find some remains of a person with some artifacts dated to, I think it was 3,500 years ago. But then dad became obsessed with this cave and also with stories of treasure in Ecuador, of which there are many. We now know that the Spanish conquistadors went after El Dorado.
00:47:19
Speaker
kind of many died in the process. There's been a lot of failed attempts at finding these treasures, but we do have a lot of historical accounts of different settlements in the Americas being covered in gold. And we know of all the gold that was stolen from the Americas. So it's kind of all connected to that. And second to that, my father became really interested in the pre-Columbian cultures, all these kind of different
00:47:46
Speaker
indigenous people that had developed ceramics and ways of making tools and craftsmanship that was more advanced than over in Europe for its time. So my dad kind of followed this treasure story until his death.
00:48:04
Speaker
He also began efforts to protect the cave as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. And when he died again, because I wanted to keep a hold of his spirit, I just wanted to follow everything to do with him because I realized how good a person he was. And I was like, the world feels crazy right now. I only kind of really trust my dad and his integrity. It was also this kind of desperate hanging on for something that felt good.
00:48:32
Speaker
within what was for me, like I said, this very dark space of despair. I was in despair over the world, and I also started watching way too many documentaries about the destruction of the world. But at the same time that my dad died, I met this man, Manuel, who became my boyfriend for a while, and he was learning to be a bird watcher, bird guide, and he was heavily involved in environmental activism at the grassroots level in Ecuador.
00:49:01
Speaker
And when I first met him, he mentioned going to see bears. And for me, I was like, wow, bears. You can see bears. Why am I not going to see? All these questions started, why am I not going to see bears? Why don't I go and see all these animals and forests? So he ended up being kind of my jungle guide. He was also interested in helping me follow my dad's work.
00:49:24
Speaker
I over the years that I was with Manuel I went back to live in Ecuador and I started exploring different jungles different forests and ecosystems mostly to do with bird watching not always with the treasure and because for bird watching you are required to stay silent you can't see birds if you're nattering away
00:49:45
Speaker
It was the first time in my life I'd been asked to stop talking. I come from a Latin culture that doesn't really know what silence is and doesn't know what individual space is. So I quickly got bored and was finding it too much. I was like, I have to talk. I can't not talk. So again, in my craziness,
00:50:04
Speaker
I started just talking to the jungle. I remember the day I just was like, hey, jungle, I'm bored. I've never been asked to stay silent for this long and it's really making me anxious and I can't handle it. And then the jungle started calling, talking back to me and saying, hey, don't worry, just breathe, just relax. And I'm here to listen. And I was like, oh, God, I really am crazy. I was like, now I think I'm talking to the jungle. What is going on? But because it was long hours trekking.
00:50:34
Speaker
Again, I had no idea that trekking for hours was so good for you. Manuel was someone that liked to go to very wild, far-out places. He didn't like people that much, so we would always trek as far away as we could away from people so we could see all these beautiful, exotic birds.
00:50:50
Speaker
And so I started telling the jungle about my dad and death and how sad I was and how bad I felt. And the jungles just kept saying, don't worry, let it go. Look at the beauty in here. Look at the details. Look at the birds. And for a while I was convinced that these
00:51:08
Speaker
beautiful birds were here to make everything. I literally thought they were like my little therapists every time because I started, again, entering these altered states of consciousness. When I would walk in silence for a few hours, I just felt so different and I felt high. And I started, again, getting visions or thinking I could talk to the birds and the bees. And at the time, I just thought, even if I'm imagining this, this is making me feel so much better.
00:51:36
Speaker
But before you know it, I do this long enough when I fall in love with jungles. And I have no, you know, my dad even had painted them as very dangerous, like anything you hear about jungles and wild places is full of like,
00:51:48
Speaker
tales of her agnophobia or whatever, all these Hollywood films that are just put this fear in your mind. And I kind of experienced the opposite. I was still really scared and they're still very poisonous things in places like this. But I just remember kind of saying to the jungle, hey, I'm going to be very respectful. I'm going to take my time.
00:52:08
Speaker
And it felt like it could hear me and I always felt looked after in these jungles and I've bumped into massive spiders and I've walked next to poisonous snakes and nothing has ever happened to me. I can't guarantee that for everyone but I had this very real sense that the jungle could hear me speak and then
00:52:27
Speaker
You know, through actually my psychedelic interest has started finding out that the indigenous people that use plants as medicine believe that everything is conscious, that plants have a consciousness that can talk to you through this kind of philosophy of animism. And that's when things started to get even more interesting for me is when I discovered some of this indigenous wisdom through through also being involved in the psychedelic space.
00:52:54
Speaker
I mean, I love it, Eileen. It's like you with a very fresh, unbiased...
00:53:00
Speaker
almost naive state of mind, discovered for yourself the thing that shamans, healers, medicine people, these are skills and talents and gifts that they have cultivated over decades of apprenticeship and training and vision quests and fasts in the jungle and dietas with plants. And I love how, again, that following your dad's spirit
00:53:29
Speaker
led you straight into the heart of this wisdom, but you got to experience it directly without someone telling you anything about like, this is what this plant says or this is what this thing is for. And this is how the jungle, you know, this is how you have to sing to the jungle. You got to actually have this unmediated introduction to something that so many Westerners are now seeking.
00:53:52
Speaker
You know, we think like, oh, I'm just going to find the right guru, the right shaman, the right meditation teacher, the right psychedelic, the right retreat center. And then suddenly I'll get it. But I think what your story illuminates is that some people are invited in a totally different way. And that if you're trying to, if your intentions are pure,
00:54:14
Speaker
And you're going with an honest heart and you're saying like, please, I'm having trouble. I can't do this. Then interestingly, these powerful intelligent.
00:54:24
Speaker
you know, energies will, will reach back out. And that's been my experience too. If you show up in a humble, honest, sincere way and say, like what I said to the mushrooms so many times, I'm having a hard time. I can't do this. I need help. Then it opens this dialogue. But if you go in and say like, this is what I need. This is what I want. I paid for this. I chose this shaman. The plants are like, see you later. Like, good luck.
00:54:52
Speaker
And what I've learned over time is it is like forming a friendship. It is like cultivating a relationship. They talk to you like, I suppose, a human would, but in their own elemental way, with their own elemental intelligence. And I was also lucky that Manuel just also would starve me or not give me water. So he became my vision quest guy because he thought I was a bit of a spoiled city girl.
00:55:16
Speaker
I love it he's like we're gonna we're gonna starve you keep you from having enough water make you walk for many hours make you stop talking and like you didn't even know it but it's like he was like watch what just happens like
00:55:28
Speaker
He didn't even know that. He was obsessed with birds. He was your geek that's obsessed with birds. They're not taking them off the list, but he was like, knew the names, knew all the geeky stuff. It was too much for me. I knew nothing about anything. I think that naivety allowed for such a beauty of conversation. I feel that that's why my mind was able to just let go because it didn't know. I had no contextual background to project
00:55:55
Speaker
onto this jungle, because I'd never been in it. I knew a little bit about jungles, but not like that. So spending hours in silence, just literally back and forth and back and forth talking to it, it taught me to breathe. I still find it fascinating that one of the first things the jungle said was like, relax, breathe deeper, take your time, and you can do this. Because I would say to the jungle, Manuel's making me walk too much, and I'm so tired, and he's not feeding me, and he's not giving me water either.
00:56:25
Speaker
You know, and I would complain, it's just like, you know what, chill, you slow down, you've got more energy, and all of a sudden I could hike for a whole day without food or water.
00:56:34
Speaker
doing this. Following these instructions that came straight from the jungle I all of a sudden could survive there in a way I couldn't before and that continues to completely fascinate me and then what I watched in Manuel and other trackers because then in all of this I got to meet other people that had lived in jungles for a long time or had gone from being hunters to bird watchers.
00:56:56
Speaker
There's this, like, these animal senses that we carry that can pick up on the movements and noises of the jungle and the animals. That starts to, again, sharpen, become HD. And after a while, I became completely fascinated by how Manuel or other people could hear the bird way back, or they knew exactly where the bird was. They just knew this stuff. And I was like, what is this? This is magic.
00:57:20
Speaker
So I started paying more attention and learning and that there came a point when I was able to do the same.
Nature, Consciousness, and Treasures
00:57:27
Speaker
And that's when I started experiencing spaces of no thought. When I just felt like an animal, there was no longer this human mind going on and on and on. And again, you can spend years meditating to get there. All it took is for me to focus on birds and their movements and their textures so that I could let go of this mind chatter. So I quickly dissipated my anxiety in jungles.
00:57:50
Speaker
It was a lot harder to keep that up outside of a jungle, of course. Which speaks to the importance of the environment. I think so much of these hacks, consciousness hacking, biohacking, microdosing, it's like we want to take the cure and then go back to these toxic environments. And we're like, why is this not working? And it's like, well, maybe the environment and the entire ecosystem around you matters a whole lot more than what you're trying to do as an individual.
00:58:19
Speaker
And you and I have always said this, and people just kind of say, oh, yeah, nature. I was like, no, really. Spend extended time alone in nature. We're in a small group of people in nature. And we mean real nature, not a park in a city, but there are many more trees and plants and mushrooms and animals than humans. And it takes weeks. And most people don't have weeks, but it's like,
00:58:45
Speaker
just a month in nature in true wildness could be worth way more than 10 psychedelic trips or five meditation retreats or, you know, so much therapy for anxiety while you're living in a city that's making you sick.
00:59:02
Speaker
So I think there are so many applications for the stories that you've shared. And I just hope that people feel inspired that we still have a wild world. We still have nature and like experience it now.
00:59:18
Speaker
before it's gone. Absolutely. And on that note, I would love if you could share in the kind of final five or so minutes that we have, what are you doing now? Like, where is your work now about, you know, protecting and ensuring that these natural places, these wild places that have benefited you so much are there for, you know, for many, many lifetimes yet to come?
00:59:43
Speaker
Right. So again, years into this kind of quest and interesting vision quest, for me, it kind of became very evident that nature is a treasure, also consciousness is a treasure. I'm obsessed with how our consciousness can do all this in relationship to nature and our bodies.
01:00:02
Speaker
And so I started kind of noticing all this attention coming towards me because of my father's story, the kind of story of the treasures growing all the time. There's been a few documentaries made about this. And I wanted to kind of use that to get people more interested in protecting nature for that reason, to be like, actually, the treasure is right in front of us. Let's maybe just keep this gold in the ground. I actually became,
01:00:29
Speaker
I actually became less interested in the physical treasure as soon as nature started speaking back. And I find out about all the indigenous wisdom that comes alongside that. I was like, what? Nobody told me that existed. I'll choose that over gold any day. That was all. So I got heavily involved with conservation and activism in Ecuador for a few years with Manuel.
01:00:52
Speaker
And then through that, I kind of married it with my art practice in terms of making nature-inspired watercolors and art. We're going to create some art installations around this cave. You know, some of you know we took John Hopkins, a musician, to the Thayus Caves in 2018, which he's now made a piece of music from.
01:01:14
Speaker
which then became his album, Music for Psychedelic Therapy, that my art's a cover of. And yeah, I'm kind of set up. Tyus is a foundation that can support the protection of the Tyus caves itself and then further from there.
01:01:29
Speaker
various habitats across Ecuador. What's really interesting is that Ecuador was one of the first countries to give nature rights in court. And we know now that this month, the people of Ecuador voted to keep oil under the ground in a large area of the Amazon because
01:01:46
Speaker
They believe they are as good as dead without the forest. Now, it always impressed me that people in Ecuador were constantly putting their lives on their line to protect their forests. I did not grow up with the sense of how valuable a forest was in that way, having grown up in a city. So that's completely flipped for me. Now I know that not only does nature give us the food and water we need to survive, it could also just be our fundamental therapist, spiritual guide, healer,
01:02:15
Speaker
that is just there. And jungles have, because they're kind of dangerous and hard to live in, I think that's what's protected them. Their own wildness has protected them from being destroyed completely, but we're still at a knife edge-ness. And yeah, kind of, I'm using all my resources at the moment, either through art, storytelling, working with musicians,
01:02:40
Speaker
and partnering up with other people and organizations in Ecuador to just really strengthen that network that's already there. I have a lot of hopes for Ecuador. It's starting to really gain momentum in winning court battles against oil and mining companies.
01:02:55
Speaker
And, you know, Will Smith went there last year. We'll see he'll be featuring it in his new show, Welcome to Earth. And I hope that actually also boosts the stories in a way that is actually useful for people on the ground. So that's really my main purpose is to support all the people on the
Friendship and Creative Collaboration
01:03:13
Speaker
ground that are putting their lives on the line on a daily basis to protect what I think is one of the most magical places on Earth.
01:03:21
Speaker
Amazing, Eileen. I am so honored to know you for all of these 10 years. I'm so glad that psychedelics brought us together. I think as we've grown older, we see that psychedelics may not be a lifestyle, but rather another gateway. So they open up a door into a different way of understanding the world. And that's where the exciting adventure begins. It's just the beginning. It's not an end. It's not even the middle.
01:03:48
Speaker
And so I just feel a lot of, yeah, just it's very heartwarming to think about all of the different paths that brought us together and then all of the paths that had rippled out of that friendship and relationship.
01:04:04
Speaker
And now there's the beginning of Midnight Water. My writing and your art together are rippling through reality, through people's minds, through their experiences. And we are getting to show people how amazing it is to feel, to really feel everything, to see the beauty, to explore the dark places.
01:04:26
Speaker
And I wish you the best of luck. I wonder if you can share just your website or a place that people can kind of stay tuned into what you have going on, if there are updates that come over the course of the next year and how they can support what you're doing.
Eileen's Art and Updates
01:04:44
Speaker
Yeah, thank you so much for all your beautiful questions. First thing, if people are interested in the CAVE story, it's www.tayos.org, which is T-A-Y-O-S.org. You can read about the story there. You can sign up to our newsletter and be kept up to date. We're a bit quiet just now because there's a lot going on in the background. We're kind of been doing so much fundraising and rejigging of the whole thing so we can
01:05:10
Speaker
make all sorts of beautiful things happen. And then my personal website is eileen-hall.com. That's where my art lives. Some of my other musings live there. And the best way to support me just now is if you want to buy prints or artwork, that's really the best way. Some people like to donate straight to the project.
01:05:32
Speaker
But like I said, do sign up to the newsletter list. I'm not that active on it, but I'm hoping to start really updating our audiences on that very soon.
01:05:43
Speaker
Wonderful. Thank you so much, everyone. It's been a pleasure. I hope that your interest is piqued into all of these new territories. Eileen and I are so happy to be sharing all of these fascinating treasures with all of you. And stay tuned for our next guest. So now you know who the hosts are, Catherine McLean, research scientist and author of Midnight Water, A Psychedelic Memoir.
01:06:10
Speaker
and Eileen Hall, a cave explorer, jungle speaker, and amazing artist. And she did the cover art for Midnight Water as well. And now that we've set up the foundation for this dialogue, we'll be inviting in new guests and people who we get to ask all of the best questions about their life and how that weaves into our own experiences. So stay tuned for more in this series, dialogues,
01:06:40
Speaker
in the labyrinth. Have a lovely day.
01:07:03
Speaker
you