Welcome to Mind Escape. Are you ready?
Are you ready to escape your mind?
Hello Mind Escapees, if you have not already, please go check out
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Tonight we have an amazing episode with friend of the show
and author Matthew Palomeri. If you don't know who Matthew
is, please go check out her previous episodes.
We have some on our YouTube channel and our audio platforms
as well as some vaulted in our Patreon, so please go check
those out. Matthew is a wealth of knowledge
when it comes to everything psychedelic, psychedelia,
ayahuasca. He's also an amazing writer who
writes non fiction and fiction and his fictional works are very
interesting and I highly recommend them.
He has a new book coming out called Drug Wars, A New Dope
which releases on November 12th. He's just a really all around
great guy to talk to and he's always got interesting insights
into things. And this is a conversation that
I always love having when I know he's going to come on because I
can just pick his brain on the creative process and being a
writer and how that kind of plays into the whole psychedelic
experience thing and how descriptive detail plays into
it. So please go check out his
books. I have the link down below all
the way at the bottom. He's got, let's see here how
many books he's got. He's working on his 23rd book.
So this is not somebody that does this in their spare time.
He is a professional writer, so please support him and I hope
you enjoy the show. All right, Matthew, welcome back
on the show. It's been a little bit, but
you've probably been on the show more than most people.
I want to say. You're probably near the top of
people we've had on the most, and it's always a great
conversation. You're always in the midst of
writing some new awesome books. So welcome back.
Thanks for having me. I, I hope I haven't bored
anybody yet and I hope I'm not going to overexpose myself
'cause you know, you can get arrested for that, right?
Last time we spoke, we were talking about, you know, your,
your new book, I believe it was The Hummingbird Whisperer.
And now you're, we just were talking off air a little bit and
you get you're working on a new book on the history of ayahuasca
and the the connection to the tribes and everything like that.
Can you give us a little bit of maybe a little taste of what's
to come with that? Yeah, thanks.
Thanks for having me on, by the way.
I always love being here and good intelligent conversation.
So I researched ayahuasca for 10 years before I found it.
And since then, I've also been working directly with it for 25
years. I've been to the jungle tons of
times. I've done.
I'm losing track. I think I've done 1410 day
ayahuasca dietes, plant diets. I've been eating ceremonies for
years. I've worked in different
traditions. At the peak of it, I was doing
it 30 * a year. Now a lot of my mentors have
passed away and all that, and I'm carrying the torch.
And I realized that all this research and study I've done,
much of which people don't really I'm not aware of, that
was time for me to write the definitive book about ayahuasca
based on all of my research and my personal knowledge and
experience up with it, because I want people to go into it with
their eyes wide open. You know, there's all, there's,
there's the woo woo stories. And you hear every once in
awhile somebody died because of something, you know, and it's,
it's not for everybody, but if you're going to do it, you
should have your eyes wide open and be fully aware of
everything. So I really want to bring all
that to the forefront. It's one of the reasons I do so
many interviews because I want people to be go into your, blow
your brains out if you want, but have your eyes open and know
what you're doing as opposed to going in ignorant and, and
ending up not coming back, you know, and and losing your life.
So I'm going all the way back to prehistory and prehistory
because it's prehistoric. Nobody knows how long it's been
around for. But prehistory begins with with
mythologies. You start because that's how far
back it goes. You know, whether Jesus did this
or that or Jesus is a lie or wasn't in coming back and all
that stuff as its basis in myth because that's how far back it
goes. And, you know, we don't really
know. And, you know, you know, a lot
of times one culture will pick up the other culture's myth and
kind of slap a new coat of paint on it, you know, and send it out
again. You know, it's like, like a lot
of the Egyptians did, you know, the the kings would come and the
new guy would come in and he'd wipe out all the stuff from the
first guy and then put his name on it and take credit, you know,
like that. Anyway, I want people to be
aware. So I go from all that and then I
go into the first Westerners who were involved, which we, we were
talking about, you know, Richard Spruce from England originally
and then Richard Evans, Schulte's and Schulte said, Wade
Davis and Mark Plotkin among other people as proteges.
And then that got into the whole Ginsburg and boroughs, the Yahoo
letters, if anybody knows about that history.
Anyway, I go bring all that up and then I get into the
beginnings of the first churches because originally there were no
churches. It was like tribes out in the
jungle doing it and that was their thing.
So I am have all of the history of the churches and how they
evolved in the beginning up to present day and the legalities
of it. And then now what's going on
with this big outburst of ayahuasca churches, They're
everywhere now setting the precedent of, of freedom of
religion over Drug Enforcement. You know, that that whole thing.
And then I, and then I bring it even up more to modern times.
So I, I have a long questionnaire that people can
take to realize all the things about ayahuasca, the diet and
that this is dangerous. And that's dangerous if with the
Mao inhibitors and if you're mixing it with other things,
particularly antidepressants, SSR is you're pre loading your
synapsis, whatever with serotonin and then you're taking
more and you can go into convulsions and you can die.
I mean, that's a we've. Talked about two like toe or
Brugmancia, the adding in the datura into the mixture.
I mean, I datura on its own is pretty, you know, nightmarish.
So I can't imagine adding that into the mix.
We did it for a couple of years, some years back, but we only put
like two or three leaves in like a big brew and I could feel the
energy and have the sense of it, if that makes any sense.
But after that little bit of time of experimenting, the
shaman said we don't need that. We got chacruna, Chacruna for
plenty of colors and we just don't need the extra stuff.
But it was a worthwhile experiment.
It's like, you know, I may be done, I may be done ayahuasca
during the day like a dozen times.
I prefer it at night, but it's worthwhile experience to do it
during the day. Just like one time way back, I
went to a weekend of ceremonies and I didn't take, I was a
sitter and took care of everybody and I wanted to learn
that side of it too. You know what I mean?
So I'm going to go through all that and bring it up to present
day and then sort of safe practices and I'm probably going
to do a little section on each of the plants.
When you do the 10 day dieto, you work with another plant or
plants. So I'm going to do like, you
know, Bo bin sana chuchuwasi ushbawasha, una de gato waiusa
chitik tsenango, all those plants I'm going to do I'm going
to do almost like what Sasha Shogun did.
I'm going to do a thing on the plants.
This is what the plan is. Genus species, not overdone.
But here's a scientific, here's what they call it, and then
here's my experience with it. You know, Sasha did that, and P
Col. and T Col. One of the interesting things
about ayahuasca is that all of the knowledge you get is purely
subjective. You can read all the books in
the world written by everybody in all the galaxies about
ayahuasca and you're still not going to know what it's like
until you do it right. So it, by its very nature, it
makes the, the book itself subjective.
So there's a little bit of personal aspect to it as opposed
to being like strict, I'm the authority, I'm the teacher, I'm
the professor. And you know, A = B, you know,
no, this is in my head. So, you know, I mean, maybe it's
subject to misinterpretation, but here's, here's my 35 years
of research and experience for what it's worth.
And you know, as I mentioned, I've been leading ceremonies for
close to 20 years. So I've seen almost everything.
And I want people to be educated and open and aware of what it
really is. What can it really do?
What what can it not really do you know, where does it come
from? Like you said, That's always
fascinating me. How the hell you go in the
jungle, everything looks the same.
I mean, it's all green, you know, And how do they know of
these two plants? So I, you know, I got a couple
of quirky old mythology stories from some of the tribes.
But there, there are numerous combinations of plants that they
use down there aside from the Ayahuasca.
And there are numerous variations of the ayahuasca
brew. The standard one is, is
ayahuasca vine with Shakruna psychotrioveridis and
Ayahuasca's Banisteriopsis copy. And that mixture.
And ayahuasca is the power and Shakruna is the light.
That's what they say. Yeah, because the power
potentuates the light to come. Because without the without the
vine, you don't get the visions anyway.
No, no. I I'm psyched for that book to
come out. Like I said, we were talking
offline. I mentioned Andrew Gallmore's
book Death by Astonishment. You know, he's the first few
chapters are about, you know, the history a little bit, you
know, the Richard Spruce, the William Burroughs, the, yeah.
Hey, letters, all that. But I, I, you know, I would like
to know more from like the indigenous side of things too,
you know, like where, where did they come up with it?
What is their myths or their history say about it?
That's what I'm gonna. Have.
Yeah. No, I'm, I'm super pumped for
that and obviously we'll have you back on when that.
Oh, yeah, yeah, When that one pops because it's, you know,
like I'm a writer. But in many respects, ayahuasca
has become my life's work. Certainly my passion for alter
states go back as far as I can remember.
Even then, can get myself dizzy as a little kid until I almost
puked, right? All of that and all that
experience has come to bear. And the other thing that's come
to bear on a lot of the shamanic stuff and energy is the fact
that I have a background in computers and electronics.
Electronics is the study of energy and shamanism is about
mastering energy and drinking ayahuasca is about mastering the
energies of your thoughts and your, you know, getting your
psyche turned on its head and figuring out how to navigate it
and make sense out of it. And what what can it show you
from seeing things. And, you know, such a radically
altered perspective from what we consider to be baseline.
So I want people to be aware. You know, it drives me nuts when
I see some of the Hollywood crap with all the how they make
Ayahuasca look. And, you know, God, I saw this
one show and this guy's sitting with a guru and he's got a
freaking a hookah pipe and he's talking to his friend.
You know, I'm doing an Iowa's concession with my guru.
And I'm like, oh God, you know, those people don't know.
So I want people to be aware, you know, awaken aware.
I think it's powerful medicine. I think it's needed now more
than ever and also has great potential for abuse if you don't
pay attention to what you're doing and who you're working
with. And, you know, there have been
some of the deaths that have come or, or from people working
too much with tobacco, you know, in terms of ayahuasca because I
worked with a tobacco shaman once.
So likes likes tobacco, snuff or what?
No, so I've been doing this or not, but they use nicotine in,
in bug poison. And if you take high doses of
nicotine, the effect it has, what it does in the bugs and
what it does to you is it fills your lungs with fluid and you
and you, you basically kind of drown.
So there have been a few cases of people who are working with
tobacco who I remember one in particular I was following some
few years back and I was a younger woman and, and, but she
was like very thin. She weighed like 98 lbs.
And So what they gave her for the dosage for the tobacco
overwhelmed her. You know, I had another friend I
was studying shamanic stuff with and he did one of their tobacco
faster cleanser dietas and his kidneys got infected.
So there's been a lot of mischiefs.
You know, the other thing that drives me crazy is I see
sometimes come to us for our shamanic spiritual weekend.
We're going to do 5 meo on Friday night in ayahuasca on
Saturday, and then we're going to do mushrooms on Sunday and
you know, maybe we'll smoke some more toad on Monday.
I mean, I don't think it's right.
It's not the way. It's overkill.
Do one thing, stick with it. Stick with the old ways that are
tried and true through millennia.
You know, all this stuff like, you know, you might as well go
to a drug store. Hey man, what do you want back
in the day, What do you want? Uppers, Downers, coke, smack,
acid. What do you want?
We got it right here, you know, step right up, right?
It's too much. It's too, it's like, it's like,
oh, this is good. I guess if I take a bunch of
more, everything else, it's going to be better.
I'm going to be enlightened because I took so much shit,
right? Yeah, I think, I think the
macros always the way to go if you have truly like a real
transcended experience or something awe inspiring or, you
know, an experience like that on a macro dose, whether it's
psilocybin or ayahuasca, whatever, you don't want to do
it again for a while. Like they're like you want to
sin on it, you want to marinate on it.
You want to yeah, you want to integrate it.
Yeah, you want to integrate it into your life.
But you know, there is people that take things too far and
they do, you know, one time isn't enough or it's, and it's
not even like they're physically, you know, the
compounds are physically addictive.
It's just that they're, you know, I don't know they're.
They're greedy. I've seen people die because of
that. You know, it's something that
really needs to be respected. I never thought first, Jesus, I
went, I did everything when I was younger and then in my early
20s, I took a break. I was a vegetarian for 23 years
and I went totally baseline for 13 years.
I wouldn't even take an aspirin if I had a headache.
I thought, I want to clear the decks and see things clear.
You know, listen to me. I'm being redone it.
Anyway, when I first read Terence Mckenna's Food of the
Gods, and I thought spirituality and altered states, are you
shitting me? And then I went and I got his
the book that him and Dennis wrote, the Austin Orrick, the
mushroom one and undercover. No, the other one.
Mushroom Growers guide by Awesome.
That's what. They said but it was those guys
I spent 1000 bucks this is back in the mid 90s and I bought all
the shit and it took me three tries and fails.
So I finally grew my own mushrooms and started taking
them with, with a spiritual intention as opposed to I'm
going to get fucked up. What's this going to do to me,
you know, with that intention and started having some kind of
magical experiences. And then once I started doing
that, eventually I won't go into the whole story unless you want
me to offer an attention. But I found out about the Antio
Botany seminars and I went. The first one was in San
Francisco in 96. And I went and I met the tribe
and I met Anna and Sasha Shogun. And at the time Sasha was
getting hassled by the government for publishing PCAL
and TCAL. And I don't have any money, but
I gave Anne like 5-10 bucks, maybe 20.
I don't have any, but I just dare.
She wrote me a two page letter, handwritten, thanking me.
And then from then I started going more and more and more and
more. And got into the whole thing,
you know, and then and then I was already fascinated with
shamanism, altered state, spirituality, shamanism.
You mean it could not be the same thing.
You shouldn't be. Wow.
I'm in heaven, right? And you know, I was taking
anthropology courses and you you talked about the Indians point
of view, my historical novel, my first published novel.
And without evil, it's about first contact between the
Jesuits and the Indians in South America.
But it's told from the Indians point of view.
You know, that's the stuff that's always drawing me.
The indigenous, like you said, the the indigenous knowledge
that where it comes from. What do they know?
How do they know? You know, how do they know so
much about neurochemistry and Physiology?
You know, and you have all now this, you know, modern day
quantum physics, right? Shaman's like, well, you guys
been the past two millennia. I mean, come on, get real,
right? So it's all fascinating.
And I think that the need for it is more intense now more than
ever. You know, we're all, we're cut
off with technology and, you know, the cell phones and AI and
all that stuff that takes us away from just being outside
and, you know, walking barefoot in the grass and hanging out
with the tree. You know what I mean?
We're culturally so far removed from that, even Bitcoin and all
that, you know? Yeah.
I think, well, I think, you know, this new frontier around
with technology, I think it'll be you'll be getting ahead if
you're able to integrate all of it, if you're able to stay
grounded in nature, but also understand the advantages of
using these powerful tools as well.
You know, just like a bat, like anything else, balance
everything in moderation, everything in balance.
You know, I don't think we need to say no technology, no this or
no no. That's impossible.
No, and I, and I know people there, I, there are people that
are like that, that think that like, oh, this is going to be
the end of, you know, everything.
And, you know, who knows what the future will bring?
But I, I will say, I think when you look at this paradigm that
we're in, that's shifting, I think it's important, like you
said, though, to stay kind of grounded in what got us here
and, and based on our Physiology and our biology and all that.
So yeah, I think it's, it's these things are powerful tools
and to understand them in the history of them and, and, you
know, give them proper reverence, that's, that's
definitely the way to go in my opinion.
Yeah, I mean, it's not, you know, one of the reasons I wrote
that historical novel is because I saw their culture basically
disappearing. So I did tons of research.
I researched that book for 2 1/2 years.
And I like to think that I saved the culture, at least in print,
you know, so people know that hey there, there was this way of
being in the world and looking at the world.
That's not anymore, you know, because there's always something
to learn. You know, history does repeat
itself over and over again. But you know, it's interesting,
too. I said a little while ago, you
know, one of the keys to ayahuasca is learning to
navigate, for lack of better words, extreme psychological
states, right? And almost almost more important
or maybe even more important is integrating those things back
into your normal everyday life, right?
So with the way technology is shifting and changing and
accelerating right now, it ties in with what you you, you were
also just saying that it's about navigating it, learning to
survive in a world with AI. And you know, to me, AI is
eating the world. That's a whole nother story.
Don't get me going on that. No, I mean just here's, here's
an example real quick. So for since I've been, I've
been doing mind escape now for over 8 years.
I used to do with my cousin Maurice.
He got busy, he's got his own business, you know, he has
enough time for this and, and I respect that.
And then I started seeking out like, you know, putting feelers
out. Does anybody want to help out or
be a producer or help me with this or that or whatever?
And there's been a few people along the way, but nobody
actually offering any, you know, I'm kind of like a, you know, I
have OCDA very particular, very detail oriented and things like.
That you have refined taste. You're not OCD, you have refined
taste. I I really do have OCD though,
for real. But yeah, this in terms of
taste, yes, I would say refined taste as well.
But so chat GPTI think, you know, in gronks for some, some
things they offer like assistance from some, you know,
like they provide. I I, I'm not using them to ask
questions. I mean, helping, you know, that
I'm using them to help organize my own thoughts and my own
things so I can keep on track with certain things and not get
completely like lost in my own research and my own thoughts and
things like that. So I do think that there is
something powerful to it. I think if you're just asking it
questions all day long, yeah, you're not really using your own
brain power. There might be something
negative about that. But if you're using it to help,
you know, you're integrating it into a creative endeavor.
You're integrating it into and not making it do all the work,
but just helping, you know, use it as a tool to help you.
I think they're going to be something powerful to that.
It has its uses by my. This is my personal perspective
as a creator. To me, I've been cultivating my
craft all my life and I'm going, I've just been going through it
with this book. I go through it with every book.
You find a problem that you need to solve and you wrestle with it
and you're miserable with it and you go to bed and plug it into
your brain and you wake up and you sometimes I could spend, I
could spend 4 days trying to figure out a paragraph, but I'll
tell you what, when that subconscious delivers, there
ain't nothing like that magical what?
And Oh my God. And then it's like, holy Jesus,
that's brilliant. Where did that come from?
Right, right. And you're really dialed in and
you're like channeling and you, because the whole idea of the
process is learning to work and program your subconscious.
So for me, that struggle and it always it, it's a miserable
struggle and it always delivers and it always delivers in a big
way. It's, you know, it's like
bidding your head against the wall, right?
It feels so good when you stop, right when it comes and, and
sometimes it's just one word or the tweak of one sentence.
It solves this whole big problem and it's so rewarding because
all this other stuff comes out behind it.
And for me, the AI stuff takes that away.
I'd rather suffer. I look at myself as like,
instead of all the stuff that the AI and all that, I'm like an
old school Craftsman with hand tools.
I got a hammer and a chisel and I got a sandpaper.
And I'm not going to use power tools.
Yeah, you're a. Wordsmith.
Yeah, I'm a wordsmith, so. And I don't want to hear what
you have to say, how you think it should sound.
I could give a shit. I wanted to sound this way.
And and you keep telling me you're going to help me.
You're a pain in the ass. Get out of my way.
You're distracting me. I got work to do.
Get out of here. Right?
So that's my way. But like.
We have people use people use AI to write scripts and books and.
Things, that's what I was going to.
Say that's, that's what I, I mean, I'm, I'm a kind of against
that. Like so to your point, but like
I said, like, you know, making lists or organizing thoughts, I
think that's different. But what you're talking about I
agree with. I don't if you're having to do
creative work for you, I think that that you're missing the
point to your point. Yeah, exactly.
But like, like I was reading one thing they did with the AI, they
found out I'm making, I'm paraphrasing here, but there was
a certain kind of cotton, cotton plant disease, no soybeans.
I think it was soybean disease that came and they plugged all
that stuff in there. And they can go to go to the
chat GP or any one of them and say they have my soy plants,
they have this, this and this and come back out with the exact
answer. It's this disease.
You need to give it this. No, it solves all the problems
because they can program them all in.
But to me though, it's human nature.
It's just, it's getting abused. You have these now, chat GP or
not, whatever, AI suicides and all the, the slop they say and
it gives you wrong answers. Somebody plugged me into it and
it said I was a renowned writing teacher from Schenectady, NY.
I'm from Boston, right? So there was a lot of.
So it'll tell you what you want basically.
But I do agree there are uses for it that are practical in
terms of organizational type skills, but get it out of the
eye. So I was going to mention
Lorenzo from the Psychedelic Salon.
He's he and I real time. Obviously, I'm going to help
help him start that podcast. He's writing books and he's
using the AI to figure out where he's going to go with his plot.
I can't do that. I had the whole process and the
struggle and this amazing, the surprise of what comes out.
Nothing beats that. I'd live for that.
That's the whole thing, as Stephen King used to call it.
He probably still does cause it falling into the page.
You know, you're staring at a blank page and then the words
start to come and then next thing you know you look up in
like 4 hours of passing. You got like 4 good pages,
right? And you're just, you're in that
writing's my favorite authored state.
No, I, I think you're on the money with, you know, your take
on it. I agree with everything you just
said. And I, you know, I look like I
said, I've tried implementing other people into this podcast
and having them help in different ways and stuff like
that. And nobody could ever really
help in any meaningful way that I needed.
But ChatGPT can. So like, you know, and, and
they're not writing scripts for me.
They're not doing anything other than organizing, creating SEO
descriptions and things like that.
And you know, things that it can, you know, if you can look
up keywords and tag words and like, that's, that's what I'm
talking about, using it as a tool to look up other online
things, not create, you know, like I'm a musician.
We were talking offline. I'm all about analog, like all
my guitars and amps and pedals and everything's analog.
The music at the intro, that's all analog, you know, like that.
That's, that's, that's I'm all about that.
But I do think that there can be some integration with it
depending on what it is. So IA 100% agree with you.
If don't use it for, if you're a creative person, don't use it to
create. Maybe use it if, when it comes
time to publish or whatever you know, or something along those
lines where it's, you know, helping you figure out stuff or
maybe a bibliography or whatever the case or something like that.
I one of my fans turned me on to this book.
I don't know if you can see this or not.
Yeah, I can see it. I'll just hold it up for a
second. I'll read from it it's Ways of
being by a guy, James Bridal, and it says it's animals,
plants, machines to search for a planetary intelligence.
It's brilliant. It gets into the whole AI thing
and then the AI of the OR just being aware of intelligences of
other things. Like just because plants don't
act like us doesn't mean they're not intelligent.
They're just intelligent in different ways.
So it gets into all that and AI as we know it and then other
intelligences and how we're all sharing the same space, so to
speak. It's really brilliant book.
It's it's a wonderful perspective.
Check it out. That was a big book too.
How many pages is that thing? Yeah, it's only 300.
I don't not counting the the appendix and bibliography and
all that, it's like 312 pages. But I mean, it's really, really
well done. Yeah, no, I'll have to check
that out for sure. And it'll be interesting to see
where all this goes. Look, you know, you have to
understand the, you know, this is kind of what I am into, what
I do, technology and you know, things I'm, you know, when I'm
not being a podcaster and you have to understand what AI is
capable of and what it is. It's just a, a large language
model and it's just aggregating information that's already out
there. So yeah, to, to come up with
some breakthrough thing or whatever.
It's just, it's just putting pieces together.
It's not actually discovering things or actually giving you
the full answer. It's giving you the best answer
that some other human had already put down on paper.
Yeah, our unique respect. But it's it's also, what's the
word I'm looking for? Sorry, it just slipped away.
It'll come in just a second. Yeah, it'll come to me.
It'll come to me. It'll pop in here in a second.
OK. But it's the way it how can I
put it, the way it works? It's not.
It's not so much AI, it's so much as in and of itself.
Is it how it's used that's the real problem?
Cause humans are going to mess things up.
You know, well, as you already mentioned it, it will give you
wrong answers. And if you're just assuming that
everything it gives you is right, then yeah, you're you're
already. Yeah, the, yeah, the AI, you
know, the AI suicides and the AI chatbot love affairs.
I just read an interesting story today, earlier today or
yesterday about a, a guy who was involved with the AI and came up
with a mathematical theory. And you heard about that one,
The AI encouraged he he came up with this mathematical theory
and the AI encouraged him and said he was brilliant and it was
all men, like the best thing in the world.
You're right. You solved this massive
mathematical problem. And I found out it was total
bullshit. And it was.
I have heard like AI psychosis, like, you know, like you like
like like kind of reaffirming people's delusional beliefs or
things like that. Exactly what I'm talking about.
Yeah. So one of the things we, it's a
human nature, but one of the things that we mess up with is
we get a technology and we go balls out with it before you
even knowing what it really is. And you know, I've for me, you
may have heard me say this before, but I started off in the
Air Force working on tube equipment.
I went from tubes to solid-state to integrated circuits to
microprocessor to mini computers to PCs to mainframes to PCs to
networks. That was my, my last big job was
IT manager, right? So I've lived through all that
technology and been part of it. The, the company I used to work
for was the ones that handed her all the URLs.
We, we own Network Solutions at the time, that was the one place
where you could get your URLs. And I worked on cutting edge
lasers and this and that. So I was part of all that.
I made my living in the middle of all that.
But I've noticed that we do stuff, we get something and we
think this is cool and then we're off and running before we
even know. And I think that AI has a huge,
huge double edged sword and we're going to benefit from it,
but we're going to suffer from it.
We already are. You don't.
Even know that you could say that about the Internet right
now in general. Too.
Yeah, even even, Yeah, even technology overall, if you think
about it, it's like it gets ahead of us.
And one of the interesting things I've noticed is, you
know, the expression state-of-the-art.
Well, that's where the evolution of technology is, is at anyone
moment. I don't know that it's that way
anymore. But for years and years and
years in the industry, there was Moore's Law.
And basically they would take the amount of place, the amount
of space it takes for a number of circuits.
And they were having it every year.
So what would happen is they'd have like for argument's sake
and PCs and all that you'd have, you'd have a 286 and you might
have that for a year or two or whatever.
And then they, they got this new improvement, 386 comes out.
Well, so a suddenly all the 286 prices drop and then you have,
you know, 386SX and then 486, right?
And then every time and then the evolution of the technology is
moving at a particular speed. So whatever speed it moves at,
it comes out with a new version. Suddenly all the old versions
drop. So it, it drives, it drives it
financially, economically, it drives it and it's just going
and headlong forward without any real knowledge of where it's
going. And we're we're discovering more
every day, right? I mean, even all the AI stuff, a
lot of it's been based around like the NVIDIA chips, which
were like the ultimate probably still are the ultimate video
processors. Right, Yeah.
I mean, if I had to guess, though, I would say with the
invention of quantum computing, the in, in most, I, I don't
think most people are even realize they think that quantum
competing is just faster. But I think that no, it's more
based on physics and understanding physics and things
like that. So if you can, if you can, if
you can implement some sort of advanced AI that's not in the
stage that it's in now, like a more intelligent and integrated
to that we might be able to open up understanding of physics in
our own universe in a way that we never have before.
So that would be an application that I would be all on board
for. Now that might bring up other
problems, and I'm sure somebody would try and weaponize some
aspect of it, but. It's going to be all of that.
Yeah.
You know, quantum to say quantum computers faster is like
comparing speed with Infinity. I mean, the whole thing is
fucking exponential and sprawling and just it's, it's,
it's it's, it's like a bottomless, hungry, freaking
ravenous monster. Yeah, they're talking about
creating, you know, nuclear plants just to power these
things. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, No, I just read a thing this morning about how a
lot of people's electric bills are going up because it's
consuming so much power. And if you think about it in a
way like sort of in terms of a metaphor, right, you have this
thing consuming the earth, consuming power, and it's
supporting what's contrary to the natural world.
You know, it's, it's, and that's just like one perspective.
It's not all about that, but it's interesting to see that
sort of dichotomy arise. Yeah, I think, I think look,
with all this stuff, I think we're entering everything's ex,
ex, you know, expanding exponentially.
But also we're also still humans, we're still flawed.
We're still, you know, we're not perfect ourselves.
So this idea that we're going to make something perfect, it's
almost like we're trying to make God or a God or something.
We're playing. God, but we're, I don't, I don't
know how if we're not able to achieve that ourselves, how are
we able to build something of that nature that I guess that
would be the philosophical question.
I would have you know, to the people that are pushing that.
Yeah, so here's a little story for you.
Years ago, I work with this young girl, younger girl, and
she was studying to be a therapist and her whole life was
whacked. Everything was wrong.
And I sat down with her one day and I said, and I was mean, I'm
trying to be mean or nothing. I said, don't you think you
should figure out your own life before you're going to try to
solve everybody else's? So you just broke down and
started bawling. I wasn't trying to be mean, but
that was my observation, Right? And then you realize.
Yeah. How can you help somebody else
if you can't even help yourself? Yeah, you got to start.
That's the whole concept of shaman is the wounded healer.
They they figure out their own stuff and heal themselves, and
then they can go heal others by what they've learned about
themselves, you know? But a lot of people who get into
psychiatry and psychology and therapy are whack themselves.
It's part of their search for trying to figure out what's
wrong with them. This girl, yeah, this girl was
pretty blatant. Didn't.
Trust me, dude, I've, I've been to enough CBT and therapies for
my OCD. And, you know, I always wondered
like if I ever came across a therapist that actually had OCD,
they could probably help me more than anybody, you know, like, so
that never happened. But oddly enough, the best
therapist I ever had was like a converter.
He used to be a priest and then he became like a therapist and
we would talk like he was I, you know, I would talk about like,
you know, altered States and psychedelics and like bring.
And he was open, you know, to those ideas of helping, you
know, and things like that. So yeah, I think that, yeah,
we're just like these, like perfectly imperfect beings that
I don't know, it's going to be interesting.
We're not grown up enough for the toys we have.
That's true. That's very true.
A. Big part of the acceleration,
we're talking technological acceleration the biggest one of
the biggest things is the Internet because it connects us
immediately. You know, I can have a physics
equation I'm trying to analyze and hit boom.
And 2 seconds later some guy in Russia was reading it going, Oh
yeah, I know that that subtractor constant, blah, blah,
whatever. You know, here's the answer.
And that kind of instantaneous communication.
I mean, even I'm writing this book and I'm coming across
little things and I want to get a refresher.
I just take the term and Google it.
I'll pop the definition. I'm like, all right, there it
is. Right back in the day, you know,
like when I was researching Land Without Evil man, I'd go to the
UCSD first. I would log on, dial up pre
Internet. I could dial up the UCUCSD
library and then I'd download all the stuff I want and print
them out. Then I'd go to the library and
I'd spend 30 bucks on a copy card and I'd find all the
articles from Schultz and, and all those guys and I'd go and,
and I'd walk out with a thick stack of papers, right?
And then I had to sit home and read through it all and then put
it all into the key, you know. But then I had tons of books.
I'd have all the books out. I still got them all out now for
my last bit of research. They're all there when you find
out. Exhausting that Dewey Decimal
system there. Oh yeah, I, I was, I grew up
with that. But if I find it online and I'm
working on the document, oh, there it is.
I do a cut and paste, pop it into my document, edit it, you
know, put it where it fits. It's all done in seconds.
What used to take days. Even the whole cut and paste
function, they used to literally cut and paste when they edited,
right? Probably.
Looks like a serial killer's note or something.
It's exactly what it looked like.
Yeah, exactly what it looked like.
They would really cut and paste like that.
I, I, I just, I would just rewrite it.
I'd look at it and rewrite it. I think that's better process.
But you know what works is. We went on this like whole AI
tangent, which I loved by the way.
That was fantastic. I do want to kind of get to some
of your writing though, and like your process because I too,
because I don't, you know, like we always talk about like
ayahuasca and psychedelics and I love all that stuff, the history
and your connections with all these, you know, big shots and,
and great minds throughout psychedelic history.
But I kind of wanted to ask you, your takes, 'cause I know that
you're, you're really ingrained in the writing community too.
And you, you do non fiction and fiction and you have all these
great stories, your fiction and non fiction, often, you know,
they weave these psychedelic experiences into narrative.
How do you balance that poetic creativity with like, accurate
representation of those states, if you will?
Yeah, that's a good question. That's been my lifetime struggle
I've had. Let me think about this.
Stan Crippner, who I mentioned, Lorenzo from the psychedelic
salon. Big psychedelic guys say they've
never seen it. I've never seen anybody describe
it as well as I do, and I appreciate that.
And I take that as a compliment because I've struggled all my
life to try to get what is beyond words and paint a picture
to put it into somebody's mind that defies words, basically.
So one of the things I discovered in the key, one of
the big keys, is metaphor. You know, basically better for,
you know, black as coal. You know, all those references.
So you find something. Metaphor is one thing that
represents another. And if you put it the right way
into somebody, they can get it. Now for me, the process of
writing the mind is the canvas and the words are the brushes,
the strokes of the brush. Except you're not painting a
static picture, you're painting a dynamic picture.
So you want to pick elements that stand out, that somebody
can totally relate to, that makes it real for them.
And then you choose that and you do your best to put that
representation of what you've experienced or know or you're
trying to describe in their mind, but using a lot of
metaphor and colors. And, you know, they used to make
jokes about HP Lovecraft. Oh, it was the ultimate horror.
It was so horrible. I'm paraphrasing, but it was so
horrible, I can't write it, you know, basically like that.
So when you understand the elements that are important, one
of the things about ayahuasca experience and psychedelics in
general, but especially with ayahuasca, is you can have
emotional, auditory, visual things all confused into one.
One of the keys to dream retrieval, for argument's sake
and dreamer interpretation, is to follow the feeling that the
dream gave you. Follow that and try to figure
out where that came from when you'll discover more than trying
to just do logically make sense out of it.
So you pick out things also that have have what we we call
significant details that put you there, that put the reader
there. Whenever somebody reads, they're
really becoming the narrator. Especially in fiction, we all
want to be the hero when we watch the heroes, you know,
everybody wants to be Spider Man or, or you know, whoever their
favorite is, Superman, Batman. And, and even in the thriller
novels and spy novels, you're living vicariously through the
characters. You're seeing things through the
character's eyes. You really, if you're doing a
good job, you identify and you sort of become the character in
your mind. You're having that fantasy of
being a super spy or whatever. So when you put yourself in that
place of perspective and then you pick significant details
that put the reader there with you, you know, it's a cliche,
but you could say cold as ice. It's a cliche, but nonetheless,
everybody knows what a site could be called as ice, right?
You know, you can get creative and say, you know, the, the, the
side of the corpse felt like a rattlesnake Slytherin down his
spine. And, you know, icy drops of cold
sweat ran in his butt crack and whatever.
When you bring in visceral things, that makes it real
because that's something everybody can relate to, right?
It was so disgusting. I started gagging and smelling
and then this thing, you know, I was fucking blowing lunch,
right? I mean, those are things
everybody can relate to. Yeah.
So I'm sure, especially the butt crack part.
Yeah, yeah, I was getting carried away, but.
No, no, that was that was great. But people.
Have told me over the years that I really have a knack and I
worked on it for years to develop it of putting people
there. Yeah, I mean, I've never done
ayahuasca, but you definitely have got the psychedelic feeling
and some visuals. And obviously you don't just
write about, you know, ayahuasca, but you definitely
have you have that down. I would say just like I've seen
a couple people recreate videos online that kind of resemble the
visuals of the experience. I think that you've got that
from like a writing perspective, which is a great thing to have.
It's, you know, just look, one thing when I was getting into
reading these kinds of books, like in high school, freshman
year, my cousin Maurice, who used to be my my Co host, we
read electric kool-aid, acid test, on the road, Dharma Bums.
What else did we read? You know, like a Jerry Garcia
biography, Like we were reading all sorts of stuff,
counterculture stuff, Hunter S Thompson.
And one of the things that struck me the most was all the
those great writers had the ability to use descriptive
detail in a way that, like you said, kind of puts you there.
And I think that you do that very well, as you mentioned.
And I think that that's an important thing to have,
especially when you're discussing these kinds of
experiences. Yeah, it's authenticity.
It's why I decided to write a memoir.
How many people got to do what I've done and and you know, the
crazy path I took to end up in the jungle.
And they have such profound experiences and to be able to
make sense out of them, you know, sometimes I feel like
myself and others are like, I'm like a, I'm a scout and I've no
turn on stoned. I've hit every branch so I could
find with anything I could find and been through some really
crazy things that I've learned to make sense of and navigate.
So now it's important for me to take that when people I hear it
all the time. If I, if I lead a group and I
take them on a journey, they feel very, very, very, very safe
with me. And I always tell them I'll go
absolutely anywhere in the dark with you.
No problem. I'm here and it makes a big
difference for them because they feel safe and protected.
And for me, it's part of embracing being freaking and
psychedelic elder or old guy, 'cause all my mentors are gone
just about anyway. Well, it's my turn to carry the
torch. And I think it's important to
pass on everything I've learned and maybe some of the nutty
stuff I've gone through, people can read about it and go, OK, I
don't need to do that, you know, like that.
But it's my time and place to do this so.
To that point, do you see your writing itself is like a
psychedelic process that maybe you're channeling something
larger than yourself for other people or the general public?
Yeah. Oh.
Absolutely. That's when I when I talk about
falling into the page and when it's flowing.
Years ago I was, I used to read write my stuff and I'd wait a
few weeks, then I'd go read it in a writing workshop.
And I remember years ago, one of the first times I was reading my
stuff, I hadn't looked at for a couple of months and I was like,
shit, this is really good. Who wrote this, right?
Like, this is brilliant. I'm not that good, right?
And, and now my best stuff, I trust in the process and it
comes through. It's the same thing when I play
drums. I'm known for, for playing the
floor also. I also play hand pan.
You know what hand pan is, right?
I play hand pan and when I'm doing that in an ayahuasca
ceremony and I and it starts to come, I just close my eyes and,
and it just takes me and I just go and it takes me places.
I'm like, wow. And of course, everybody who's
with me, who's listening, they're, they're, they're,
they're, they're on the journey with me and I take them all
these different places rhythmically and tonally.
I mean, you know, you're you're a musician, right?
But when you're doing the ceremony and they're really
receptive and open to it and you're doing it with the
intention of guiding them along. Yeah.
You may have heard me say this before, but in the lore of the
jungle, they say that ayahuasca is the river and the notes and
the ikaros, the songs and the notes of the music or what carry
or the boats that carry you along the river.
So when I hit that and I have that feeling, I just let go and
man, and it's a beautiful thing. And when I get to that point,
like I said, Stephen King called it falling into the page where
I'm staring at a page and that's, you know, 3 hours have
gone by and, and I got 4 good pages and like, wow.
And then the other thing is, is when you go through successive
edits, it's like a different party who was looking at it each
time. So like, I'll finish the first
draft of this thing, I'll set it aside for a month and forget
about it. Then I'll print it out.
Then I'll go through it with a red pen and I'll line edit it.
Now, having it in print with a red pen, I see it in a totally
different way. It's like another person looking
at it than the one who first wrote it, right?
And then when I take those red lines, and then I integrate them
into Word as a wall back and forth, that's another edit.
So each successive time a different part of me contributes
something. Sometimes some I could be 3 or 4
drafts in and something really good will come.
I'll go fuck, I got to get that in there, man, right here.
Let's cut that over here and move that down.
We'll get rid of that sentence. Put that in there.
You know, it's, it's like working with woods, sending it
over, polishing it, you know, getting, you know, looking for
typos, all that stuff. But it's a, it really is a
magical process. And it's, and it's, it's beyond
me. To me, good art.
And that includes music and writing transcends bad.
You really sort of surrender yourself to it.
I put shit into my subconscious. I have no idea what it's going
to do. I put it in and I forget about
it because I know it's going to come back out in some cool way.
And it's a very wonderful, mysterious process that I've
cultivated now for 40 years or so.
And it's freaking magic. And the stuff that comes out, I
mean, God, this is brilliant. Who the fuck like this?
It wasn't me. I ain't that good, you know?
And there it comes. And then when you hear other
people say it, you know, I've got something.
I lost track. I've got something like 42
writing awards, all kinds of stuff.
For me, I like it because it's validation, because you don't
know, you could think a lot of what you do with shit.
But then I get a sense that when it comes out, it's going to
happen. And one of the reasons, among a
million others, when I started writing is I was reading a lot
of shit. And I'm like, if they're
publishing this shit, I could do better than that at least,
right? And then, of course, I got
really swallowed up in the craft.
And I was lucky and blessed to, to run into, you know, Ray
Bradbury and be mentored by him and other big people who really
saw me as one of them and took me under their wing.
And, you know, I, I never intended on being a writing
teacher. I got hundreds of students.
Some of my top students are now teaching with me at the writers
conference. They're, they're, they're
getting to be big name writing teachers themselves.
So I get the proud daddy syndrome, you know.
Yeah, that's awesome. In your teaching, though, you
know, you emphasize discipline. How does discipline though
coexist with the chaos or the the craziness of these visionary
experiences which are pretty much not discipline at all?
Well, I keep them separate for one thing.
Like I've known writers who do down in the jungle doing a
theatre and like I'm working on my book and I'm like, you're
fucking nuts. It's not.
This is definitely what you're not supposed to be doing.
I have one guy, I won't mention his name.
He was begging me to read his manuscript.
I almost took a swing at him. I was like, get out of here.
That's the last thing I want. I'm not here to write.
I'm not write. Tell me off air I'm interested.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right.
Remind me anyway. We'll add it to the Patreon.
No, I'm. Joking now, one of the things
Ray Bradbury said, which is great among among another
gazillion brilliant things, is if you show up in the same place
at the same time every day to write, your body will adapt to
the rhythm. Your our bodies, we're made of
rhythms. We breathe them.
We breathe out our heart beats, our pulse goes our, our brain
waves. We're all about rhythm.
Rhythm is life. You know that as a musician,
it's why music is so popular, because it's rhythm, you know,
one of the most best things I've ever heard, you know, Pink
Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon and the heartbeat.
Boom. Damn.
I mean that this like takes me over.
That intro is just transcendent. I remember.
Yeah, being a freshman, blazing up, going to lay down, throw my
head, my big headphones on and just lose myself in the dark
side of the moon. That was like the first.
That was like my first before I really got into, like,
psychedelia. Yeah.
I was, yeah. I won't even, I'll tell you one
thing really quick and getting back on track, but I've taken
hundreds and hundreds of people on their first acid trips.
And one of the things I always do as part of the initiation is
I have them sit through Dark Side of the Moon.
It's like the thing. I think that's the way to go
'cause I'll tell you one thing, I've experienced that on the
wall and those two do not go together at.
All well, Dark Side of the moon is is it for me as far as I'm
concerned. The war the war aspects of the
wall mixed with LSD are not two things that.
No, it's the energy of it. It's so dark.
It's so. Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, so the key is the rhythm. So now I got a great rhythm.
I'm hitting the gym five days a week and then I write.
So I'm very physically active and then I write and I'm showing
up the same time every day and it flows and it picks up and
your body knows even like, like I'm one of those Hemingway was
like a coffee shop bar room writer.
I can be like that. I love going to funky old coffee
shops where you smoke coffee and cute little chickies are running
around and I'm working on my stuff and it's just enough.
Like I get stuck and I can look over and look at some little
cute chick and kind of momentary distraction, you know, and the
whole vibe and coffee and then, oh, that's it.
And then I go back and, you know, work on it again, right?
It's that thing. It's the rhythm.
So with the gym and the writing, it's like a pendulum.
Even back in the day when I was working out, I remember I was
reading books and I would read a book and I would, so I would do,
you know, 10 reps read 2 chapters, 10 reps read 2, right?
And I'd like to finish books and get good workouts.
And because I was playing the energies off of each other, so I
use that kind of an energy to go.
And I hate to say it, but cannabis really helps me.
But typically I have my coffee in the morning and I'll make
myself wait till 4:20. By then, you know, the caffeine,
you get a little brittle and it's just not doing it and all
that. I'm going to take a couple hits
of some good weed, man. I'll get another 3 or 4 pages.
Good ones. It's like a second stage, like,
Oh yeah, OK. You don't have to twist my arm
about it bro, I'm all. Yeah, yeah.
No, no, I'm always. There, if you're an artist,
there's very few things that I do think are super helpful and
yeah, that could be one of them. Now I was telling my brother,
you know, my my happy place. Is it caffeine, coffee, a little
bit of weed? And I'm writing, I'm in heaven.
I'm serving my purpose, I'm being and stuff's coming out.
And like I said, it comes out and I look at it, I go, wow.
And then when I've had some of it, I've entered in some
contests and I win for his prize, honorable mention or in
first place I go, yeah, I guess you can write.
You're not blowing sunshine up your ass.
You're not worthless. These people who don't give a
shit who you are, you're just looking at the jury work affect
them or, you know, is it powerful?
And to get that, you know, my, my second year at the Santa
Barbara Writers Conference, I won a fiction award about a guy
who got some psychedelics from a shaman and didn't do what he was
told and ends up losing his mind and killing his girlfriend and
getting taken away in a straitjacket.
But it was a psychedelic short story.
It was like my first one. And I was at this writers
conference with all these older people and this and that.
And then they freaking gave me a fiction award for it.
So I thought, wow, I can write, you know, and now I know.
Not just a lot of people, even bigger name people who have a
lot of respect. Stan Krypenn, I said, is a big
fan of mine, my buddy Mick. Mick.
Mick was from Mick. He won't mind me saying it.
Mick Mashbeer. He was Alice Cooper's lead
guitar for a Billion Dollar Babies album and tour.
He's a really good friend of mine.
He loves my work. I I sent him all the audio books
for free now. Yeah, but we get together at
least once a year, and I'm up there.
He's in Santa Barbara. But I've had people who I highly
respect. Jim Fadiman's another one.
I told you, Jim Fadiman came to my writing workshop, right?
Yeah, I think you mentioned a couple.
Episodes. He was my writing student.
I didn't even know who he was, and he was like my teacher's pet
because he was good. He was writing these cool little
short stories. Yeah, he's written some.
I think his last couple books have been non fiction on micro
dosing. Yeah, that's why I want to get
him on the ayahuasca one because.
But I I got to know him because his uncle Clifton was a big deal
in the literary world and that's how he was involved with the
conference. And when the conference was was
over, after spending a week with me and I didn't know who he was,
and Jim comes up to me and hands me his book, as it's called, The
Other Side of Hate HAIGHT. It's a great novel about this,
the summer of love, and what you might call it, the government
program. Yeah, I'm K Ultra.
Thank you. I'm K Ultra.
Yeah, Yeah, that was really that.
I looked at it and I looked at him and I said, you're one of
us, aren't you? And he goes, oh, yeah.
And then I found out who he really was.
You know, I was freaked out and then when he came out with his
micro dosing book, I, I interviewed him on the
psychedelic salon for the book. And then I did, I did the Santa
Barbara Writers Conference scrapbook about the 1st 30 years
of the conference big book. We did a documentary film and I
sent Jim some clips, stuff I found about his uncle.
So he really appreciated that. So we're we're, we're, we're,
we're good friends like that. So I think he might he.
Still got an open invitation. I reached out in the past.
There was no response that that happens too.
And you know, like I'm always open to have these conversations
if, you know, ends up coming around.
That's happened a couple times where I try to get a hold of
somebody didn't work out. And then later on down the line
you, you know, you connect. And I mentioned off air, though,
I became familiar with, I mean, obviously the microdosing stuff
now, but the, you know, an electric kool-aid acid test.
There's a part where Jim and his wife Bale Kesey and the Merry
Pranksters out of jail, if I recall.
Yeah, the beginning part that's. When I first read it, I didn't
know him. Yeah.
I read it way back. Yeah, yeah, that book is.
You're talking about descriptive detail, Tom Wolf.
What? What a oh he.
Was a brilliant writer. What a he puts you there.
Yeah. Yeah, I saw a great documentary
about him a while back. Yeah, he, there's, there's very
few, you know, you know, and it wasn't obviously just the
psychedelic stuff either. You know, he kind of crossed
different genre. But yeah, I mean, that's what
you've got, man. You've got the descriptive
detail. I've, I've read, you know, a
handful of yearbooks and the one I always think about too,
because I do think about, you know, metaphysics and death a
lot. Is, is it death a love story?
Is that the name of? It.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
That's gotten some really interesting responses.
I knew it would. Yeah.
A lot of people mistake the cover.
With the Grim. With the Grim Reaper.
Yeah, And, you know, I wanted it to be like death is giving you
a, a, a cheesy Hallmark card, you know, because the voice in
it was sort of, for lack of better words, kind of light and
I won't say quite snarky, but, you know, hey, wait, do you see
this? You know, I kind of like that.
And that was a fun experiment in in voice.
You know, you have a particular voice when you're writing
particular stories. It's essentially that the tone
and the voice of the narrator or the storyteller or the main
character. So that voice was different than
say, the voice when I did my land without evil about, you
know, historical right. And with death, I was really I
that that that really got caught up in that whole idea of the
voice of death. You know, if that if death is
just talking to you when I want on conversation, what's he going
to say and what's it going to be like?
And then you can go off and have throw a little humor in there
and had a lot of fun and I got some really amazing reviews on
it. So that was fun.
And I need to classify that book fiction or non fiction.
I mean, the other thing too is we all die.
We all think about it, but we all pretend.
We all, you know, pacify ourselves.
Yeah, it's, it's always, you know, it's always this like,
obscure thing in the back of our mind until we think about it.
And then it's like, oh, let me push it back there because I
don't want to think about it. No, but I thought that that was
a great book. I think anybody interested
should check that out. I was going to ask you in Spirit
Matters, you described the spiritual dimension of reality.
How has your understanding of metaphysics kind of shifted or
changed through the years since you've written that or hasn't?
That's a great. Yeah, that's a great question,
bro. Here's the thing, you get
impressed by certain things at a particular point in life where
you're at a certain stage where you have so much knowledge.
Often times you come back with it some years later and you see
all this other stuff you never saw before and it can be really
eye opening and mind blowing, like one of the things I
realized. So my first published book was
The Small Dark Room of the Soul and Other Stories.
And I realized a couple of years after I published it, that was
about the human shadow. And I wasn't even, I don't even
know what the shadow was at the point, but that's exactly what
it was about. And, you know, I was talking
about Anna and Sasha Shogun. I was with them at the Antheo
Bonnie seminars in Polanke. This is right around, you know,
99 two thousand and Anne encouraged me to to do more
work, research more into the shadow and incorporate it into
my writing. And she made a big difference to
me. And I looked back in a lot of my
work and I was already doing it, but I didn't know what it was
and I didn't define it, if that makes any sense.
So I look back at some of my earlier works and I'm going,
damn, you were like right on. And you didn't even know it, you
know, like that. So that's always really
brilliant. And sometimes I see things, some
books I'll read two or three times and see it in a whole
nother way because I've got more time and experience under my
belt. One of the great books I reread,
which was, which was challenging, but I loved it.
I just finished rereading it for the research for this one.
It's called The Antipodes of the Mind by Benny Shannon.
Have you ever heard of it? I have not, I'll have to check
it out. He's, he's a cognitive
psychologist and he writes about ayahuasca and his experiences
with it from the perspective of being a cognitive psychologist
as opposed to totally like spiritual or an anthropologist
or, or any of that from a cognitive psychologist.
So he really struggles to keep the scientific method in place
on something that defies it. And I thought it was a really
wonderful, both times I read it, perspective because you want to
look at stuff like especially ayahuasca.
I mean, ayahuasca is full of mystery no matter what.
That's one of the conclusions he came to at the end of.
And that's a big book that's pretty thick.
But the idea of somebody with that different perspective
looking at it that way, like for me, the definition of insight is
to look at something from this way and that way and that way.
Look at it. What does the anthropologist
say? What does the cognitive
psychologist say? What does the psychiatrist say?
You know, what does the archaeologist say?
And you look at all of those. And then it's like looking into
a room from like different windows and maybe through the
ceiling. That to me is how you really
gain insight into something. So for me, I'd read all this
stuff about ayahuasca before I ever did it.
And then I did tons of ayahuasca and then I went back and reread
whatever the first time I'm like, yeah, right on.
And oh, that's what he means. And Oh yeah, I get that, you
know, like that. So it's a constant process of,
of growing and, and being a writer.
And for me, I would, I, I guess I could say writer slash
lecturer. And the fact that I've done, you
know, I'm doing a great podcast with people like you and you
know, coast to coast, all those things where I do so well.
I'm a communicator and writing is the art of communicating.
And I've learned to, I spent my life refining the art of
communicating with the written word and otherwise.
And I'm always messing around with words in my head, turn them
around backwards and saying them backwards.
And you know, you got your birds all wicked up.
You know, Chuck, you Farley, whatever.
You know, I'm always going through my head.
And every once in awhile a funny pun will come up.
You know, one of the things I've been saying lately, I don't know
if it's original, but people will say to me, oh, yo, you
know, you're a good writer and you're a great teacher and
you're a very good, you know, you're a great writer and blah,
blah. That's it.
And I'll and I'll always say I'm a legend in my own mind.
That's as far as I go. The rest of it.
Thank you, nice to hear. But I'm not, I'm not doing it
for that. I'm doing it because I feel it's
important to communicate knowledge.
And I think ultimately if you continue in with this work, you
start just gaining more of, for lack of better words, more of a
cosmological perspective, bigger picture, and you see things.
I, I don't think when people say like dissolving your ego, I
think we've talked about this in the past too, like you need your
ego. It's all just about what you
feed your ego. Without your ego, how could you
become the best at anything? Because there's a certain level
of competitiveness or like drive to become, you know, known or
drive to get something that you feel super important out there
or something along those lines. So when people are like, oh man,
I totally dissolved my ego. And then, you know, a year
later, they're the biggest asshole you ever met again, you
know, so I think it's just about what you feed your ego, you
know, like I, you know, I, I have an ego, you have an ego.
Like everybody's got an ego. Even if you dissolve it for the
duration of an experience, it's going to come back.
So it's more about how you cultivate it than how you're,
you know, bolstering yourself up or whatever.
But I wanted to ask you, so you know, usually consciousness
studies, they split materialism and idealism.
Yeah. What?
What have you found through your own experiences?
Like where do you stand on that debate personally based on
everything you've experienced? Two things very quick.
I don't consider it's ego. I always like to say I'm a cast
of thousands. I'm a multi edit infinite Hydra
of psycho, some not so psycho sub personalities.
And one of my coaches told me years ago you don't kill your
egos, you give them a new job. So I like that anyway.
I had to get that out and then you were just asking about.
Yeah, like consciousness materialism.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Idealism.
Yeah. I got into that a lot in my
other book, one of the longest book titles ever.
The center of the universe is right between your eyes, but
home is where the heart is. Because here's the thing, you
can't really change the outside world.
I can't change what's going on in freaking politics.
I can't personally can't really change what's going on in
Ukraine or Gaza and all that insanity.
I can't change any of that. But I'm in charge of my
conscious awareness and I can choose where I wanted to invest
my energy or not. So therefore I get the choice to
create my reality within my mind because I have.
We all have all these different perceptions and thoughts and
feelings and emotions and energies and microwaves and
convolution all is coming at us, but we get to choose what we
make of it. So I could see a guy walking
down the street and thinking he's going to shoot me or stab
me and be paranoid and have high blood pressure and maybe have a
heart attack because I'm all freaking out over something and
has no reality except some fear that I have that might be based
on a past experience. Or I can cruise on and say, hi,
how you doing? Or I can say I don't even care
about you don't even exist. I'm more focused on that we get
to choose where our conscious awareness of and that's the
whole concept of mindfulness and being in the moment.
So when the little monkey mind cycle monkey lunatics all pop up
in my head, which they're there all the time having a blast.
That old homunculi. Yeah, and I'm looking at them.
And if there's something really stupid, I'll go.
I do it in a loving way, but I'll go.
Look, you shut the fuck up and go to your room.
Daddy's home. I'm not listening to your shit.
So just go to your room. I hear you.
OK, now shut up and go to your room.
And I do it in a loving way, but I pay attention.
And you can watch people, if you observe people really closely.
And you can watch sometimes the expressions that go across their
face, sometimes a bunch of times, even in a minute.
To me, it's like you can see the little sub personalities popping
up and, and you know, they work together and they're very
insidious and they all do their little thing and they all have
agendas. But you got to acknowledge them,
sometimes even let them out to play.
But keep an eye. It's like having kids, right?
You got a kid, right? You watch your kid, you may let
them run to the edge of something of the snap, but
you're watching and you'll get them.
You'll let them go out as far as it's safe.
And then if you think there's a boundary that's not good, you
you're going to intervene and make sure they're safe.
But you want to give them a little bit of a leeway to run
around and start exploring those things.
Yeah, I'm, I'm way less, way less laid back than my wife,
which is, you know, I'm just, I'm just an overly cautious
person in general. So I kind of look to her because
she's more of a rational, yeah, you know, in that regard, but.
Yeah, it's what you do. You know, when kids are really
acting up and they're being a problem, they're looking for
where the boundaries are. And sometimes you got to step in
and be the bad guy and say no, you know, you don't do this or
that because you're going to hurt yourself or whatever.
And a lot of people don't like to do that.
But that's why the kids are acting up.
They want to know where the boundaries are so they know
where the safety is. You know once you mean.
How do you learn? I mean, that's how they're
getting. They got to get that first hand
knowledge. You know, it's like the old
thing, you know, I can tell you don't touch the stove, but most
people are going to still touch that stove and they're going to
have to find out from first hand experience, you know?
That is right. That's the best, best way to
learn. Exactly, exactly.
So, you know, that's that's the way to look at it.
There's a you ever hear of ifs? Well, it's called Internal
Family systems and somebody turned me on to it a while back.
And when I read it, I'm like, oh, that's what I've been doing
all along. And it basically says that we
all have a like I say a cast of thousands.
We all have a bunch of disparate, some personalities
inside of us with different agendas, some unified, some
conflicting. And the idea is, I like to say
the idea is to get the whole band to start singing the same
tune together. And then you're not worried
about what happened in the past or what might happen in the
future or all that. You're present and you're fully
present in the moment here and now.
So you're more focused on what's happening, and so you're more
aware. That is really the definition of
mindfulness. That's what meditation's all
about, is to try to cultivate that.
So you're paying attention because it's all about paying
attention and paying what is paying attention.
Paying attention is awareness, right?
The more you're paying attention, the more aware you
are. And isn't that the path to
higher consciousness, so to speak?
Right, Higher awareness. I think some people, I mean,
look, there's different types of meditation.
Yeah, sure. You know, there's, I think a lot
of people think that you're just supposed to completely clear
your mind. And I know that's kind of what a
lot of spiritual teachers teach too, you know, like this loss of
self or nothingness or something along the even though that's I
think that's still impossible to achieve because even if you
think of nothing, you're still thinking of something.
So, but it depends. I know people like I have for
me, I used to meditate and try and just block everything out
and just experience whatever these light forms and different
things and all this weirdness. And then there's also a
meditation I like to do. Maybe, you know, you take a
couple hits and you know, you're in close your eyes and you know,
it's more of like a a fact, not a fact.
Finding mission, inspiration, finding mission where you go on
a little journey in your own mind and find some sort of
inspiration for your creative process or something that'll
help you. Or so yeah, I think that there's
different aspects to that. So I was gonna ask you too, how
do you like, how do you reconcile mystical insight with
rational thought or philosophy? And can they coexist, or are
they just like fundamentally different languages?
The different languages that are trying to figure each other out.
So I you, you heard me say this before, but I think you might
find this interesting in context of this discussion here.
When you go to sleep at night, at some point, not everybody has
dream memory and all that, but at some point your logical brain
takes a rest and your other side comes out, your creative,
emotional, intuitional side as opposed to the logical side, the
feminine side, and it speaks in a language that's almost alien.
When you have a dream, that brain's talking, the other one's
kind of taking a rest right when you wake up.
The left logical side that's been trying to figure things
out, tries to make sense of the dream.
That's why dreams are so weird and dreams recalls weird
emotional symbolism and conceptual creative.
It's not linear, logical, word after word.
It's overwhelmingly and it has emotion tied in with it and it's
just it's alien. Now when you drink ayahuasca,
your right brain wakes up, but your left brain doesn't go to
sleep like in dreaming. So then you get the right brain
going off with its emotional, physical, visual, conceptual,
musical, rhythmic, all that non rational stops going like crazy
and it overwhelms the left side. It's too much, it's too much
parallel processing, too much intuition, it's overload and the
left more often than not can't make heads or tails out of it.
When you pass through that experience and you come back to
quote, UN quote baseline consciousness, that is exactly
what what integration is, is the left brain trying to figure out
everything that happened with the right brain which
overwhelmed it. Because it's a lot more powerful
in that way with with the emotions evolved and all that.
And it ties in with something you kind of referred to a little
while ago. You're trying to make sense of
that experience that defies logic, and yet it's very
powerful and very profound. So in many respects, and I tell
us to people all the time, in many respects, it's the time
outside of the ceremonies that are more important than the
ceremonies themselves. Because you can have all these
insights and all this stuff that happened in epiphanies and
stuff. But when you go in your
everyday, quote UN quote, waking consciousness, baseline life,
and you're challenged by all these things that you consider
to maybe even be absolute truths under a visionary state, and
then you're confronted in real life with it.
That's where the work is done. Then what are you going to do?
You're going to fall down the rabbit hole like you used to.
You're going to go, oh shit, now I've seen that from this side
that I never saw it that way before.
Look what's happening there. It is popping its head.
And I always love to say right about the time you got something
figured out is right when you're going to get your ass handed to
you without fail. So.
I mean it it to, to. So I do think that what you're
saying is 100% true. And actually to that point, I
actually started writing down these epiphanies and profound
things in these experiences because when you come out of
them, it's almost like a dream. Like you were like, oh, how was
I 'cause you're, you're in a different state of mind now and
you're not, your mind isn't able to make the connections or
contextualize what you were experiencing in that state.
That's right. Did you ever read any Carlos
Castaneda? I have not.
I look, I somebody kind of turned me off.
They said, oh, he's full of shit.
Not everything's a lie. And so I never read that's I
don't know anything about it. That's just what.
A couple people, I read a bunch of them and they were the thing,
especially when I when I was like 18.
So what do you think? Do you think there's legitimacy
to it, or do you think it was? It's a, it's a little bit of
both my, my anthropology professor went to UCLA with him
and he and he told me that the shaman Don Juan was actually
amalgam of a bunch of different people that he had met and
worked with. And some of it was made out, but
it was a, but it was a perspective and a philosophy.
So I got into an argument with a guy on the radio about this one
time. I shot him up years ago because
it doesn't matter if even the stories are a liar, it doesn't
mean they they can't contain truth.
Oh, absolutely. I just, I guess somebody maybe
kind of portrayed them as more of like like a trickster, like
maybe trying to pawn off things. He was.
Yeah, some degree he was. Yeah, some degree he was there.
Something but to your point though, maybe there there's
Nuggets in there. Obviously I'll I'll definitely
check it out. I just, I haven't heard that
name in a little bit so. Oh it's fine.
I read all the books like 3 times.
I read all the books critical of him.
Sure this holds in it. But you know, I always like to
say, and you may have heard me say this before, in this day and
age, journalism, which is supposed to be about truth, is
more often than not a lie. Fiction, by its very definition
being a lie, is more often than not about truth.
I mean, where do we get our best news from the fucking comedians,
right? I mean, so you got to listen to
all of it, even like mythologies, whether Jesus lived
or not or did these things or not.
Listen to the story, see what it's got to tell you.
Yeah, you could make that argue like I, I actually that's a good
analogy because you can make the argument like, doesn't matter if
Jesus rose from the dead, if he was this great person that did
these great things, he's still an amazing example of a human
being, you know, in a, in a time when people were terrible
people. Let's be real.
Story of the prodigal son and all that, right?
And listen to what's being said. Don't, don't shoot the messenger
or crucify him or whatever, right?
Like that, right. But it, it, it, it's interesting
when you think about it and getting touching back on myths
and stuff like that. And even in writing.
And I was talking about like significant details and putting
people there and all that. The more you type, the more you
lead toward archetypes, the more you are heading toward universal
truths, and the more you tap on the archetypes of universal
truths, the more people are going to relate because we can
all relate to archetypes because they're bigger concepts.
You know, I'm sure you know this, and you probably heard me
say this before, but you look at Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter,
Star Wars, they all follow the hero's journey.
All phenomenal pieces of work. They're they're because they hit
the archetypes and that's why they're so universally loved and
known and accepted and embraced. Because they.
Joseph Campbell Little formulation there.
Yeah, Universal archetypes. The more you can hit those
things, the more people can relate, because that's what you
want to do when you want to communicate is you want to reach
your target audience and write it.
But you have to share in a way that makes it accessible to them
so they can make sense out of it hopefully, or just to get them
to even think differently or see things in a way they may not
have looked at before. Right, absolutely.
Listen, let's do this new segment.
I don't know if you're ready for it, but and then after we'll hit
a couple more things and then we'll wrap it up.
But Matthew Palomari, Are you ready for Mike's Mind Melters?
Melt me, baby. All right, Matthew, I'm going to
ask you 5 philosophical questions.
Just answer them the best you can.
Now I've been changing out the 5th question to just get this
formula correct. And I think I've, I said this
last time, but I really think that this is going to be the
final formulation cause the goal is to ask the same 5 questions
to everybody. But the 5th question's been kind
of evolving a little bit. So but here, here we go.
Number one, what is something you believe in that you know is
probably wrong or illogical, but you are just not being honest
with yourself? The government, I'm pretty
brutal with myself actually, and I'm always open to finding out.
If something doesn't fit my paradigm, then I'll let it go
and create something new. You know, when you, when you
create something like we probably talked at some point
about cymatics, where you send a particular wavelength, frequency
and amplitude and you get a pattern and if you increase it,
the pattern will dissolve into chaos and then it'll reform
again in a more complex pattern. And if you continue doing it,
it'll go through permutations of that, each one being more
complex and sophisticated than the other.
That's my model for the, for the evolution of consciousness.
So I have all my beliefs, so to speak, and I hold on to them.
But if I find something that's challenging, I'll explore it,
and if it happens to shatter it, I'm willing to let it all go and
see what comes. Reforms back with with the new
knowledge integrated somehow. It's kind of a roundabout
answer, but. No, that's great.
You just have an ever evolving philosophy, which I think most
people should have. But I mean we all have cognitive
biases and blind spots. So that's why I asked that
question. Some people aren't honest with
themselves and I think that that yeah, I think that can be
uncomfortable for some people. But I've.
Probably done a few things where I'm where I'm like I'm I think
I'm great and I'm really a Dick, but you know, I'm working at
trying to track them down all. Right, all right #2 do you think
there is an objective purpose for humanity, and if So, what?
Yeah, I think this will probably sound weird.
It might get me in trouble. But I think the objective
purpose of humanity is to discover that we're God.
I think I, I, I freaked out one of my grandnephews.
He said to me, this is a few years ago.
He said to me, do you believe in God?
And I said, I am God. And he was freaking out.
He was going to a church. So do you mean just just just to
parse that out, do you mean like we're all pieces of one greater
being like experiencing itself or something along those lines?
Yeah, yeah. I mean, what else?
If we weren't here to self reflect?
I always, I, I got atheist friends.
I always like to bust their chops when I can because I tell
somebody. If you tell me you're an
atheist, you're telling me you're God because you made the
ultimate decision whether God exists or not.
If you say God doesn't exist, then you've just blotted God out
of existence. That makes you God, and if you
cease to exist, then there's nothing.
If you truly cease to exist, then there's nothing.
So that makes you the God. I like to think that we're all
gods of our own universes and I think that everybody in our
lives is a reflection of some aspect of ourselves and those
people in our lives who totally drive us.
Bog fog, those are our shadows. And we have other aspects that
really relate to like you and I got a great mind.
Now we, we see eye to eye on most things because there's
parts of me that reflect parts of you and parts of you that
reflect me. You know, people say to me, are
you a writer? And I tell you, talk about OCD,
right? I say, no, I'm an obsessive
fool, right? And, and being a writer, wanting
to get things right and getting the, the words is the best you
can get them and polished and punctuated and all that, you
know, there's that aspect to it. So I see everybody as a
reflection of who we are. And when I see somebody and they
rub me the wrong way, it makes me take a harder look at myself.
And there's always tons of resistance, but more often than
I find something that's been hidden in there.
So yeah. And then I'll tell other people,
you know, you know, religious people or spiritual people.
I say, do you believe it's God? God is everywhere.
Yeah. Well, then you're inside of God.
You're part of God and you're looking out and you get to make
the choice of what's real or what you want to believe or how
you want to act by what comes into you.
Like I was saying earlier with cognition and perception.
So the last little piece I'll say, and I put this in my book
and I did a podcast with the guy one time talking about shamanism
and wannabes and guru Itis and all that.
And I ended and I said everybody's a shaman only most
of us don't know it. So it has to do with that
reflection. I'll stop there.
OK, that's a. Good, that's a good answer.
Yeah #3 do you think? Do you think humans are special
or separate from the rest of nature?
If your answer is yes, please give me your best example or
explanation of why. We are nature, and if people say
that they don't believe that they're God, then then suddenly
they're separating themselves from God.
But if God is everywhere, how can you separate from something
that we're within? Under the same token, in
perspective, ecologically speaking, we're the Nexus of
life on this planet. I don't know that we're the
smartest. I don't know that we're
necessarily at the top because like, plants were here before
us, just because they don't speak or communicate and
perceive in the ways that we do, it doesn't make them any better
or worse. Maybe better, maybe smarter, but
we're inextricably part of the environment.
You know, one of the great things about the jungle is you
watch the cycle of life. So you'll have the bugs.
Something eats the bugs. Namely, maybe a frog eats the
bugs. Maybe a bird eats the frog.
Maybe a Jaguar eats the bird, maybe the Jaguar dies and then
the bugs eat the Jaguar and and then the frogs eat the bugs and
the birds eat the frog. You know, it's and we're part of
it. We're an integral part of it.
And it's a huge Symphony, every part of it.
The sights, the sounds, the smells, the, the interaction of
life, the symbiosis, you know, plants, you know how
hummingbirds pollinate flowers and how their beaks are
developed to go into the flowers and they and they pollinate
particular species. We're all part of it.
And what, what one of our biggest problems is, is we think
that we're separate from it. We think we're separate from
God. We think we're separate from the
environment, but we're not. And one of the, the lack of
better words, well, you know, without beating a dead horse,
but one of the downsides of technology is that sense of
separation from life. And I mean life overall.
You know, the sun goes up, the sun goes down, the seasons go
through, the seed goes in the ground and you know, it sprouts,
it blossoms, it grows, it reproduces.
We come along, we eat the fruit. You know, it's all intertwined.
We can't, we're part and parcel of it.
I have my other book, the holographic Cosmic man.
If you look at look at Mother Earth as an entity, and
Gurdjieff and other ones have said that is the temple of
Anthropocosmic man in Egypt, and it's a map.
They say it's a map of the human body and the cosmos.
Yes, the Temple of Man. Yes.
So that's why, that's why I consider it to be if we're all
universes ourselves, then we're a holographic representation of
the universe. So we could be a holographic
representation of the Earth, which is a holographic
representation of the cosmos. It's all, that's why it's, it's
holographic cosmic man. And then the golden mean,
because the golden mean is the perfect mathematical
representation of a hologram. And we're all intertwined with
each other. If you take a hologram and break
it down into individual pieces, you'll see the hole in each
piece. So that's my perspective on
reality based on my experience. It's like I always like to say
this is my perspective and this is my universe, which makes it
the truth for me, doesn't have to be for anybody else.
No, that's good. And actually, I mean, you're the
way you explained it, and nature and we're all part of God.
It sounds like you have a very Spinoza.
And from a philosophical standpoint of God, which is
Spinoza pretty much, you know, nature is God.
And actually that was kind of what Albert Einstein adopted as,
you know, his spiritual side of things, if you will.
Yeah, but question #4? I love how you say that.
What do you think happens when we die?
You know, have you ever heard of the Hathor's Tom Kenyon?
I love their stuff. And they said there's a few
things. They they said that when you
die, you don't necessarily have to go to the light or all that
stuff. You don't necessarily have to
make any decisions. If you just wait there and stay
in that state of pure awareness, then they say unlimited
possibilities will open up to you.
I think based on our experience in this plan of existence, that
if you've explored your consciousness as much as
possible, that you'll have a lot more flexibility.
They also said that if you're, if you're a follower of a guru,
I'll just use Jesus as an example, not making one.
It could be anybody, it could be Buddha, it could be Krishna,
whatever, whatever. But if you follow a guru, they
said that when you pass your, your guru was sort of obligated
to be there for you and take you into their realm.
That's great, except that they're in there.
You're in their realm, so they have to follow their roles in
their realm. So I like to keep my mind open
to unlimited possibilities of what can happen.
Now, there's a little Side Story.
I got my friend Jacques who just died couple two or three months
ago. Poloko Le.
I have never talked about him or not.
His music opens up the psychedelic salon.
He's the guy I first did 5 meo with back in 90. 8 Is this the
story you told of the ukulele player in Hawaii that the DMT
he's or he said his near death experience was the exact same as
his five meo? Exactly.
Yeah, exactly. So I asked him after he died and
came back after busting his chops.
I was like, I mean, I said, you're such a loser, you don't
even know how to fucking die, right?
You know, you might as well just give up.
But I said, I got to know it's 5 meo that experience.
Is that a rehearsal for Diane? And he went, oh, yeah, 'cause he
was gone for like 6 to 10 minutes.
And he described being in that state of sort of pure awareness,
no sort of physical trauma, emotion, and just being awake
and aware. And that's a guy who died and
came back and then did a lot of five MEOI think he visited a
lot. So I like to think I've had tons
of death experiences on five meo in ayahuasca.
That's actually a common thing to people that have.
I mean, I've had my own near death experience.
My heart didn't stop, but I lost consciousness and lost a lot of
blood. I think, I think when your heart
stops, I think that it's kind of a different, a different animal
than when you're, you're still like your heart's, you know,
pumping, you still have a pulse. But when you lose the function,
I think you, you do go to some other thing, some other place.
My mom had one of those traditional near death
experiences giving birth to my younger sister.
And yeah, she went places and saw people.
And so, yeah, I think, I think that there's something to that.
But I think what a common theme is, this is what I was going to
get to is people that experienced that almost have
like they wanted to stay there. And when they come back, they're
like they, they long, they long for that to go back there
almost. He said that and then he said,
But then part of him said, no, it's not time yet.
And then he came back. And you know, for me, with all
this stuff I've been through, I'm not in any hurry to die, but
part of me is really looking forward to it.
You know what's up? It's a real love story.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I, I, I'm dying to know.
And what, you know, I'm getting. I'm in good shape.
I'm in really good shape, but I'm still getting older, so I
have my aches and pains like we all do.
And you know, sometimes the good thing about going to bed at
night is just getting a break from all that stuff, right?
So part of me thinks that stepping out of
three-dimensional reality as we know it.
And so it's part of the great mystery and I'm anxious to see
what's waiting for me. You know, I think it's infinite
all. Right.
All bets are off. I like it.
Now this is the controversial last question that I've been
interchanging in and out, but I think I'll settle on this 'cause
I think that this is something that everybody thinks about.
This is a quote I love, probably one of my all time favorite
quotes from Arthur C Clarke. 2 possibilities exist.
Either we are alone in the universe or we are not.
Both are equally terrifying. Do you think there's life
elsewhere in the universe or do you think we are alone?
No question. Infinitely expansive and then
some. We're just, we're just in
microbes in the big picture. I mean, you look at all those
stars out there and galaxies and you know one of the things about
it because you know, I've written a fair amount of science
fiction too. One of the things I'd love to
speculate on. Then I may have even read it
somewhere. We know here on planet Earth we
exist with certain amount of oxygen and water and other
elements that we need to have a healthy environment to exist
with them and grow and all that. But in other places, maybe
there's another culture that breeds methane or, you know,
they live on ammonia or I mean, it's infinitely possible for
infinite permutations of intelligence and awareness.
When you look at the vastness, I mean, just our sun, we're just
part of its freaking little solar system in the Galaxy then
of of a gazillion galaxies. I mean, and then if you think
about it from the holographic perspective, it's even more
fascinating because as far in as it goes, as as far as it goes,
and it just keeps sort of, I like to think of it in that
multi faceted, infinitely holographic permutation of
ultimately mathematical perfection.
I mean, that's one of the reasons I love sacred geometry
so much. I mean, it's everywhere.
You can't deny it. You can't deny that it's in your
fingers and in your hands and in your body and you know, the
Fibonacci spirals and all of that.
And the way that the math works out.
I mean, it's just, it's a beautiful thing, you know, when
you look at, I can sit there all day and write about all the
visions I've had in ayahuasca. I still could never adequately
describe the colors I've seen. There's nothing that comes close
to. I can visualize them in my mind.
I can remember them. But that's something you can
only experience first hand because it's beyond normal
perception, whatever that is, right?
So I think that, yeah, I think everything is nothing and
nothing is everything. And it's all intertwined in a
big loop of Infinity. And it just goes on far, far,
far beyond any comprehension we think we might have.
We're just freaking fetuses. We're not even up for fetuses.
We're like microbes, man. I mean, it's so big and to
become, you know, to grow, spend your life working to grow your
awareness by exploring your consciousness.
How far can you go now? How many people never get that
far or never even get off on the right foot or they stay stuck at
being emotionally 3 years old their whole life.
You know, I've seen 90 year old people who are like 3
emotionally, you know, petty or whatever or bitter or not or all
of those things and you can't, you can't really define it,
which is one of the greatest beauties of it all.
I remember years ago walking into a spiritual bookstore in LA
and this Swami guru guy was talking.
I can't remember his name or nothing.
And I just walked in at the beginning of his talk and he
said, I'm paraphrasing here, but he said, you have asked me to
come here to speak to you of God.
But as soon as I open my mouth, I'm lying because I can't even
begin to define what's so vast and indefinable and infinite
that one utterance is a lie. And it is this whole talk like
that was really great. It was nice to hear he was.
His delivery was great. Anyway, it's all infinite.
I always tell people, you come across somebody and if they tell
you they're enlightened, run because they got stuck and they
got, they got caught and they're in some freaking kind of ego
trip. It never ends.
And the more, in my experience, the more I become aware of the
bigger the problems I have and the more responsibility I have
for screwing up, the greater consequences because I know
better. And that's sort of part of the
path if you're trying to expand yourself, you know, and become
more aware because in the end, it's about expanding awareness.
And expanding awareness is expanding consciousness.
And what do they say? Where?
Where your attention goes, where your energy goes.
Yeah. And to me, the whole path is
learning to master energy, period, Because in the end,
everything is energy. That's what you're saying.
You believe there's life out there.
I'm just joking. Yeah.
No, no. And to your point too, I think
early on in your answer you mentioned living on, you know,
an organisms and ammonia and methane and they've actually
found. So like I, I don't know, there
was a study or a paper like five years ago maybe where they found
phosphines on the clouds on Venus, which would indicate it's
like a something that only life produces.
So, you know, and I don't know if anything ever came of that.
And then recently, I don't know if you've been paying attention,
they found like super ancient trace, you know, evidence of
life on Mars. So I mean, you know, that's kind
of got lost in the lost in the news cycle, but what hasn't,
right? So but yeah, to your point, I
think that, you know, if you're talking about extremophiles, we
don't, we don't even fathom, you know, you even look at something
like a tardigrade or a water bear.
This thing can survive a nuclear blast and hibernate.
And then, you know, so yeah, there's all sorts of things.
And I definitely agree with you. There's got to be stuff out
there. So.
But listen, you answered all my questions.
I appreciate it. And consider your mind melted.
Oh good, I've been trying it all my life.
I just want to get a couple things in before we wrap it up.
I do want to talk about your new book, Drug Wars, a new Dope.
Can you maybe describe that a little bit, Tell us what it's
about? Yeah, it's my, it's my, it's my
first long term comedy. Some of my short stories have
weird little comedy twists here and there, but it's a comedy.
It's a Star Wars parody and it starts out a long time ago in a
cannabis field far, far away. And a there's a Rastafarian
looking guy standing next to a big waving field of great
cannabis. And he looks down and he sees a
mushroom and he picks up the mushroom and brushes it off and
he eats it. And this is all happening at
sunset and the cannabis starts kind of moving around the way
they do when mushies are happening.
And then he starts moving forward along with the sunset
and he goes across the field and up.
And then it goes into what they call it a Scroll down.
I think you know how the movie starts and it starts off without
with the story. And in the story, the corporate
empire are after the roster underground growers because
they're trying to rule cannabis production throughout the
Galaxy. And so the rebels, the star is
is a dude dope toker, and there's Doobie 1 Knubbie and
Hash Stoner, a Princess Sansa Mia, her hair looks like a big
cannabis bud and they're trying to crush the roster.
Underground grows. Underground growers.
Please tell me there's pictures too.
Well, it's a perfect graphic novel and I wrote the.
Spider, yeah. Yeah, so the the ultimate weapon
that the corporate empire has, by the way, it's Ronnie Ray Gun,
the dank Spliff Lord and the Empress Nancy.
And their weapon of destruction is the death bomb.
It looks like a huge penis and it shoots A paraquat ray that
blows up the planet Tryptamine. The the robots are 5 meo and two
CB. The ship is the the Pineapple
Express and and do dope toker has to use the buzz and it's the
red eye Knights and the inferior crack smokers and do dope toker
and all the vape. All the fighters are vape pens
and all the ships are like different kinds of pipes.
So do dope Toker has to learn how to use the buzz, and he has
to learn to fly his vape fighter up to the rectal port of the
death bong. And the rectal port is a
carburetor that a bong has. They call it the rectal port and
he asked the guy, this rape fighter using the buzz to fly
through the twin testicle towers to, to shoot the plasma into the
rectal port of the death bunk to blow it up and save the empire.
Classic. So yeah, this stuff like when
they have to sell his his weed speeder from the planet, they go
to Hoffman's used bicycle lot and the the bar room scene is
Leary's lounge and says turn on TuneIn and drop off.
There's all kinds of little inside jokes.
You know he hash donor says my ship has a record for getting to
the to the cannabis Galaxy and eight bong hits.
They don't shoot people, they smoke them.
The what you gonna call it the the swords, the Jedi lightsaber
lightsabers. They're pipe lighters and it's
tons of psychedelic stuff like the little 2 CB robot.
He also has like Roach clip extensions and like bong
extensions and. Are there elocks?
Yeah, those are the blunts. They call those the blunts and
they catch them so that when they when they're inferior crack
smokers, they smoke all the blunts, right.
And when they get put into the big crawler, the weed crawler,
when the the robots get captured, they're forced to be
trimmers. They're all trimmers.
So there's all kind of. I had so much fun with it, even
the squadrons. Some in depth satire, that's for
sure. Yeah, yeah, that.
You know the squadrons, when they're fighting, they're like
Blue Dream, Panama red. What about Jabba the Hutt?
What do I call him? Or Boba.
Fett. But what do I What did I call
him? Not Jabba the Hutt.
God, I can't think of it now. Bubba.
Bubba the Kush. He's Bubba the Kush.
Yeah. And then the Wookiee.
He's he's a he's OG Kush. So, you know, in the movie he
kept calling him, which we call it in the in the in the original
movie, The Wookiee. Chewie.
Yeah, I call him Chewy. So in this one it calls them OG
and the robot's MEO, and the other one's 2C and he does all,
all kind of crazy. I just had a lot of fun.
When does it come out? November.
OK. Yeah, it's it's available for
pre-order now. It's short.
I wrote the script and I actually entered the script in a
comedy competition. It was 1/4 finalist.
So I decided to adapt the script into a novel because I've done
novels into scripts, but I hadn't gone the other way.
So that was a great exercise and I had fun with it and I had fun
narrating it and getting it all done.
So it's all ready to. Yeah, I'll have to listen to
that one, that's for sure. Yeah, if you bug me, rattle me
up the road, I'll send you a. Yeah.
And then do you have a working date for the Ayahuasca book?
And do you have a working title too?
Yeah, I'm pretty sure it's going to be ayahuasca, the mother of
all the plants I've had different.
That's the working title. I've gone through a few of them.
But I said I want to include some of the plants or maybe
almost all of them that I've worked with and my experiences
with them as as well as the the taxonomic information and the,
you know, the proper naming and all that.
So I want to do that and the whole idea of mother and Mother
Nature and plants and plants as teachers and and bringing the
technical lack of better words, the technical knowledge and
history along with my personal experience.
Pachamama. Yeah, Pachamama, some of the
native names, you know, Yahe and different tribes have different
names for it. And I've included a couple of
the other plants. But I want to show that whole
relationship of plant helpers with ayahuasca being the mother,
which is what I was told years ago.
And some of the mythologies and, and even a lot of creation myths
of some of the indigenous tribes with their relationship.
They credit ayahuasca with sort of the beginnings of the world.
And, you know, it's always associated with like the
Anaconda, which is often seen in visions, and snakes, and snakes
are associated with the rivers, like the Amazon and all the
tributaries. Yeah.
I mean, snakes, the iconography throughout history, you know,
fertility and life. Yeah, there's a lot there, even
wisdom. Wisdom, Yeah.
You know the whole freaking Adam and Eve, right?
Well listen bro, it's been a pleasure as always.
Let's wrap it up here. We've been talking for a little
over 2 hours now and never feels that long.
If my ass wasn't asleep, I'd try and go maybe a little bit
longer, but yeah, we're. Good.
We don't want to burn people out.
Well, I was on hiatus. I got to get back in ass shape.
I call it. You know where you're sitting in
a chair talking for a few hours. But that's why I.
Go to the gym. I'm going to be using that
Theragun on this thing later, but yeah, man, I really
appreciate it. You're always a wealth of
knowledge and you've always got interesting insights into things
and different takes than a lot of people.
And I love picking your mind 'cause, you know, you are such a
creative person. And yeah, that's kind of losing
its, you know, we talked about AI and everything and, you know,
creativity is, is at a premium. You know, you look at what's out
there, you know, you're whether it's Netflix or Hulu or
whatever, a lot of stuff's recycled shit or, you know, like
the same takes on things. And just so when you, you know,
you write from personal experiences in these unique
places and relationships and things like that, I think it it
does matter. And we need more of that in the
world. And hopefully, you know, we can
find a way to maybe use AI or technology to do the the stuff
we don't want to do so we can fulfill our creative destinies,
if you will. That would be my ultimate
future. Yeah, use it all wisely if we
can. Well, all I can say is it's all
for you, and I wouldn't do it. If you weren't here and other
people weren't here to listen to my babbling, then I wouldn't
have any purpose. No bro, we love your babbling.
You got to keep babbling. But it's going to lead somewhere
and I'll try. To keep my head from getting
too. Good.
No, but seriously, I do. I'm looking forward to a new
dope and listening to that audio 'cause I don't think I've ever
listened to your audio books yet, so that should be
interesting. And then, yeah, I'm really
psyched for this ayahuasca one that you've got coming.
Yeah, I think it's going to be a good. 1.
All right, man, well, let's wrap it up the same way I wrap up all
episodes, which is we love everybody, stay safe out there
and we'll catch you next time. Peace.
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