5-MEO-DMT + What's Really Real with Martin Ball

(upbeat music)

This is synchronicity.

This is synchronicity.

This is synchronicity.

This is synchronicity.

This is synchronicity.

This is synchronicity.

This is synchronicity. (upbeat music)

Welcome to synchronicity. My guest this week is Martin Ball. This is a fun conversation you're about to hear. And primarily for me at least because then I have differing points of perspective on a lot of different things. And I think if you dig Martin of his work, where there's on this podcast page, an actual podcast, you'll see that we have some differing viewpoints, although a lot of viewpoints that I think ultimately are quite similar. So you'll hear a kind of a healthy debate about the nature of reality, non-duality, what's objectively real, what's objectively real, what's tangibly real, the unis of kind of religious or ritualistic or magical or spiritual modalities I'm advocating for as you can imagine.

Versus they're just not being necessary and potentially harmful. So there's a really nice debate that goes through, I think it's like halfway through, I know it's kind of a long one, but it's interesting for me at least to have these types of conversations, not because I'm trying to consent anyone of anything, but to flesh out my own beliefs and realities, they'd be enmeshed in something that I kind of just take for granted and to get them out in work. It's always nice, it's pretty fun. Sometimes it's a fun thing to do. So that's what happens in this episode. Is there anything I need to say? Go check out Martin.

He's got a conference going on in Oregon, Ashland, Oregon called Exploring Psychedelics. Sounds pretty cool, he's got some cool people going. Definitely check him out, see if you vibe with him. Big thanks to Rianne, who recommended Martin. Like I said, I enjoy disagree people. Well, no, it's a good way to work out your kind of beliefs, like I said. So that's this episode. Do I have emails to tell you, yeah, crypto sync. If you want to join crypto sync, this is not a bad time to get involved in cryptocurrency. I know you could say that theoretically at any point when things are going like they are, but spring summer, not so bad.

I'm doing a special offer. I wrote something on Facebook that I just shared with the Synchronicity community via email and the cryptosing community. They kind of gave a background picture of what was going on with me in 2016 and why I'm such a cryptocurrency evangelical. And it's not really so much that I love making money or being financially secure and that's the best thing in life. And oh my God, that's what you got to do. It's that a lot of the things that I talk about a show are incredibly effective modalities for kind of altering your consciousness in a positive direction, you know, being more grateful, being more compassionate, being more understanding, trying to find things to help you with whatever your particular issues are.

But I've met enough people in life and experienced it myself where if you don't have some sense of stability and truthfully just creating space, whether it doesn't matter what that's brought on by, but often, if you don't have that financially, all this shit is really hard. Like it's especially hard. Let me put it this way. Let's say you've never worried about money, so you're not gonna give a shit about cryptocurrency, probably anyway. But if you've never had to worry about money, think how hard it is sometimes to meditate or do a healing practice. And think of how much your ego and other things can be involved.

And you pretty much like don't have to worry about a thing that a lot of other people worry about. I'm probably not speaking to that many of you. So you are not in that group and you do have certain financial concerns. If you know how much time that takes up, and for me, what kind of opened up an aspect of my life is recognizing that, no, this isn't a get rich quicks. No, you're not going to be a millionaire overnight and make $10 into $100,000. But something is clearly happening in the space. It's not all smoke and mirrors, it's not all Ponzi schemes. And drilling down and trying to understand this, I think has a dividends not only financially for people, but just learning more about the nature of reality.

I know that sounds weird, but people in crypto sink. And I also say this, let's say you're listening and you just don't any money that you just have nothing. But you want to send me an email, know@sinkpodcast.com, and I'll offer something out. I also offer free resources on YouTube related to this stuff. I don't want this to be exclusionary. I do want the community to be gated in the sense that I want serious people in there. I don't want riff-raff coming in 'cause the gates are completely open and they can just start spewing opinions back and forth. We really cultivated a really nice group of people in there.

So I know this sounds like an extended ad, but I did want to point it out. It's still absolutely a part of my life. And even though I don't talk about it on the podcast that much anymore, I'd lie if I said it wasn't integrated in any way. So anyway, we're gonna get to this episode now. Big thanks to Patrick Nemchek for Patreon, Patreon music. It's May. You guys take care full time. God willing, he doesn't get sick anytime soon and I'll have full time to work on the podcast and other things, music, such as that. All right, getting to the episode. Big thanks to Martin. Without further ado, here is Martin Ball.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music) Cool. So with that said, thank you for coming on again. I think a cool place to start would maybe be, could you, let me ask you this. Before you did five MEODMT, were you a psycho knot? I mean, I imagine there has to be some precursor whether it's psilocybin or LSD before just jumping in or was that your first experience ever?

It definitely was not my first experience.

Yeah, it's like that'd be crazy for a second. Okay, so I think the reason I asked that question is because it seems to me, and you can tell the story, it seems like there was a profound shift when you did five MEODMT relative to these other ones you've done. And these shifts, I think it's really important to say, and people who are familiar with this show, we'll know this, it's not like five MEODMTs, the panacea, this is the one you have to do, and then you'll get it. These experiences can be brought about in many different ways as you know, as a comparative religion analyzer here. You know, these things can be brought up by anything, but I'd love some perspective about kind of your life before five MEODMT and how you would kind of synthesize your current perspective, 'cause I imagine there's people listening who have not had a revelatory experience, whether brought on by five MEODMT or otherwise.

So any perspective there, I think would be a cool place to start.

Okay, well first I'll answer that by saying it's a relatively long story.

Cool.

And after I went through this event, and well not just an event, but a process that was really initiated with five MEODMT, and then I started speaking publicly about what I had learned and kind of the development of my own view of the nature of being, the nature of God, the nature of reality, that I went through several years where people kept asking me, how did you learn this? You know, even people who had had five MEODMT, they're like, well, still how did you develop this perspective that you're now sharing? And I ended up answering that question so many hundreds of times, I mean, literally, by people coming over to my house and like, I just want to talk to you, and I want to figure out how you figured this out, how you learned this about yourself.

So I eventually wrote it all into a book. So the short answer is my book Being Infinite, an theogenic odyssey into the limitless eternal memoir from Ayahuasca to Zen really tells the whole story about what that is. And it's significant that I reference that there is a whole story because for anyone who works with entheogens or anyone who's, you know, working on a meditation program or something like that, when they finally do have the big, big breakthrough, there's often that feeling like, oh shit, every moment of my life has been leading up to this right here, and you get this, you start to see how your own story unfolded and how you were confusing yourself and also leading yourself in the right direction at the same time, so that personal side of it, I do think is very important.

So then I wrote the book Being Infinite so that when people ask me that question, I could say, here's the book, but not to short circuit the interview in any way, I do want to say that it's a detailed story and it takes a long time to really tell the whole story. So I'll give you the condensed version here. The condensed version is that when it comes to mind altering substances, when I was a high school student, I got really drunk once and threw up and was hungover and thought, this is like the worst possible thing. I have zero interest in doing this at all, and it made me just feel stupid and sloppy.

I mean, literally, you know, I was out drinking rum and coke or something with some friends and we were out at this park and I couldn't walk back to the car, so I'm crawling across this big field and my friend is kind of walking his dog, right? My friend's walking alongside me and I was like, "Oh man, I love you so much, you're such a good friend." "Boy, you're throwing up everywhere." And, you know, I get home and my older sister was asleep in her room and I literally had to crawl into her room and I'm like waking her up like, "Jessica is my sister's name." I was like, "Jessica, Jessica, I need help.

"Throw, throw it up." And she went and she got buckets for me to throw up in and she cleaned it all up and she hit it from my parents and so it's like one of the nicest things my sister's ever done for me. But I decided right then and there, I was like, "Okay, drinking alcohol, "I have zero interest in drinking alcohol." And at some point after that, some older kids at school were like, "Hey, you wanna hit it this?" And they were actually, no, no, it was actually my cousin. I remember now, it was just my cousin.

It's usually very close to the family, I've found it.

Yeah, yeah, it's all, it's a, I blame my family. My older cousin is actually the first person who's smoking out with marijuana and it was either my 14th or 15th birthday. I'm not certain which one it was. I think it was my 15th birthday. And that, for me, that was just like a revelation. It was just like, this is amazing. You know, we were just watching TV at the time but I was like, "Whoa, this is the greatest thing ever." And found that, you know, at this time, I was also a budding musician and yeah, there was an older kid in school that I was playing guitar with and he's like, "Well, we're musicians."

And so an artist and it's our duty to get high and share our artistic revelations with the world. And I was like, "Yeah, okay, I like that." So anyway, for me, cannabis use really tied in with things that I wanted to do, like going out hiking, making music, making art, writing gothic poetry. You know, I was all into the whole goth scene as a teenager. So that kind of started me on the path of like altered states was cannabis. And then later on in college, there was a philosophy major, religious studies minor and I had people saying, "You really got it." It was actually my girlfriend at the time.

She's like, "Well, you've really got to try "silocybin mushrooms given that you're interested "in all this stuff." So yeah, I started with "silocybin mushrooms at a festival, summer festival." I have no idea how much I took or anything like that, but I got separated from my friends. It was kind of a classic case of taking psychedelics at a festival. And this was the first quote unquote festival I'd ever been to at the time.

They're not, they're just like, "They're all like this."

Yeah, I mean, it was something else because it was out in the middle of nowhere in rural California on a river. It was called gathering of the vibes. And you know, I mean, keep in mind, okay? Keep in mind that personally, as a person, as an individual, I was like the nerd, okay? I was like the semi-cool nerd. No, not like really cool, but semi-cool nerd where I was all just about academics, you know, that kind of thing. I didn't, I didn't party. I didn't engage in quote unquote the counterculture or whatever you might want to call it. So I went to this festival and it just blew my mind because there was naked people everywhere and I was like, "Whoa, shit, why?"

You know, I thought this stuff happened in the '60s. It was long gone, but you know, there's all these naked people and there's all this open drug use of there's people having sex in public. And I'm like, "What is this?" So anyway, that was my first mushroom experience was at this festival. And I got separated from my friends and then they're like, "Oh, I'm kind of paranoid." And I felt like I could look through everyone. Like I could just look at people and like see what was going on with them. And then that was just kind of freaky and weird. Then finally, I found my friends and sat down and then enjoyed the show.

There was like concert going on and, you know, and that was great. So that was my first mushroom experience. And mostly from that, I was just kind of curious because I was like, "Well, it was really weird. "I'm not sure what the appeal is "because it was so weird and kind of just disorienting." But I thought, "Well, I want to get back into this." So I started exploring that more. And for a number of years, it was just cannabis and psilocybin mushrooms is really all my experience was. Plus, you know, I had sort of become a Zen Buddhist and was practicing meditation. And then sometimes I like to combine all three together.

Sure.

And those are some very, like the first time I smoked marijuana and then meditated.

I can't do it.

It was, for me, it was just like crazy. It was like, at the time I described it as an out of body experience. That is now a term that I have set aside. I don't really like that term for various reasons. But anyway, that got, because of my experiences, that got me interested in trying to read as much as I could about the use of psychedelics and traditional cultures. You know, I got into Carlos Castagneda, got into Terrence McKenna, got into all the ethno botany that I could find. And so this was while I was a graduate student. Then I like to tell the story. And so I was in Los Angeles. Excuse me, I was in Santa Barbara.

I was an undergraduate in Los Angeles than a graduate student in Santa Barbara. And one day, I got to LA Times. I was like my newspaper. That's what I'd like to read in the morning. And there was an article about this plant called Salvia Divinorum, which I had seen mentioned, you know, in some of the anthropological literature that I had read. But there was this article about this guy, Daniel Seibert, and how he was selling Salvia Divinorum on the internet. And he just lived down in Santa Monica. And the LA Times provided his website. And I was like, well, I'll give that a try. So I ended up ordering some Salvia Divinorum.

Some enhanced leaf Salvia Divinorum.

Yes, I remember that stuff was really popular back in the day. And I have a weird sort of Salvia, not to cut you off, but when I was doing it back in the late 90s, I was in a circle of people. We were using the blowtorch to get it and using like a bong or something. Nothing for me. I was just like, yeah, this is nothing. Guy next to me totally lost his shit. I mean, like completely was gone. Person next to him, she went, she said she was in India in a purple, sorry. And I was like, what the fuck? So it's always been something. And again, my step that, not to reference them too much, also a big Salvia person, big, big into that and extols its virtues in many ways, continue.

Yeah, well, apparently something like 10% of people have zero reaction to Salvia.

Yeah, yeah.

So it sounds like you're part of the 10%. But for most people, it is by far the weirdest psychedelic that's available out there.

I've heard that.

Because it's completely unlike anything else. So I started working a lot with Salvia. And it's also one of these things where often people who try it, they're either, I am never touching that thing again, or, whoa, when can I do that again? That was amazing. So there's like no middle ground with Salvia dippinorum. People either really like it, or they just wanna stay the hell away from it because it's so different and unique. I was one of those people who's like, this is awesome. I love this. So then to kind of fast forward this story, after I finished graduate school, things did not go well for me in terms of trying to find a job.

I kind of felt that I was just gonna, you know, I'm the kind of person that went from high school directly to college, directly from college to graduate school. And the plan was then to go become a professor and start teaching religion, religious studies. And this is all detailed in the book. It's quite an interesting story, but that did not work out. And I won't get into those details. So I ended up actually having a lot of time on my hands. And what that meant was I started reading novels again for like the first time since I was a teenager that everything had been academic, academic, academic.

And so I went and I read the whole Dune series, which I had started as a teenager, but never finished. And also went in and read all the Lord of the Rings and some Marillion and the Hobbit, you know, read all these books. And when I finished the Lord of the Rings, it was literally, it was a Tuesday night. I was a temporary professor. I was a lecturer at UC Berkeley. And it was like 10 o'clock at night on a Tuesday. And I just decided right then and there, I said, well, you know what, I'm gonna write my own science fiction fantasy epic. That's what I wanna do because I, you know, I've just had this temporary job at UC Berkeley that I'm gonna go back to teaching English and Santa Barbara.

And that's a really boring job and totally not engaging my intellect in any way, shape, or form. So I'm just gonna write my own epic science fiction fantasy series. And that began my series Tales of Arduin. Which is a four book series, which almost no one in the world has ever read is just a handful of people have ever read these books. But anyway, I wrote these novels and then after having written it, I realized that everything that I'd really learned from working with Salvador Divinoram and Mushrooms, I'd put into these novels and used it as plot developments and character developments and things like that, including some of my own personal experiences.

I just gave them to the characters and the stories and I wrote it in there that way. So that inspired me to then write this book, Mushroom Wisdom. And that was the first book that I specifically published about psychedelics. Now psychedelics were in the novels, but they weren't intended as, you know.

Excellently, right, right.

Yeah. So after writing that book, that got picked up really quickly by a publisher, by Ronan Publishing, which is really surprising to me. And when the book came out, there was this guy out in the desert in California and he's like, "Oh man, I really want your book, "but I don't have any money. "Can I trade you some stuff for it?" I was like, "Oh, well, okay, "that the publisher had given me like 25 copies of the book." So I sent this guy a copy of the book and he sent me, there's some various things, including some Yopo seeds. So this is where my experience with 5MEO DNT began is with Yopo seeds.

So these are seeds from various tree species that grow in central and northern, southern America, South America. And these are traditionally roasted and then they're ground up and then they're mixed with stuff and then they get, you snort them or someone actually takes like a blow gun and like blows them up your nose. So I first started trying that and was not really too taken with the experience that I've described that is like snorting roasted corn nuts or something that I just like the flavor in my nose that didn't like and the experience itself was just like the guy who sent them to me said, "Oh yeah, it's a nice dreamy experience, "last for like 20 minutes or something like that.

"Give it a try." So I gave it a try and it's kind of like, so what? Especially after having worked for so many years with Salvat de Nora, which I was used to just like, bam. And so that wasn't such a big deal to me. But then anyway, events transpired at Burning Man in the year of 2007 where for the first time in many years so I had been married, I had two kids at the time, my son was just five months old but had been very, very unhappy in that relationship personally for about a decade at that point. But it never had the strength of heart or character to do anything about it. Basically I had wanted to end that relationship and just there was a whole variety of reasons that I held myself back from doing so.

But then events transpired at Burning Man in 2007 where I literally made the decision at Burning Man that not only was I gonna listen to my heart which I had been ignoring up until that point but that I was gonna follow my heart and that I was gonna be true to myself. And this choice really was the turning point for me personally. Because then a week after that, having gotten back home from Burning Man and when my wife said I just get the feeling that you're going to leave, I said yes, that's true. And then that eventually within a few months brought me up here to Ashland, Oregon which is where I am now.

Now here's the great irony is that at Burning Man I'd been running a theme camp called the God Box. And the God Box was a really obscure little theme camp when we weren't anything major, we never made the big announcements or anything like that. But at the God Box I had designed this thing where you'd come in and first you had to take an oath that you're going to get to go and open the God Box but you can't tell anybody what's in the God Box. So you had to sign an oath agreeing to that. And then you would have to write in the book a confession so that you could say whatever you felt you need to say before you get to open the God Box and see what's inside.

And then you would go through a didgeridoo purification and then you could go into what we called the layer of the mystic toad and open the God Box. And this all came about because I had been searching for like a big, I wanted like a big treasure chest or like a big arc, like some big, fancy box, right? And that was going to be the God Box. But I ended up just finding a mailbox and I decorated it and I put eyeballs on it and these big, green feet. And once I made that I was like, yeah, it's like a mystic toad. So the God Box was also the layer of the mystic toad and the mystic toad and the God Box were one in the same thing.

Okay, and so then you go in, you go through this whole process and you crawl into the layer of the mystic toad and you open up the mailbox and then inside was a mirror.

Cool.

You see, ah, it's meat. And I started this kind of as a joke at Burning Man that I thought, oh, this would be kind of funny. This would be fun. And the first year that we did it, people were coming out crying and there's like, that was the most profound experience of my life. And it surprised me and my other camis. They're like, whoa, I think we're doing something here. We don't know what we're doing.

Yeah.

This is a video of acting people. So anyway, to keep the story going, after I moved to Ashland, I moved up here with no job, no prospects, no idea what the hell I was doing. I was just doing that whole follow your heart thing. And I ended up applying for a job at a local record company that doesn't exist here anymore. But the guy who received my application for that, when he checked out my personal webpage, martinball.net. And then he ended up calling me. He's like, dude, I can't offer you the job because you're not right for the job. You're way too educated. We just need some snot-nosed kid to do this shit.

And he said, but, well, what kind of mystic toe do you have there? And it's a mailbox. It's like, oh, okay. He said, well, I have the real thing, would you like to come over and try it? Okay, I don't know who this guy is. Okay, but at this point, I knew that there was this toe, this Sonoran Desert toad, Bufu Alvarious, the only toad in the world whose secretions produce five MEODMT. And this guy said, yeah, man, it's a rocket ship straight into the heart of God. And he's like, well, okay. I had experience with the Yopo seeds and whatnot. So I was like, well, okay, we'll find out about that. So anyway, he invited me over and we used some toad venom.

And he had this really weird vaporizer thing. And the thing about toad venom is you need to use an awful lot of it because the percentage of five MEODMT inside of it is relatively small. And I definitely didn't get enough. So it really wasn't much beyond my Yopo experiences. So it was kind of like, okay, sure, that's great.

Nothing my fault.

Yeah, Salvia Devanorim kicks ass over this thing. I mean, just in terms of experiential wow factor. So I wasn't impressed by toad venom. And I just wanna emphasize again that it was not enough. It was a small amount. And then about a month later, this guy invited me over again. He's like, okay, this time I have like a pure plant extract of five MEODMT and I've got plenty. So come on over and try it again. It's like, okay, I'll do that. So keep in mind up until this point, I myself had kind of fashioned myself as sort of a, you know, mushroom shaman kind of guy, sort of Zen Buddhist philosophically, somewhat agnostic about the whole question of God, you know, and being trained in philosophy and religious studies, I could talk to you about the empty nature and consciousness and, you know, I could.

You had sampled from the spiritual buffet in many different ways, yeah.

Yeah. And, you know, I kind of viewed the reality as all this whole living thing, but I never felt that up until that point, if you had asked me, do you believe in God, I would, you know, I'd give you some kind of wishy-washy answer or kind of talk my way around it philosophically. Or, you know, just say, fuck, I don't know, or whatever. And also, you know, having been raised secular and then seen just what I consider to be sort of crazy Christians around me, that the whole, even the word God made me uncomfortable.

Sure.

They don't use that, like, talk about the universe or something, but don't use the word God. But anyway, you have this fancy vaporizer that has this glass chamber that was filled with the vapor and argon gas. And it's like this little piston. And so as you take your hit, you see the piston move down. And I got about two thirds of the way through the hit. And as I was inhaling, I mean, I can't tell you how rapidly this occurred that I didn't even take the full hit because it was just, oh my God, it's God, oh my God. And so I just, the first thing that came out of my mouth, as I was exhaling, he was just, thank you God.

That's God, all right.

Yeah, and for like 40 minutes, I was just lying there just saying, thank you, thank you. My arms are open and just from the experiential level. Again, as I'm taking the hit, it's like everything in the room is just dissolving into pure white light. And it's like you're moving through living starlight. It was all conscious, it was all aware, it was all pure love. It was everything, it was the totality of all existence. And after that, okay, after that, if someone were to ask me, do you believe in God? My answer still would have been no, I don't believe in God. I would say, I know God because God is everything.

And so five MEODMT is rather unique in that as we started off with this conversation, there are many methods for people to experience, but now I would refer to this as a non-dual experience, the experience where any sense of separation and individuality was completely overwhelmed and overcome. And it was just the totality of everything all at once and it's one thing. And so that's what I use the word God for, is that it's the totality of reality and it's alive. It's aware, it's conscious, it's life and it is love. And after that, I would say, no, I know God because God is the only thing that's real.

Everything else is just God playing with itself through these different forms, but actually there's really only one. And so then that then started a process.

Yeah, I bet it did.

My ego trying to grapple with this reality of like, what the hell is this? Because then see the natural question for anyone to ask after an experience like this is then, well, if God's everything, then who am I?

Yeah.

And the ego has a really, really tough time with that. So this was in very early 2008, like January of 2008. And then in the spring of 2009, is when I finally just cracked. And again, this has all explained in my book being infinite, the lot of details to this story. But at that point, I simply cracked. And then it was like I was tripping five M-E-O-D-M-T all the time. - A lot of the time. Okay, cool. I didn't know that. I happened to me, I just had someone else on the podcast. It was brought on by an L-S-C experience. It lasted three months for me. And what's interesting about this, everyone who's had this experience, I was relatively woo-woo and mystically inclined.

However, I started having direct experiences that lasted through waking life and the dream state. And it was continuing. All I could talk about was unconditional love. I'm like a 20 year old kid at music college in Boston. And everyone thinking, I'm insane. I'm losing my fucking mind, getting diagnosed as bipolar, going lithium for a little bit, hit a crash. Basically, the hallmarks of this are so regular. They're so almost classifiable, where I don't like to put them in a box like the American Psychological Association, but there's really clear hallmarks of mystical experiences that everyone seems to have.

Furthermore, I don't know and you probably have some experience with this, all my evidence is anecdotal. The frequency, and maybe this is just people speaking about it in a more lucid manner, the frequency of these things seem to be just ramping up at an exponential rate and brought on by many different things. So I'm fascinated that this seems to be your particular viewpoint about what supports and is in your direct experience. Let me say that, your direct experience of this is exactly my direct experience. And then you must know this from your studies with religions. This is what was happening to Ramakrishna.

This is having all the non-dual, evasive Adanta people. They're talking about this experience very clearly. And then the irony, as you know, you can't relay the experience. It's an experience, you have it, you're in it. And then you spend potentially the whole rest of this incarnation trying to give people just the taste of it so they can be like, "Oh, okay, you can go and experience this yourself." It's just, it's a very interesting thing to me that seems to be just kind of emanating from our current time and place. So yeah, fascinating.

Yeah, yeah. And I think that there's a couple of different reasons for that, but one is that people are, at least in the psychedelic world, people are using psychedelics as tools to help them have this experience. And it's, what's happening in the psychedelic world today is very different than what was happening in the 60s, for example, because that was more like my first experience of taking mushrooms, I'm at a concert, there's naked people, you know, that kind of thing. It's not necessarily the right context for having a full non-dual experience. And now people are looking at, you know, more intentional use, or for example, also something that people are going back to now as like MDMA, where people were like, "Yeah, I used to take MDMA and I'd go to raves "and I'd go to all night dancing and things like that."

And now we're seeing how it's a very effective therapeutic tool, but it's not taking MDMA and going out dancing all night, it's taking MDMA and lying down on a couch and going through your shit and experiencing yourself. And so people are using these tools in a different manner where it used to be more for entertainment, now it is more for personal exploration and growth and resolution of trauma. And five MEODMT also, I think it's kind of interesting in the history of this, because apparently, the psychedelic elite from the 1960s and on knew about five MEODMT. And they, and this, I mean, I know that this sounds like a conspiracy series, but literally they got together and they made an agreement saying, "Let's not talk about this."

I heard you saw this with Ralph Metzner, and I mean, that's the fucking source.

Yeah, so no one's smelt.

Yeah, Ralph Metzner himself, when I interviewed him, he said, "Yeah, well, we all knew about it "and we agreed that we weren't gonna talk about it "because we didn't want it to be made illegal." And then that's really kind of startling for me 'cause I myself, I am not part of any psychedelic elite in any way, shape, or form. So I haven't had anybody come and like, "Well, Martin, we really need to talk to you "about not talking about five MEOD, "or anything like that." And so after my experience, I got on my podcast and I was like, "Everybody in the world needs "to know about this." Because the experience itself is, it's more accessible through five MEODMT than through any other route.

Okay, so there are many effective methods to having a full non-dual mystical experience. Five MEODMT is simply more effective than anything else. And especially when you're looking at psychedelic substances, it's just in a class of its own. It is, I mean, even at the time when I, so this is about 10 years ago, when I first started publicly talking about five MEODMT, the general public, for the most part, had not really heard about it. And even in psychedelic circles, everybody thought, "Oh, you mean DMT, right?" And I think, "No." 'Cause they were used to Terence McKenna and DMT and Machine Elves and the Transcendental Object to the end of time in 2012 and all this crap that was being spewed around.

And I would have to tell people, no, I'm not talking about NNDMT. That's what Terence McKenna was talking about. I'm talking about five methoxy dimethyl tryptamine and there is no valid comparison. Okay, five MEODMT blows DMT out of the water in terms of what kind of experiences it makes accessible to the individual.

Is that due to the potency alone or the structure of five MEODMT relative to an NNDMT?

Well, there's a couple of different ways that we can address that question. The energetic power of five MEODMT is beyond DMT. Okay, so that's just one aspect of it. That even in terms of dosage, if you want like a full DMT experience, you need to use like anywhere from five to 10 times the amount of material that you would use of five MEODMT.

Right, right.

So just at that level that the dosage levels are much smaller for five MEOD and the experience is much bigger. Also, DMT experientially tends to be extraordinarily visual, very, very visual in nature. And something interesting about the visual nature of DMT is that it almost guarantees that you will be locked into your ego at least in some capacity because as long as there is the one that is seeing and the thing that is seeing, there's a dualistic sense of separation there. So this is one of the reasons, I mean, Terence McKenna was very fascinated by DMT and to use my Terence McKenna voice. And it's the one that really makes me hallucinate.

That's a pretty damn good impression.

And I like to hallucinate. So I smoke DMT and I see these machine owls. Okay, so he was enamored with the visionary phenomenon of DMT.

And the operative word being he there.

Gee, yes, that that is dualism that I am entering into these other realms. And so he used to describe it as the other. He used that word a lot. And he also referred to psilocybin mushrooms as the other. So these visionary qualities of DMT tends to remain at the dualistic level. Okay, by comparison, five MEO DMT is not that visual. It has visual aspects to it. But that's not the predominant feature of the experience. The predominant feature of the experience is the sensation that everything that you thought you are is suddenly dissolving. All sense of boundaries and separation is dissolving. And then it's just this unitary experience.

And this is why when I started talking about this, I said kind of in contrast to Rick Strassman, I said, well, if people want to call DMT the spirit molecule because they think they see spirits and all the rest of this stuff, I'm going to call five MEO DMT the God molecule because this is the one that takes you all the way. Now also at the neurological level, people who have been doing neurological work and looking to see where these neurotransmitters are actually operating on our brain, that five MEO DMT interacts with the brain in a way that's different from DMT and that it actually overrides the structures, the neurological structures in our brain that are associated with our ego normal sense of consciousness, whereas DMT actually can even activate those centers of egoic awareness, okay?

So that we have something differently going on energetically, visually and experientially, they're very different and then they're also working differently at the neurological level. So they're very, very different from each other. It's much more common when people have a DMT experience to talk about aliens and spirits and elves and other realms and things like that. And it's pretty rare that people have a DMT experience and say, wow, I felt a sense of unity with all things and completely dissolved my ego and was in the pure light and love of God. Like in Rick Strossman's book, DMT, The Spirit Molecule, when he had all these different subjects that he was giving DMT to, only a couple of them had non-dual experiences.

Everybody else had alien, weird shit experiences, whereas with five MEO DMT, the majority of people report having an experience of absolute unity, okay? So they're very, very different from each other experientially and really can't just say, well, they're both a form of DMT, so they must be the same, because that's just not true.

That, I could, it's like saying, you know, MDMA is the same as dexadrin. They're both amphetamines. They're completely different. I, I, I, I grok that. So let's, what would be your, let's build a cosmology of these realms. Because I, this is something that I like to do is, you know, get people's perspectives on what's going on. What do you think, let's talk about DMT and N DMT for a little bit, because I've never done DMT, I've never done ayahuasca. I'm like one of the few people I know in life outside of my son, who's about to be two, who hasn't done ayahuasca or DMT. And one of the reasons I haven't done DMT, and I, I have people who regularly will have non-dual experiences.

They're also very much psychonauts and in not what I would deem consensus reality for the most part. They're, they're functioning, of course, but you know, they're, they're looking at the world a little bit differently. One of the reasons I've avoided DMT, not in a negative sense, is because the duration of the experience and relative, because what I always ask people after they have a psychedelic experience or any transcendental experience, brought on by anything is, well, what did you learn? What was the experiences? How did you integrate it in? What is the practical benefit of that experience?

And I also recognize that sometimes it can take a decade for the practical benefit to reveal itself. So I don't hold it against them. But it seems like the experience is, is very much like you described a sensory kind of, not egoic in like a negative sense, but you relating to something that you're somewhere else, whether it's the astro world, another dimension, these objective real things, whether the psychic projections, what's your take on maybe kind of the spectrum of existence and where DMT would fall relative to five MEODMT. So five MEODMT, it sounds kind of like, at least to me, kind of like the clear light of awareness and Tibetan Buddhism, like you are in the fucking void, emptiness, fullness realm.

So where do you think, do you think there's an objective reality where in NNDMT, those things exist? What's your take on that?

Yeah, I like to use the phrase of the divine imagination, that that's what that is. And I really first introduced this concept in my book Being Human, which was the first book that I wrote after I had my cracking breakthrough. As I, damn, I've got to tell people about this about what's going on here. So in Being Human, I introduced this concept of the divine imagination. And the way that I describe it is that it is your personal interface with the fullness of the imagination of God, the unitary being that is all things, but that it's an interactive mirror interface. In other words, it is reflecting you, both as an individual and you as the infinite source of all creativity and imagination that is God, but because it's mostly not dissolving the ego that you're still interacting with it as a form of character.

And therefore, it very prone to misrecognition that when you see these things, you say, whoa, that's the weirdest damn thing I've ever seen. What is that? But see, when you understand from the non-dual perspective that, oh, well, I am God, that my imagination, not my personal imagination, which I'm mostly inhabiting as an individual, but my imagination as God is limitless and is filled with all kinds of fantastic, amazing, incredible things that seem to be able to access other areas of space and time and being and all this weird stuff. But this is where I like to personalize and say, well, it's all you, okay?

It's not you as the you that you think that you are. It's the fullness of you. That's why it's the divine imagination. It's not the personal imagination. So there's things in there that may seem transcendental or archetypal or coming from other cultures and other places and other times, but since you are God and you are all things, these things are all you and it can be kind of freaky if you're in that state, whereas for a dualistic, but then you can recognize that it's yourself. I mean, one of the ways I talk about it is imagine that you've never actually seen yourself in a mirror before. And this is hard for people to imagine 'cause we've all grown up in cultures where we have mirrors, but keep in mind that for most of human history, there weren't mirrors.

And then at some point, somebody invented a mirror and then it was like, oh shit, that's me. But just imagine you've lived your entire life and you're an adult now, but you've never seen your reflection. And you've never seen someone draw a picture of you. You've never had your portrait taken. You've never had a photograph. So you don't actually know what you look like. The first time you see yourself in the mirror, it'd be like, whoa, who's that? What is that?

It's like any time on psychedelics, if you look in the mirror. You're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, who is that over there? And then suddenly it dawns on you like, shit, that's me.

And then it starts changing. And they're like, oh shit, none of this is real, fuck.

Right, and then it brings home the question of the, well then who am I, who am I really? So it's a reflection in the divine imagination. And it is not objectively real. It is something that is experientially created through these feedback loops in the moment. So someone says, oh yeah, it was this really, real experience of this giant mantis-like deity. Okay, that giant mantis-like deity does not exist out there somewhere. It's created in the interface in the moment. So for example, one of the places that, this is one of the things people don't like about what I have to say, is that I've critiqued for Extrospan in his book with DMT, the spirit molecule where he says, well DMT possibly gives you access to what he called channel dark matter.

And that he started treating these as objective experiences. And so now you'll see people posting online about how scientists say that DMT gives you access to alien civilizations and other realms. And I am emphatic that is fallacious. That is not correct. These are merely reflections of yourself in that moment. And if you think that they're real, you're deluding yourself and you're creating a narrative.

All right, let me--

Around your experience.

This is very interesting. Let me ask you this, would you say that they're unreal in the same way that we are unreal, Martin and Noah? Or would you say that we have some more concrete reality than those non-objective things?

Oh, we definitely have more concrete reality than those because those are ephemeral. Those are just experiences that are happening in the moment. Whereas we are energetically grounded into physical bodies that have continuity and coherence over time. Whereas--

Yeah, I think, I agree with you to some extent, but I do believe that these archetypal, whatever realms we wanna refer to them as are objectively real as well. But in the same way that I don't think that this human world is all that real either. I, here's, and I'm sure you can relate to this, when you pierce the veil of this world, not on psychedelics, when you're not under the influence of any mind-altering substance and shit happens. Whether it's synchronicities, whether it's just these magical, whatever word you wanna use that, no, this is not how consensus reality, we were told it works. To me, what that feels like is that yes, humanity, we are clearly, I do believe this, given a very precious birth, if you believe in reincarnation, and cyclical existence as humans, because we have this reflective ability, we have this ability to potentially see other worlds.

But I do believe that there are, those objective worlds are equally as real as our world, but not because our world is real, but because our world is fundamentally not real. Like, I don't, of course, I believe in linear time, but I don't believe, I've had experiences that just completely shatter the illusion of time, in many different ways personally, anecdotally, many different ways. So that's kind of my contention is that, it's not that those realms are concrete, that you can go and visit there, but I feel like this isn't concrete either. And I don't mean that, like, B, don't forget, don't take care of your responsibilities, all of those things, there's a balancing act, I think we were supposed to do here.

But yeah, I don't know, I think it's a little more nebulous. I think this world is probably less real and less concrete. And that, I think, I mean, this is your experience, too, and so you would have insight into it, too. But I think that that's accurate. In my experience, that seems accurate, that this world is probably more like a dream as opposed to the dream not being as real as this world, right? That's what I think.

Yeah, but I would just go the opposite of that, but I would say that, again, in physical reality, there's continuity and coherence over time, and that's something that is not experienced within the psychedelic state or within the dream state, where things are constantly changing, that you can't keep going back to the same place or experience the same thing.

Reference, right, right.

Yeah, so that, yes, reality as we experience it as it is an illusion, but I also say, this is as real as it gets, okay? So it's an illusion, but it's still real, and that what happens in the mind is of a lesser ontological level than what happens at the physical level. So for example, if I win the lottery in a dream because there's no continuity and coherency over time, that other than having a psychological and emotional effect on me, that's not gonna change my life. If I win the lottery out here in the real world, I'm gonna have a bunch of money to spend, and that's gonna change my experience.

So the things that we experience in our dreams, yes, they affect us, but not at the same level of reality.

Okay, I will say in my experience, there is a clear energetic connection between the dream state and our reality. And money is a great example because I am blessed enough to have been invested in Bitcoin and gotten into cryptocurrency, truthfully at the perfect time, and it has obliterated the concept of money for me. And I was someone who before this happened was experiencing a cute, tremendous financial turmoil. Just bought a house, just had a kid, and I really was just feeling the effects of financial responsibilities and racking up debt. And I view certain activities that I did involving prayer, unintentional dream work, but observing psychic phenomenon non-judgmentally is having a profound impact on my actual later physical experiences.

Now energetically, we could say with this emanated from the physical thing, that was a projection outward into the dream state, and that just concretized kind of what my intention was in this reality. But that also I think sometimes disregards what could happen with precognition or experiences of non-duality whereas time doesn't exist. That the balancing act for that I think is probably one of the hardest things to do, but as I've gotten further removed from my non-dual experience, extended non-dual experience, I think I get less and less convinced that this world is real without negative repercussions, without me getting untethered, and we gotta do whatever you want.

It just certainly feels like this world is less concrete, whether this is a function of some omega point or whatever the hell people wanna call it, or it's just a broader awareness of this kind of collectively rising in our society because it's just, it's hard to admit we don't live in very psychedelic times, whether we partake or not, you know?

Yeah, but the thing is though, the physical world operates according to certain constraints that are not necessary in the dream state or in the psychedelic state.

Totally.

So again, this is where we're dealing with ontological levels of reality. So for example, when I dream and every once in a while I remember that I'm dreaming and it's like, oh yeah, I can fly because I'm dreaming. I can't do that in physical reality. I have to get an airplane that there are certain rules that allow physical reality to maintain itself as a coherent energetic structure through the ongoing flowing movement of now in a way that is not apparent within dreams or in the psychedelic state. And while there is psychological and emotional transference between dreams and visions and our physical reality, again, if you're starving, you might dream of eating food and feeling satisfied.

But when you wake up, you know what? You're still gonna be starving or I'm gonna use an even more personal example because this happens to me sometimes in the wee hours of the morning. We're in my dream, it's like, damn, I really gotta pee. And I keep trying to find a place to pee in my dream. And then I'm feeling like, I just peed. Why do I still feel like I need to pee? Okay, and then I'm looking everywhere as I get to find another bathroom and I got to pee and then I'm peeing and my dream is like, fuck, I'm still not satisfied. And then I finally wake up and realize, I really need to urinate.

Okay, no matter how many times I pee in my dream, that's not gonna change the fact that I physically need to pee. These are different orders of reality. And what happens in one is not necessarily going to satisfy what happens in the other.

I agree with that. However, I will say that ontologically speaking, just because there are observable rules in this reality, in my mind, wouldn't give it precedence over any other world that maybe we're not aware of what those rules could be. That's to me because I'm also using, you know, some historical and, you know, religious and contemplative science backgrounds here. You know, a lot of dream yoga that's done in Tibetan Buddhism, the function of those, there are operating rules for reality. There are in, you know, I'm not well versed in occult stuff at all, but there are clearly structures and rules to these things that seem to be independently observable, sometimes with no pre-knowledge of what those would be.

So it's not like I've been exposed to something and, oh, here are the rules now. So to me, I would need either some clear evidence that this is the highest order of reality relative to something else. And to me, I guess I'm kind of agnostic in the sense that I've been in other realities. Sometimes they bleed into this reality and I'm not, I haven't seen enough evidence that I would say this is, this is the most concrete. That's kind of my stance on it.

Well, I would then just challenge you is like, well, then find something more concrete and show us.

Well, that's what I would say. That's what I would say. I would say your direct experience of five MEODMT is perhaps the most concrete level of reality. That's the foundation upon which all of this is built.

Yes, yes.

That would be my level of reality that I would say, okay, that's really the only real slash unreal thing, that void fullness. So to me, our constructs of who we are are just equally unreal, but by the same token, those other archetypal or whatever worlds are just as real as well.

Right, but it's what's unreal is our concept of ourselves.

Right.

Okay? So we are real, but it's what you think you are, that's where the problem lies, okay? 'Cause that's the ego that gets in and says, well, I'm this or I'm that and this is this and this is that and starts labeling and creating a sense of narrative for the personal self. But since you mentioned it, it's important to understand that when we're talking about, say like Tibetan Buddhism, they're quite clear that when they're talking about these intermediary states of consciousness, they are projections. They are not, they're not fundamental reality. They are projections and the whole training process of Vajrayana Buddhism is to use the projections to recognize that actually these are all just constructs of your own mind, which is actually the pure light of awareness.

And so like once you get to Zogchen, the highest teachings, they leave all of that visionary stuff behind.

Totally.

And it's directly, direct entry into the non-dual state. So all of the dazzles and the bells and whistles and the lights and the machine elves, all of that is the play of the mind in misrecognition of itself. And then when you do recognize yourself, see this is where we then go back to the experiential level, that we can argue about it as much as we want or talk about as much as we want at the verbal level. But when the experiential level actually opens up, the revelation is, oh shit, it's all me. Oh, I don't know what to do with that. I don't know what to think about that, you know?

Absolutely.

Then it becomes a question of, so then what is the relationship between the absolute nature of reality and the apparent relative nature of reality that we exist in most of the time at this dualistic level? And here is where I find that the more attention that people pay to their visionary experiences, either psychedelic or dream state or whatever, the less grounded in this reality, they tend to be. And the more off the mark, and here again, this is a place where people really don't like me, that I like to use them because he's the perfect example, that Terence McKenna was so far off the mark about what he was talking about.

Totally.

With Machinels in 2012, that I use him as an example, that the more energy and attention you get to try to unravel the narrative of your psychedelic experience, the less grounded in actual reality you are, because we must not forget that Terence McKenna was serious when he said, at the end of 2012, we will all step into UFOs made out of language and rejoin our intergalactic community, and this will be the omega point of human history, and he was wrong. That's not an accurate description, and it's all based on a narrative created through his visionary experiences.

That I believe, and I think that's really important to point out that the visionary experiences have taken his gospel and not recognized. Like I said, I'm not saying, hey, you have this experience on a psychedelic, you see these realms, they're objectively real, that's more real than us. Certainly not saying that, I don't believe that, I don't think it's true. I just think, and one thing I want to go back to Tibetan Buddhism is, if we're talking about all of that in that cosmology, we're firmly in the cyclical world of Samsara. So we're put in maybe a unique position of awareness relative to these things, but this is also equally as illusory as anything related to demigods to Helmrell.

So that's important, I think, because I think, if we're saying that this reality is somehow, it's our reference point right now as humans, but who knows if we die and we're in that clear realm, before we reincarnate, we want to go to Buddha realms, whatever the hell it is, we may have a completely different conception of what this reality actually was. To me, and I think I saw you say this in an interview with "Reset Me," the overwhelming kind of feeling I get about this incarnation is one of gratitude. It seems acutely precious. It seems, and that I don't want to diminish that this realm in some way is, oh, it's just like every other, it's not that important, they're equally unreal.

It certainly feels, this maybe is our ego, but perhaps not, very precious in terms of being able to even have these types of conversations and reflect on them, whereas if you're in another one of these, let's say you do incarnate as an actual God, a lesser God, not the source, you're in some realm as the Buddhist described, and this is why I always ask this question whoever I speak to, 'cause I think it's somehow, a lot of people don't take stances like you're taking, they don't take stances like I'm taking, it's just kind of an unresolved question whether these are objective things. But yeah, I mean, I think we'll agree to disagree, and I certainly will give your idea a lot of thought, because I think there is validity, and it certainly experientially, it'd be hard for me to omit that this certainly seems like the ultimate reality.

When I go to sleep and wake up every day, I'm here. I just don't know if that's the end all, given how weird life is, it just seems like it's not as, you know what I mean? - Well, so this is one of the reasons why I've given the label onto my own view of radical non-dualism, that I 100% reject the notion of reincarnation. I say that that is 100% a fabrication of the ego, because it maintains the idea that there is some individuality that is you that is reincarnated across multiple lifetimes, and my position is very firm on this. There is only God. There is one being that is pretending, at this moment, to be these two different people talking to each other, but we are actually the same being.

Agreed.

So there is nothing that is you, other than your distinct physicality, and then the identity that you have wrapped around that physicality that creates the impression that you are distinct from me, but there's only one. So there is no multiple incarnations across multiple lifetimes. There's only God, and therefore, there is no heaven, there's no hell, there's no afterlife, there's no intermediate realm. You see, there's the divine imagination, which can be experientially entered into and exited out of, but in terms of actual incarnation, there is one being living all lives simultaneously. So another word that I would use for God is God as the multi-being.

God is the individual being that is the multi-being that is all these things, and there aren't other realms that there is the mental space of the divine imagination, and we can interface with that, and we can experience that, and it's a lot of fun, and sometimes it's scary, and sometimes it's freaky, and there's lots of weird stuff in there, and it can be also insightful, it can be revelatory, but it's all just projections.

But how are you-- - Those levels are all just projections. How are you not including this realm within that narrative there? It would seem that if that is one God, I believe what's so weird for me is speaking about non-dual. I got 100% agree with your conception of this interconnected being, experiencing itself through divine imagination. That literally fits in with my viewpoint of the world, where I don't agree is that I do believe in reincarnation for various reasons, not that it's some actual, like Noah's gonna reincarnate as this, however, if we're in this realm, that is a function of this realm that I think is possible, and I think there's enough objective proof that there is some linearity, however, again, it's kind of like we've agreed to play this game, this game of time and space.

Within this game of time and space, all of these things are possible, but ultimately this game of time and space is just a game. That's kind of how I look at it, and that would necessarily include our human incarnation. So you could reincarnate as Jeff, as Dave, as Linda.

But then who are you talking about when you're saying you could reincarnate? Who is that you you're talking about?

Oh, so the cosmology for me, the hierarchy here would be the clear light that you experienced when you did five M&O DMT. That is the, we could put that at the bottom. That's the foundation of everything. From there, and I don't know this, we could imagine being the operative word here. We, he, her, whatever it is, would be able to have different cyclical realms of existence. Also realms outside of the cyclical existence. So these would be the Buddha realms, these heavens, these other places. None of these, just to be clear, are more real than that base level of reality. That's all that I think is.

That to me is like, that's the end point, that's the layer of discussion, and I think that's ultimately where we agree. To me, anything stemming from that is equally real and unreal in the same way. That's, I think that's basically where it is. So within that confine of you being Martin or me being Noah, if we're in this realm of cyclical existence, Samsara, where these different things can happen, we could choose to reincarnate in this kind of game world over and over and over, and we would be ourselves in some weird way. And I think there's also a function of why we don't remember reincarnation in this game world, is it would be horrible if we remembered every single previous existence, and there wasn't some layer that was kind of blocking us.

And I think people can access these things again though. I'm not saying that, oh, well, this is reality, and that people just reincarnate, and the math adds up, and this is how it is. It's just, I do kind of agree that this is a delusion. It's not like a real actual thing. It's just this imaginative game that we're playing, but I don't make a distinction between any of the Bardo states, any of the other dimensions, realms, or anything, and this one outside of specifics, but it's not like it's more real or unreal than the others. That's my viewpoint.

And that's just a place where I would fundamentally disagree that I would, and what for me, what it comes down to is when you really know yourself, and when you're really honest with yourself, that this becomes apparent, this becomes clear, because so this is what happened to me, okay? So as I was going through my process, it was like, oh shit, maybe all this reincarnation stuff really is real, maybe all these other realms really are real, and the resolution point that came for me was when it was, oh, that's not the case. It's just God, and that this physical world that we are living in, this is how God is playing itself out, and that these other realms are merely reflective states, and that this is, it's a game that we are then putting our own illusions onto.

We are projecting those out into our image of ourselves and what we think of others.

But who is we, who is we there? Who's the operative we?

Okay, so the we would be the ego.

Okay, but is the ego real?

The ego is a mask, it's not your true identity, it's a character. - Like persona.

Yes, that the one multi-being is performing as, okay, but there is nothing that is essentially Martin, there is nothing that is essentially Noah, there is nothing that is essentially anyone, that it's this one being doing this, and that what it comes down to is that psychedelics, so this is what I really write about in my latest book in Theogenic Liberation is how to tell the difference between your natural energetic flow and structure and the energetic flow and structure of your ego and how you create the character for yourself, and that when you get clear on this in your physical embodiment, that then you can distinguish between where you are putting layers of illusion and projection onto yourself and onto reality, and when you were just being authentic.

So one of the ways that I describe this is that energy is real, and it's about learning how to pay attention between what is my authentic energy versus what is not my authentic energy, and this is also a place where I highly encourage people to step back from speculation and wonder, that this is a process of self-observation. It's not about intellectually trying to figure things out, it's not about trying to parse things out into, well, this is real, this is not real, it's about learning to tell the difference at an immediate energetic level between what is and what is not, what you are adding to the situation, how you are interpreting the situation, and that the more time people spend speculating, the more time they're actually just generating mental energy for themselves, and are not necessarily grounding themselves into the reality of the moment of now, because of course, yes, time actually is an illusion, but we experience it now, and so it's about getting in touch with what is now, what is here, what is my true nature, and that then these intermediary realms that we're talking about, they lose their significance.

Totally, oh, I couldn't agree more. I could not agree more with that. See, this is something where when we're talking about it kind of ontologically, or just trying to figure out where it fits in, I found the same thing as you, that once you kind of get it, like once you get it, and what's interesting is getting it can be different things for different people, but once you, as an individual, dualistically get it, you don't have the same types of questions, you're clear on what your perspective is, it fits into your experiences throughout your life, and what's beautiful is it can shift often. I mean, people find this when you're a kid, your experience of the world changes when you're a teenager, when you're an adult, when you're an old person, but I agree that the questions become less interesting or even just less useful in terms of like, what is this, why is that happening, why is this, it's just kind of like an inner sense of knowing.

I do absolutely agree with that, and I think that's really important, 'cause I think I notice a lot of people get caught up in that shit, especially psychonauts, like they love to, they have this weird experience, and they gotta analyze it to death and extrapolate meaning, and just to be clear about McKenna, I love Terrence in so many different ways, and his brother is a good friend, but he was, and he would be privately, I've heard many stories, the first to admit, he was full of shit, all he was just talking, a lot of it was verbal diarrhea, he knew it, he also, you know, I've mentioned this on the podcast from people who are very close to him, he did not do macro doses for the last 15, 20 years of his life, he really wasn't doing it, and that's, there's no shame in that, there's no nothing, but you have to fit that into some of the things he was saying, and it's cool, Terrence, if anything, gets your imagination going, which I think is a critically important thing, but if you interpret that as gospel, as this is actually objectively what's going on, and that's why I tend to agree with you.

I wanna be clear when I say that these things could potentially objectively exist somewhere, it's not like they're of a higher order, it's not like they're higher up in the magnitude, so those are the realms we should be looking at, I very much kind of relate this to what Carl Jung would say about exoticizing foreign cultures and countries, you don't wanna get caught up in some other thing because that's the true source, and disregard what's going on with you in the moment, and now for you energetically to try to figure it out, so I think that's, I'm glad you mentioned that, and it's unfortunate when people idolize someone, everyone's guilty of this at some level, and someone says something that doesn't fit in with their narrative or picture of them that they can get kind of testy about it, but I think there's a way to respect Terrence McKenna and also just vehemently disagree with a lot of things he said, it's not that hard to do, I have friends, I don't agree with all the things they say, it's not that crazy, so damn it.

Yeah, and I don't wanna beat the dead horse or anything like that, but I'm not quite sure where you're located, New York, so I don't know how people were in New York, but I gotta tell you over here on the west coast, man, when it was coming up on 2012, it was treated like gospel, and everyone's like, yeah, it's coming, it's coming, and I was writing papers about how I think all of this is a bullshit narrative created by Terrence McKenna and other people who have bought into all this, and I gotta tell you, I received hate mail, I had people like, just you wait and see, it's gonna happen, you know, and so when any, and then after the big nothing, it's quite interesting that then people's approach to me shifted to like, well, he was an entertainer, and he was inspiring, and he was creative, whereas before that, people were really taking a lot of this stuff seriously, and something that I see in a lot of spiritual communities is that they really take their visions seriously.

They really take their dualistic experiences very, very seriously, and they use them to make excuses for themselves, or to try and define themselves, or create a narrative, I mean, over here on the west coast, I mean, I live in Ashland, everybody wants to be a shaman, or a healer, or a priestess, or, and so they create an image, what they do is that they take one ego, and then they replace it with a whole new set of ego structures and narratives, and then they use their dreams and their visions and their astrological sign to give themselves excuses for why they do the things they do, and all I'm trying to say, ultimately, is like, okay, that's fine if you wanna do that, but none of that is necessary, that you are the clear light of awareness, and if you wanna focus on the razzle-dazzle of the Samsaraic experience of being, that's fine, that's not actually bringing you closer to truth, or to reality, and it's not actually helping you be here, now, and be authentic and true, which for me, that is the most important, that the more energy people put into their astral experiences, the less they tend to actually be here, and the less capable they are of dealing with actual reality as it presents themselves, 'cause there's so much of an overlay of projection and identity and meaning, and so that I'm just trying to undermine all sense of meaning.

Yes, yes, I can tell, and I think the middle ground for me there is sometimes the gap between what we consider, or one would consider consensus reality, and maybe what actually is going on, is too big of a chasm for people to just be like, all right, fuck it, I'm jumping, we'll see where I end up, especially if you've been indoctrinated culturally or society to a certain way of being, and again, I see this happening with cryptocurrency and how everyone has a very strong relationship to money, whether they eschew it, love it, find its energetic purpose, or whatever, everyone has attachments, which is completely destroys people's paradigms, but it's not, everyone's attachments to who they are as a person, I lost my train of thought, hold on.

Remind me what we were talking about?

I don't know, everything, reality.

No, what were you just saying?

I was saying that the more energy that people put into their narratives of their astral experiences and spiritual experiences, that the less grounded in reality they tend to be.

And I agree with that statement.

At a personal individual level.

I agree with that statement. I think for a lot of people though, that's unnecessary, it's like if you remember when, at least from me, when I was in high school, a lot of my friends were skaters. I didn't give a shit about skateboarding, but that was the culture that my friends were in, so I put on the jinko jeans, I got a skateboard, I fell on my ass a few times like fuck it, I'm not doing this. I think that's kind of what's going on. I think there is a, and also I will disagree to some extent about 2012. I don't think it was a cataclysmic end times that we're getting into literal spaceships. I can mark in my life, maybe a self-fulfilling prophecy, a major energetic shift for the planet, and I know it sounds like woo-woo shit, and a lot of other people had had very pivotal experiences in their lives, whether it was a psychedelic experience or a shift in job or profession, so I do think there was kind of a energetic pivot that was experienced, it's not the literal kind of, we're gonna lay on the floor and drink Kool-Aid and go up to the mothership, but I do think this stuff actually happens, so what I'm saying is the function of something like this would be.

Let's say in my deluded world that there was an energetic shift towards the beginning of the 2010s, and people are feeling this, and we're seeing this maybe in people, this massive influx to yoga, and shamanism, and ayahuasca and all of these things, I think it's kind of like the tricycle for getting to five MEODMT experiences, so I recognize that I, listen, one of my favorites is Cho Geem Trungpa, spiritual, you know, cutting through spiritual materialism is essential reading for anyone trying to find out who they are as a person, in my opinion, just because you will learn very quickly, your ego, anyone's ego, will co-opt fucking anything.

Anything. - Anything. So it's important to be aware of that, but I also recognize like, you know, people are gonna do what people are gonna do, you know what I mean? Maybe people pretend to be in a certain type of music until they find the music that they actually like, and is really who they are. That's kind of what I'd look at. I wanna wrap this up, but I want to talk about your conference that is coming up, and also, you know, anything else you wanna mention where people can find you, and I end with a few questions after that, but I wanna give you a chance to let people know what you're up to.

Okay, well, before I talk about the conference, I'll just really quickly mention my latest book, which I mentioned before, but I'll bring it up again, which is "Inteogenic Liberation, Unraveling the Enigma" a non-duality with five MEODMT energetic therapy. That's the full title of the book. And the purpose of the book ultimately is to help people cut out the middle man, essentially, of how to enter directly into the fullness of what you are, and then get straight on your embodied physical being, and leaving out the middle stuff. Like I say right at the beginning of the book, this book is for serious self-liberators.

If you're reading this and you wanna learn how to be a shaman and use psychedelics and work in the astral, this is not the book for you. If you wanna learn how to ritualize your use of psychedelics, this is not for you. If you wanna go all the way and figure this shit out, and then live that in your embodied everyday reality, this is the book for you. So I'm very emphatic on trying to cut out the middle man, because that's what I found happened for me. So I'm trying to share that with other people, and I also emphasize that people have to do it for themselves, that that's the only possible way to get the, you can't get it just by reading the book.

You have to engage with the methodologies that are written about in the book. You have to approach your experiences with a certain level of understanding and openness in order to really work through it, and that I do think it's possible for people to do that. So I just kinda wanted to wrap up that for you.

Yeah, yeah, no, that's awesome.

With that, it's definitely my most popular book that I've written. Being human would be second to that, which I wrote in 2009, but this is the expansion and continuation of what I really got started in being human. And, you know, a lot of people, it's interesting, because I do hear from a lot of people who tell me that when I started reading your book, I was really angry because you were telling me that all these things that I really took seriously are not so serious. And then they say by the time I got to the end, I was just like, damn, this guy's just telling me the truth. Fuck, what I do with that, okay.

So yeah, that's just to plug the Exploring Psychedelics conference. So five years ago now, I started here in Ashland, Oregon, at Southern Oregon University. It was actually another professor at the university, sent out an email saying, hey, anybody wanna help me put on a psychedelic conference? There was a few other professors that he targeted at the university that he knew might be interested. I was the only one who responded and I say, oh yeah, I'll do that. And by that point, so I have my Intheogenic Evolution podcast. I've been running that for a number of years at that point for about five years.

So I said, oh yeah, well, I've got people from my podcast and we can bring them in and it'll be great, totally. And now at this point, we're in our fifth year and the other professor has backed out so he's not really involved in it anymore. And that's for the past couple of years, just for job requirements or whatnot. It's not that he decided he disapproves in any way. It's just he's not able to commit himself 'cause it's a great deal of work. So now-- - Life happens, yeah.

Yeah, life happens, so this is our fifth year of doing this and it's gonna be May 24th and 25th, which is Thursday and Friday at Southern Oregon University here in Ashland and that's followed by an after party on Friday night where my wife and I will be performing music and we've got some other people playing as well. And then on the Saturday after that, which is May 26th, we have an all day psychedelic documentary film fest where we're gonna be watching a few different documentaries and then also having some presentations and responses that are part of that as well. Overall, there's about 35 different people presenting.

Awesome.

Covering a wide range of topics that the conference itself is called Exploring Psychedelics. And the subtitle is in culture, science and religion. So I tried to take a really broad perspective of what are people doing culturally? What is the science, how has this been used historically or in contemporary religions and really try and keep it broad? Like some conferences like everybody to be a scientist or a PhD and I like to mix it up. So we have everything from enthusiast to practitioners, to neuroscientists, to religious studies scholars, to theologians. I mean, it's a real big mix of people that participate.

I also like to promote that it's the only conference, the only psychedelics conference in North America that I am personally aware of that is offered for free. There is no ticket required for this conference. And I like to point out that many of these conferences charge you upwards of $100 to $200 to $300 to register and go to the conference. This one is for free. I do ask for donations. Anybody who's interested, the web page is www.exploring-psychedelics.org. And you can check out the lineup that we have for this year. So coming up just about three weeks from today is when the conference is. And it's the largest such conference in the entire Northwest of the United States.

There's nothing comparable that happens in. So I'm excited to be doing the fifth year. It's a hell of a lot of work on my part.

Yeah, it seems like it would be.

Because I'm the only person, I'm the sole person organizing this whole thing. I don't get paid any money for doing any of this. It's many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many hours of volunteer work essentially by me, but I do it because I love it. And it's a great excuse for me to get a large group of people together that I can then put on a concert later and play music, which is one of my personal loves in this world is making and performing and sharing music with people. So that gives me an excuse to put on a gig and then two to 300 people to show up, which otherwise doesn't ever happen for me.

So I kind of joke and I'm also serious that for me personally, what do I get out of the conference? I get to put on a concert and have a bunch of people come and enjoy themselves. And for me personally, that's what I really enjoy. But I also love allowing a variety of perspectives. I mean, like if you were to ask me, stand and ask me, okay, out of all these presentations that just happened in this conference, which where do you agree and where you disagree?

Oh yeah.

There'd be a lot of stuff in there and say, well, I don't agree with what, but I want everyone to feel that they have a voice and I want people to feel that they don't need to be quote unquote an expert, but I also want the experts to be there as well. And so that it's, I kind of call it the people's psychedelic conference because it's free. Anyone can attend and I'm open to receiving submissions from anyone and like to keep it a nice mix. And also, when possible, give voice to minorities who are not well represented in the contemporary psychedelic movement and also to women that, you know, you see a lot of these conferences, they're dominated by men.

A lot of the biggest names in psychedelics are men. Women have just as much to contribute and their voices have not been given as many opportunities. So for example, on Thursday, I have a variety of women presenting and then there's going to be a women's panel presentation. And then the big topic on Friday is five MEO DMT and we have a variety of different perspectives being presented there and then also a panel presentation on that. So I like to keep it diverse and keep it fun. And yeah, it's coming up in three weeks. So I can't wait till it's done because then I can relax.

Yeah, I know how those types of things go having put on a few events. And I think getting the multiple perspectival view, multi perspectival view is just so important. There's a lot of things you say that I really don't disagree with many things, but I also like that you like hearing different opinions too. So now I'm going to ask you three quick questions and then one open ended one may seem silly, but they're not. What is your favorite color?

I definitely gravitate towards blue greens, turquoises, such as that. Just I love that as a color. I'm really fond of all colors. But if we're really talking to like the personal egoic level that my eyes look prettiest with a nice blue green color.

You and me both my friends. What is your favorite number?

Oh, fuck. I guess I have three. It would be one infinity, which is not really a number. And then 13, just because I like to be provocative and annoying to people. And I know that people are superstitious about the number 13. So that's just an immediate answer there.

13 is my favorite number.

Oh, we're so alike.

What is your favorite animal?

Well, human beings.

That counts. You could say that.

Yeah, but Manta rays are really damn cool. I mean, I like the look of a Manta ray and the sleekness and just the whole shape and form, I find very satisfying. But yeah, I'm honestly, I'm not really that good with favorites because.

I know, I believe you think, I've done so many. You think you're the only one who has trouble with these. I get it, but I got them out of you. That's the important thing. Last question. What's a practical tip that you could share with people listening that's helped you in your life?

Take some really strong psychedelics and then just give yourself the challenge of going through the whole experience by doing nothing, staying present and remain symmetrical in your body. That's my challenge. Then that's my advice. That's my advice. And I got to tell you, it is extraordinarily difficult for most people.

Yeah, no shit, that's not.

This is one of the fundamental points that I bring up in both being human and everything I've written since then and especially in theogenic liberation, that if you really want to figure out how your ego is running you in your body, in your life and in your mind and in your heart, you must explore symmetry in your body and then find all the ways that your ego is gonna try and pull you out. And once you get really clear on that, then the distinction between the ego and what's really going on becomes obvious. And that's where you find your point of clarity. So that's my advice.

I love it. Martin, thank you so much for doing this. This is a lot of fun, we'll do it again.

Yeah, well thank you for the invitation and having me on, it's been a month or two since anybody's interviewed me. So I was kind of like, when I went to the next interview it's coming along and I got your emails like, oh yay, there it is.

It's a synchronous city.

So as you can tell, I love the opportunity to share and talk and I can just ramble on pretty much forever endlessly.

Dude, I love it, I love it.

Yeah, so thanks for the opportunity.

Yeah man, I'll let you know when this is out and thanks, have a good one, man.

All right, take it easy.

Bye. (upbeat music) ♪ I wasn't fine, no one could save me, buddy ♪ ♪ Strange, what is I, how many foolish people do ♪ ♪ I never dream that I met somebody like you ♪ ♪ I never dream that I knew somebody like you ♪ ♪ No one could fall in love ♪ ♪ And it's on me down to break your heart ♪ ♪ No one could fall in love ♪ ♪ And it's on me down to break your heart ♪

Thanks for listening to that episode. There was some weird microphone stuff going on in the intro, the little skippy, skippy, so sorry about that. Sometimes it happens, I don't know why. If you wanna go check out more of Martin, go to his website, martinball.net. If you wanna check out more of me, well, I don't know, there's syncpodcast.com, there's crypto sync, there's all these different things you can do, just have a great day. Have a great weekend, have a great life. I will see you next week.

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