Desire, Universal Laws and Miracles with Mitch Horowitz

[Music] This is synchronicity, this is synchronicity.. [Music] Welcome to synchronicity, this is a very, very fun and cool and interesting episode. I'm not gonna sell you on it, you know who it is, it's Mitch Horowitz, he is the occult historian, author, lecturer, narrator, his latest book The Miracle Club. You may have heard me talk about it in the previous episode with Duncan, an upcoming episode with a guest you know. Next week, it's cool, I don't know, I just said you may have heard about it in an episode that's coming out next week. So you probably didn't hear about it there because you haven't heard that yet because it's not out.

Baby brain, still a thing, technically by the way due date for the baby that's already here is two days on the 28th of June, so that's weird, supposed to still be in the belly, not there, came out. Fun note about this episode, Alexis went into labor as I was recording this episode with Mitch, I found out about it, as soon as I was done with the episode, my mom texted me, I called her, she was with her. And I knew I'd been, I had literally been, you'll hear a lot about Neville Goddard in this episode and imagination. And I had specifically been imagining a very, very quick birth for Alexis because I knew she didn't want to, you know, deal with the whole, it was a 17 hour labor with Eli, and I knew she didn't want that.

So I was imagining a very smooth and fast labor, and I knew as soon as I spoke to my mom when I was done with this podcast, I was like, I'm definitely going to miss this. I got on the first train, had this weird event where my mom says, baby's here, then you go right through the tunnel from Grand Central heading up north and I didn't have any communication with her 15 minutes. Weirdly enough to do next to me, it's like some banker guy, some like high powered banker guy, they're like hiring some VP of banking and some regional bank or something. And Financia, his sister had just had a, or his niece, yeah, his niece had just had a child that day, that morning, which is weird.

He didn't think it was that weird, I was like, that's a little weird that someone in your direct family just had a baby and I sat down and my wife's having a baby. He didn't think it was weird, he was the focus on the money stuff, but he was very nice. So yeah, this was quite the episode. I don't want to get too much into the weeds in the intro because the episode is good enough to hold on its own. It's pretty self explanatory, but this idea of imagination has been at the forefront of my mind, you'll hear at least the past month. And it's led me down a very kind of interesting and fun road that I haven't really explored before, which is Western occultism, mysticism, Christian mysticism for the most part had some Jesus stuff, but not a lot.

I knew a little bit about it in this episode, but it's led me down this really cool avenue, which I'm really devouring these manly P. Hall and Neville Goddard talks, which I'm putting up. Mindpud Network has a YouTube, by the way, my youtube.com/mindpudnetwork. I'm restoring all of these old manly P. Hall talks. I'm basically cleaning them up so they don't have this huge hum in them and you can hear them a little bit better. And as I'm doing that, I'm getting the benefit of seeing not only the amount of things you spoke about, but just like the interest, they're just talking about cool shit. So I'm putting all those up, so enjoy that if you're into that stuff.

I don't know manly P. Hall. He was a brilliant kind of intellectual, spiritual, philosophical writer. By the age of 27, he wrote the secret teachings of all ages, I believe. I haven't even read it. I'm just listening to him right now, but people have showed me the book when I go to their house, cool people. And I'm like, "Holy shit, that's a tome." And he wrote that when he was 27. His breadth of knowledge and ability to speak extemporaneously about a variety of subjects is fucking pretty fucking cool. That's all I'll say about that. He's probably not for everyone. He's a little dry in these talks, but I think the profundity of what he's saying comes across in the written word too.

And Neville Goddard, putting up a ton of his talks too, and we speak a little bit. Not a little bit. We speak about it. Mitch is a huge fan of Neville. He turned me on to Neville. It's kind of this nice chain of podcasts that show you where this is what the podcast is. It shows you where my head is at, and this is a direct kind of wormhole into it because Mitch is just so clear about his approach to spirituality and being authentic and being truthful and letting that be your barometer about how you operate in a world that can be pretty wild and malleable and nutty. So I love this talk. Love Mitch. Go check out his book, The Miracle Club. I listened on Audible. You can get it on Audible on all these places.

Not pitching my Audible. I don't even think I have an Audible link. It's a really good book. He narrates it on Audible and Neville Goddard. Go check out all this stuff. On my iPod network, there's a ton of these lectures if you're hooked by it. This imagination shit really works. I redid my website. So the website is much cleaner, much better. So go check that out if you're into websites that are new and cool. And big thanks would be remiss if I didn't point these guys out. My friends Ned, the only CBD oil product that I have ever used will ever use. Trust. Love these guys. Go check out the episode. If you don't know what I'm talking about. Couple back. Go check them out.

If you go to helloned.com and use the code Sink, S-Y-N-C. Check out. You get 15% off. Get the full spectrum hemp oil, just some money. I just asked for more. I literally just had them. I'm like, "Yo, I'm out. Need more." Mainline that stuff. So yeah, that's it for that. And without further ado, here is Mitch Horowitz. ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ Mitch, thank you for coming on. Pleasure. Thank you for having me too. This is a wonderful place back in the hood. Right. We're live in my home on the lower side of the hood. Yeah. So you asked me why this podcast is called Synchronization. I gave you my little rundown. Listeners of the show are familiar with.

And I was just about to really truthfully thank you from the bottom of my heart for giving me a perspective and then tipping me off to, of course, Neville Goddard, but some of the techniques related to imagination and reality. But most importantly, you got me asking myself a question that I had never asked before in my entire life, which is, "What do you want to do?" Like, I never asked that man. It's a mysteriously powerful question. And the greatest deterrent asking that question, "What do I want? What do I want to do?" is that we often persuade ourselves that we have already asked it. And we think, "I've been there. I've been over that material."

That's familiar. Of course, I know what I want. Of course, I know what I want to do with my life. I've been telling myself my whole life what I want. And I ask people to take a yellow light in that regard because we have a habit of repeating things to ourselves by rote that we think we're supposed to want or that we think even if we're operating within the private confines of our own psyches will somehow make us look good among members of our peer group. And we engage in an extraordinary amount of self-censorship even when we're functioning very privately. In fact, when we're functioning very privately, many of us have these sensations or these fantasies or however you want to refer to it that somehow everything that we're saying is on stage, which I think is a kind of reflection of how profoundly and deeply, in some cases, we internalize a sense of peer review, peer pressure, peer conflict, the wish for peer appreciation.

So for many, many reasons, that being just one of them, we self-censored. And my encouragement in the Miracle Club and elsewhere is to get people asking in an uncomfortably intimate and uninhibited, unembarrassed way what do you really want? Because sometimes that will chafe against values that we think belong to us. Yeah, and I think that's something that you can hear someone say that, but until you take that step and face that uncomfortable, and just to be clear, it's very uncomfortable and just for my own personal kind of the trigger point for me where it flipped. And I obviously had some metaphysical support from Neville Goddard in your book, which was very helpful, but was this idea of, like, I have had a very weird relationship with money.

I've luckily been able to manifest just enough, just enough to get me to the point where I can support my family, but I freelance, so it ebbs and flows, so of course, what do you do when it starts ab, or what do I do? I used to freak the fuck out. And this is like, we're going to talk about some weird shit in the show, but I want to talk about the most practical benefit I've found from this imaginal kind of, we'll get into the meat of Goddard's philosophy and kind of what he experienced, but moving into a state of, let's say, not poverty, but out of lack or fear or untrusting that something good will happen and not feeling like you have to do something to make it happen.

So I, of course, did these imaginal? What are the first things I'm going for, material things? Boom, give me money to solve this. Boom, boom, boom, boom, which is great. I've never even asked for that in my life in prayer externally or internally, so that alone was a major shift, but then it started getting me thinking, like, why do I want money? Why do I want these things? Is it for security? Is it for fulfillment? And it started digging me deep in the hole. So I started seeing, when I heard about this imagination thing, I started saying to myself, I want this to be true. I want to see if this works. So I started asking for these things, imagining these things to myself, all this stuff.

You know what I didn't get in the first two days is any of those things, but what I did get is an amazing validation that this principle is true, which is people started coming out of the woodwork to tell me about incredible synchronicities, incredible manifestations that defy, like, anyone would hear these stories and be like, "Holy shit, that's objectively crazy." So I'm like, "Holy, I think there's something to this." And then I started noticing, because this month I knew it was coming. It was going to, one client dropped off. I knew it was going to be one of those periods of times. I wasn't freaking out. I wasn't getting into the same mindset.

It was almost to the point where I had to sum it up, the freaking out, just to remember what it felt like. So this idea that we're constantly out picturing our conscious mind is not specific to Goddard. It's not specific to really any tradition. They all kind of key in on this, but this, what you mentioned in the book and what Goddard talks about specifically is not that there's this operative principle at play that we all kind of intuitively sense and have done it before, but that we have some control over it. And if we are clear about what we want, why we want it, and can then go feel and experience that, we actually bring it into the world. That's fucking mind-blowing, man.

It is mind-blowing, and the turnkey is absolute passion, honesty, and a willingness to often focus almost obsessively on that very thing that we desire. That shapes against some people's traditions. I mean, there's a whole question of non-attachment and non-identification within Buddhist and Vedic traditions. I do not subscribe to that. That's a much larger conversation, and we may get you later in our session, but having been on the path for some 25 years or so, I've come to feel that those concepts, which are the products of a man-made religion, as all religions are man-made, as all religions respond to the social circumstances and the societal fissures and pressures from which they develop.

That's true of Judaism and Christianity, as much as it's true of Islam and Buddhism and Hinduism and so forth. I think that is an aspect of the Vedic tradition that frankly does not fit the life of the 21st century seeker. I think it was developed in a time and a place vastly different from ours. As far as the material you'll encounter in the books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy certainly do not fit our lives in the 21st century, and whether people consider themselves Bible purists or not, they reject them, and that's empirically plain. So attachment or not attachment, at this point in my path is not an issue for me. I think of my path as frankly being one of aspiration.

I care very deeply about people's desires and wishes, if one takes seriously the dictum that man is made in the image of the Creator, or is put in her metacism as above so below, then it stands to reason that we are creators within this concentric sphere of existence, that we occupy. It doesn't mean that we don't experience limitations, we certainly do experience limitations, mortality alone. But I do believe that we are creators within this sphere, and as we function within this sphere, there's all kinds of things that we wish to get done. Some of them involve beauty, relationships, health, sexuality, finance, art, creativity, business opportunities, which themselves are a form of self-realization that I don't think are sufficiently honored by many people within the alternative culture today.

And I'm curious, Apropos, of what you were describing, you described feeling an unprecedented sense of relaxation around money, and I wondered if further things occurred. Are you in the midst of this right now? Did the money come through? Were you able to get the kids spaghetti? I mean, what transpired? So here's what's going on. I, normally what would happen in this situation is eventually the money would sort itself out regardless. I would not have to take out a loan or go to some things. There have been times where I've had to do that, but it's rare and I was much younger and more careless, I think, with what I was just spending things on. No, but I haven't gotten a large sum of money that alleviates.

There's no physical, there's no sensory input that says everything is okay right now. There has been enough that's come in since I started doing this to give me like a little bit of like breathing room, but it really is what Goddard talks about that if you live in the wish fulfilled, you're not tricking yourself to do it. It may start is that you may be having to summon the strength and willpower to do it, but at a certain point, you just kind of ease into it. And it's been not only just related to my finances and I've been, you know, I love that I have a wife who can objectively tell me if I'm full of shit or not.

I was like, don't I seem like more calm in general? Don't I seem less reactive and a lot of my aspirational stuff really was focusing on the state I'd be moving into, not necessarily related to money or finances, but what that would allow me to do if I wasn't. So I'll give you a little side how I got to this realization from a couple of years ago. I've had Bitcoin since 2013. I was just taken by it. I think it's an amazing thing. In 2017, there was a huge bull market, you know, something that I bought for $100 was then worth $20,000. So I had in a very short period of time in terms of paper money more than I've ever had in my entire life, and I got a glimpse of what it feels like to have no pressure financially.

No immediate obligations, no responsibilities. Now I can focus on me. What I didn't have the realization of at that time is what I wanted to do. So I just kind of did nothing and then watched the money contract back into where it was and oh, I have to go back to my regular life. What's interesting about it this time is there is no financial support for me feeling like I felt back then, but I've moved into the state. I know that I have the opportunities and connections I've made in about two weeks have been more than I've made in the previous six months and all inbound. No action taken by me to make something happen.

That has been astounding to me. I'm truly more impressed with the psychological changes and emotional changes in me than if a million dollars hit my bank account. Like that would be like a flash like, "Holy shit, amazing." But it would wear off. I know that the financial aspect of it would wear off. I am quite taken that not only do I have this sense of relaxation, I've found a practice in terms of these imaginal exercises that essentially is getting me to meditate. I'm doing these one-pointed meditations where if my mind wanders from the thing I'm imagining, I immediately pull it back. I'm well versed in meditation. I've never been able to do it my entire life.

The reason as far as I can ascertain is that when I've tried to meditate with no purpose, no function, I don't get the point of it. I don't see what's going on. I can notice my thoughts. I see that they're going on, but there was no personal control or level of depth that I was trying to experience. So I just get bored eventually after a month or two, even if I felt calmer. This, I'm doing exactly what you say. I'm passionately focused on what I think will lead to a fulfilling life for me and people around me. Very much aligned with your doing. I mean, once I've found out that this principle is in fact real, that it really does work like this.

This isn't just some trick. And I love that there's an empirical test we can put ourselves through. I've basically been evangelizing this and luckily in a way that isn't sounding crazy and it doesn't sound like totally batshit and turning people off. I'm blown away by the felt feeling, the difference in how I was thinking just three weeks ago about all this stuff. And it's not fading really. It's pretty fucking incredible. I'm very touched to hear that. In case any of your listeners are unfamiliar with who we mean by Neville God, he would say Neville was a British Barbaden mystic who lived and worked in the U.S. for most of his life.

He died in 1972. He wrote primarily under his first name Neville. And his one key teaching was your imagination is God. And he meant that in the most literal sense, and Neville taught that anytime you come upon the phrase God in scripture, Old Testament or New Testament, it is a symbolical reference to your own imagination. And that everything you see and experience are your own mental images and emotionalized thoughts pushed out into the world, including my very own voice. So I am a shadow, a figment of your own intellect, of your own imagination, and that you, the thinker, are Christ clothed in human flesh.

And that your task in life is to learn how to operate this wonderful creative faculty that we call the imagination. And in time, although you will realize lots of desires and lots of fulfillments and all of that is sacred and good, you will ultimately come to this realization of yourself as God. Yes. And that is what we are moving towards in Neville's estimation. He said desires are sacred, desires are to be honored, desires are to be fulfilled, desires are the voice of God speaking to you, in effect you could say their prophecy in the most literal sense. And the fulfillment of those desires will ultimately reveal to you your own identity.

And Neville has been probably the most influential figure in my life since the past 15 years. While I do believe that awareness or consciousness or whatever term one wants to use may very well be the ultimate arbiter of reality. We as individuals do experience multiple laws and forces and these bodies that we occupy will decline and decay and we will die. And I have wrestled with that because the fact is we experience limitations within these forms. And I feel very strongly that some of the suffering and the illnesses that people experience either on an intimate level or sometimes on a global level is not some product of their psyche.

And the people who are suffering horribly right now in the civil war in Syria or in hurricanes that hit down on the Philippine islands or earthquakes that strike Haiti. Or even worse so paying some karmic price which I always find a very fuzzy concept that Western seekers resort to in this cherry picking way whenever they want to explain things that their own ideology is incapable of covering. So I look out on the world and I feel very strongly that we live under or at least we experience multiple laws and forces. And then as a seeker, I have to square my dedication to novels ideas with that and I am loathe to talk about circumstances that I haven't personally experienced.

One of the objections I have to some of my fellow travelers within the world of new thought for example, new thought is a movement that teaches that thoughts are causative. I have no objections to the label, but I object to ways in which people will come up with theories or ideas about 9/11 or the Holocaust or an earthquake in Haiti or some event of mass suffering whether it's natural or whether it's so-called man made. And I object to people talking about things that they have in personally experienced because our only empiricism on the path of conduct is personal experience both inner and outer so speak to me about what you the individual has experienced not what somebody around the world has experienced If you haven't been through war, don't talk to me about war, but talk to me about what you have experienced. Let's think about it together. So I work with Neville's ideas, but I try to work with them as best I'm capable in a dynamic way not to say, "Well, this is what the great man said and this is what I live by" and there's just too much of that online.

You drop a suggestion online that maybe Neville was wrong about a scriptural reference and it's as if you've just allowed a herd of pigs to run into the Pope's palace in Avignon. And my wish is that we as a generation have to work dynamically with these ideas. This is a really important point because as I've been talking about, you know, Neville's main two points were the law and the promise, which I call the ultimate bait and switch. People use the law to achieve all their desires in the material world, all the things they want, and then inevitably you realize, "Holy shit, you're God." There's a different twist on it and then you have an ethical framework, which Neville is very astute with the golden rule, which is packed with know thyself embedded in it, which is great.

But as I've been telling certain people who really engage with this and intuitively feel that it's true, I get those questions. "Well, what about the baby who died?" The baby wasn't thinking of anything. The best way I can reconcile it in my mind is that essentially we are doing this all the time. There's a great story Neville told about this woman who had these neighbors in an apartment and they were very annoying and they were just bothering everyone. So someone came up to her and asked her because they knew she did this imagining, "Can you make these people leave?" She's like, "Okay, I'll do it."

Didn't think anything more of it. They will be done, done. A few days later, the parents died in a terrible car crash and there was two disabled children and a small children. So the lady came to Neville and was like, "Did I fucking kill these people?" He's like, "Here's what's going on." If you use this principle, you don't consciously devise the means of how it happens. And what I really like about his interpretation of this law is that it is neutral. The only proof of that we need is that bad shit happens in the world. We see it. We know it. So to me, that can explain very fucked up shit happening in the world.

You shouldn't make the assumption, and I think this is what you're getting at, which is really important, that Neville Goddard was also someone who lived in the mid-1900s, right? This is a vastly different time. When I hear him talk about the only true God is the biblical New Testament, what I immediately think of is like, "Yeah, I totally get that, but I also see how the Tibetan Buddhists got there. I also see how the South American shamans got there, and I see how they use their imaginations to create these systems and tools to help them understand what I think is essentially the same thing."

I agree. Right? So if you do cross-comparative study of these things, whether professionally or otherwise, I think you'd always come to that conclusion. They're kind of talking about the same thing. I wouldn't presume to tell someone who's in an incredibly uncomfortable situation myself having been in several why they're there. That, "Oh, you're just imagining yourself, and that is not helpful to someone. It doesn't empower them. It doesn't give them any tools to pull themselves out of the state, even if it's true." So I think that type of explanation for why is there war in Syria is not going to pass the muster for anyone.

However, I do think unconsciously we are constantly doing this. This is something that is a process. Jung called it the collective unconscious, and these bubble up, and it dictates our life. I think this is what happens, and I think we give reality to these situations. I can envision a future where war is diminished, and poverty is a thing of the distant memory. What I can't do truly and fully is imagine that happening tomorrow. I can't imagine that happening in a week. I can imagine it happening over a course of time, but I think this is where we bump up against this kind of what Neville would call the bridge of incidents, right?

That these things are actually the cause and not the imagination. So what's been so exhilarating for me about this, but when I say exhilarating, I also mean, usually when I engage with a mystical or metaphysical concept, there is a sense of weightlessness. There is this sense of, oh, I'm up here in the clouds. I cannot shake this tethered feeling that I feel grounded as I speak about this thing. What's been blowing my mind really in a truly incredible way is that if we take imagination as causal, if we take thoughts as causal, first we're going to go take care of our own shit and the people around us.

But if this is true and we form these pods of people who really understand this in Rocket, can we change major events outside in the world? If this is just our experience of what's going on, even though we're co-experiencing it, I view things like war or Trump or things like that as severe wake-up calls. Those are things not meant to discourage us and make us feel shitty about the world. But to say, oh, my God, I care that this is going on, what can I do to potentially change this, whereas before I would have said, do something in the world, go do that thing. Now I view the starting point, not to say you shouldn't do that.

I'm not advocating a sit back and do nothing approach in the actual reality. But I think you start with this desire, this true passionate desire, to fix some of these problems. And what I've noticed is that has been a desire of mine. I've come into contact with other people who share this intention. And kind of what I'm starting to believe is this is how we alleviate these objective problems in the world. It doesn't give a clear cause of them, but at least there's a solution which is arguably more important, right? Yeah, it's a very interesting thing. But I want to go back to something you said about desires, because this is something that I think in the West is such a tricky fucking thing.

Because I think a lot of people fall back on this, the meek shall inherit the earth feeling that you shouldn't want these things. The desire is just a trick. I was talking about Duncan. He wanted this synthesizer. He wanted this Moghuan. It's like an $8,000 synthesizer. No one in their right mind should be dropping $8,000 on a synthesizer. This is not a good purchase. And he felt bad about it. He's like, "I know if I get it, I'll probably then just want something else." And it was just more of kind of this Buddhist idea that you can't extinguish the desire by getting it. Well, I think there's truth to that. What I told him is like, "What if you could get a Moghuan synthesizer? You didn't have to buy it.

It was a situation that worked out. Wouldn't that be incredible?" And I could see the flip in his mind. He's like, "I didn't think about that. What he didn't know is that I have a podcast network in addition to this podcast. One of my other podcasters just got sponsored by Mogh. They sent him a synthesizer. He has less downloads than Duncan. I think there could be a potentiality where this actually happens. And it seemed to me that Duncan intuitively knew that this was still a desire. He had no idea that in any way I could help facilitate this or even give him a potential route to achieving this.

But I think most people do what Duncan does. Like if you want something, and even if you really want it, you don't actually pursue that thing for some reason. If it feels against your brain, and I think overcoming that is such like your book was incredible for intellectually investigating that and giving kind of like a practical answer to it that I think helps people. I appreciate that. There's a lot to impact there. And I appreciate that story about Duncan because he is a perfect example of the conundrum that we all find ourselves in. I mean, here is a creative ethical guy who is a musician who wants a Moog synthesizer, which is a beautiful instrument and a wonderful object.

He has a productive purpose for it. He's deeply desirous of it, but he's also asking himself, "Am I just feeding the hungry ghosts?" So, yes, I get one goodie and then I'm going to want to get another goodie and so on. I would say the following, first of all, I very, very strongly encourage people to self-verify some of these spiritual teachings that we hear of, that we receive second hand, that we read in translations of translations of translations of ancient texts. Specifically, in this case, the notion that desire filament doesn't satisfy. I would be very, very careful about accepting that at face value.

I was, at one time, part of a very deep esoteric spiritual path that encouraged self-verification of every idea, individual verification of every idea. But human nature being what it is, of course, the person dispensing that teaching would inevitably want you to go away and come back and be verified exactly what he or she already believed. And I take that teaching too seriously to wish to do that. I am, I grew really tired, frankly, of people repeating parroting back to me. Yeah. Teachings that they had gotten from warmed over iterations from Hinduism and Buddhism, repeated, passed on over and over and over in the West for generations to the point where they take on the quality of catechism.

This idea that desire fulfillment doesn't satisfy. I don't know that that's true. I could name desires that have been fulfilled for me that are very, very satisfying. I could name sexual desires that have been fulfilled that were very satisfying. I could name relationship desires that were fulfilled that were very satisfying. I could talk of days I've spent working on a cherished piece of art or a book or a piece of screen work or something of that nature. That proved very satisfying. I'm finding this conversation very satisfying. Quite frankly, I dreamt of a day where people would want to talk to me and hear my point of view where I would be a guest on a podcast or a radio show or television, you name it.

I've done all those things and I'm doing more and I find it very satisfying. So I'd be very, very careful about accepting someone else's definition. Now, if you do attain all these things and like Buddha, so we're told, you find them unsatisfying, well then bravo. I want to hear from you and I want to learn from your experience. But I don't want to talk about these things secondhand and I would encourage no one to accept them secondhand. My venture would be that Duncan has very good reason to want the move synthesizer and I hope he gets it, whether it's through sponsorship or $8,000 or his neighbor Mike, you know, giving it to him for whatever reason.

But I really, truly want people to get into a different sense of relationship to their desires because I think desires are sacred and I think they should be taken very seriously. Well, it's interesting because I felt and thought about a lot of things when I was listening to your book. So I heard your voice when you were saying all these things and I didn't come away immediately with that. This book is helping me re-examine my desires, but after engaging with it, that's exactly what I have come to realize and I'll give you a little insight into how I've come to where I am with this stuff is. I worked in the nonprofit spiritual world for seven years.

I established a lot of digital ecosystems for teachers who are very prominent in the West. I will not mention my name. Many people knew they are. I've worked with them. It's because three quarters of them are crooks. Yeah. Yeah. I'm sorry, I don't mean to be. No, that's on the same path. Yeah. It's a valuable observation. It was incredibly valuable and I think that rather initially, I was like, oh, these people are just nefarious shitheads. I've come to realize I don't think that's what's going on. I think a lot of these people were at the quote unquote forefront of going to the east and finding some true wisdom.

I think some of these mindfulness and vipassana stuff really get you in touch with you, which we know is actually what it is. But what has happened is when they've come back and started spreading the word, they realize there is financial benefit, there is attention benefit, there is awareness. And then this very interesting dance comes in because these are spiritual people who know the self doesn't exist and they shouldn't be self glorifying and they shouldn't be achieving their desires. This very, very intense schism happens where there is a frontward facing persona of who the person is who's going to teach you all the wonderful things.

And then who the person actually is behind closed doors, which I got to see constantly. And to me, I've let go that I'm going to be the savior or expose or help with any of this stuff. What bothered me most about that was not the position that I found myself in when I started calling out some of this stuff was that there are so many people who do what you just described to hear that if you whatever you want, if you get it, it's going to be unfulfilling. You're going to be a hungry ghost with a huge belly and a tiny little mouth. That's going to be your life. And what that does to someone who is in a state of poverty or not enough.

What that does to their psyche is to me, if you want to talk about karma and karmic repercussions, like you're playing with fucking fire there. Like you are disempowering people. So to hear you talk about not just in like a a selfish, even though it can be, but just embracing your desires to even just try them on to see if it's what you actually wanted. This is a radically different approach than what is being pitched in the mindfulness world, the spiritual world for the most part. Most of that stuff is, you know, rich people trying to figure out why they feel bad because they have money so they think they just get rid of it and don't want things and that's going to solve it.

And yeah, I think we're seeing this very weird moment in Western spirituality where people are forgetting that like, like you said, like everyone can think of when they receive something, whether it's a relationship, an object, sex, whatever it is, where they were fulfilled. They felt the thing where they knew this was right. How do you disregard that just because someone tells you it, but I've done it. Everyone does it. It's so weird. There's so much to say there and those observations are very valuable. And of course, when I said a bunch of them are crooks, I didn't mean to be glib or chemical. I don't want to reinforce this notion that everybody's on the take because they're not.

And people are a mixture of guile and sincerity. And I often remind people to keep that in mind when they're critiquing the so-called prosperity gospel. There's a lot of people involved with the prosperity gospel who are complicated folk. And if you view it from outside and say, Oh, they're just milking their cock stars. Yeah, she first of all, the congregants probably wouldn't stick around over time if they were just getting built and many of them do stick around. Many of them also do not contribute ruinous sums of money to these ministries. Some of these ministries go too far. But the truth is, by and large, many of us are mixtures of guile and sincerity. And I too have frequently witnessed on the spiritual path. Teachers, leaders, nationally known folk who have a public facing persona and a private person.

And they can be very different, which is always disappointing, because I think let thine and I be single is a profoundly valuable piece of wisdom. And I speak from some experience because I was for many, many years, the editor in chief and the vice president of a metaphysical imprint at Penguin Random House. So you know, yeah, I would also say on a personal scale. And this is very important. And I feel strongly about this. I'm a freelancer to today. And for some years, my job has been exclusively dedicated to writing, speaking, narrating screen work. So I don't have any kind of incorporation, and I don't receive a regular weekly pay track. I work off of exactly what I earn per project and every freelancer knows that getting paid, getting paid on time is very important within that paradigm.

The only places that I ever felt venture to rip me off were growth centers, the only place. And the more public facing a group was about its ethics, about its not-for-profit status, which means nothing, by the way, not-for-profit is simply a tax designation shared by everybody from the NRA. With Scientology, it means literally nothing. It's just a tax designation. It was the places that had the most public facing ethics and that would hold conferences on green business practices and would be host to people who would be the first ones to contest my rejection of non-attachment, not identification, and want to talk about westernized versions of these values of meaning and mindfulness and non-attachment and ethics, and were the loudest voices objecting to Trump or whatever the nearest equivalent was, or objecting to the practices emanating from Wall Street or what have you, or complaining about our media saturated society, et cetera, et cetera.

They were always the places that were first to rip off artists. And I won't name names because I feel it's unfair, because sometimes these places may go through changes of management, and I'm not trying to permanently sully some institution's reputation. But I can say firsthand that institutions that your listeners would have heard of have made donations to, have paid to attend events at, would send me very nice sign letters of agreement telling me they would pay me such and such a percentage of the door for such and such an event. And they would not pay unless I kept on them like a hungry bloodhound. Basically make you feel like a schmuck to go get something that was yours. It was a policy. It was a policy to rip off artists.

Yeah. And there are places right here in New York City and elsewhere that your listeners are patrons of, of course, that absolutely have a policy of ripping off and discouraging payment to the artist. And again, these are organizations that produce the most beautiful mission statements to read them is to hear the voices of angels singing, and their actions are completely at odds. And that is a hard, tough truth. It's also an educative truth because it should lead the individual to ask that if a school, if a person, if an educational institution has been abiding by a certain philosophy or set of teachings.

For 30 some odd years, and their behavior ultimately is no better than Trump on one of his bad days. What does that tell us about the extent to which these ideas comport with or don't comport with our lives? What does that tell us about a brokenness in human nature? What does that tell us about the facility of these ideas for Western seekers in the 21st century? It ought to place us in front of big questions. Not only big questions, but I mean, exactly what you said was my direct experience. When I was working with many of these teachers and organizations, and I was going on retreats and really experiencing powerful stuff.

Truthfully, I mean, because they think ultimately it's within us. So it's for us to create those experiences and felt things. I shit hit the fan really bad for me because what ended up happening is I saw some bullshit going on in this one organization. And I said to the person who's the executive director, I said, "This person is doing unethical things. Here's the proof. I don't want to be the person doing this. I'm not the spiritual police, but I'm letting you know." And he told me that once. And it's one of the few things that he said to me that I still actually think is pretty good advice. You're not the spiritual police. It's not your job.

But I brought this up. And within 30 minutes, everything went to shit. I got a phone call from the person who I was speaking about professionally and respectfully. And I have never in my life been spoken to like that. I mean, it was comical. I was laughing because of the things that were being said by this person. I was like, "What is this?" That snowballed into what essentially this is right before my first son was born. Just we had just moved, you know, my financial stability was dependent on this organization and organizations who had come from that. And immediately what this person did was pull the rug out. Not only quickly got me out the door within a month, but then, as I found out later from some of our mutual clients, was going on a campaign to talk shit about me.

And I mean this as clearly as possible. I took this specific organization. I mean this in not egotistical terms from the brink of disaster and basically having to shut down and create something new, just a whole new thing. So like within the first six months, I was they were grossing seven figures. Like they were on the road to recovery. We're doing what we're doing. I helped facilitate these mission statements and things out into the world. And the first thing I did was had this very deep internal debate about, do I throw the baby out with the bathwater? Is this vein of spirituality completely bullshit?

Luckily, through grace, I realized that it's from within me now, I didn't throw the baby out with the bathwater. I kept the parts of it that were legit and consigned the rest of it to just mortality and people being people, which I don't think people, it's not an easy thing to do. When someone fucks you over and their whole life has been dedicated to this one practice of being a great person, it's going to make your life good. And they do one of the worst things I think you can do to someone, which you know they're having a child and you're going to fucking pull up their income because you didn't like something they did.

Nothing to do with the business. I was very close to just kind of rejecting it all. And I truthfully went through about a year and a half, two years before I got my footing again and like truthfully understood that that was just a person doing something. But to your point, it made me question the validity of that path to the point where I saw the flaws, I saw the inconsistencies, I saw that if someone had dedicated or multiple people had dedicated decades of their life to this specific meditative practice or chanting or whatever it is. And they weren't even better than like someone who didn't know anything about this who just naturally knew how to not be a shithead. It just got me like it completely changed my concept of what a spiritual path is, what it means.

Ultimately, what are we talking about when we talk about a spiritual path. And again, to tie this into the Goddard stuff and a lot of things you broke brought up is the hardest thing for me. And I wouldn't have thought this to do with all of these concepts is, and I love when Goddard never says this, you know, if I say Jesus Christ or I say God and you think of something out there, you're failing the fucking test. And that the first week I was doing this, my natural reaction was if I had something good happen to me is thank you, just to thank you out into the world. Now I directed in words, and at first it felt like a schism and a betrayal to like, oh my God, I'm pulling away from the external source energy. But now I recognize there's no difference.

I'm not doing it to self aggrandize myself, but to essentially say like, this is the operative power. This is what's going on. And if we can be clear about what our desires and passions are, that's a fucking amazing thing that actually does way more than any of these other things combined could do. So, I agree, I think clarity, first and foremost, unembarrassed, unambiguous clarity is the price we pay for beginning to experiment with and exercise some of these forces, which brings me to the point of what I mean when I say spiritual, what I simply mean is it's to me spirituality is extra physicality. It's that simple. I'm referring to the prospect of extra physical forms of life in which we participate that go beyond the five senses that go beyond the cognitive motor period.

And that can take you in myriad directions. It doesn't mean, in my view, belonging to any organization or doctrine or tradition, it may involve chanting or meditation or yoga, it may involve none of those things. You may have your own personal conceptions of what you're doing, but my personal belief is that we do have an existence that goes beyond the physical, and I use the term spiritual to reference that. I feel it's important, and you alluded to this, which I appreciate, is to note that no one should be made to feel cynical or dejected by some of the stories that were swapping about bad actors in the spiritual world, because, of course, there are good actors and there are good practices and there are good people.

I never knew Neville, for example, he died in 1972, but my deepest impression is that he was an ethical teacher. He was a good teacher. He never presented a public face to the world that differed from his private face. I do my best to be a plain dealer with people. I never say different things in front of different audiences. I will say the same things when I'm speaking in a new age venue or on a late night radio show that I will say at an academic conference, quite literally, and there's enough of my stuff posted on YouTube so that people can hold my feet to the fire on that question. Go listen to a talk that I delivered at Rice University and go listen to what I say on coast to coast AM, and if you think I'm catering to one audience or another.

I try not to. If I do, call me out on it, please, because my wish is to say the same thing everywhere I go, so I don't want people to be in despair and to feel that there's no place where you can speak plainly or get the real deal when you're on the spiritual path. There are plenty of such places. I don't know if they're in the majority. You can be in the minority and still be effective. If I say it's 10%, well, 10% does a lot of people be in that 10% hang with that 10%. You know, spend your time in that 10% of the world wherever it may be. There are a lot of problems too because human nature, as you alluded, is very fucked. And I do feel very strongly that whatever one's position, whatever one's perspective, and this is true in terms of politics, true in terms of culture, true in terms of religion, think really hard and carefully before you go after someone's livelihood.

Because I feel that few things are more ethically grave than going after someone's livelihood and you better be awfully sure, awfully sure you've got a good reason to do it. And I say that from many different perspectives, one of which being that I don't know whether karma exists. That's a very big term, and I don't like to use familiar terms like catechism as I was earlier, but I do feel strongly there's a cosmic reciprocity, and I do go strongly that there's a connectedness and that there is a compensatory element in life. And one should just think real hard about how you engage with other people.

So this karma issue, well, fucking said too, and I'm glad you brought this up with livelihood. It was my felt experience. It was just beyond the pale karma. So this is how I've reconciled all of my other kind of journeys and studies and coming across metaphysical things. Neville is very much a Christian mystic. He's using the Old Testament, the Abrahamic religions, and the New Testament as what he says, not a historical count. It's the only thing I've really heard him say in the negative is that this won't people. You can believe that, but they weren't. These are psychological states that we move through, right? So if we're trying to think about it as psychological states that we're moving through, right?

And we know that this isn't a historical accurate. I lost my train of thought. I'm trying to remember it. It was a point. What were you just saying? And I'm going to remember it. Oh, well, simply that there's a cosmic reciprocity. There's a compensation to a certain degree of connectedness. Right. And this is how I reconciled things like karma and other traditions. If this principle of God being our imagination or this I am being the creator, anything we imagine takes on a level of reality. I think this idea of karma and reciprocity, reciprocity sounds more like the law. That sounds like the thing that probably is built on.

But if millions and billions and trillions of people throughout the ages believe in karma, I think it begins to work as a principle. This is how I think our external reality is also stabilized. Neville would say it's an imaginal, stable, imaginal acts create our reality. So I kind of have this escape hatch where I can say, yeah, I don't know if karma is exactly what I feel it is. But I know enough of it to know enough people think it's a thing that I've seen what looks to be that operative power working and doing. That's a wonderful point. Yeah. I really truly think you've made a wonderful point there.

And it reminds me of a recent placebo study at Harvard that some of your listeners may know of called the so-called transparent placebo study where researchers at Harvard Medical School administered a transparent placebo, a transparently benign substance to sufferers of irritable bowel syndrome and a very significant number, 59%, felt significant and extended recovery. And researchers wondered why would a transparent placebo have that effect? And I wouldn't rush to answer that question. He has their pet theories. And every time I talk about this as a conference, at a conference, hands go up from people who have never spent a moment of their lives studying medicine that they're sure they understand why it worked.

I'm not sure at all, nor were the researchers sure, but what you've said relates tantalizingly, perhaps, to those results. It could be, if we were to look at it from a strictly metaphysical perspective, that the very belief in the operativeness of a placebo in and of itself could be sufficient to trigger whatever's going on, whether it's hopeful expectancy or whatever's happening. And I would bet that the Director of Harvard's program in placebo studies, Ted Kaptik, who's a very interesting and broad-ranging intellect would probably agree that the very belief in the efficacy of a placebo could in itself be sufficient to make it an operative principle in a person's life, which is exactly what you're saying about karma.

Yes, because I think of this two different aspects of this. When I was leaving the city a few years ago, I didn't want to go, but it was the right thing to do, and I still wanted to live here. And I started getting this intense pain in my neck and my arm, the shooting pain. I went to the doctor, they got a herniated disc. Three people within three days told me to read Dr. Sarno's book, healing back pain. I bring the Sarno greater intellect. Unfortunately, just passed away, but yeah, incredible person. Clinician, exactly. So, for people who don't know, I've spoken about it before, but he was a clinician, and his essential theory, and I'm a young man.

I'm not a Freudian, but he is very Freudian. And his theory is that unconscious rage and emotions that are not acceptable to express an external reality get trapped in us and essentially manifest as physical problems. He called it, I think it's TMS, it's essentially your muscles contracting from lack of oxygen, it's the physical property, but he refers to it as a black box where we don't know why that's happening, right? And to me, I'm reading this book, and there's a point in it, I think that the book I read was actually mind body prescription, which is like an updated healing back pain. There's a point in the book where he starts talking about some people, the pain will move around. And as I'm reading this, the pain starts jumping around all my body, and I go, oh, like this is fucking freaking me out now.

'Cause now I'm actually seeing this happen in real time. Within two days of reading this book, the back pain was gone, and it's never returned, I've never, or the neck pain and the arm pain, it's never returned. But what I think was so fascinating about how he got to that point is he was a clinician. He didn't come up with some theory and put it on people, he just was seeing people said, no, exercise normally, there's nothing wrong with your back, it's totally fine. And he also came to this theory by recognizing that in the early 1900s, there wasn't a lot of back and neck pain, there was a lot of ulcers, everyone had fucking ulcers, and he saw that as the manifesting physical signal of stress, whereas later when people started getting neck and back pain, and weirdly, people don't experience a lot of neck and back pain in their older ages. It's between middle age when these things manifest, when the stresses of the world compound, and you have to navigate your way.

To me, that's fascinating because this is someone who was not coming at this from a metaphysical standpoint at all, but again, is getting to that point of that operative power with, maybe that's just his thing, but he got enough people to believe it, so now there's this thing, TMS, and people solve their issue. It really opens up the door for a lot of phenomena in our world, and intuitively to me what it feels like in our time, our linear time, we'll talk about time in a little bit. These principles seem to be more manifest, they seem to be accelerating in terms of how these things work, and how they are playing out in our external reality, which is both a very liberating sense, and also terrifying.

If this is now the operative principle, and more people are moving into it, there's a lot of fucking unknown that can happen from that. To me, why I'm so grateful for what you've done with the Miracle Club, and I've read so much more of what you're doing, Kueh, and all these things. You're opening people's eyes to this, and I think someone like me, I don't need the intellectual analysis to totally fully grok and intuitively get it, but I know so many people who do, they cannot get this shit without having some type of intellectual salve to kind of grease the wheels for them to get to this point.

Oh my God, this is working, and again, this is something you share with Neville. Yes, he would talk about the promise and all this weird metaphysical shit, but he was like, try it. If you don't believe me, try it and see if it happens, and to me that is what every good mystic, leader, Buddha, whoever it is, that's what they say. Don't take my word for it, fucking do it and see if it works. One has to mean it, and one has to be willing to lose the individual if he or she tries it, and it doesn't work as it may not for a certain individual. In fact, one thing that I caution people about, whatever perspective they're coming from, whether they're more from the material side of things, more from the spiritual side of things, don't make the assumption because something happens that there's just one thing going on.

And that's very important too. People will sometimes look at the placebo effect and say, well, gee, it's the release of endorphins in the body, or it's the release of inflammation reducing enzymes in the body. It could very well be that along with a dozen other things that we haven't identified yet. It could be that that's what the prayer response or the mental appeal or hopeful expectancy looks like in the body, but we don't really understand the trigger system or what have you. And there's all kinds of ways in which we can experience a cause and assume that it's exclusive, but it's the only cause.

And I think one of the things that frustrates people with some of these practices is that sometimes it will seem to work, and then sometimes it won't seem to work, and they'll say, well, gee, what am I doing wrong? Or others around them will be all too ready to volunteer to them what they are doing wrong. You're not saying this prayer correctly, or you're not in a proper mood of hopeful expectancy, or you're not praying with a feeling that you've already received that for what you're praying for. And the fact is the individual might not be doing anything wrong so much as we experience different laws and forces in different ways based on our vantage points.

Gravity is ever operative, but you're going to experience it differently on the moon than you will on Earth. It doesn't mean it's not happening, but your vantage point is very, very different. Gravity responds to mass. So there may be all kinds of different outcomes going on that can be very tantalizing and at times very frustrating, but it's not just one thing that's happening. And I would ask people to be aware of that, whatever place they're coming from, whether it's a place of materialism, place of spiritual search or some admixture of the two. There's lots of stuff going on in life, but trying is vitally important. It's the fee of entry to any of these ideas, and one can only go there alone.

You may be in a group, you may be having discussions, exchanges like this one, but ultimately, whether you read Neville and say, "Well, I am going to focus on this as I'm going to sleep at night, and I'll do it for several nights in a row and see what happens." That's something that only you can do or not, and otherwise it's just a complete abstraction, but the wonderful thing is you can try it. It's free. You don't have to put a label on yourself, join anything, tell anybody that you're doing it. In fact, I suggest not telling anybody that you're doing it because people may shake your resolve. Just try it. It's an exquisitely private possibility that belongs to everyone.

Again, just amazingly said, man, I'm curious as to where you are now and what your... I know at 3PM you do your prayer and meditation time. What does your reality look like when you wake up and think of this world and recognize, "I'm Mitch again. Here I am." What is that existence? What practices have you set up to kind of, whether you want to call it, stabilizing your reality or willing to stuff in or bringing it in? What do you do? Well, there are two things that I'm very involved in right now, and there have been many things that I've engaged in from yoga to various movements to meditation, but my practice doesn't rest on any of those things today.

It may in the future. Sure. Where I am right now is, first of all, in working with Neville's ideas, one of the things that I'm very interested in is this question of gestation that Neville talks about. Sometimes we can focus on something through meditation, through visualization. Neville prescribes a particular form of meditation in which you concoct sort of a scene or an image in your mind, run it through your mind in a very pleasurably relaxed state, sometimes a state that you experience just before you drift to sleep at night. Again, you experience it when you awake in the morning. I work with that, and I work with that very, very carefully, but I'm also attentive to what you were referencing as the bridge of incident, which can't always be predicted.

I believe from my own experience that there are periods of gestation. Sometimes you have to watch very carefully and patiently. I also believe one idea that I've been working with is that things can reach us through very ordinary channels. It's so ordinary that we're apt to overlook them, or these channels can be so offbeat and unusual that they might not resemble the arrival that we pictured, so we tend to disregard them anymore. I'm trying to deepen my practice with Neville. I'm also very, very interested in deity worship. I believe our ancient ancestors were correct to ascribe names to and to personify certain energies, whether they refer to them as Minerva or Jupiter or Thoth or Hermes or Set. I'm very interested in restoring these practices in our own time and in our own way, and in a very individualistic way.

Some people feel that that's contradictory to my interest in Neville, but I'm willing to sustain contradictions, and I think you might have to on the path, because you will bump into them sooner or later, and I think the ability to embrace paradox or contradiction is very necessary on the path. And I don't actually, in the ultimate sense, think any of this is paradoxical, somewhat apropos of what you were describing about karma in that I think that if we provide vessels and structures that we see as expressions, as points of exercising in our beliefs or our principles, then those become perfectly valid tools. Prayer is one of my tools, but prayer of a non-traditional sort. I'm very interested in the ancient pantheon.

I'm very interested in people, myself, forming relationships with energies and deified figures and forces that our ancient ancestors sought relationships with. And I would submit to the individual that if there is a figure from the pantheon of gods, mythologies, from whatever time, place, era, culture, to which you feel personally drawn, personally attracted, pursue that. Yes. That's something I'm exploring very heavily right now. Well, it's interesting. This is a very interesting thing you've brought up because this has been my, this is where I'm at right now. And again, the kind of karma, if you imagine it, it can be true, you know, thing does help explain a lot of this, but what I will say is this is that when I start thinking of deities, and I remember Neville saying it's all inside of you, I think of it kind of as the macro and the micros as above so below.

Like if we take Neville's original conception of what this incarnation and what we're doing here is it's God, energy source, whatever you'd like to call it, created these characters, created this story, loved them so much that he wanted them to truly be alive so he animated them with himself. I think that's essentially the same thing we can do with deities. So they're not contradictory, right? You have this blueprint of this foundational thing that creates our reality, but you can imbue any of these deities with the essence, divine essence that you put into them and have them be real and therefore they become real.

So that's kind of what I've been weighing back and forth, and that's kind of where I'm at right now because I still love Kali. I still love these personified characters who I feel have emotional and depth, they have depth of being to them. And I think what has been tripping up some of my friends when I talk about Neville Goddard is a anyone who grew up in a strict Abrahamic religion is automatically like fuck, I don't want to read the Bible. I don't read any of this whole testament shit. You don't know what people do with this stuff. It's hard to convince them that these are psychological states that are being talked about, but also this idea of how do I reconcile my previous conception or cosmology of God or deities without completely abandoning it.

And I have not found a major conflict there just because, again, I think we're doing this, like the collective we as God are doing this. We have our individual experiences. And who's to say that my worshiping of Kali or Hanuman is wrong and it's only Yahweh in Jesus Christ, because to me, like, look, this is what blew my mind. I was thinking about this in Zogchen, right? What is the deep? I know a little bit. I haven't done it, but I know what their basic core practice is. If you've read the Tibetan Book of the Dead, you get a sense of it. It is intense, intense, imaginal visualization. That's what they do. They imagine the A, the Tibetan A, they imagine this pedal on this D&D in this concert.

And this one, again, that seems to me to be further proof that whatever conception you end up with, whatever you have imagined at the end, and here's your whole tradition. Written out and all these things. It's the same fucking thing. It's literally people experiencing this internal God and projecting it out and either getting people to believe with them or doing their own thing. And to me, that's a very liberating. It doesn't put all these things at odds with each other. It doesn't even put the physical at odds with the immaterial. It literally provides a blueprint as long as there's anything that you can imagine it has validity. I think one thing we haven't spoken about truly because I know you possessed this, but I think what a lot of people get tripped up with this stuff is having that ethical framework, having this ability to take what we're talking about is potentially life-changing, world-changing, reality-changing, but not just doing it willy-nilly. And I love what Neville says, and this is when I was really kind of like hooked and sold.

He says, whenever in doubt, just do the loving thing. Just do the loving thing. And I think that principle, it's so simple, is so fucking powerful. And if you apply that to any aspect of your life, it's just, wow, it's an amazing thing. Yeah, man. Well, I do agree there has to be an ethical backbone to everything a person does. That does not necessarily mean it has to be handed down from other classical or religious texts, although some of these texts have their most sublime insights in terms of ethics. I was earlier referencing Leviticus and Deuteronomy and practices that we certainly do not inherit from those times, but I think that ritual is probably one of the areas where religions were more localized.

Ethics are one of the areas where religions were more universal, and I think one finds proof of that fact by there being ethical strictures and prohibitions from Polynesia to the Mediterranean separated by vast distances of time, language, geography. They were quite similar, and they had to do with not violating another's personhood, either through theft or violation of the body, or physical violence, things of that nature. And societies in order to function as societies needed to entrine these things. And I think that they probably are attached to something larger than civil law, getting back to this question of there being some sort of compensatory element to human life.

Some sort of connection. So I do think that when one goes on this path, it is important to have a code of honor, a code of ethics, and work with it. Work with it. See if it's operative for you. It may be that loyalty, for example, becomes a higher ethic for you than love. And what does loyalty mean? People get worried when they hear the word loyalty. They think it means corruption because it means being loyal to a bad actor. I don't think it necessarily means that at all. I think there's a certain solidarity that one can find in loyalty, a certain repayment that one can find in loyalty. But work with it. Work with it. But it's vitally important, I think, to have a code.

And the last topic, not a small one, but one that I'm acutely interested in, is this idea of time. Right? I have long said for a very long time that I don't believe in time. I obviously am not denying that we don't experience linear time. We age, we die, we know these things as fact. But in your book, you talk about these time collapse moments, right? These synchronicities that really seem to pierce the veil and really expose the relativity of time. What is interesting to me about this idea, if this is true, and I feel that it is true, is this gestation period we're referencing before. I don't mean that we can immediately have things, but when I was talking about my synchronicity experience, two felt things that were very, very clear to me.

One is I felt like I was moving through different realities and dimensions. I felt as I was stepping forward and changing the way I thought the world around me was changing, which I got some validation of. The other was that time just didn't work the same way. If I had to get somewhere and it was 30 minutes away and I was already late, I would get there on time and there was no explanation for how that possibly could happen. I think I'd love to hear your take on what that is, but also the practical implications. If time is just this ever-present moment and there is no past and there is no future, applied towards the imaginal stuff, there's obviously the ramifications are incredible.

What does that allow us at any point in any time in our lives to open up to? That's to me one of the most cool ideas about time being this one singular nexus rather than this construct that moves forward in a snake-like way. Yeah, it's a fascinating point and there's so much there. I'll reference it just briefly to bow to colloquial time. That's the reason why when I'm speaking of mental creativity and thought causation, I don't use the term manifest. Yes. And that is clearer for me because if we face the prospect, which is suggested to us across a whole range of different fields from psychical research to quantum physics to string theory to Einstein's study of time and relativity, we are faced with the distinct possibility that everything is going on at once. Everything is in a kind of state of superposition and that could be discussed on a whole variety of levels.

We could do a whole show about this topic alone, but when you're working with the implications of quantum theory and some of these other fields that I've been referencing, you converge around this possibility that everything is in a kind of state of infinitude or superposition and only gets localized based on the perspective, the selection, the awareness of the sentient observer. So that might suggest that one of the reasons all this positive thinking is working, if it's working at all, is that there is an act of selection going on, that our five senses are not much different from any other measuring device that you might use in a laboratory, whether it's a photon sensor, whether it's a microscope, whatever it is, how are our five senses really different from a measuring device of any kind.

And we perhaps select experiences by perspective, thought, expectation, emotional charge, anticipation, and it's very possible that this is how we go through life and we experience linearity as a very, very necessary and important illusion, which helps five sensory beings, the place from which we're functioning most of the time, organized life, our world would be chaos without a sense of linearity, because most of the time we are functioning from a five sensory perspective, but when we use exquisitely fine instrumentation, like a photon detector, or when we direct a particle at a target or a double slit, and we're able to make exquisitely fine measurements of what happens to that particle, we see other things going on that are not available to us when we pan back, so to speak, and use our five senses, we'll call it information leakage. William James referred to this phenomenon in his Gifford lectures, which became the varieties of religious experience, and he foresaw by almost a century a theory that would become popular within quantum physics circles, but I was just referencing called information linkage. James said it was the mystic who saw as though looking through a microscope and when panning back, the individual experiences less and less of reality of what's really going on.

Some theorists have suggested this may be why reality as we see it in a particle lab is different from reality as we experience it right here and now in which there aren't multiples of everything. There's one table, there's one floor, there's one chair, maybe information leakage, so it could be that we just don't glean a lot of what's going on, and we need linearity in order to organize things, but what's going on is infinity. Yeah, and when you say infinity, the most recent person I think of, and I never would have got him in a million years, but because of you and Neville, I have a newfound and incredible appreciation for William Blake.

Oh, sure, absolutely. Holy shit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like was limitless. Like was limous. Yeah, insane. And if we think about his connection with Huxley and how that is popularized, it's just, it's so cool. All right, I, I'm sure as you can tell could literally talk all day. We'll do it again. I end with three quick questions and then one open ended one, they won't take long. What's your favorite color? Red. What's your favorite number? Three. What's your favorite animal? That's cool. And last question, what's a practical tip that has helped you in your life that you could share with people listening to be accountable, absolutely be accountable.

The, the killies heel of the new age is a lack of accountability, and people flow into the alternative spiritual cultures, because they feel like it gives them an escape hatch from accountability and keeping their word and the idea of being laid back or intuitive or going with the flow, not infrequently is an excuse, is, is a pale substitute for not being able to be accountable in the world. If you can't keep your word, you can't do anything. So start with accountability. I love that spiritual bypass. No good. Mitch, thank you so much for doing this. This is awesome. Enjoyed it very much. Sure. We'll do it again.

Thanks for listening to that episode. Go check out Mitch, MitchOrwitz.com, his latest book, The Miracle Club. There's links to all of this, of course. Wherever you're seeing this, listening to it, the website or the podcast apps or whatever it is, it's there. There's links. Miracle Club is his latest book. Go check it out. Oh, let me tag this on, because these people are awesome to the end, even though they don't have to. Ned. Go check these guys out. Hello, Ned.com, CBD, Full Spectrum Oil. It's the only shit that I use and I trust. Truthfully. So that's simple. I actually use it. I actually take it.

I love these guys. Go check out the episode. If you want some more info on who they are and why I love it. Use that code, Sink, S-Y-N-C at checkout 15% off your order. Win, win, win. Everyone wins. Support a cool business. Get a cool product. Get a discount. I get a pay me. It's good. I like it. It's good chip. So that's it for this episode. Oh, for super fans. If you're into the episode, besides rating and reviewing the podcast, you can go and fill out this survey for people. I have put a survey up on my website, which is new. Sinkpodcast.com. Go check it out. Fill it out if you feel like you want to. That's it, and I will see you next week.