Ep. 63 - Digging Deep with Michael Garfield

(upbeat music) It's about using the mind to point past the mind for smart people who are otherwise a little too smart for their own good. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) Welcome to episode 63 of Synchronicity. My guest this week is Michael Garfield. Michael, it's probably easier to talk about what Michael doesn't do as opposed to what he does, but I'll get to Michael just in a second. You know, you know what's going on. End of the year, guys, ladies, gentlemen, women, everyone. This is the animals listening, ethereal beings, in the background, ghosts, whatever. What a great year this has been. I know every one of the popular thing to do this year, at least online.

This is what I see is everyone's shitting on 2016. So many people are dying, Kerry Fisher just died. Rest in peace, Kerry Fisher died. Obviously didn't know her personally, but she seemed like a cool lady. You dealt with a lot of stuff. So everyone's blaming 2016, this fictional segmented period of time. I think it's just like kind of like a sardonic, you know, thing to do, hipster cool, is that a thing? Am I blaming hipster? I'm sorry, hipsters, I don't know. You're probably all good people. But truthfully, everyone's blaming 2016. I thought 2000, listen, here's the real deal. I had a baby, had a son this year, 2016 ruled for that reason for me.

Also 2016, Miami Dolphins are going to the playoffs. That anyone who knows me well knows, like truly crying tears of joy this week. So that was awesome. Outside of that, I mean, it's just a matter of perspective, isn't it? Yes, there's plenty of things that are not great politically, globally, environmentally. There's so much fucked up shit going on in the world. I'm not dismissing that. But again, it's a matter of perspective. And 2016 was a pretty transformative year for me on a lot of levels. This podcast, starting this really at the end of 2015, was pretty awesome. I am so happy that so many of you continue to tune in, week to week, send me emails at know@sinkpodcast.com, join the Facebook group.

So people are getting involved. Like I didn't, I try not to have expectations with things like this because that can really, it can set you up for failure or perceived failure. But really seeing the response, both in terms of like actual numbers and the really more important thing that I learned this year is the feedback from people and how this is actually helping some people and connecting people, that's awesome. So really, this has been an awesome year. Don't have much to say this week. Want to say one thing though, I started keeping a schedule for the past few days. I am anti-schedule. If I was that truthfully, that is, I do not like sticking to them.

Alexis has recommended for years that I try to stick to a schedule and I just, I can't. But I did it. And I gotta say, if you're like me and you feel it's impossible, especially if you're freelance or you have time and you kind of structure your own days, if you're the type of person who doesn't like schedules, plan what just, you need to do it more. It's like the God and you think, if you don't have 10 minutes to meditate or 20 minutes to meditate today, you need to do, you know, an hour. Truthfully, get yourself on a schedule. This is a test for a little bit, for a week or so. Man, I feel like I've been very productive, but not making a ton of progress, if that makes sense.

It's a subtle difference, but the schedule really, I find it to be helpful. So I'm actually dedicating time during the day to writing, to writing music. And I gotta say, a lot of this has to do with the research for this upcoming course on creativity that I'm gonna be releasing on my iPod network, but honestly, it's been transformative. Also, I wanted to do one other thing, 'cause this is a long intro, me talking, how I do normally on these things. I got a review, a lovely, I think it was a three or four star review, and someone was like, "Hey, I really like your guests, they're really awesome, "but you talk too much."

I wanna say two things about that. One is, it's my podcast, so fuck off. No, I'm kidding, that's not really what I wanna say. Two is, I'm totally aware that I talk a lot. One of the reasons, truthfully, when I started this, is I wanted to get better at listening. And I think I've gotten better. I think if you go back to the early ones, I've gotten better, but I still have a long way to go. So I do, I really do welcome all feedback, negative, positive, in between, constructive criticism, hateful rhetoric, whatever you wanna put, if you wanna leave a review and rating on iTunes, that's great, if not, no big deal.

I'm really looking forward to 2017, that's basically what I'm trying to say. Let's get to Michael Garfield, okay. Michael is just a very, very smart person. What I really, and listen, being a smart person is great. It's a wonderful thing, but what I like about Michael is he kinda uses his intellect to get past his intellect, right? That's a tricky thing to do, you can get really caught up in that sometimes. 'Cause the intellect, which the ego uses quite a bit, can be very, it can feel you're so damn right all the time with the intellect, when you're really just thinking about things and thinking through and so on and so forth.

But he really does an amazing job, not only through speaking, check out some of his talks, and there's links to everything he does, there's michaelgarfield.net, too. He also does a Patreon page. Please check that out, support the dude, because he's doing cool stuff. He releases all types of cool things, like he's Ableton, music making packs of his samples. But let me say this, he does so much. He is a visionary artist, he's a speaker, he's a thinker, he was a paleontologist. That's dinosaur studies of fossils. He has a podcast called the Future Fossils Podcast. Definitely check that out. He's just a really interesting guy.

So obviously, you put two people like us together, and we're gonna talk a lot, and we do, but I think we get to some really important stuff in here, which I'm not gonna spoil for you. Listen to the episode, see if you like it. I encourage you to check out and tune into what he's doing. He's also got music, then I mentioned that. He's just got a tremendous amount of creative output, but he's also very down to Earth, but will also go to the highest heights and discuss things, you know, from a very lofty point of view. So I think you're gonna like this episode, all right? Really, really, really happy New Year to everyone listening.

If you're listening to this in the future, and the New Year has already happened, I'm not gonna say what year it is, right? Happy New Year for this year coming up, even if it's 11 months away. So thank you, as always, for listening, and without further ado, here he is, Michael Garfield. (dramatic music) What's up, man?

Hey, how are you?

How you doing?

I'm doing well, how are you?

I'm good, I feel like I've seen your face like a lot over the past, like week watching you speak, watching you perform, it's nice to finally meet you.

I really appreciate you doing such due diligence. I've noticed you liking a bunch of things.

Well, you know, it's funny because a couple of people, you know, I'm connecting with a lot more people these days, especially as opposed to the previous five years of my life, especially in the digital domain. I did a lot of behind the scenes stuff. But because of like kind of my day job and the tools I use to kind of build communities and keep in touch with people, I'm pretty much around a computer or, you know, eight of the daylight hours that are available to people. So like I see when people post things, like I get notifications and I actually do tend to like check out what people are actually sharing, which I think is useful because, you know, I think if you don't kind of curate what's coming in, that's when these tools can get pretty destructive.

So yeah, I definitely like, yeah, I tune in for a lot of reasons. One, I mean, this is, it's really interesting. Your name just kept coming up from a lot of different people who I was speaking to, from Michael, from Third Eye Drops, from Bruce, Steamer, I forget, of course, just like all of these, yeah, all these people just started mentioning your name and like from other places too. So like I pay attention to synchronicity, obviously. And I was like, okay, I'm gonna get here, maybe just a little bit. So I'm gonna get in touch. And I really like, especially for this conversation, trying to get a better sense of like who you are and what you're doing.

Like, I think I have a pretty good sense now and I'm pretty excited to speak to you about a lot of different things. So thank you for creating this, yeah. All right, so let's just get started. All right, so I, as I mentioned, I was going through and watching a lot of your talks, your performances, I saw a lot of your artwork. There's a lot to digest with you as a being. You put a lot out there and, you know, I was like, I had to find some place to focus on. So I went to your about section, right? On your website and I scanned it. And I just wanna pull out this one section. There's just one little two sentences here that I think are fucking awesome.

And I wanted to share those. Maybe we can kind of start around this 'cause I think this encapsulates maybe everything that you're doing, which is you said the goal is to help heal the alienation and disenfranchisement of our modern age by showing people how each of our lives is inextricably a part of something vast, mysterious and awesome. Part one, that's fucking perfect. Part two is pointing to the common core of science, art and spirituality with equal dedication to both playfulness and rigor. So you just basically encapsulated how I, without knowing it, and I saw many people describe you have this amazing ability to put things into words that other people really maybe think or feel, but you can put them into words, which is awesome.

You just encapsulated, you're welcome. I, you really did just encapsulate what I feel like I've been doing with this podcast, what I felt intuitively before I even knew how to express that in any way. So how, my first question, right? How did you get onto this track, right? What led you to the point where you A, even noticed that there were things going on. These shifts, these cultural, both seismic, cultural, you noticed these things, but then also had the ability to analyze and then formulate, here's the goal and here's how we're gonna do it. So how did you get to where you are?

So I'm writing this book right now that was sort of seeded or inspired by a couple of talks I gave this summer at different festivals. And this book, which I'm calling How to Live in the Future, which is again, like playfulness and rigor. It's tongue-in-cheek, totally. 'Cause the ultimate goal is, as a friend of mine said last night, now is the path to the future. Like now is the portal to the future. You know, so it's, you know, it's a joke in so far as it's like an eye level, I see you, you see me and we're having a good laugh about the fact that we both are curious. We're both think-y people.

And, you know, I've got this coffee mug sleeve from the Denver Museum of Natural History that I kept around 'cause I think it's just so great. It's the head of Tyrannus. It's like the skeletal silhouette of Tyrannosaurus and it says brainpower, which actually looks like my tattoo, which is the Jurassic Park logo and I'm just saying all sorts of visual stuff.

It is, I can't confirm for people listening, that is.

Brainpower, I was saying to people, 'cause I was actually, and I've been talking to people about the inevitability of having to package this.

Right, right, and present in simple language for people. And so my friends were kind of interrogating me last night about this stuff. And they said, so what do you, what's the goal here? And I said, well, the goal is to, speak about the, you know, reality with a capital R, in a way that doesn't lean on any of the familiar, the familiar language or the jargon of any tradition, anything. - Right.

But activates, 'cause all of that stuff is--

Stigmatize, there's so much--

Yeah, yeah, even, like, as one of my friends pointed out, even the word self and other.

Right, of course.

When you're talking about spirituality or like spiritual truths, you know, to even talk about the self starts like, people start thinking, it sounds kind of new A.G. or self--

Totally. - Or whatever. So it's been, for me, it's like, how do we talk about these things in a way that satisfies the intellect that like, if you treat the intellect as like the guard dog, 'cause for me, I'm a very thinky person. So I need to be able to give my brain something to do. I need to satisfy that like punishing skeptical, constant gear turning and apply it to something that will like employ it in the dissolution of its own hyperactivity. So it's, you know, it's about pointing past, using the mind to point past the mind for smart people who are otherwise a little too smart for the-- - They're all good, totally good. - Right.

And so that's really my story. If you want to talk about this in terms of the--

Yes. - The wounded healer. It's, you know, my going to school for a biology degree, a paleontology degree specific to study the age of dinosaurs. And then through the classes that I was taking, getting more and more interested in the general contours of the history of life, you know, why it is that the history ran the way it did and not some other way. And that immediately spills out, that river takes you directly downstream to the oceanic question of life, the universe, and everything. - Right, right.

And so it's, for me, it's always been a scholastic consideration. You know, this, the, and I am to understand that like, Advaita Vedanta, which is like--

Yes, absolutely. - I didn't know your listener base, I am going to assume is aware of this particular kind of pedantic school of Hindu thought that uses the mind to get past the mind. - That's right.

You know, and really, really employs the intellect to show people that you don't exist, you know. It's like, oh look, you know, your eye, yourself, even your witnessing, featureless observer is still, in some sense, a linguistic abstraction out of this experience. So at any rate, that's like, how did I get into this? I got into this by feeling deeply unsatisfied by the way that these particular questions were being handled and treated by the people that I knew in the university system. - Right, sure.

And spending the last, it's been just over 11 years now since I got out of undergraduate school at the University of Kansas. And all kudos to their remarkable education, like it was a fabulous school, but the school system--

Right, right, right.

It's set up to discourage, actively discourage, people from having these transdisciplinary insights and broad, synesthetic questions.

Yeah.

They want you to drill into like some microscopic corner of reality and find a way to make no sense to anything.

It's, and it seems like as though that's merely just a function of the cultural conditioning to kind of subjugate the transcendental in our daily and kind of moment-to-moment experience. And that the school system is, I mean, it's just a product of that. It's part of the system and it's natural. Like, I always look at these things, 'cause I mean, I know you talk about culture a lot, which I also find fascinating. I mean, there's always a choice when you're going down a quote unquote spiritual path. Do you become a renunciate? Where do you go in, right? Do you're gonna do tantric or you're gonna go into a cave and meditate?

And for most people living in this country and in the West, like, it's probably not very realistic. You may go do it for a little bit, but I bet you're coming back. There's a reason we're here. So I always find it interesting to look at culture and understand how that interacts with us as individuals, collectively as society. And I know this is another area. You're constantly, you have your eye fixed to it because we see, when we're talking about things like spirituality, this is why I highlighted that part of where you wrote in your about where it's the common core of science, art, spirituality and all of these things coming together and how they all have validity.

And one isn't to be lessened as opposed to the other. And when they work in unison, it's actually when we can get this. So I love that you say, and I love the name of your book, like how to live in the future because obviously the tongue and cheek which we're alluding to, which I will explicitly say is, you do it by living in the here and now. That's obviously, right? I mean, that's, it's a joke, but it is also as it's a joke, it is true. Like we still, when you're talking about Advaita Vedanta, so I followed it quite heavily for a few years and still take a lot of one of my favorite, you know, mystics Sri Ramakrishna, it comes from that lineage and Vivekananda, and there's things that I like and things that I don't totally like.

But what you're talking about is trying to basically recognize the non-duality of the universe through duality which is something we have to reconcile with much in the same way that we have to reconcile with time being linear in this particular dimension. So, yeah, so talk a little bit. I mean, what, you gave a good synopsis of the unsatisfactoriness of the answer, the answers you were getting to these kind of existential questions or these broader questions, but at a certain point, there must have been these leaps or experiences that led you to a certain path because you're, your outlook and perspective on the world life, death, all of this stuff, while growing numbers of people, I think, relate and understand this intuitively, or just by intellectually, because of people like you, a lot of people don't.

This is stuff completely below the surface and the threshold of where people are paying attention to. So, what were some of the experiences or things that kind of led you along that path to where you are now?

I would be a fool to deny the role of the psychedelic experience.

Right.

My evolution as a meta-disciplinary renaissance human, but because psychedelics, specifically like the psychedelics I was, I mean, the experiences that I had between, say, the ages of like 22 and 25.

Right, right.

So, there was like, you know, a unique period there where I was reading, I had, part of the reason I fell out of alignment with the academic program that had animated me since childhood, this is a lifelong thing. Like, I was going to be a dinosaur hunter and then my freshman year of college, I was introduced to all of this amazing stuff through my friends in the dorms. (laughs) They were just like, here, you know, we're gonna turn you on to Bjork and Ween and Bobby McPherin.

Those are all awesome.

Oh my God.

You know, Georgia O'Keefe and Alex Cray, we're gonna teach you the word "mondel." And this is all one guy.

Right, right. Usually how it goes, yeah.

One of my dear friends, and of course, I have many other friends to thank for many other things, but he was the guy that turned me on to Ken Wilbur's work and Ken, those who aren't familiar, Wilbur is an American philosopher who did, at the age of, I think, 23, wrote this book called The Spectrum of Consciousness, which connected the sort of Freudian psychological model, or rather, just the studies of developmental psychology in the West with the Eastern models of transpersonal psychology of mind beyond the ego. So he moved from that into developing what he called the integral meta theory, which is a theory of how we form theories based on what kind of person we are, where we are in our own psychological development, and then also the way that we can divvy up the various perspectives that we take on reality, according to whether they manifest in our inquiry as individual or collective objects, you know, internal or external.

So you've got anatomy as an external singular object, system theory, external plural. The study of meaning and the interiority of groups of people is an internal collective and like depth psychology and personal inquiry, meditation and stuff falls into that that quote unquote upper left corner of the individual interior. Those are like four dimensions of anything, everything. So I wanted, I was so inspired by this 'cause I was like, oh my God, there's a way to, you know, all of the world that I had been observing fit into one quadrant of that model. All of science that I knew as science fit into empiricism, the study of individual exteriors, the anatomy and the behavior of the world.

Which is, let's be clear here too, not to cut you off, but that's pretty much how our society is functioned for X amount of hundred years, if not a bit longer. That's what we have, that's what we find ourselves today in the midst of maybe a transition point, but that's the operating system, the Cartesian, you know, that's where we're looking, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Totally, so when you say like what particular things sort of launch, you know, really what it was was that for all of those brilliant insights, Ken Wilber also painfully and to me offensively, misrepresented the sciences in particular the state of the evolutionary sciences and what evolutionary biology can and cannot say about the emergence of order from chaos, et cetera, and so both sides of this debate were either not aware of one another or just thought the other person was an idiot.

It sounds pretty familiar, yeah. The academic biology world, I recommended one of Ken's books to the head of my museum at KU and he read 20 pages into it until Ken said that evolution can't produce half of a wing. This is an ancient creationist argument that there's no obvious developmental series to get you from an animal with no feathers and no wing muscles to an animal flying around under its own power and which is bullshit 'cause we actually have a perfect series of fossils from China, China and Germany, these regions of remarkable preservation that show exactly how dinosaurs transitioned into birds and all of that was available to Ken when he wrote this book.

And so the head of the museum just took that book and on page 20, we're in the trash. And when I went to Ken and I said, you know, as I got more involved in his community, 'cause there were a lot of brilliant people involved, but that nobody who was examining what his work would mean to the study of evolution. And it was obvious to me that his work was very powerful in its capacity to inform the way that we understand the role of perception, mind, beauty, language, communication, the all of the internal and qualitative dimensions of the universe, the fact that science does not consider these things.

It has to possibly maybe be related to the fact that we have these quote-unquote huge questions that remain unanswered, you know? So I was like, oh my God, like these two people need to talk. And of course, this is one of these things like well, mommy and dad, they don't really wanna talk to each other, right?

That's right.

So I went to Ken and I said, hey, Ken, you don't really need to rely upon invoking the sort of metaphysical, what he called, the erotic urge to increase of order. That he said, well, the universe is just constantly bootstrapping itself into greater and greater, more inclusive and transcendent beauties. And it's like, well, that's great. But your whole model suggests that everything has both an experiential dimension and a descriptive dimension. And that there are two perspectives on this, everything that can be experienced can be described or explained in some way, even though that's visual and imperfect.

So like, here you are saying that, you know, that there is no such thing as a metaphysical, mysterious metaphysical property of the universe. And yet you insist on invoking one in order to explain how we got from the primordial soup to the internet. But like, and I was like, that doesn't fly. And it just neither of them--

We can have as both ways, yeah.

Yeah, neither of them was willing to listen. So I had to kind of give up on both of them. And it's really, it's been a long haul. Like, I'm embarrassed that it's taken me this long to get to the actual process of writing a book about this stuff. But for those who are interested, I actually did recently read, and I catch him if you can. He encountered him first through Eric Davis's podcast, Expanding Mind, but the author and professor, Richard Doyle at Penn State University, wrote a book called Darwin's Pharmacy, which is about the role of mind and specifically of sexual attraction and choosing a mate, you know, finding something beautiful and wanting it and choosing it?

Yes, yes, yes.

And like how, you know, he revives Darwin's whole, thinking about that because Charles Darwin and the historically forgotten co-author of the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection, Alfred Russell Wallace.

Yeah, never heard of them, Jesus.

Yeah, they independently came to the same conclusions and presented their work together to the Royal Society. But nobody, you know, but history buried Wallace's work because he was much more collectivist in his ethos, that he was a working-class scientist who collected specimens and sold them to museums in order to fund his research, unlike Darwin, who was a trust fund baby, basically, and did this for fun. And those two biographies reflect in their work because it was Wallace who basically argued that increasing social unity was an inevitable byproduct of the evolutionary process in so far as competition creates strategies for cooperation.

Right, right, right, right, right, right.

Yeah, so he actually saw like social healthcare and social safety nets in general as a very, as like an evolutionary virtue.

Yeah, and it makes sense logically, right, 'cause you have to come up with strategies to get better if things go wrong, right?

Right, but his work was actively suppressed in favor of a revisionist model of evolution that emphasized laissez-faire competition due to the way that the work was promoted by Robert Barron, Capitalist, who wanted to see what--

That's what I was gonna say. That's what I was gonna say. Which one fits in line with the ideology of the time and the past hundred years before that? Because you're not going to, I mean, I was reading a great book that I finished recently. I was reading for a while, was Douglas Rushkoff's Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus. And so, it was so great. I mean, it was enlightening just to see because I didn't have, you know, like most of us, and I liked history in high school. It was in my advanced history classes, but like, you're getting such a weird picture of what is actually going on in school textbooks.

Like, it's so weird. It doesn't even, it's such a horrible facsimile of like, it's like the analogy I'll give, like, if you grew up in the 80s or born in the 80s, if you remember what TVs used to look like when you had to like get up and change them, like in the fuzziness and everything, and you see a picture now of like HD crystal clear. Like, that's what you're looking at in history books at best. You're getting such a crappy picture of what's going on. I mean, but yeah, dude, it's interesting that, well, basically what I'm saying is it makes sense that Darwin would be prized. And I think to this day, we still have examples of this.

I mean, to the highest office in the United States right now, we have Donald Trump, you know, appointing, Myron, I forget his name, a climate change denier. And like, it's one thing to maybe argue about like, the causes and conditions of climate change, but to deny that it's actually taking place and try to put out arguments that it's like, that's really weird to like, it's saying, and that person is in charge of the EPA in like one of the biggest industrial nations in the world. So, I mean, it still, it looks like these patterns are continuing to repeat themselves. But what I love about what you're doing, and you describe this with a lot of people who you kind of look to, is you're essentially my favorite type of person, right?

You're a bridge builder. You're someone who connects bridges between different groups, whether it's actual people or ideologies or thinking, you build these kind of maps that allow them to all coexist on this same template. And that to me is like, that's what we need more than anything. A, we need people to be able to, who can shift their perspective to see things from many multi-perspectival views, because then you're actually getting a pretty complete picture of something. But then once you're able to do that, to be able to translate, it's like the, another analogy I'll give is like, when you take psychedelics, if you intentionally take psychedelics for some type of growth or insight or something, what you're attempting to do is make contact with something, you don't have to define what that is, ideally bring something back, right, back, quote unquote, and be able to transmute it or interpret it or translate it.

This is why people love McKenna, right? Not everything Terrence McKenna said was true, quote unquote, but everything he said resonated on a level because he was basically just communicating experiences from these other transcendental dimensions. So I love when I meet someone like you, who is A, able to eloquently go through and look at causes and conditions, both historically, biologically, culturally, spiritually, and then speak about them. And then more than that, actually come up with some strategies and ways and plans on how to deal with where we are. So with that said, like, where do you think we are in this point in time, right now, both culturally, spiritually, collectively, like what the fuck is going on?

I'll ask you that. (laughing) Well, first of all, I want to, what you just said reminded me of this quote I had to pull up 'cause you know, you're saying, when you take psychedelics and you go in there to make contact with something, we don't have to get into what that is. And you come back and it's like, you come back, you know, whatever that means. And it just reminded me of, you've probably heard this Sir Arthur Addington quote. He's a physicist and he's being asked to describe what's going on at the subatomic level. And he says, something unknown is doing, we don't know what. (laughing) It's great.

And actually, the psychic researcher, Dean Raiden, whose entire career has been predicated on authentic science being a facts first, rather than a theory first process where you admit that something is going on, if you don't understand it, you can say, look, the most rigorous research in the world, triple blind studies. Like, what, what designed a triple blind study? Like, how did, how crazy dedicated to proving the skeptics long do you have to be to come up with that shit? But that's exactly what's been used by Larry Dossie and some of these studies on the effect of prayer in healing. But at any rate, some of the most rigorous research in the world suggests that time flows in more than one direction and that people are telepathically connected.

And like all of these crazy things that we have no understanding as far as the mechanism by which these things occur. And yet, here they are. So at any rate, with that quasi disclaimer that anything I say about where we are is totally surrounded by the ridiculous, which is like all the heat and light thrown off by what seems like a good idea at the boundary between that and complete ineffability. What seems like is going on right now and what I find, I will probably return to again and again in writing this book is that there's no question to anybody right now except for maybe the Trump cabinet that we're going through a quote unquote mass extinction on this planet.

But in order to understand what that means, we have to really understand what a mass extinction is and what that's meant for life in the past. And so taking a slightly wider frame here, mass extinctions are almost simultaneous in terms of the fossil record.

Sure.

In terms of like vast spans of time. You see a mass extinction occurring or less at the same time as a massive radiation of new species. That it's not really a step backward. It's a kind of a dosy-doe where a lot of new energy and new niches become available in the ecosystem. And that newly available resource is populated by new creatures that foot into some kind of familiar lens and in just kind of some new ways in terms of their ecological relationships so that there's actually a more complex ecosystem standing there at the end of things when everything is said and done than there was before.

And so it's actually, it's a catastrophic moment akin to like a rite of passage in an individual lifespan where it's no going back and like some of the things that applied to that world no longer applied. But you end up actually with a richer, fuller, more complex and diverse planet after a mass extinction. You know, it might take 100,000 years but you end up with this world that arguably is more interesting and intelligent and beautiful than the one that came before it. So you see this with like the example that I would have as the textbook example actually doesn't even count in the list of the so-called five mass extinctions that we have before this one.

'Cause all of those five were land vertebrate extinctions. And before there's three billion years of life history on this planet before that. So one of them, like the first one that we actually really know for sure 'cause the life three and a half billion years ago, the planet was a fucking mess. It was not a place that would be hospitable to anything alive today except for the kind of crazy shit that's growing in like thermal geysers at the bottom of the ocean and yellows. Like it was a nightmare, but we're talking about a world that was constantly bombarded by meteors. You know, like we're talking about a world that like is just basically molten.

Right, right.

Except, you know, sometimes it's not--

Like a hellish landscape, essentially.

Well, in fact, you know, they call it the hey-de-in epic.

There you go, there you go.

Yeah, but like once things kind of, so there actually may have been a number of times that life started and it's like felt completely. And those are all lost in history.

Right, right.

You won't really know for sure 'cause the oldest fossils that we have are just the chemical traces of life in rock that's already been metamorphosed. It's not like we can see that it's actually there. It's just like an echo.

Right.

So life actually goes back further than we can really know. And you've talked to Bruce Damer and Bruce's work on the origins of life is really fascinating and revealing, reveals a lot about where we are right now, but just kind of stay on it. (laughs) The mass extinction that I think kind of bears the most relevance for us right now is called the Great Oxygenation event. And it happened about two billion years ago. And it happened when a particular strain of bacteria developed the ability to photosynthesize and the ability to take carbon dioxide and light and turn it into sugar and oxygen is a huge innovation.

It's a fucking, it is a singularity.

Yeah, yeah.

And it changes the whole paradigm of the world in and around, right, right.

Absolutely everything. It changes everything because up to that point, all of life was anaerobic. And what that means is like the metabolism was actually adverse, it has like oxygen is toxic to an anaerobic bacteria. So, you know, anaerobic bacteria still live in the soil and deepen the earth and in our intestines and, you know, places where they're not exposed to the air, but it used to be the case that this was everything that all life was that way because the air itself contained very little oxygen. And so the anaerobic bacteria lived on the surface. And then the photosynthetic bacteria created the modern, you know, well, something closer to the modern oxygen levels in the atmosphere, which we know like leads to rust oxidation.

And so it rusted out most of the life on earth. Most of the life on earth was unprepared to deal with the oxidation stress and literally just like burned up and died. So this like profound energy, like what was literally an energy revolution akin to something like say the discovery of the internal combustion engine, right? Or just generally fossil fuels, you know. The first, like whale lamp oil and burning coal for steam engines, the first industrial revolution in that sense is very similar to this story. And so we can look to this story for how did that play out?

Right, right, right.

What happened was it was a shit show for a couple hundred million years while life like buried itself in the ground to escape the apocalypse. And yet what happened was a new niche was created an opportunity for a new metabolism because this new resource, an oxygen rich atmosphere that didn't exist before suddenly existed. And out of that atmosphere, we evolved a new metabolism, the glycolytic metabolism which takes oxygen and food and converts it into sugars and carbon dioxide and completes this metabolic circuit with photosynthetic plants and other bacteria. So now we exhale what they were inhale and they exhale what we inhale.

But that circuits only about two billion years old and there was a moment of crisis and terror and like Armageddon in getting from point A to point B. In much the same way that the Protestant Reformation was like by denouncing the singular authority of the church, it's like felling in a giant tree in the woods and that tree falls down and suddenly all of these apocalyptic prophets with their own interpretations of the Bible that were basically validated in that apocalyptic vision by Martin Luther's insistence that the Bible says it is a matter of individual interpretation.

Right.

Yeah, there's a really interesting episode of, is it the Invisibelia podcast? I can't recall which, but there's a podcast out there about how the city of Munich, Germany was taken over by one of these apocalyptic cults right after the Reformation and it led to this war with the Catholic church. Like the pope actually sent an army out to this to Munich and there was, I mean, they were walled in and starved out, you know, and like hundreds and hundreds of people died in this process in just that one city and this was happening.

You know, all over the place because, you know, what happens is when you lose one of those keystone things or when there's that, you know, everyone in Silicon Valley is geared up to disrupt.

Right, right, right, right, right, right, right.

What happens when you disrupt something is you create this new terrain of competition and it's a mess until a new order establishes itself.

Right.

That's what we're living for.

Yes, right, right, that's a great idea.

And yeah, so to like bring it all back to your question, that's the situation that we're in right now is basically dealing with how do we, one, reconcile, how do we reconcile the, like our individual life goals with the inherent instability of our age. And the answer to that is probably that we have to understand ourselves as basically the children and parents of a revolutionary order.

Right.

And as students of history and prehistory really understand what that really means in terms of our rights and responsibilities, you know, like look back at the book of Exodus, you know, don't make the same mistakes.

Well, that's, it's funny you mentioned that because I was gonna say like, look at our mythology. Like Joseph Campbell identified the monomyth, right? The heroes are to look at all of our mythology. Every single thing that has emerged from cultures based on these myths is describing exactly what you're saying we as a species need to do, which is usher in in this transformational period, some way of being that is going to basically save and implement some plan in some way, whatever that means, whether it's physically, spiritually, not in a body, in a body, some way to direct this. And why I find this also fascinating is this, you know, historically through biology is validated, but also esoterically, also philosophically, like all of the traditions of the East, the West and even more, you know, newer, like, you know, the Rudolph Steiners, the Christian mysticism, the Carl Jung's, they all kind of point to this being a thing.

This is what's happening right now. Now, I agree, and I think I've felt this on many different levels and also intellectually, like you, and this is why I love having these types of conversations because I think it is important, part of the bridge building is bridging the gap between the intellect and the intuitive feeling aspects of ourselves, so the heart and the mind. One without the other is not a good situation, it's usually gonna end up in bed and I love the heart and I think, you know, I love when people say, love will solve everything and I get that and I understand what that means, and I'm very much that type of person.

But like, it's not always the only thing that is needed. You also need clarity and wisdom, wisdom and understanding of situations to maybe respond with the proper amount of, you know, being compassionate can also mean being forceful. So like, there's a whole level of spectrum of distinction in there. So, yeah.

There's two figures of Tibetan Buddhism, like the Dalai Lama and the Karmapa. There's compassion and wisdom and people forget that it's a two-headed snake there, yeah.

I know, and that's one of those things where, and I think that's also another byproduct of where we are culturally and societally. We have these, it's like, you know in the E-chang where they say like right before something, once it gets to the apex of what it is, it reverts into its opposite or transmutes into its opposite. Like this is what is happening. It feels like mitosis in a certain way because we're looking at these polarizations emerge in like every single sphere of like, I'm talking about from politics obviously, but I'm looking today at an article and it's owned by a media company that's ultimately owned by Rupert Murdoch, and I don't read this publication very often, but it's basically sewing the seeds of division within an electronic dance community that does not stand for that.

People don't give a shit. It was literally an article written to frame someone who won a DJ, you know, a poll as a white conservative. It was like trying to frame him as like a Breitbart person like, what the fuck is going on? Like, have you listened to this music? Like, how do you miss the point so completely? So it feels like we're in the thrusts of this, right? And then so I'm so, you know, that's, and I wanna be clear, like this is somewhat of a scary notion and I think it's good to face some of the fear that might come with this, but ultimately the reason that I think you and I are both jovially talking about this is it's also a very opportune time to, right?

There's a lot of seeds that can be planted now and conditions that can be created that really can make this a pretty transformative for the better type of way. So I'd be curious to hear your thoughts and kind of where we stand on that kind of crux, yeah.

Oh, yeah, well, actually the thing that I was gonna say about that, let's hear. I had to just remind myself, there was another chapter that I needed to write.

Yeah, but the sort of second part of this insight, looking back on this ancient extinction and the way that it played itself out is that it resolved by it created this opportunity for life to take this poison, this pollution and turn it into fuel and that, you know, however you wanna look at this, you wanna look at this as the alchemical process of the refinement of the negative or if you wanna look at this in terms of the enormous economic opportunity that our landfills present to those of us who are willing to come up with artificial intelligent trash sorting devices that can reclaim all of the conflict minerals that we've thrown away, you know, it's like, actually Drew Stammer talked about this on the Duncan Trussle podcast a while back.

Yes, yes, I heard this.

The main reason for asteroid farming is not to collect the rare earth minerals on the asteroids, it's to collect their water because we don't need to go to space to collect all the minerals that we need, we have them in the trash already. And it's far more efficient. It's a far easier pitch to investors to say, let's build a robot that will mine trash over there, then let's build a robot that will mine trash several million miles away and move it over here.

And let me just say metaphorically what Bruce is describing is, I think what you and I will both get joy out of this is that's the process that you do as an individual to. You don't go out there in a space to get those rare earth minerals. They're already here, you go inside. Like the metaphor is perfect, right?

In your own trash heap, right?

It's in your own toilet. Like you drop the wedding ring into your own shitter. Now you've got to reach in there and wash your hands. So that's the, you know, to me, like I'm a huge fan of, and student of the cranky genius, William Irwin Thompson, who taught English at Cornell and taught history at MIT before leaving the academic world to start a transdisciplinary think tank for the planetization of culture. There is the, very specifically, let me see if I can find their tenets because this, let's see, it's like one of the things that they cared about was specifically the planetization of the esoteric.

And at any rate, there are a lot of brilliant minds that were very influential in this stuff, but people that, like Stuart Brand and Lynn Margulis and Gregory Bates, and all these other people whose profound influence on recent history may not be known to most people, but it's like, it's there. It's like in your phone. It's in the way that our whole society has programmed and a lot of it came out of this think tank in the 1970s. Anyway, Bill Thompson has this phrase. He says, evil is the enunciation of the next level of order. So basically like anything that you think is evil, or for me, I also think of it in terms of alien, the alien.

The alien is a relative term. It's like a compass direction. Or it's like a point relative to where you are. The alien is like what's on the horizon of what is familiar to you. And anything past that, you don't even see. It's below the horizon. But like if you move from where you are to where that thing is that you observe, that becomes familiar, and the person you used to be becomes the alien.

That's right, that's right.

And so he's saying the same thing about evil. He's saying that every generation thinks that the music their kids are listening to is noise. But noise is actually the signal that we don't understand.

Right.

And like the pattern is there. And every generation learns a deeper intimacy and appreciation for quote unquote noise as the source of all of its order. Like the same way that Brian Eno talked about how the glitches of any particular medium end up becoming its features.

Yes.

The art of that medium, the CD skipping or the record vinyl scratch becomes like the definitive sound of that thing. You know? And then we end up working it in. And so right now we're in that process of taking all of our industrial pollution and you also see this culturally and politically. You know that people consider other people waste.

Right. Well, that's how right.

Other people like quote unquote white trash. Okay, well, your own fucking, your soul's salvation is in learning to find value in the people that you think are trash.

Right. And see, you just touched on the most important thing. And this is where just like everything in our lives, we oscillate, right? We don't elect a state and remain to stay there. You know, remain to stay in that state because we can't, we, as long as we're people and have the functionings of people and humans and aren't some ascended enlightened being, yeah, I'm gonna do that. So where, all right. So let me ask you this, culturally, 'cause what you said is so fucking important. When you can learn that your enemies or the people you don't value actually have the greatest lessons for you and are merely being pretty good mirrors for you, but you can't recognize it.

When you have this knowledge, what are some things that you've learned or are effective tools for combating the mindset that says the other perspective or another perspective is actually more valid, which is I'm going to, this is all well and good, Michael. This is great, but guess what? There's still companies trying to take over to code a pipeline. There's these people doing old things. What are we supposed to do? That's a higher sense of order. Like, what are we supposed to just accept that? I obviously deal with these questions constantly because I think many people, especially based on the show and my public voice here, I'm a very optimistic person, generally, but it doesn't mean that I don't see these fucked up things around the world.

It doesn't mean I can't look at, you know, policy decisions and devaluing humans so you can basically commit genocide on them as like, no, that's not an issue that we need to do. What I've found in my life, right, is like, this is the only thing that makes sense to me right now. And this isn't, I'm saying for everyone, but it could be, is when you start with yourself and try to confront that trash, 'cause like, if you're calling anyone trash, you better believe who your first, the person you're actually talking about is yourself. Anything we say about someone else is really about us. Maybe not the literal words we're saying, but the feelings, the emotions, the intention, and that's a tricky fucking thing.

But I've caught myself, as I'm sure a lot of other people have, when I'm in a fight with my wife or something and I say something and I go, holy shit, what I just said is literally what I'm doing. Like, that's me and they're like, you know, very rarely can I actually be a mature adult and catch myself and be like, oh, I'm sorry, I just keep going with it, but I mean, that's his life. But I mean, like--

It's very hard to break up with somebody when you realize that everything that you're mad at them about is the problem you have with yourself. You know, like, it kind of makes it difficult like to retain the necessary rage to remove yourself. From a person.

'Cause we realize that you're karmically entangled in that crazy way.

Right, and I do think anger is something that has a function. It's not just something like the ego that gets a bad rep sometimes or gets a bad rep. Like, the ego, you know, the rhombos quote, it's a terrible, a wonderful servant, but a terrible master. The ego actually does have, even biologically a function in our life, like without the ego, we don't evolve to a certain point to run away from lions and find shelter somewhere, because we're just like, I don't know what to do, whatever, maybe this lion is nice. There is a psychological component to the ego that is useful. So throwing the baby out with the bath water is--

I think it's kind of funny that we still talk about lions though. I mean, it's been like, it's been like 50,000 years.

It's, you know, it's the mythological. Yeah, I mean, it's the mythological. It obviously these things when you trace them back, all these anecdotes and stories. What we're telling the same, it's funny we use lions, you know, it's funny you point that out because these are the same conversations that people were having hundreds, thousands, like, you know, tens of thousands years ago because these are things we have to consider in our relative context of where we are now. But I do agree with you in the sense here that maybe everyone feels like this, but that's why I have a lot of friends who are a lot older than me and younger.

I'm granted that's not a huge sample size of time, but I ask people like, did time feel like this when you were younger? Does it feel like there's something qualitatively different about time or how we experience things? And the answer I get from people who are like, you know, 65, 70 and older is yes, it is very different. This is not how it was. I remember being 40, I remember being 30 and life didn't seem like this. And I think it's easy to point to communications and media and say that's why it feels. But I also think there's something kind of in the ether that is driving this kind of cultural or societal or even biological evolutionary biology kind of change.

There's something in the air here that's going on. Okay, but I got a little lost here. What are some antidotes in your mind or have helped you really kind of deal with that polarization and that duality that a lot of people, myself, yourself, I'm sure, get caught up in? Like how have you kind of found to, what tools have you found to kind of break out of these rigid kind of like ways of being and thinking or reacting is probably the best term? So insofar as I'm starting to define my social role as someone who, or my role as a public communicator, as someone who employs biological metaphors in order to convey what I consider profound insight in a way that appeals to an analytic and secular audience, then I think that like Bruce Dahmer actually said, he's kind of taken me under his wing as the science mythology guy, which is great because he in a lot of ways inherited that responsibility from Terrence McKenna.

Yes, and it seems like now that he's setting off into the world to focus almost more exclusively on his very important scientific research on the origins of life, which I find utterly amazing and inspiring and he doesn't, he's like, somebody else needs to be the bard. You know, why don't you try to work this up? And one of his first suggestions was do you, like tell a story, tell stories. People love stories. Don't just sit there and rant about facts and, you know, don't mind splooge all everybody. Give people a little lead that they can follow. And so this is an experiment in responding to this question with a story.

The story is about a muscle fiber who lives in your arm and this fiber every day. Every moment of every day is in a state of greater or lesser tension against something. Something, that force, that mysterious other, our hero will never meet that person, that other fiber on the other side of your arm. That is, you know, your tricep is the alt-right, right? And then your bicep fiber is my Jewish liberal progressive cousin in Clinton, you know? And these two forces are always pulling against one another.

Right.

And if either of them were to give up, the arm would be useless. The arm would accomplish nothing. So to the extent that we acknowledge the overwhelming burden of like the weight of this evidence that we are components, first of all, that like if we look at things from the aerial view and we observe human society in terms of averages and numbers and like big data, population.

Sure, sure.

So how does the species, rather than just individual people, then we have created what philosopher Timothy Morton calls a hyper object is a thing that's not like, you can't point to it. Like his example is climate change. You know, it's a thing, we realize it's a thing, but it's everywhere, or it's too big that it cannot be perceived directly. So this hyper object, the human super organism, you know, we acknowledge that in some sense, it has a valid reality. It has an agency of its own, it's doing something. So we're actually in what amounts to this like planet-wide slime mold made out of people.

And the intelligence of it is not located in any particular place, it's distributed through the collective activity of all of us, but it still demonstrates a sort of coherent, unified behavior. Enough that we can talk about it in the anatomical and behavioral terms of Ken Wilbur's empirical upper right, that individual external thing. And we can say, oh, there it is, the human species. And if we wanna talk about it as a system and we can get into the interactions and the external collective stuff. But the point is that like seeing it that way, and this was a huge thing for me, this was a lesson that in many ways was emphasized or exemplified to me by William Irwin Thompson again, because he invited people with whom he vehemently disagreed into the Lindisfarne Association.

I love it.

And he was very clear that his vision of the future was profoundly different. Some of these other people, people with whom he had moral disagreements about the destiny of the human species. There was actually, there's a really, you can find a lot of the old tapes from the Lindisfarne meetings on the EF Schumacher Center website in the internet archive.org. So there's a lot of really sage, interesting people. That are giving these talks back in like 1973, '75. In that block. And at the time, one of the things that they discussed was a debate over whether or not we should move resources into building space colonies.

And like the military industrial realities of who is actually gonna be building these colonies. You know, and whether this represents a shunt of necessary funding away from ecological stings really works on earth. And you see these people going toe to toe on this stuff on these like, what, to them feel like life and death.

Right, right, right, right.

And yet they're doing so with such respect for one another because they're aware that they are participating in an ecology of mind. And this is the fucking key to this question, which is acknowledging that you are, you know, Susie the muscle fiber and that you are, you know, rather than believing like so many of our boomer activist predecessors that like, we're gonna do this, we're gonna win this. You know, and it's like acknowledging with all of the new humility, first of all, that if you are right, and this is a project that like wins eventually, the odds that you're gonna live to see it always throughout.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, like it's that quote-unquote the long arc of history, right? You know, that's like bigger. You know, we're so addicted to that gratification of seeing the final results of a thing. Now, I remember, like you can do gene sequences like instantly now, it's crazy. When I was in school, you know, 11 years ago when I was working at museum, eight, nine years ago, it took like they had a dedicated computer in the lab that took like a week to draw a tree of relationships between the gene samples that they put in there. And it just said, don't touch, there was like a piece of paper. Do not touch this computer, you know?

And like somehow in the last century, and other people have written about this much more eloquently than I'm gonna be able to talk about it right now, but sometime recently, we began to value speed as a thing, as a virtue, as an end unto itself. And so we lose, we've lost sight in only the last few generations, it seems, of what motivated most human beings throughout history, which is participating in this intergenerational project, you know, that we don't get to live to see completed. And so there's that. But then it's like even if the odds that we're actually, that this is a cathedral that we're building and not the constant and necessary tension between opposites, who knows?

Right.

Like the odds are probably pretty good that there will always be some species of liberal philosophy and conservative philosophy in the world, because these are what biologists would call an evolutionarily stable strategy. You know, personality types are like the way that atoms space themselves to form the shape of a molecule according to their electromagnetic repulsion. You know, it's like people that hate each other, hate each other because they're part of a social molecule and they're repelling each other.

The tension, this is what Bruce is talking about. This is, I think, a really, really interesting and valuable way of looking at conflict and tension. And I think, again, to just tie this together because a lot of people, when you get to talking about this stuff, and you talk about these big questions, especially if you are, you know, very into the woo-woo stuff or the spiritual stuff will go very heavy into the, well, love and light and that's all there is, but this tension that you're describing is actually, like, and this, let's just be very clear about something. I'm talking about this dimension, this world.

I do believe there are other dimensions that maybe lack this tension and are completely different. You see this talked about not only metaphysically, but also, you know, in Buddhism, the samsara realms, these different realms for different experiences happen. It's like a delic experiences can take you to certain places that aren't, but here, at least here in three-dimensional earth reality, this tension exists. It seems like for a reason. And I think the reason it exists is what we're kind of getting at here is this is where you forge an understanding of how to be, how to maybe, if you think that this is an evolutionary spiral that ascends upward, like, this is the tension that is necessary.

So instead of seeing suffering and tension and conflict as a hopeless, meaningless shit world with an angry vegetable god or no god, you can actually see it as something that is a natural byproduct that is actually a good thing and that is not saying the starving kids in Haiti and Africa are, that's a good thing, but that there's a function for it and that function can be anything from responding with, oh, that's really sad to, oh, I'm gonna give some money and support, oh, I'm gonna try to come up with the system to make sure that this doesn't happen anymore. So there's always potentialities with all this.

And I think when you start to view it more as like a function, it kind of can loosen the shackles of like fear and these emotions that can kind of color the experience and make you get pulled to one side of the other of this polarity. So it's this weird paradox how this tension can actually create this balance that is very useful for us as humans and being. So I love that, yeah.

Well, I think also people, it's kind of hard to see, you know, we're always looking at our own eyeballs, you know, and so we kind of forget they're there. And it's that same thing that I think that, you know, the way that the human brain creates, like operates, the way that cognition operates is through the differentiation of, it's through boundary detection. Like if you actually look at the way that thought is organized and nerves form into groups, it's detecting edges.

That's right.

Of stuff, you know? And so once you've detected the edges around a thing, then you have a thing.

Right.

So you can, then you can associate that thing, you can identify that thing with another thing. So you go from like archaic consciousness to magical consciousness in the, like, the gene-gupser sense of things. And then you start associating those things over time because once you have two things, then you can talk about movement. And then you get mythology, mythic consciousness, right? But so at any rate, this tension is there. It's in the passage from one to two to three. And, you know, from thesis antithesis synthesis. So this is the, this is like the fundamental architecture of the way that we think.

And so we just take it for granted that that's the way the world is rather than, rather than, this is a way that an organism living within a particular setting evolved to model its environment. You know, 'cause a tree is not perceiving this environment in this way, you know? And I think that there is, you know, probably one of the, you know, one of my prophecies for the next 50 years is that we start understanding more deeply the actual world spaces disclosed by non-human perception, non-human intelligences. And we're gonna start with the familiar, the close things, the apes, the elephants. It's gonna be a real mind fuck when we finally get into the dolphins.

That's what I was gonna say, set a scene.

Yeah, the dolphins, all the stations, the dolphins and whales, because they actually, it seems like, you know, they use, they went through a similar path that we did. They evolved their intelligence on the basis of highly developed sensory capacities used to navigate a complex environment.

Right.

But they did so basically by processing sound visually.

Right.

Like they have, like their brain, actually, my understanding is that they, when they're communicating to one another, the sounds that we hear actually form--

A visual representation, that's right.

Yeah, they form, you know, like a somatic glyph in the water, a three-dimensional moving sculpture that has some sort of internal syntax that's understood by the other dolphins. So they're actually communicating in like four-dimensional objects, you know? So like, there's no doubt that they experience that their philosophy is completely, you know, what philosophy they have is, would be structured completely different from our own, because we're looking at visual, we're looking at the detection of edges in a visual field, primarily, whereas they're looking at the three-dimensional structures of a moving object, and they're seeing through them.

And they're seeing, they're thinking of things in terms of thickness and like, they're, you know, composition. - Density, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, they're, you know, they're looking through you, and they're saying, oh, you're pregnant, you know? They're detecting your cancer. You know, they're seeing things in a different, they're literally experiencing things in a different dimensionality and through different sensory channels. And so we would expect that to be totally different. And like, that humbling revelation, I think it weighs in on this whole thing about the way that we understand tension between people. You know, that it's like, the tension that we experience or observe is based entirely on our constructed categories that we perceive as in tension with one another.

Where do you draw the edge?

Right, the boundary, right.

The boundary there. And the, your, where you draw that line is gonna be different than from where someone else draws that line, so there was like a meta-conflict between, you know, and I've had this conversation 50,000 times while someone is on LSD.

Right.

Saying, everything is one, why don't you get it? You know, and then someone else is saying, if everything is one, then--

Why are you saying it's perfect, then why are you so worked up about this? You know, and it's this, you know, it's this like perfect storm.

It's funny, you keep plucking things out of my mind because one of the things that I think LSC and other psychedelics do so well is they are boundary dissolvers. They break down, even in the neurotransmitters, what's actually going on, it's their dissolving boundaries between stuff. But we're gonna have to wrap it up, I'm gonna ask you my end of questions. Dude, I really think, looking that this has already been like an hour and 10 minutes, I'm pretty sure we could probably talk for like eight hours on end, which I actually hope to do, potentially in some live setting, not too far in the future, 'cause I know Bruce mentioned to me that we all kind of have this idea that's emerging of these, and I know you're doing some of the festivals you can, but I think there's gonna be some cool stuff going on around this country and the world in the future years, 'cause I do think this stuff is really important.

Okay, but let me ask you my last--

A podcast conspiracy. (laughs)

There you go, man.

That will result in some true and false flag operations.

Without a doubt, without a doubt. So, okay, here are the last few questions for you. What is your favorite color?

Green.

What is your favorite number?

Eight.

What is your favorite animal?

Ooh. (laughs)

The first thing that came in my mind was an elephant, but I really don't think about elephants all that often. My spirit animal is the Archaeopteryx.

What is that?

Which is the missing link between, well, it's not really, but it's been called by history, the missing link between birds and dinosaurs.

Oh, cool.

It was a fossil that they found in a limestone quarry in Germany, two years after the publication of "The Origin of Species", and after that happened, the religious community rebutted Darwin's argument with, if there, 'cause he says in that book, he says, "It's pretty obvious to me "that if evolution is the thing, "then birds evolved from reptiles." And so the Christians were like, well, I mean, I shouldn't say that because Darwin himself was a very devout Christian.

Right.

But the fundamentalist community that believed that the young earthers who believed that everything was created as this. - Recently, yeah, yeah.

The types were permanent and they're from the start. They were like, "Well, then, where's your half a wing?" It's the exact same thing that Ken Wilbur was saying 150 years later, which is totally wrong. But like, but there was a valid question because at the time they didn't have an intermediary fossil.

To prove that that might be--

And then this thing happened, and then Charles Darwin and his buddy, Thomas Henry Huxley, were like, "Oh!"

In your face.

Thar! (laughing)

The copterics lithographica, eat it, there's a bird with teeth and claws, and it's got fingers on its wings, and it looks like a dinosaur, and in fact, there's only about 12 specimens of them known to science, and one of them, a couple of them don't have very well-preserved feather impressions.

Right.

And they actually were mistaken for this different species.

I could say they didn't know a spell as well.

Yeah.

Oh, I see why it's your favorite animal. All right, last question. What is a practical tip that you could share with people listening that has helped you in your life?

There is a process for shadow work that I learned from the integral theory community called the three-to-one process, and it's a way of shifting from observing something, to conversing with it, to identifying as it. And it's basically, the way it goes is you observe something that's creating an emotional reaction. Good or bad?

Right.

It doesn't, you know, you observe something that has an emotional charge to it, which, again, like, you know, if you're in the middle of fighting with your spouse, you know, it takes a little, it takes like a necessary minimum level of self-awareness.

Right, right.

You can know if you're getting upset for, you know, stimulated or whatever.

Right, right, right.

Oh, you know, 'cause I've done this, I've done this process also with things I find beautiful, things I find really beautiful, but not me.

Right.

You know, like, a very, like, sensual, voluptuous woman who, you know, has like all this, you know, just this bounteous feminine, orgasmic thing going on. And me being like, I'm not that, I'm a, you know, I'm a heady dude, you know, but like, it goes both ways. And the way it was taught to me was with a monster that appears in a recurring dream, like a gorilla that was chasing Terry Patton, who was the guy that taught us about 3-2-1 process.

Sure.

He said, write, like, sit down and write about this thing. Like, describe it in the richest detail that you can. Really get to like chew and swallow the descriptive dimension of this. Don't run away from it. Sit there and look at it.

Right.

Like, you're drawing it. Like, sit there and, and like, lovingly observe this thing because it's not gonna hurt you, it's in your head.

It's an abstraction, right, right. Or like, if it's somebody that really pisses you off, it's like, well, they're over there, you know, it's whatever. So once you've articulated this third-person description, then you're probably at a point where you've described it well enough now, that you can kind of pretend to be in a conversation with it. You can sit down and do, like, the Gestalt Therapy.

Right, right, I was gonna say, yeah.

You sit at the empty chair and then, you know, I'm me and then I'll go sit in the other chair and I'm the Gorilla now. And so you ask this thing, and this kind of touches into some of the stuff you asked earlier about acknowledging the teaching.

Right.

You ask this thing, what it's, you know, okay, hi, hello. What are you doing here? Why do you keep showing up in my head? What is the lesson here? What would you, like, what do you have to teach me? What would you like to say? Because all of these things are voices in your own internal pantheon, you know, like your own encyclopedia of sub-personalities. So there is some valuable essence of your complete being that is revealed through engaging with this in this way. And then, of course, once you've done that, at some point, the deepening revelation is that you just sat in a conversation with yourself for the last 15, and that it was you the whole time, and that you had, you know, that going through this process of deepening intimacy and engagement with this challenging other, you're able to actually bring it within you and claim it as a part of the multi-dimensional God self or whatever you wanna say.

That is awesome.

Yeah, so this has been one of the most practical technologies for me dealing with ghosts. Like, I actually had, not long after I learned this, I was living in a house that was, all of us living there were experiencing poltergeist phenomena.

Sure, fuck up, that's scary.

Yeah, so like, that was my first, that was my like, okay, well, you know how to do this now. So, I was at a ween concert.

I love ween, by the way.

Ween is like, ween is, my friend Eric turned me on to them, like, I don't know, like 10, 15 years ago. I love ween, they're amazing.

I was at this concert, I was a little high, I mean, we're talking 11 years ago. I was a little high, I noticed a presence that was at the fucking concert, that was the same ghost that was at the house. And I was like, wait a minute, you know, it's like when you, the room is dark and you realize that you can kind of tell, there's a stir in the air and you can tell someone's in the room, and it's like, this is your moment to be like, this is a horror movie? Or to be like, wait a minute, who are you?

Right, investigate.

What are you doing here? And you know, what is your name? 'Cause that's a big thing with like, disempowering the hold that a demon has over you.

They ask the demon for its name. You know, they have to comply. You know, it's in the demon code. They have to tell you, you know, it's like, it's not supposed to stop.

Right, I was just gonna say, "Rob plus the skin."

Yeah, that folklore is based on truth, you know? So you ask at this thing, you have a conversation with it. And literally, I felt this movement of this being, this scary ghost thing. And I felt like there was a leak in my body, like in my energy, my aura or something, there was a leak in it. And recognizing this thing as some splinter of my own psychic energy, drew it back into myself through this like hole in my shoulder.

I sucked it back up, Ray.

Sucked it back in. And when I did that, the poltergeist phenomenon stopped.

So basically stop haunting houses, Michael. Why are you being a dick?

Well, I mean, the thing is that we don't, you know, it doesn't occur to us how much of our lives are haunted in this way.

Well, yes, yes, yes.

It's like all this thing, all this stuff, if you really, I mean, this is like, this is a very basic magical maxim or like reality truth thing that like you do alter the quote unquote out there by working on stuff internally. And like to the degree that each of us can recognize in the way that after 9/11, Ken Wilber himself wrote this book or wrote a an article called The Deconstruction of the World Trade Center where he applies his integral metaphorical paradigm to that complicated question and says, I am the terrorists. And he's like speaking from that like, Christic position that transcends and includes the ego, but you know, it's not mere ego.

Right, right.

I am the terrorists.

Right.

I am this thing because if we only see it as outside of us, then we can continue to persist in this bicep tricep.

To reality, rights, rights.

Game that gets us nowhere. I mean, really, really like what we're in the midst of as a country right now kind of looks like, you know, we're not working at, we're not in the middle of a workout. We're like in the middle of a seizure.

Right. It's like the muscles are firing, but it's not coordinated.

It's not productive towards something. Dude, man, we're gonna do this again really soon. Like I guarantee it because this is really fun. We're just scratching the surface in so many other ways. I really look forward to getting you know you better. I'm glad we're friends now, man. This has been awesome. Thank you so much.

Thank you, Noah. Yeah, folks, definitely. I think we should have you on my podcast.

I'd love to. They have time and place future fossils. Yeah.

Future fossils podcast on iTunes. Also patreon.com/MichaelGardfield.

I'm gonna link this episode so up with stuff to you that people are gonna be inundated, man. Don't worry. I will. I thank you so much for doing this, man.

Noah, you're great. Your Facebook group is great. I look forward to getting to know all of your listeners. (laughing)

Yeah, cool. - What's up, man?

All right.

Busy, bud.

Busy. (upbeat music)

You know, we all have had, and even a population of non-psychedelic people have had prophetic dreams, intimations, unlikely streams of coincidence, and this is all of these sort of things. These are experiences which cultures deny. Cultures put in place. I'm sure you've heard this word, a paradigm. And then what fits within the cultural paradigm is accentuated stress. And what doesn't fit inside the cultural paradigm is denied, marginalized, argued against. And we live at the end of a thousand-year binge on the philosophical position known as materialism. (upbeat music)

Thank you for listening past the music. As always, you people are the best. Maybe you didn't have a choice. Maybe it was just playing, you know, like what the hell. But really, thank you, Michael. Tune into what he's doing at michaelgarfield.net. His Patreon page is great. Go, you know, pledge a few dollars there. And every month he gets to put out cool stuff. I think that's pretty cool. If you want to hear more of me, (laughing) I'm sure there must be something there you like. I did a really cool podcast with Corey Allen from the Astral Hustle and Michael Phillip from Third Eye Drops, both podcasts on MindPod Network.

And you can check that out. It's on the Astral Hustle, called it a Tri-Cast. We're gonna do a few of those and rotate them around the podcast. 'Cause I think, you know, three people, it's pretty cool. Also, by the time you're hearing this, it should be out Zach Leary from It's All Happening. Also on MindPod Network was just on Joe Rogan Show. So that's pretty cool. So go check out his appearance there. I'll give you some other tips on what to check out next time. Guys, thank you so much. Happy New Year. Really, thank you so much for listening and lots of love and I'll see you next year. The grill is shot.

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