Ep. 53 - Dr. Bruce Damer

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This is Synchronicity. Welcome to episode 53 of Synchronicity. My guest today is Dr. Bruce Damer. I'm going to get to Bruce in just a second, you know the drill, but for some other stuff. I wanted to talk about, I've mentioned it a few times before on the podcast, there is a book coming out from MindPod Network, tentatively titled Practically Mindful. I think that's probably going to be the final thing, but it's not these decisions aren't just up to me, you see. I want to talk a little bit about this because I think it's going to be really cool. So essentially three or four months ago, my friend Brandon, who I've mentioned on this podcast many times, he's helped me in my day job of digital strategy, consulting, implementation. I've known him for a really long time. We've been in fantasy football leagues for, oh geez, oh my god, almost 15 years now at this point, that's nuts. But just a really good dude, he came to me with this idea of a basically sourced book on a topic. And the topic we eventually settled on with some research was how to stay mindful and aware without meditation. And that doesn't mean that you don't meditate, it just means some people, me and other people like me sometimes have a hard time sticking to a meditation practice for whatever reason. And there's a lot of courses out there and there's a lot of teachers out there. And if it works for you, that's great. And ultimately, I think everyone should probably work up to some form of meditation practice. But I understand the hurdles that we all kind of face getting up to that regular daily practice. So we figured it would be a nice idea to go into the community, ask people like Jack cornfield, Sharon Salzburg, all of all of the people on mine pod network, the first incarnation, some of the people who still reside there to our Brock, all of the new people on mine pod network, like Michael Donovan, Sean done, Kelly McLean, Yoshino, and Zach Leary, all of these people. I don't want to for Corey Allen, I don't want to forget anyone. They all made contributions. And we also got some other people like Duncan Trussell, Reggie Ray, there's, let me put it this way, there's over 35 people who have contributed to this book.

And it's going to be an exercise book where it basically goes down each person's particular tip or essay or idea on how to remain mindful and aware without sitting down on a cushion with your eyes closed or open. So I bring it up because the thing is going to be pretty cool. Not only is there a valuable book that's coming out that I think should help a lot of people, potentially could help you, but there's also going to be an affiliate system launching with it. And the way this works is anyone who's interested can get a code. And if they share that book to their friends and family and people who they think might find it useful, you actually, you make money.

You get a, you get a percentage of the sales of the book. So this is a way to spread the word, allow people to win as it goes on, and hopefully really provide some value in people's lives. So as that continues and evolves, I will keep you updated. I think it's going to be really cool. The reason I also bring it up is there's more to this affiliate program, not my favorite name for it, but there's more to this kind of model than just the MindPod network book that's coming out of them. I've been actively, this is a little secret behind the scenes stuff with what I'm doing. I've been actively going out and partnering and building relationships and finding people with active and engaged and quality audiences and communities. These are people like feathered pipe. It's a Montana retreat center who I connected with, and they're just incredibly nice people.

They have a whole SAVA foundation, not SAVA aspect to their retreat center where they incubate, like Nepal funds, all veterans funds. They basically create these, spawn these nonprofits that go out and make positive change in the world. Not to mention, it's an awesome retreat center. I bring them up just because they're one of many people I've been partnering with, and they're especially awesome. What's up, Eric, if you're listening. But I'm doing this for several reasons. One, I think the idea of collectively coming together to support whatever it is we're talking about on this podcast and other streams of consciousness, like this one, if we come together, we're going to be more powerful than if we're all doing it on our own little islands. There's a lot of factors at play, the way digital media works, technology works, this top-down model that you need to be in these big places. Those barriers have been somewhat lowered for people. Anyone can start a podcast now, anyone can have a Facebook page, but there's still particulars and intricacies to this that make it somewhat challenging to just start up and have this thing emerge. However, there are lots of people who have done this, and it's my intention and goal to partner and create reciprocal relationships with all of these people and their audiences and mind pod networks audience and synchronicities audiences, basically create this web that if something cool is coming out, let's say someone has something that a book they wrote or a web course or just the free offering, like a meditation, we can put it through this web and it'll reach a lot of people. So this is the reason I bring this up is not just to say, "Hey, this is what I've been doing," but if you're interested in this, if you're listening to this, you're like, "Hey, I have this thing, I have this idea, I have this company, I have this organization," and you're interested in figuring out, like, "Well, maybe there's something I can want to be a part of this little web." Write me an email, noah@syncpodcast.com.

It's relatively, we're planning this out. It's not kind of like a half-ass, "Well, let's partner with some people and maybe some cool things will happen." There's certainly an aspect to that, because, you know, that's a cool thing to do, but we're being pretty systematic about it and we want to make sure that the people who participate in this are getting value out of it, their audiences, their communities are getting value out of it, and then be really the most important thing that we're sharing stuff that is useful and helpful for people. That's the whole idea of MindPod Network. This podcast, yeah, that's an idea behind it, but this is me just kind of talking to some people, but MindPod Network really is, it was created with the intention of creating a wide range of spectrum entry points across the spectrum. So if you're interested in, let's say, dreams, but you're not so into the Buddhist stuff, you're not so into the Hindu stuff, you're not so into the Christian mysticism or Gnosticism, but you're interested in dreams, we want there to be a way for you to access all this shit that we're talking about without it seeming, you know, preachy or dogmatic or overwhelming or stuff you just don't care about. So that's the idea. We're going to continue to work towards that. I wanted to fill you guys in because I know you listened to this podcast and, you know, just sharing what's going on in my day life, my day life, I don't know if that means my day job, I don't know, who knows anymore, but so I am sharing that with you. Okay, I want to also want to mention another thing that I've that have been going on. So I've mentioned this, I think on a podcast or two, but I've been going through, I have on my Kindle cloud on my phone, something I purchased, the book I purchased years ago, and it's the collected works of Swami Vivekananda. And if you don't know who Swami Vivekananda is or was, he was a devotee of Ramakrishna, who is one of my favorite mystics, just one of the coolest guys, one of my favorite books, those of you who have written in and said your favorite books, when you join the community, I often say the gospel of Sri Ramakrishna is one of my favorites. There's so many great parables in there that I just think are always timelessly important for what's going on in anyone's lives at any given time. But this this collective works of Swami Vivekananda is particularly awesome because I think it's like 17,000 pages. I mean, it's like every speech you ever gave, everything you ever wrote down, I mean, it's nuts. But the reason I bring it up is it primarily deals with what their lineage is was Advaita Vedanta. What this is, is this is basically a non-dual conception of the world, which is very difficult to grasp because we live in a dualistic world.

There's no denying that there's good. That means there's evil. There's bad. That means there's good. There's dark. That means they're light. They imply each other. That's the meaning of a dual universe. But Advaita Vedanta essentially makes the statement that, well, yeah, sure, we live in a dual universe, but ultimately everything is one. And there's a lot of ways to dissect that. There's a lot of parallels and crossover with Buddhism and all this other stuff. I'm continuing to say the word Buddhism weird. I don't know why it is slipped in somehow. But it's a really great if you want an intro to any of that stuff. I long ago when I was in college, I remember on Facebook, you could put your religious views. And I think I put Advaita Vedanta when I was really getting into this stuff like 10 years ago. But anyone who's interested in that, I highly recommend picking it up. It's something that I read, you know, 10, 20 minutes before I go to sleep every night on my phone in night shift mode. Thank you. I don't want that blue light.

And I highly recommend it. I think it's something that anyone who's interested in this would find useful. Okay. That is it. Now let's get to Bruce. Bruce is fucking amazing. I first heard Bruce on Duncan Trussell's podcast and was blown away not only by how smart he was and how knowledgeable he was down to like very nitty gritty specifics of like, you know, scientific and empirical studies. He's participated in and been a part of, but also just his his seamless, his seamlessness and his ease of speaking about things that are sometimes difficult to speak about. You know, someone like Terence McKenna was really gifted at this. He could communicate a transcendental experience or a psychedelic experience in words that evoked the feeling and experience itself. Bruce also has this ability and is also just incredibly engaging and a really great person to talk to. If you want, let me point this out at the beginning and also point it out the end in the outro. But Bruce has a podcast called the Levity Zone, Levity Zone. Go check it out.

It's really great. It gives you a sense for who he is, what he's doing. He's not the podcast person per se. He has a podcast, but this he is he has come up with theories of evolution, the collective evolution models, couple phases. I mean, these are things that are well beyond my ability to grasp. But when he explains them, they make sense. And you can go check this out all on his website too. There are links, there will be links on syncpodcast.com. There will also be links on mindpodnetwork.com. Don't worry, I'm going to get you connected with Bruce if you're interested. This conversation was also amazing. We talk about a ton of stuff. One of the things Bruce brought up when we were exchanging emails to set this up was crossing the liminal boundary between logic and magic. I mean, I don't know about you, but that sounded like incredible. I was like, okay, got it. That's what we're going to talk about this whole time. Obviously, the conversation ranges. You know, my conversations with people, they go from place to place. Hopefully, nicely coincide at the end of the episode, but not always. But this one, I think, does.

I don't want to say too much about it. It's a bit longer than my normal podcast, because we were having such a good time talking and speaking to each other. Let me say this, I have a very good feeling and strong intuition that this won't definitely not be the last time we hear from Bruce, but there may be some other things emerging from this episode and my relationship with Bruce. Also, on top of that, I just sat down with another really awesome person who's referenced at the beginning of this episode, which is Michael Phillip from a podcast called Third Eye Drops. I sat down for an episode of his podcast this past weekend and was blown away by how incredibly cool Michael is. And I think we're going to be doing some cool stuff in our own right.

So I'm trying to put my money where my mouth is figuratively and literally and really start linking up with these cool people doing cool stuff, right? What could be better? So maybe you may be saying some live events or some little salon type things we can put together different parts of the country. So, you know, stay tuned for that. As always, thank you to everyone who has donated, who has subscribed, who has rated and reviewed this podcast synchronicity. It means the world to me. It helps. It really does in more ways than you can possibly know. So I really appreciate everyone who is doing that. If you want to do that, go to synchpodcast.com, syncpodcast.com, join the community, subscribe, leave a rating, leave a review, donate if you're so inclined.

It really does help and I appreciate it. So enough rambling from me. We're going to get to the episode. So without further ado, here is Dr. Bruce Damer. Sometimes Michael Phillips, the third eye drops. He takes my local recording and he just merges it in. So instead of using Skype, which can drop out and stuff against it. It's funny you mentioned Michael. A friend connected me with him a week and a half ago and I'm going on his podcast tomorrow. So that's interesting. Yeah, the local recording is perfect. It's usually just because the Skype stuff, I hate that Skype sound, that digital artifacts that pop in. So whenever we can get a local recording, that's definitely preferred.

So thank you for that. That's awesome. Cool. So yeah, what's your podcast about? What's this podcast about? That's a great question. I don't know that my grand idea for it is what it's actually about. I don't even know that I had a grand idea for it. Essentially, it's just me talking with people who I think are doing interesting things. That's the general kind of qualifications for what the podcast is about. A little more deep than that. I like to talk about things that often go overlooked in a lot of people's lives. That's why the podcast is called Synchronicity. I named it after Carl Jung's definition of synchronicity. I like things that kind of pierce the veil, things that maybe don't fit into the way that we typically view and respond and react and perceive "reality." So I like to find different perspectives from people ranging from scholarly like Buddhist, to the philosophical Eastern philosophies, to modern science. I'm really excited to talk to you because I don't think I've had the privilege of talking to someone who's is knowledgeable about the empirical scientific side of a lot of this stuff, which is very interesting to me.

But yeah, I mean, that's kind of what the show is about. It's really just conversations with cool people, though. Wonderful. And you're up in, you say you're in Portland? No, no. I am right now, I'm in Silver Spring, Maryland, right outside of Washington, D.C. But we just are in, we are buying a house literally in the process of buying a house in upstate New York, in Dutchess County. Nice. Nice area. Nice area. We're super excited. Yeah, it's in my book. We're so excited. We lived in Manhattan. I just had my first son with my wife like six months ago, and we lived in Manhattan before that for like eight years. And so we miss, we love New York. We love the city, but we especially love like just a little bit north of it in the Hudson Valley. It's just like so beautiful. And yeah, we're super excited. So that's, I'm East Coast. Yeah. So that I just got a little note from the Woodstock Museum. There's a museum up there of Woodstock paraphernalia.

I've got Timothy Larry's library and news archive here. I'm good friends with his son, Zach. He's on my podcast network. And there's a lot of interesting relationship tangents that I think I've had Lorenzo on from the psychedelic salon. And I think there's a lot of interesting crossover. That's awesome. You have his whole library. Are there plans to do anything with it? Yeah, the actually what happened was I was the agent for the trustee Dennis Berry. And through various processes, the manuscript collection got placed at the New York Public Library about five years ago. And they did not want his books, his record collection, and surprisingly the news archive, which is news clippings and stories from the Harvard Crimson days all the way up till his death. So I was given that by the by the trust. And in there was his wallet. The last of his ashes, at least from the ashes distribution kit, a couple of silk shirts, the chandelier from his house in Bel Air. So there's a lot of Tim stuff. And I've been collecting all this stuff for years, but I have a collection of letters and stuff from Terrence, Terrence McKenna. You know, Terrence's archives was completely destroyed. Dennis in the fire. Yeah, Dennis has a journal that's full of scrawled handwriting. Clea has some stuff. Really, there's very little of Dennis left. So, I mean, of Terrence left, so we reconstructed Terrence from cassette tapes in over about 10 years. So you guys could hear him. And that's what Lorenzo did in the salon. But but we rebuilt Terrence, but that's not the topic we're talking about. But it's an interesting crossover to these explorers of consciousness. You know, I got to get I got together with Terrence to explore the crossover between his virtual worlds and mine. You know, in the 90s, I introduced him to Avatar cyberspace. And so we could make notes and he introduced me to his cyberspace of a sort. And then we could make notes and compare the media. And now with VR, just some news for you. I've been doing performances with Android Jones. We did our first one at Lightning in a Bottle, which is a festival out here. Yes. And it was an it just got the video actually. But it was called Fire in the Sky. What it was was Android doing doing live painting on two Jumbo Tron LED walls. I did this channeled four part poem, which goes from cosmogenesis to conscious ascension, sort of in four parts, 25 minutes. And then Val Santana did the beautiful beautiful DJ. Yeah. And then the house did all kinds of effects. And we had this group, you know, it's about 24 year olds who are you are usually there like Beatles on their cell phone, their schooling fish, right? They're driven by social media. Our goal was to hold their consciousness in a container where they would not take their phones out. We would and we saw no the light of no glow of a iPhone or Android in that entire audience. That is awesome. And they were they were trapped like the school of fish were trapped in our container and the adult in them with sonar into the space. That's right. So so their consciousness was wafted into the story space, but kept there by Android's live painting. Right. And by this, this sonic, so it was a new package to to capture the these, these minds, you know, and these souls into a deep kind of a trip in a way is a trip that isn't a trip, but it's like having a kindergarten class with story time and that for transforming people, it's a powerful new package. So what we're doing is we're doing it again in Vancouver, not with Android, but with another set of musicians on at the Spirit Plant Medicine Conference in a week and a half. And then I've given it to Michael Garfield, who I've encouraged he's going to Australia to do a tour at Rainbow Serpent and Earth Sequence. And I've encouraged him to take this format and try to do it down there. So it's a brand new kind of powerful format designed to overwhelm the propensity to go to your phone and your social media, but just totally anyway. But as part of this, I got connected with Android's VR efforts. And so he has this VR world that he's made that was shown at symbiosis. So at symbiosis, people who put on the HTC Vive and went as fantastic. It's it's a world in which the hand controllers pull out the three his brushes, basically his magic brushes that he uses to make all his art. And you are doing the painting, you are Android, and it's all three dimensional, but you know, the dragon's head is coming toward you and eating you. And all around is a cylinder of Android's incredible work done in 3D, like the Samskara dome that he's done, but inside VR.

So Duncan and I are talking now about doing a VR podcast in there. Oh cool. And so that we met, I met with Andrew last week, and his tech guy, Scott and who's in Santa Cruz, to try to figure out, they have to make it multi user, because all this stuff is a good login, right, right, right. And all this stuff is so primitive, you know, I worked in avatars and virtual worlds in the 90s. And these people didn't learn a thing, you know, with VR, VR companies that came out, they don't have any social affordances in their worlds and everything. And I sort of had given up on this new generation of VR and said, oh, they're just making all the same mistakes. But now with Android and with Duncan and the fact that the worlds are beautiful, the worlds of Terrence would be blown to smithereens by these worlds. And he would be, you know, impressed by the world. So we have got there. But I think of Android Jones as the Leonardo Da Vinci of VR, I mean, the stuff, you know, he's just literally encountered this medium, and he feels like it's a creature that's talking to him. And that he, it's a dance that he's doing with it to bring out the power of the medium. So we may have our Da Vinci in VR.

Well, it's interesting from all of that you mentioned, there's so much there that is fascinating. And I agree with you. And I obviously wasn't, I didn't really know anything about the first permutation of VR. But I do know kind of what it's shaping up to be now having not even, I don't have a vibe, but I see this stuff. They're coming up. I'm interested that now the PS4 is trying to get their VR into the to the mainstream. And I notice what you've said is something that I've wondered a lot, which is there needs to be this communal community aspect to these things for them really to transcend just kind of like a quick game experience or like a little thing that you can watch or do. I've heard Duncan talk a long time about like, I mean, maybe even going back like three or four years about being able to do a podcast in VR and have like a virtual stage where the guest is being interviewed and all these people can interact with their avatars. And I think that's an incredibly powerful thing. And I'm hoping that we can move towards that. I also want to point out that we are talking about with those live interactive multimedia pieces is fascinating to me. I've seen a really interesting thing happen where two spheres that I'm acutely interested in and have spent a lot of time reading involved doing creating, which is electronic music and this whole kind of spiritual consciousness world start to merge in a very significant way, even at the festivals that you're speaking about, like lightning in a bottle. There's DJs there who are on, you know, Burning Man, another great example. I've never been to Burning Man, but I can tell you this, the robot heart people, some of the mixes and DJ mixes that come out, which I know is a whole other discussion, how that fits into the kind of cosmology of Burning Man.

But the music that at least that comes out of it, these are from some of my favorite DJs. They've been my favorite DJs for 15 years before they even knew what Burning Man was. And just the music coming out of there is incredible. So I'm seeing these kind of experience, what you're describing where Android's painting on stage, where there's a person doing music, where there's the poem, if I'm not mistaken, what you were describing was also on your Levity Zone podcast. Yeah, I put the audio. I put the studio recording of that up on the Levity Zone, if you have a chance to hear it. Yeah, it was really cool. It was really, really cool. And like you were saying, it's it takes you kind of from like the Genesis aspect of it through this other.

Yeah, it's really cool. But what you're talking about there in those multimedia experiences is very much what I'm interested in as well. And I think even tying that to trying to get millennials or younger people, I'm not quite sure where the millennial cutoff is, but getting people to kind of pull away from their phones, regardless of their age, regardless of their demographic is something that is incredibly valuable because I mean, I remember being glued to my computer 15 years ago. I've always been into computers, but now with the access we have with these devices and how our consciousness gets pulled to them, like the way you were describing that and just like, you know, using hand motions, it is like you're getting sucked into this other device world and not experiencing everything around you. And you can create these immersive experiences through art, through sound, through visuals, through, you know, physical physically being there. I think that taps us into to me, which is the greatest experience we can have, which is this experience of experiencing the world with other people. And then like this aspect of community is something that I touch on. You asked what the podcast is about. I would say in almost every single episode, somehow, some way, shape or form this concept of community, Sangha, Satsang, whatever you want to call it, emerges because I think that is what will ultimately take us from these isolated places to where we're trying to go.

Yeah, and in fact, when people go to Peru and they sit in that circle without they're hopefully without their smartphones, and they go through cathartic release and experience and they get bonded in a way that they're probably never having their lives. They get bonded in a tribal way or when they go to do Vapasana somewhere with the group, or they go to a retreat in the wilderness or whatever. And then we experience what it used to be like to be in super close bro community. I mean, the real deal. One of the things that I decided I wanted to do is that I missed the 60s. You know, Dennis kind of got the tail end of it, but I missed it. I was a teenager in Canada in the 70s, which the 60s kind of hit Canada in the 70s, but Canada was a proper society, so we didn't have protests. We had a civil society in health care and all that, so what was there to protest? You know, so the Boy Scouts were smoking hash and this and that, but I sort of thought, you know, there were golden times in the 60s where the community reemerged for the first time out of this strictured society in the Cold War of the 50s, and it was all done by kids. And if you look at it, in this collection of stuff that I have, from about 1966 onwards for a few short years, because this thing crashed and burned and crashed hard. They had created this glowing, almost allucinian return of magical close community, you know, fraught with its challenges. I mean, the rock bands fought like cats for God's fakes, you know, but one of my friends who I go to Peru with now and then he was 17 years old. You could relate to this. He said, growing up in New York or in the boroughs, and he takes a bus in 1967 out to San Francisco, and he gets a job running the sound and light at the Avalon Ballroom. For 18 months, what he does is he runs the sound and light things as these bands come in and perform sometimes the first time, like the Grateful Dead's first show, or Janice Joplin's first show. And he sits there as this kid with a front row seat on the scene that's going on. And it was incredible love that was pouring through everybody who arrived who simply met eyes wearing their duffel bag clothes or whatever and doing their first acid and dancing to this music. They were brothers and sisters. They were bros and, you know, and the best friends in the world. Everybody was. And this thing lasted, you know, we're coming up to the 50th anniversary of it. So a group of us are co-organizing the 50th birthday of the human being, which happened on January 14, 1967. That was the kickoff for the summer of love year in San Francisco. So they're having a new summer of love reunion for like 70,000 people in Golden Gate Park this coming year. It's 50 years. That's a long time. But that was a unique period of about 18 months before it went sour. Right. And community existed and maybe it wasn't the sustainable community. But it was the first experience that that generation of now salt and pepper hair, you know, hippies, you know, aging boomers, they had it. And we had a guest here last night, Queen Moon, who was part of that scene. And she's this delightful woman, she founded this magazine called Mondo 2000 in the early 90s. And she was part of this whole scene. And I recorded her for like two to three hours just talking about her journey through that epoch. And then after that, and how it spun people out into doing Native American things and going on healing journeys to Nepal in 1972. And, you know, Dennis and Terrence went down, you know, in search of, you know, the black and the green down in the Amazon on a 71. It spun the whole generation off to explore and do things because of the sheer power of what had happened. Some of them spun into cocaine and opiates and crashed and burned out into, you know, fear and loathing in Las Vegas in the 70s. And then the whole nation went into the conservative nightmare of Reagan and which is now blowing up with Donald Trump, it's the eating itself, this monster that came that killed a lot of that community. It killed social programs. It it killed rapid transit. It killed community ethos. It was it was, you know, a monster that came on the scene and privileged corporations, which is still going on. And even though it may be kind of imploding and, you know, crumbling, it's still kind of the paradigm we live in for the most part in this country, at least. And then bubbling up now is this potential return of what happened in the 60s, but cross generational through podcasts like this, where people wake up and realize I'm not isolated in my little world in in South Indiana. You know, I'm I'm connected with all this amazing, loving, exploratory and scientific community. I'm not isolated. I'm not alone. Well, you have found the others, you know, right. And I think, you know, when we talk about what happened in the 60s, and I obviously I missed it too. I was born in the early 80s. So I was born into the Reagan, the Reagan conservative takeover. It was already in full swing. But when we talk about what happened in the 60s, I noticed the exact same thing you did.

There was this cultural movement that was supported primarily by the youth, kind of as a backlash or kind of counterforce to what was this very rigid and somewhat dogmatic way of being in this country and globally, to some extent, although it wasn't as connected as we are now, so we can't see as much as going on. So there was some level of isolationism within your particular borders or wherever you chose to like geographically go. So this happened. And then like you said, there was this fall, there was this crushing. I hate to use the term reality struck back, but it wasn't sustainable. There was mistakes. There was these movements while explosive and incendiary didn't have the lasting power to potentially carry through and make this like a totally new culture within this country and globally. I see very similar things happening now, albeit in a very different way.

Obviously, this is shaped by the way we can communicate with the internet and where we are technologically and how that opens up so many other portals and doors. You mentioned podcasts, obviously, you know, any any creative endeavor potentially has the ability to get heard now. What's happening now, and I see this exactly like you said, the person in Indiana, so many people write in, send me emails were like, you know, I really appreciate this podcast. You tuned me into a lot of other things that I've actually read about an experience, but no one around me can actually talk about. So now these communities are kind of coming to the to the surface. I remember having conversations like this 15 years ago, so I was 18 years old. And I would say one out of maybe every 50 or 60 70 people I met who were my age at college out in Boston had any fucking idea what I was talking about to them. This was not really anything to do. Even if they had taken mushrooms, even if they had taken maybe some other psychedelics, sure, maybe that lifted the veil for a second, but a lot of them, it just seemed like an experience that either solidified their realities or their perspective rather than what happened to me when I was 15 and took LSD for the first time, which my entire world and conception of the world and universe and even my ego just got obliterated. And I was like, Holy shit. I didn't realize this is actually what's going on. And since then there has been, you know, various ups and downs and oscillations and explorations, which leads me to this point. So I think these cultural things are taking place again. I think it's aided and abetted by technology. We also have people like you and like Terrence McKenna and his brother Dennis and so many other people who have explored and investigated these things pretty much underground for the majority of the time, because this stuff, at least when we're delving into the psychedelic stuff hasn't been legal. So that has had to be a way that people explore it. So we have all this stuff going on. My question is to you, as we can talk about the cultural, the external, I'm just as much interested in the internal, what do you think we're doing here as humans? And what do you think the implications of the why we're here have on us? Like what like I asked this question not so pointedly to every guest, but I feel like I've heard you speak and I kind of know where you're coming from. And you've been mentioned in an email when we were going back and forth, you brought up, you know, crossing the liminal boundary between logic and magic, which just like couldn't have sounded more amazing to me. So my question is you have you're steeped in a scientific background and also a let's call it, I hate the term woo woo, but let's say this consciousness less a more fuzzy picture of what is going on in the world. What is your particular take on like what what are we as human? What is consciousness and and what is the purpose of it?

Well, you know, I'm I'm working on two, the two primary drivers of my intellectual life and my spiritual life, my mystical life are the questions I took up when I was 14, between about age 14 and 16. I remember walking out in the sagebrush hills in near my hometown in British Columbia and thinking, you know, and I just I don't know, read or seen a TV show or something like that. For me, at that moment, like I saw a plant rising up out of the ground, a little lily. It was the beginning of spring and the ground was no longer frozen. And I thought the power that moved that lily, the algorithm or the method that moved that lily to know when to come up and then to how to come up is got to be the most interesting thing that is. And then I my head went back into sort of a trip, almost like a is a kid, I was sort of living in a sort of an endogenous journey space a lot.

We do as kids, right? We're in imaginal worlds and everything. Right. So I didn't even at 14, that was still alive and well, that process. So I sort of rolled my little clock back and thought, when did this whole thing begin? How did all of life start? And then I remembered that Albert Einstein, who was a mystic, you know, the mystics always move science and knowledge forward, right? Newton was a mystic and Dick Hart and all these guys and Albert Einstein used to do thought experiments. He called him Gedanken experiments, thought experiments in German. And he would just sort of sit back and let it come to him. Let let the solution come in, not that he was working it out, because he realized he didn't have the power and the tools and the data yet to work things out. He needed to have it delivered from somewhere. You could say it's the subconscious or it's some bigger field, whatever. But all of the mystics believe that this field exists. I think that more than even believe it, they experience it. They use it as a tool. They use it as a tool. So I then stood up and I had my thirst for a thought experiment that was this seething mass of molecules moving in a group. And before I could ask it a question, it asked me a question. It's in the mind's eye kind of thing, you know, figure out how we made a copy of ourselves. And then I had a flash, which was, that's impossible, because you're a machine. And for a machine to make a copy of another machine, you need a much bigger machine, like a factory is big and it makes copies of automobiles, and then it winked at me. And so for the last 40 years, I've been on this quest, writing code, artificial life, cellular automata code, reading, meeting all the people holding conferences on on biology and evolution, and meeting all the people from Richard Dawkins to to Freeman Dyson and pursuing this pursuing this through my PhD through debates with Terrence late at night in his place about what a singularity is, you know, because he didn't really understand that stuff. You know, he didn't understand technology or what emergence was. He was a he read magazines, you know, he told stories, but he didn't have deep technical knowledge. So you know, he and I would have these little debates. But then it the flash came out of the ether, the thought experiments kept coming. The big ones where I would close my eyes and it would be three and a half hours of continuous immersion within a molecular soup, you know, cycling around and around, you know, that was a big one was about eight years ago. And thought experiments and endo trips, I call them where they're made endogenously, your own juices, and it's the mystical delivery.

So I would then cross the boundary, go into the magic into an endo trip, grab, you know, take what I could and bring it back into the mundane, bring it back into the space of the reductionist, go to my colleague at UC Santa Cruz, present a visionary idea at a conference, but framed in chemical language. No, the chemist is the most reductionist person on the planet. They're the most, you know, of course, Albert Hoffman was a chemist and he was he was mystical too, but these people are are so materialistic. So their field has trouble advancing because they don't think in terms of holistic systems. They're they're working with solutions, they do a reaction that winds down to equilibrium, they're doing individual things. There's a new field called system chemistry, which origin of life sort of is, but what happened over time is this whole process of circling into the magic to get this these visionary experiences through various techniques. Sure. And then doing the drawings, doing the writing, going to my colleagues, framing it in scientific language, it popped. So in 2013 was the final insight that led to this new theory of the origin of life. Right. And now it's in publication and two or three publications, it's been presented at least a dozen times at different labs to rooms full of Nobel prize-winning chemists. So here, here am I, you know, the kid that just does visionary stuff that took computer science, but not chemistry. And I found myself last January in Galveston, Texas at the Gordon Research Conference, which is very, very high-end meeting. It's held every two years and this one's on the origin of life. I won best poster. So I we did a fantastic graphic of this cycling origin of life within the context of an archaean volcanic island and how the whole thing does and you know, happens in one poster and at one best poster. So here I am in the evening doing a plenary session. And there's no bellists there and there's a room full of these chemists. And believe me, and I had a script that I didn't, Dave and I worked through. But here I am the doing the magic thing, but turning it into the language with that room of reductionists and they're all looking and they're seeing this huge system that they never would have seen using their techniques without visionary techniques, without opening to crossing the liminal boundary. They never would have caught this. And it was a great pleasure for me because after 40 years, there they are, they're seeing something that that is kind of breathtaking because it's a complete theory, chemical end-to-end theory of the original life that's testable in their labs because we presented them seven predictions. And at the end of the talk, one person put their hand up and said, you've got the only game in town. So that that was evidence for the power of the mystical approach of opening to the whatever is the subconscious, the liminal boundary, the magic, whatever. It worked again. And it turns out that this new theory has the power to absolutely transform human philosophy and the thinking about our civilization and where we're going. And this is getting back to your original question. What are people for, which is what Kurt Vonnegut asked in one of his books or commencement addresses in between telling people to floss? He asked, you know, what are people for? And if we discover in the lab with these seven testable predictions, that we can make a progenote in the lab, that we can make the thing, which is on the way to life, that's an evolving chemical system encapsulated in lipid protoselles, that is moving up the gradient, it's the operating system of life starting to boot up.

If we can see that in the lab, what we will learn is that we had a communal beginning. We did not have a beginning as individual cells, like most of those charts show you going back into the Arkean period and it shows first cells. Right. Amoeba. Right. And one thing fighting another, but it's not the case. If this model is shown, we started as a as a communal aggregate of cooperating entities, which in fact is what biology still is. You know, the whole the whole earth is still an aggregate of what's called a microbial map community. So this brings up something, I mean, and I'm sure you know this, and I'm sure you've spoken to people at this, this lines up with every single mystical tradition, every single philosophy that really plunges into this, there is this undeniable fact that seems to be at the bottom of all these things that everything is interconnected.

Right. If we're we can be talking about this on a spiritual level, touch the web here, it affects it somewhere else. We see that in Native American traditions, we talk in Vedanta and Vedic terms, they talk about how everything is connected. The theory of karma or the logic of karma is predicated on an interdependence of everything. And what you're talking about, is this your coupled phases model, what you're talking about. And the magical gel progenote that you might have seen in the paper. I did. The little blob at the bottom. Yeah, exactly. And I mean, I was reading about how you came up with a theory and who you worked with. And it was fascinating to me because this supports kind of what I was alluding to too with this podcast is about how could it be about anything else. It's this aspect of community, this collective, this thing that attaches everyone in some way. This is one of the reasons that I really got into Carl Jung is when he started talking about the collective unconscious and that there could be a repository or reservoir where shared symbols, mythologies, you know, archetypes all resided. But nevertheless, we're typically below the threshold of our consciousness. And going back to the experience of psychedelics, one of the things that I learned very much from them is this concept of an ego and how limited this concept of an ego actually is when it comes to perceiving reality or what is actually going on.

And much the same way we were talking about chemists. And you know, what I think you were describing is they zoom in. They're trying to see specifically what is this made of how does it interact? How do these things come together? How do they, what happens when we do this? And from a holistic point of view, it's zooming out. You have to get a bird's eye view of how all this stuff fits together. So when you're talking about using these visionary techniques to, you know, be in the Dow, be in the flow, be in the ether, you know, tap into this intuitive aspect of this stuff that exists out there, I find this is another thing I was listening to you on Duncan's podcast that I found incredibly interesting. You were talking about how you could shift roles easily in your own mind. So you could go and talk with Dennis and Terrence about mushrooms and psychedelic tricks, but then you could also go and talk to military people about how do we approach this, like, very difficult issue that we're trying to do. We're talking to space people, like, Hey, how do we, how would we potentially mine asteroids or haven't is that even possible, which we found out it's not really that possible, is it? But it's this concept of roles is something that has fascinated me, honestly, going back to I was an early child, because I'm one of those people who never quite understood how these I saw social groups and clicks and people aggregating together based on interest form. And I'm part of them, obviously, but I was also one of those people who could shift from group to group to group to group to group and communicate and notice within myself, either a subtle changes on the outside, but internally, how I remained the same and could shift into these different modes of consciousness. So I thought that was fascinating. If you could talk a little bit about that and what you were kind of alluding to or referencing when you were talking about shifting roles from place to place. Yeah, I figured that when I was a little kid, just like you, I felt sort of outside the clicks as you call them here in the US and you know, the gaggles of kids that sort of form because I figured, you know, kids don't know a lot, you know, they're not very civilized. They're kind of clueless. And so any kind of organization or thing they form can't be very good, actually. So I figured, you know, I'll just stay outside and I'll observe it. So I'll watch the marble games and I'll watch the sports and I'll watch the gangs and I'll be chased by the gangs now and then because I'm not inside any group. And I just observed and growing up in Canada, Canada's got a whole culture of that. Canada has a chameleon culture. So it's not very nationalistic. It observes the Soviet Union. It observed the US it observed England and France because those are the big colonial powers around it. And it had to learn how to deal with all of those entities that were on its borders or, you know, controlling its destiny for a while. So Canadians are super adaptable. So as soon as they get into a country, they just become the country, they become it. And and they don't take their identity with them a lot of the time. So when I came to the US, it was I came inculcated with this this training. So what I figured was America's this big TV show, you know, when I grew up, you know, there was Watergate and all this nonsense going on. And we would watch American TV and watch like, okay, now they're doing this.

Now they're doing that. This is this is what this country is. It's not really a country at all. It's it's it's a series of competing interests that push and shove like there's no plan. So I figured you know, the best thing to do is to go into as many cultures as I can and load their cultural operating systems. I love that. I love that. So Terrence used to say, you know, I think Terrence was right in the one that he would say, don't load Catholicism 8.1 or new age with 1.2, you know, don't identify with them. Don't completely become new age network 1.2. Right. You know, he he would try to load we toe toe 9.0 because we toe toe 9.0 meant that you knew how to catch fish, you know, with a single wine, and you knew how to identify birds and stuff that was their cultural OS.

But I took courses in ethnography at college, which teaches you how to understand how the language people are using is is very loaded. So for instance, in the culture of heating engineers, the word the system is really powerfully culturally loaded. They use it all the time, the system, you know, it's the heating system, but it means so many things. It's not just a bunch of ductwork. No, no, this is a central cultural meme for heating and cooling engineers, you know, and you have to just kind of become them to understand the power of that term. Waitresses, they have their own terms, you know, all these cultures. And I got fascinated with it. So as I moved through American society, I knew that I wanted to do science and tech and I wanted to be involved in cultural frontage transformation, all these sorts of things. So I decided just to become all of it. So I became involved in a Pentagon think tank, worked with anthropologists, you know, went to the Islamic world and worked with Islamic software development and banking to and when I would go to Pakistan, where I may be going again in a couple of months, I would wear my my chapels and my roll hat and my right, you know, a couple of Sundays, I would go out into the market. I looked just like a push tune. So then I would walk through the markets and I would just say, will salamalikum and the guys with the big machine guns would be just because they see you as a push tune in your tall. They always respect bush tune. So I would try to be the push to push the guy. And I would just return that and just be very gracious. And I felt the immense respect that they have for push tunes or push, you know, patons, they call them. And it's not that I'm trying to, you know, do anything, you know, kind of nefarious. I'm just trying to be inside the skin and feel like it is like. And so, so then you become, and this is what Duncan and I talked about, you become as you put on these skins and then take them off and put on another one, you become very, very malleable and flexible.

So that's right. So then the you that there's no hardcore you, there's just the little observer, and you accept people. So you accept the evangelical, you know, because you have empathy and empathy allows you to run their OS. And because you can run their OS, you can reach them. And because you can reach them, you can pass them cultural memes. So one example is a evangelical friend of mine, who I introduced to the work of Elaine Pagels. So Elaine Pagels is a Stanford, I think she may be back. He she's a scholar of early biblical writings, notably the Nag Hammadi library, which was found it's I think it's the late first early first century set of scrolls that were found in Egypt in the late 1940s. It is the earliest writings about the community of Jesus, but it's from the perspective of the Gnostics, not the dominant form of Christianity that emerged later through the councils of Nicaea. Right. And and the the Nag Hammadi library is a mind-blower because it has poems and jokes. And it's very close to what that the community around Jesus and Mary Magdalene was. Yes. And so I actually sent this to my friend because we get along because I've been to his services. I felt the the power that they release. Yes. You know, the Jesus power is amazing. Of course. Amazing. One of I love it. There's the other way to say it. So and I sent him this and I knew that because I had sort of somatically become him to join his community and been accepted, I could send him these books and I sent him that and I sent him that he got the gospel of the gospel of Judas, which was translated by the National Geographic Society. It's literally Judas Iscariot, supposedly the evil guy that turns in Jesus, but it's completely different. I mean, it wasn't that at all. You know, it's a it's a mind-blowing thing. And when he got the the gospel of Judas, he said, this explains so much for me that didn't ring true in evangelical or sort of hardcore, even the Roman Catholic apostolic description of what went down. It never made sense.

It never rang true to me. This does. This does. And this is so much more powerful of a story to us because what are we trying to do here in our evangelical mission? We're trying to get back to the original heart and spirit of who Jesus was. That's what we're trying to do. We don't give a shit about really the whole framework. But that if you can give us a story that's closer to help us in our mission. So that was an example of a skin changing to make transformation possible because he never would have looked into this stuff, you know, especially for somebody like me. Well, I mean, what you're talking about is something that I've also been fundamentally interested in, which is shifting your perspective. The more perspectives you can view a singular situation from the clearer it's going to appear, you get a 360 view of you. Good point. Yeah, absolutely.

Right. And so when you're able to shift perspectives and then communicate from a perspective that someone else is coming from, you then get to do exactly what you said. You can introduce things that maybe, if you were coming from a different perspective, would never have gotten through the kind of cell membrane of their particular where they're coming from. So this then becomes easily, in my mind, like a top three skill for incarnated beings because this then allows you to introduce especially if you've gone and I don't know if you look at it like this, I tend to believe all of my experiences point to one thing, whether spiritual, whether intellectual, whether direct experience, whether emotional, they all seem to point to a universal truth. And this universal truth has aspects to it that also are explicitly spoken about in traditions, but also experience.

And what you're talking about with Jesus, I find is fascinating, this Christ consciousness. I had a mushroom trip in, I want to say the early 2000s. And I can only describe, it was actually a series of mushroom trips. It's happened every single time I took them. I tapped into Christ consciousness. All I can say is I felt the heart of Christ. I knew what it like, I knew what it was like to think like Christ. And this is potential blasphemy for an evangelical, if you're saying this. But I felt what it was actually the right through a psychedelic experience. And it stayed with me forever. It's something that regardless, one could say that's a transient delusion that you're experiencing. But what it actually felt like is something that is indelible and stays with me. And I was able to experience it. And it's this loving energy that I do think is very powerful and transformative for people. And what you're talking about evangelicals, you better believe in conversations like this, I will evangelize Christ forever. I think it's an incredibly powerful energy. And it's also related and I think, you know, symbolically portrayed in many different cultures is many different things. My guru who is disembodied is Neem Krolli Baba.

And he famously said that Hanuman and Christ are one. And if you really start delving into that and looking at what they both stood for and all their stories and the mythology behind them, it's very easy to conclude that it is the exact same energy, maybe in just a different skin and culturally different. But getting back to the point about this, being able to switch skins and rolls and then introduce other things. If everyone could cultivate this skill, we would be able to actually communicate with each other rather than falling into which is great as I see the potential for this world and the people on it and all of everything else. It's hard to deny that the polarization that's taking place culturally seems to be getting more exacerbated.

Whether that's aided by technology, whether it's amplified, I'm not totally sure yet. It could have been there. We might just be seeing it now for the first time. But that aspect of polarizations and this us first them paradigm, which cuts now almost on a biological level based on what you're saying. This us first them paradigm doesn't actually exist. It's not really a real thing. It's a figment of our imaginations because we perceive the world the way we do. This is another force that's at play and this skill of being able to switch modalities, switch skins and communicate seems like a necessary and needed antidote to that polarization. That's why I like to touch on this so much because it's like a real medicine for this. If everyone was able to harness that skill as much as possible, I think the world would undeniably be a better place.

Here's a good example. One of our listeners, for instance in this podcast, is connected with the for any for lack of a better term with Trump land. They're listening in Trump land and they're also a hunter. I grew up in a hunting country in Canada and in school, every kid was required to go to a class where we just took a shotgun and took the shells out to unload weapons because they're in homes with people. They shoot, they get me some moose meat and they they hunt in this like a primary meat source in some of the communities. So we are taught about all that. But say, for instance, one of your Trump land listeners says, you know, I'm a visionary type of dude, but I'm also part of this community. I'm an NRA lifetime member of blah, blah, blah. And what we could suggest to him is like, Hey, you want to do the skin thing? Why don't you go because for good, why don't you go to a rally, right? That's coming up. Because now your your your leaders isolated, right? And so he's gonna start, he's gonna start going crazy because he's isolated from his own party and he starts to go off, right? Yeah, just a little hello. Now what you do, because for the betterment of your community, you know, you've got a hand you can't necessarily handle that leader, but as he goes up the scale and starts talking about, you can use your second amendment rights, like you, you know, go out and start shooting people. So that's what everybody's worried about.

But because you're in the culture, you come into that crowd, right, before Trump speaks or whatever. And you say, Hey boys, you know about how we are, how we get excited, right? And we know that this guy is going to come and get us excited. And we know that if some of our friends start bringing weapons to the rally, it's not going to be good. And all of his good old boys are going to say, you are so right, it will not be good if some of our people come to the rally with weapons. And we notice that at the gate there, they're not checking everything, right? They're not checking that guy's guitar cakes. They're not doing an everything. We have to do this, because we do not want this. If we were going out hunting, we'd be really careful with, you know, you don't have a loaded weapon in the vehicle, you get out of the gas station, you got an open window and somebody's grabbed your load of what you don't do that, you just keep your weapon, keep your things in unloaded in Iraq or keep your ammo separate from the gun. You know, this is how we would be. So what we need to do, and this could start a movement within within those rallies is like, this guy is probably going to do this. But we're smarter than that. We're not going to do that. But but some of our guys, some of our guys are hot heads, they're going to get all thing up. Therefore, we need to self organize, and we need to police the no weapons policy at these rallies. And if we go to a polling place, and we see some of our guys who we know and love, they come up to them, we say, you cannot bring a weapon. You want to do this whole thing about fixing elections, but you are not allowed to bring a weapon here. And we're telling you, because we're Trump supporters, we don't want it, period. So then that one person goes in like a shaman, because they already know the cultural operating system, they talk to their people, and they prevent a catastrophe, you know, which is we're really this close to this catastrophe, the weaponization or guys shooting automatic weapons in a crowd now into the air. They don't understand the bullets have to come down. And they just don't know they don't they don't have a clue. So this would be a great cultural skin change for one of our people to go in and just like prevent this catastrophe. Because moving us forward into the future is as much as as much about preventing disaster than it is about finding way forward.

You know, I mean, I agree to a large extent. I mean, I wonder how I look at all of this stuff that's going on in the world, not all this stuff, but some of the stuff that's going on nationally, regionally, globally. And I agree, if we can have people who are mindful, aware, conscientious about these things, go in and be able to do these skin shifting things, these, these modality shifts. I think that would be incredibly useful. But I also wonder, there are conditions and causes like, I am not someone who is ready to say that all Trump supporters are horrible people. I'm not ready to say that they're even wrong necessarily because they support Trump. I do not agree with almost anything Trump says. I disagree fervently with the way he presents himself. I find him to be callous and cruel and xenophobic and racist. And that precludes me from ever really delving too much into the person. That said, I know why some people do support Trump. I know that there are people who are in economically deprived parts of the country who need someone to tell them that I can fix this for you, that the systems and the paradigms that you have grown up with, even though they're crumbling, I can rebuild them. Look at me. I'm a good businessman. And that is a hopeful thing. That's the last thing at a Pandora's box. It was hope, right? So that's something that's easy for people to latch on to and say, this is why I support them. However, going in and trying to culturally change the minds, not even change the minds because I don't think you can do that. But what I think you can do is similar to what you're describing, trying to self organize or bring in other concepts or ideas that can organically grow within communities to then change them from the inside out. That I think is possible. But I wonder how do we begin to do that? Because let's just use the blanket terms, progressives and liberals. Most of the people I know and associate with would consider themselves progressive or liberal. They're either we're going to vote for Bernie Sanders and they're likely voting for Hillary because they're just terrified, not even because they necessarily love her.

But I see how quickly when you turn on a debate, and I've watched these debates, and I watch them for a specific reason, part of its entertainment. But part of it is to see the reactions that happen pre during and post. And, you know, I'm watching my wife who is one of the sweetest, nicest, just loveliest people. And she's just sit, listen to him say, rip and babies on. She's like, I fucking hate this guy. Like, I hate this guy. And it's real genuine hatred. And so the hatred that he's creating or people like him create really is met very often with this reaction of just hatred back. It's an I for an I type thing. Getting people to pause and take a look at what that ultimately creates, I think, is the challenge. And I don't have any solutions for this. I bring it up to talk about it because I think it's something that would be good if we think about these things.

But I do wonder, like, how do these organisms, these communities, these collectives, begin to self regulate, especially when the language and all of the extra stuff on top of this stuff is really what people seem to be focusing on. They're not digging down like a chemist into, like, the inner workings of why people feel like this. They don't care about the military industrial complex and the global economics and corporations. They know that their life is this way. This guy saying this, that's bullshit and fuck him. So my guess one of my questions is how outside of having conversations like this, creating spaces that allow and promote that type of conversation and thought, what can we do to kind of alleviate, like, these disasters, which what you're talking about. It is disaster relief. I mean, that that we have to make sure these things don't happen. And there is preventative in a lot of ways. But then I look like also, just going to that, like, look at the climate change, how much did our national, our presidents, and not that I put a tremendous amount of weight into what the president can get done or can't get done, but they didn't even mention that the planet is burning up. Like they didn't mention that, like, I'm sitting here in October, and maybe this is just anecdotal evidence, but it's like 80 degrees outside on the east coast. I remember growing up here and it was snowing now, like there was snow on the ground. So like, what, how do we begin to shift the discursive, what here's the analogy I'll give? When you sit down to meditate or once it's down to meditate and you haven't done it before, you get all these discursive thoughts. You get these emotions. It's just like a whirlwind of stuff.

I feel like culturally the world is caught in this whirlwind of discursive thoughts. So how do we collectively begin to get below that, settle in a little bit and start experiencing what's actually going on and then maybe make some positive changes? How do we, what do you think? How do we do that? Well, from my little realm position outside as the observer, what I'm seeing, there's two forces climbing. So the force on one side is the discursive thought. It's the force of ideas, ideologies, figuring out engineering solutions, accusations, everything to do with thought, everything to do with story that we're lost in this story. And there's more and more stories coming, more and more and more and more and more and more and more stories. Should we believe in Black lives, manner now? Should we do this or that? But this thing is climbing rapidly through social media, through technology, which is all a creation of thought and a creation of story. But this thing can only climb, this may be a little weird to try to get your head around. This thing can only climb the way it is if it's pushing on its opposite. So what the opposite is, is this incredible force of a thin veil into the magic. Like the veil into the magic is getting thinner and thinner and thinner. That's right. And younger and younger people are like, they pop in and out, pop in and out, pop in and out. And the magic is super powerful. Why? Because Gaia, if you believe in Gaia, the totality of life and Gaia includes us, is reaching this sort of, so where were we?

Gaia, you were talking about the force of the veil getting thinner and Gaia collectively. Yeah. When you go to drink ayahuasca in the rainforest, you get tapped into, you know, if LSD was the drug of the 60s, it made the Hade Ashbury happen that made the woodstock and all this love energy came out through through that and creativity and, you know, everything that we see culturally here. Let me I'm going to grab my water bottle. Sure, no problem. I'm getting growly. So these powerful tools come in at certain times and LSD was one of them, you know, that came in burst on the scene in the early to mid 60s. Well, if ayahuasca is that tool now, because it's just sort of unprecedented and it's spread, what is that tool? That's the voice of Gaia, you know. So, you know, Dennis McKenna will illustrate this far better than I can, but so you have this incredible, these two things riding up and the second one is riding up and one of them is just pure magic and power. So when I was walking around symbiosis, you know, three weeks ago, I was realizing this looks, this feels to me like the Middle Ages, the late Middle Ages here, because you have circus, you have performers, you have magicians, you have, you know, conjurers, you have Jedi here, like the powerful sort of energy healer type Jedi personality that was that walked between villages in Europe from the Upper Paleolithic all the way to the late Middle Ages, that that individual is now back on the scene. That's right. The medicines, the circles, all these practices, and they're so powerful. And there's a wave also that's beyond humans that is rising, then we can feel it, you know, whether it's incredible coincidence or the incredible rapid pace of things, the incredible, like, for instance, listening to, you know, infected mushroom, you know, listening to, you know, converting vegetarians by infected mushroom, I realize there's what an incredible power has been released on this earth that somebody could do that. It could create music like that that blends in that has literally every genre of music is in there. And it's such a powerful interweaving. So, so all this is happening and it's climbing together. So it's matching itself perfectly. And then what you're seeing is that the veil between the story world and the magic is getting thinner and thinner and thinner as the same climbs up and people who are informed can jump across. So they can jump back and forth and back and forth and they can actually merge it and blend it. And it's reaching some, it'll reach a concresence of some kind where more and more people are having openings, true openings to some kind of awakened state than ever before. Oh, it's insane. Yeah, it's insane. So, so where does this all go? Well, why is this happening? I believe it's happening because human beings are the reproductive organs of Gaia and James Lovelock's new book called Rough Ride to the Future, which is no book about climate change. In one of the chapters, he writes that the Terminator, no, this is perhaps my term for it, there's a line in space that that gobbled up Venus a long time ago and turned it into a hot house hell is approaching the earth. And what he means by that is in today, there's 1.35 watts of energy placed on the earth surface by the sun within 100 million years. And that's a very relatively short period of time. It'll be up to 1.5 watts because the star is going up this main sequence in terms of its output. What Lovelock calculated and you have to believe this guy who discovered the ozone hole and all that. But believe him, he said his calculations work out that by that time, the Terminator crosses over earth, we can have zero CO2 in the atmosphere, zero, or we go to a runaway greenhouse. So, we're about to join Venus. And other models have said in the past that it's billions of years, complex life in terms of plants and animals and things in the sea will exist for quite a while, then the sea will evaporate, et cetera, et cetera.

Well, it may be that that Terminator is a hard and fast thing and that if Gaia is an awareness, you know, if the whole planet, the whole Constitution of the planet is a thing, its end is approaching. And it's approaching a lot sooner than was originally, you know, we thought in our science. So, perhaps there's a force at work that is saying these humans, we can't try again with intelligent spiders, you know, we're out of it, we're out of time. I mean, these humans are some of the only complex life that has emerged for a very long time in a very large distance. We're finding out how rare we potentially are. This is it for a complex life to shoot through that profundium into a state where it is maintainable, where it is not going to fall back and be lost. So, when life reaches a barrier, it evolves to move beyond it. Just like antibiotics block the evolution of temporarily of small cells of micro microbial communities and they burst beyond that barrier. And we're up against this barrier, which is called our own survival.

So, that's a huge evolutionary pressure that is evolving humans very rapidly, because our survival is the pressure on us and the planet's capacity, but also our psychology, everything, and we're doing really well so far. I mean, we're evolving so quickly, you know, we're the most peaceable, least violent period in human history. People are healthier than they've ever been. They're connected with all these devices. We're innovating faster. We're doing really, really well. So, right now that the news is good, the noise is loud, but the news is good. We're pushing through that barrier right now. And on the other hand, if you, there's this new BBC film called hypernormalization that's just come out this week, it gives you a chilling look at the other of that side, that locked inside, that lost in story side, comparing the era that we're in now to the old Soviet Union. So, the old Soviet Union was described often by philosophers as a hypernormalization society where people just sort of bought into what was kind of a ludicrous system, but they all went along with it until it collapsed. And, but the hypernormalization system built by capitalism is incredibly, it's a serpent wrapping around human civilization. It is tough. It is tough to beat and it is comprehensive. And if you watch this BBC, watch the trailer of this thing, it's just very, very chilling. What this thing is, it's not a Wu Wu thing at all. So, no, I get it. We're fighting, you know, human beings are pushing up there. All of this is all part of our evolution, because I'll let you see a few words. I have a story to tell you, which is maybe the explanation of where all this comes from, but I got to catch my breath now. Yeah, I want to mention a few things, then tell a story, then I have questions, and then we're going to wrap it up because, A, I mean, if you're up for it, I'd love to do another one of these. This has been really fun. But I want to mention a few things you're talking about this, this pushing up against this magic and the discursive thought. I intuitively have felt, and also you mentioning that more and more people seem to be getting crossing over and being plucked out. I've noticed that just in my life, my very limited anecdotal experience. I've seen more and more people get tuned into whatever is going on. I have always kind of conceived it, and I was also just to harken back to what you were saying a bit earlier. When you were talking about Jesus, you mentioned Mary Magdalene, which I think is incredibly important that she's not glossed over because this taps into a more mystical feminine energy, which I think, in my experience, is kind of what shaping this magic pushup that's going on. And that's why I think it's also interesting that Iowaska, I've never done it. But from what I hear, all the experiences that have been relayed to me, it is perceived quite often as a motherly or feminine type of energy. And I think this is Gaia itself would be that type of energy. And I don't want to ascribe too many qualities to femininity, because I think we're not talking about gender or sexes. We're talking about qualities of being the yin and the yang, so to speak. But that's what I've experienced in my historical perspective of life, is that there seems to be the qualities attributed to feminine divinity, compassion, kindness, generosity, these open, and, you know, let's talk about the negative ones too, or the scary ones, destruction, you know, stripping everything down the Kali in Hinduism, a demonic looking thing that creates a new the world, but also destroys it. I think that is the energy that is kind of being pushed up against what our paradigm has been for the past, I don't know, 2500 years, which is this very, um, patriarchal dominated society, where literally from all of the real many of the Abrahamic religions, at least all of them, have just completely cut out or denigrated the female perspective and all this stuff, the cult, the Isis cults in Egypt, all of these amazing anthropically, you know, I'm reading a great book, I'm going through it very slowly by Joseph Campbell called goddesses is fascinating to see with like systematic surgical accuracy how the feminine was just completely wiped away. And what it feels like to me is a rebalancing or reemergence of this energy that is kind of shaping where we're going. And I'm also, I just want to say I'm incredibly happy to hear you say, because this is what I believe to, and there's plenty of problems in the world, we're not saying that there is, and I think that's a function of the world, I don't think it's a mistake, I think there's supposed to be problems. But I like to hear you say that we are doing well, this is the least violent period in history, people are living for longer.

And while those aren't necessarily the only important benchmarks for a society that's doing well, I know more people now, who even if they're not quote unquote truly happy, are at least trying to understand how to be happy, the conditions for happiness, definite, you know, and I see that around me and that's encouraging too. So I'll let you tell your story. So there's a couple of stories, but just briefly, one of the talks I've been giving in the last year or two is about the temple at a lusus in Greece. And you mentioned some of the Egyptian ceremonies that so in the fire in the sky podcast on the levity zone, it finishes with that.

And if the listeners don't know about this, this was an initiation right, a mystery school run for almost a couple of thousand years, 1700 years in Greece. And it got so advanced that they built the temple complex that could see 1000 people in a sunken temple every September to go through the greater mysteries. And all these people, they could be a fisherman, they could be a future Caesar, could be Cleopatra, you know, anyone had the right to go once in their life and be initiated. And this was not like a religious thing. This was not like going to school. This was a full ego dissolving, what is believed to be a psychedelic initiation that basically booted the the world of antiquity into existence. And so what what happened is people would come from all over the Mediterranean arrive in Athens in January and February, and it was just not easy to to travel in those days. They would wear the same white robes, they would be welcomed by the community and as the initiants. And then they would go through these this preparatory cycle of rendering them down to being equal human beings. So by the time they walked up to the plains at a lusus over that narrow bridge, where the villagers came out to cat call them, to, you know, bring them down, they were finally brought down like the nobleman, whose young nobleman who's going across the bridges, screamed at by the old man saying, yes, you proud creature that you are, you're going to be crooked and old like me anytime soon. So take yourself down a notch. Now they would get to the temple complex and they were a community, they were a tribe by that time, they were just so rendered down, this is a thousand people. And they would then go through nine days of ceremony. And on the ninth day, the women who made this brew and who ran the temple complex, not all women, but their women would dance into the complex and there was sound and music and, you know, like a good festival, like good production values. And they would hand out these cups that had the Kaikion in it and the people would drink it down and they would sit around the edge of the temple and wait. And then the light would rise and it was the light of Persephone returning from Hades. And this is one of the great myths of the Levant and the Mediterranean, this return of life of the feminine returning with life for the spring, you know, to bring life back to the earth. But Plato describes this as being so far beyond words that, you know, his philosophy was a shadow of what he experienced at the temple of the Lusus. And this thing basically created human beings out of the warrior culture of the Upper Paleolithic. So then this is what happens. So the entire modern or the classical world boots up, you've got the theater, you've got aqueducts, engineering, the polity, workable political systems, currencies, trade, language, libraries, everything, right, boots up on the back of these, these initiations and openings that people were given, because it leveled out society and open human beings. And then as Rome fell prey to a corruption and Rome just sort of was imploding in the first few centuries of this of the first millennium, you came up to the point where Christianity, which had started and people don't realize this Christianity had begun was certainly with with Jesus. But Jesus, his meeting with the community of John the Baptist is where Christianity started.

What was John the Baptist doing? A psychedelic initiation. What John the Baptist was doing, and this was common in the Mediterranean at the time, was near death experience. So what they would do is they take the initiate as another initiation, just like a Lusus, they push your head under the water, hold the hand over the nose and mouth so you couldn't breathe in water, right, and take you and somebody else was holding the hand over the heart to feel the heart rate. They would take you to the tunnel of death upon which you would see a light, the light. And this was potentially a DMT release as we were starting to understand that these profound experience can be flushes of DMT.

This has got to be something acting, you know, an actor, then they would pull you up by the hair, you know, if you had long hair like mine back in the day, and you would take that breath and you were reborn, right that. So John the Baptist was doing a psychedelic class endogenously initiation, right. When Jesus heard about them, he went down to the river to look for them, and they saw him coming. They looked in his eyes, and they said this guy is present in a kind of VR, but he has not been baptized. He's already there. And they sat in a circle and they wrote the Aramaic Lord's Prayer, which is an amazing document. If you ever get a chance to read it, there's several translation of the original Lord's Prayer. It's so current to where we are. It was so dumb down and perverted later, but the original Lord's Prayer was written then and there in that circle. Now, wind the clock forward and then we'll finish our story. So here you have this movement, you know, of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, it splits Mary Magdalene's church goes south into Egypt.

It's all about equality. It's all about all these things that we read about in the Gnostic Gospels, and you read her gospel. She's an amazing character. And then Paul, who's the pissed off, you know, basically the drummer of the band, takes Christianity north and it becomes a corporate thing. It becomes adopted by Constantine. It becomes a male hierarchical thing with all the trappings and they go through four councils in the 4th century and they're nasty affairs, you know. They split up. The Orthodox go here and the apostolic church goes here. I've read that whole history and that's a real that's a real horror show, you know, the foundation of these churches. You would never want to ever walk in their doors. And so in 396, the Pauline Christians and their Black robes, they leave Constantinople on the road to Elusis and their mission is to eliminate the competition. And they meet, happen to meet. This is one of the great chances of history because it's recorded that this was an accidental meeting and you can imagine, they meet Alaric, who's coming in to do the semi-annual raiding of cities. And he's, he represents the old tribal bloodlust culture of the Germanic tribes. He comes in, they meet him and they, they pay him coin. They pay Alaric. And this is much worse than the supposed coin, you know, paid to, you know, crucify Jesus. This coin was paid to Alaric to follow them to Elusis where they would be the wrecking crew to destroy the temple, which they did. And it was the definitive ending destruction of that entire 2000 year tradition of creating civilization and, and you know, moderating people, opening people to become human beings. So they then replaced that system with a do a tax paying book following, mind-based, story-based, male hierarchical system that would allow you contact with the power of the light, the ineffable, only at death, you know, after all, if you followed all the rules and paid your taxes, such a deal. And then they substituted fake hosts, you know, bits of bread, bits of wine here, and they substituted fake things for the original Baccalaurean elixirs, you know. And so you can nail it, you can totally nail it to that event, that year that the church was born, the corporation was born, the state was born, you know, you know, pension plans, everything from this, this, this replacement of your right to be initiated into this light early in your life. So that makes you a better human being, which all tribal cultures knew about, which our civilization was based upon, and they replaced it with this new system that we're now struggling to heave off. And we are, you know, heaving it off, we are, because we're transforming it. You know, the corporation today is not the same as a corporation of 50 years ago, it's getting transformed, but the return of initiation has come. That's, you know, that is fascinating. And here's the deal, I would love to have you on again, because I feel like we could talk for a very long time about a lot of really interesting things. And I have a feeling that a lot of listeners are going to enjoy this one a lot, which is I was blown away when I heard you on Duncan, but I want to end this conversation with four questions, three really quick ones for however you want to answer. So the first question is, what's your favorite color? It's kind of an aqua marine pale blue. I love it. I love it. It's mine too. It really is. What's your favorite number? Boy, you know, it's anything to do with threes.

So three, six and nine, you know, I love it. I do know. What's your favorite animal? Oh, the cat. Oh, cat's great. Cat is great. Okay. And the last question is, if you were to give a practical piece of advice, something that's actionable for people who are listening to this, what would it be? And take that to mean whatever you want. I think if you are feeling anxious or depressed by anything, something you see in the media, something that you perceive about your life, take a breath, pull back from it, try to separate from that anxiety and be separate from it. Don't be it, because that's the universal way to establish levity again in your system that things are actually all right. You're just you were just sort of falling into story for a moment or story was coming to grab you from outside. And you have the power to say no to those kinds of stories.

Oh, man, that is beyond perfect. I had a friend who unfortunately passed away. He was the smartest, wisest, nicest person I ever met. And he always used to say when his friends were going through our times, he was always something you could talk to. He would always say, that's just a story you're telling yourself. That's just a story. You don't actually have to believe it. So I love that you bring that up or reminds me of him. Bruce, thank you so much for doing this. I'd love to connect. Yeah, I'd love to connect in some other ways too. I think there's a lot of cool stuff where we could maybe do some crossover things. And we'll stay in contact. Absolutely. And I'll thank you for having me on this wonderful synchronous show. I think it was very synchronous to be here with you.

We too. Thank you so much. We'll talk to you. Bye bye. Yeah, I'm going to say side note here. So you may have noticed some of the in the past few weeks that I'm repeating some of the music here. It's because I haven't had time to get into the studio. And when I say studio, sit down on my computer and make music. I am actually going to have a studio when we move in a few months, which is going to be great. And I'm going to be making some more music. So to people who have been asking and saying nice things and kind words about your music, there's more coming. I just got to get to it. We're in a pretty busy time right now.

But getting to the episode, seriously, if you enjoyed Bruce, even in the slightest, please subscribe to his podcast, The Levity Zone with Dr. Bruce Damer. It's incredible. If you want to learn more about Bruce, check out Syncpodcast.com, mindpodnetwork.com, check out this episode, page. There will be links to all of his stuff. He's an incredibly interesting guy and really also just like a kind-hearted, open-minded fellow. Like, I can't get better than that. So thank you again to everyone who listens past the music. Maybe I'll put a little treat in there for you next week. Stay tuned for that. And then until then, I will see you next week. Hey there. It's Wayfair here. We're delivery and set up our as easy as a few taps on your phone. You're relaxing in an old hammock, scrolling Wayfair's app when you spot it. A brand new patio set. Next thing you know, Wayfair delivers it right to your patio and sets it up. Oh, you need a new grill, too? All right, Wayfair's got you covered.

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