Psychosis and Synchronicity

[Music] [Music] [Music] Welcome to Synchronicity solo episode this week. I had some very interesting things go on last week. Don't worry there. Guess coming next week. I got some really cool interviews scheduled. But I wanted to take the time to talk about in this episode something that I've spoken about a few times before. Definitely in the origin story of synchronicity and how this podcast came to be and kind of my experiences back in the early 2000s that led to an encounter. It led to an incredible synchronous experience that lasted an extended period of time. What got me kind of on this tangent for this episode is last week I was a guest on a wonderful radio show by Dr. Bernie Bightman.

Basically connecting with coincidence is the name of the show and I've linked to it in the episode page and notes on this podcast so you can go listen to it. Which really kind of drew out a recapitulation of my experience back early in the 2000s. So if you want to hear that there's some interesting kind of nuance that I may not have covered on this show. But one of the themes that emerged is this idea of psychosis and synchronicity and the relationship between them. And I know this from my conversations with Shane Moss who's been on the show three times and talked about his experiences two of those times related to kind of synchronicity and psychosis and mental illness and just kind of dissociative states of consciousness.

You know we really delved into it. In addition I've had a lot of people reach out who have had similar experiences and one of those people who we Dr. Bernie Bightman spoke about on his show actually reached out to me and I'm speaking to him later today. And I'm going to get a lot more into this in this episode. But I have very exciting news I teased it last week. I gave you my qualifications my prerequisites for having actual advertisers on the show. And I am very happy to announce a new sponsor of the show is for Sigmatic. You may know them from their mushroom coffees. I had never tried their products before so I said listen. I'm interested in you guys being sponsors Kelly McLean from the Dow of Comedy put me in touch.

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All right. Back to the main focal point of this episode, which is psychosis and synchronicity. So back in 2003, 2004, I've mentioned this before. You can go back and listen to the episodes about why this podcast is called synchronicity. But after an LSD experience of, which I had done many times before, I had an extended period of synchronicity. Three, four months of unceasingly synchronicities everywhere all of the time. There was really no gaps in my consciousness between what I was experiencing and the state of synchronicity. So something that I mentioned before has come to light is a lot of people who go through kind of mental disturbances, not in a negative or pejorative way, but a mode of consciousness that's different from their regular state of consciousness experience an increase in synchronicity phenomena. Now, there's a lot of ways we can dice this. And I go through kind of painstaking efforts in my interview with Dr. Bernie Bightman on his show about not jumping to conclusions and assuming because you experience a synchronous phenomena or synchronicity to just say, "Okay, well, this is 100% an objective synchronicity. There's nothing else that's going on."

There are a lot of factors sometimes that could influence what we perceive to be a synchronicity. This is evident if you've ever shared a synchronicity with someone else and they don't find it particularly interesting. So one of the qualifications for synchronicity in Jung's book about this is the ability to ascribe personal meaning to a synchronic or synchronicity event. So that's a really important thing to keep in mind. If it has meaning to you, we start to move into kind of this more nebulous, harder to pin down realm of what is going on because we're bringing in subjectivity. We're not just looking at kind of statistical facts to validate things. There really is a kind of internal connection to an external phenomena.

And that's really important. So we can see why people who are going through kind of altered states of consciousness would experience an increase in synchronicities, meaning very often can just kind of wash over all experiences. You know this if you've had a psychedelic experience, meaning just as a wash. You're a wash in it. So it makes sense that a lot of these things would be experienced as synchronicities. So there's that level of what's going on, but there's also the level of that if you're kind of level headed about this and kind of objectively observe of what's going on to the best of your ability, it absolutely seemed that people who enter what are called manic states or schizophrenic states really do report oodles and oodles of synchronistic experiences. So what is going on here, right? And bear with me as I kind of go through this because I'm not writing this down. I'm talking off the cuff.

I'm relying on my memory and kind of observations and experiences to relay my own experiences, but also to give some insight into what other people have shared with me. So when we're talking about synchronicities, we look at all of the things that are going on in our lives and something, there's a young quote there where he says that if one were able to see correctly, we would recognize that life is one giant synchronicity. And that is kind of conceptual reality, but if it's an experienced reality that takes on new meaning, right? It means something completely different than just kind of like a platitude that a smart guy was sharing at one point.

And one of the things that I think is embedded in that idea is that if you knew everything, if you had access to all knowledge, all wisdom, all everything, everything would be a synchronicity. Everything would be very visibly and tangibly interconnected in a way that wouldn't seem conceptual. It would just experience it as felt. And so in my experiences going through an extended period of synchronicity is that's exactly what happened. No, I didn't know everything. No, I wasn't the omnipotent being who understood everything. But it certainly seemed that my mind and kind of spirit was flipped to a setting where I had more access to universal truths.

And this is again, we get into a very tricky area here because when someone is thinking that they have access to mystical visions or insights, the line from there to full blown delusion is very hard to observe sometimes. So this is why particularly after kind of pulling myself out of a psychosis type state, I'm very mindful of relaying this information in as accessible as terms as possible for people who maybe haven't experienced these things. But it's one thing if someone is raving about all these crazy experiences and wonderful phenomenons, and that's not really accessible to someone who maybe has an experience, and they may just sound like a madman, which is typically what happens when people enter these states.

They're trying to relay transcendent states of mind, incredible experiences, and if you don't have an audience who you can kind of translate that to or is capable of understanding what you're saying, you have a schism. You have a break in kind of translation and understanding which very easily can lead to a diagnosis of some kind of mental disturbance or, you know, problem. So I really try to talk about these things as clearly as possible and recognize that I don't want to jump to conclusions about this I don't want to say my personal experience is everyone's experience is this is definitely what's going on, but there are some observations that seem to be recurring and present, and this becomes more clear, the more you speak to people who have had these experiences, whether they understand what happened or are unpacking what have happened after the fact, or haven't.

They don't, you know, they haven't figured out exactly what's going on. One of the things that I've mentioned a couple times on this podcast, a figure who stood out to me in a Ron Chernau book called the Warburgs was this figure, this guy called A.B. Warburg, who was an incredible art historian and kind of unlocked a lot of secrets of old paintings and Renaissance paintings that some of the mythological and kind of keys to understanding what these paintings were about and artworks. He was an incredibly brilliant and kind of monomaniac for understanding and delving into art history. But he also had severe bouts of manic episodes, delusions, all of these things and was institutionalized for a large portion of his life and Jung saw him, Freud saw him, and they kind of both wrote him off as potentially a hopeless cause, but because he knew that there was something more to this, this wasn't him just going crazy, per se, he was able to kind of pull himself out from the depths of psychosis, come out of it, not only lead a productive life, but talk about the experiences in lucid ways so other people could understand, and I think those types of people, of which I consider myself one, after going through a diagnosis of being bipolar and going through the clinical psychiatric world and eventually not being on medication because I didn't feel that the diagnosis was correct and doing it above board with my mother and a psychiatrist, I feel that I'm one of those people too. We have a lot to offer, and we can talk about very crazy experiences in a lucid and clear way to help people who maybe haven't had those experiences and shed some insight into our previous mental states, that really is a bridge, and it's a bridge we need to cross more and more because I think what we're seeing in modern day consciousness, and this was a premonition of mine way back in the day, almost 20 years ago, is that the state of consciousness that we call psychotics or people in psychosis experience seems to be a modality that more and more of us are moving into in regular life, and we can attribute this to kind of the fragmentation of consciousness from the internet and social media and the way we interact with people partially, but I also think this is kind of an evolutionary thing that's happening to people, and it was my contention back in the day that your stockbroker on the street, your government employee, your person who's going to a nine to five will experience experiences of these states of consciousness more and more as time goes on, and not necessarily because they've taken psychedelics or gotten into a meditative practice or gotten into an artistic practice, but that this is a mode of consciousness that seems to be seeping into our "regular reality" more and more. So what does this mean? What are the practical benefits of this? What are the potential downfalls? These are the questions that I am very much interested in because that's what we experience in our lives.

It's wonderful to speculate and think about all these grandiose ideas and wonderful applications of mystic transcendent states of mind, but when we got to go take the trash out or pick our kid up or go to work, how does that interface with kind of this idea that synchronicities and this kind of ephemeral material world coexist with our mundane, what we refer to referred to as "everyday life." What's the intersection of those two worlds? And that's something I'm acutely interested in because after this experience for me personally, back in the early 2000s, there was a period of extended transcendent awareness followed by an incredible plummet into the depths of despair and depression, which was really not a state I was familiar with. And then following that in the years, followed up to present, a reintegration of kind of both of these ideas of a transcendent world that we can't see and our world that we can see, the kind of grounded reality which we all live in and experience. And what is the relationship between those two? So for me personally, I oscillate between recognizing that yes, there are transcendent mystical realities where synchronicities just abound and they are constant. And also, yes, there is a world of responsibility, accountability, and they're not separate. They are fundamentally the same thing, but they're to be utilized in a harmonious way.

If we can figure out the way to do that, to be in the world, but not of the world, a very popular saying, it's kind of a key and secret to life. And it doesn't mean things are comfortable and great and wonderful all the time, but it gives you kind of a crack in the door to penetrating some deeper mysteries in life. And I think that's something that really hurts a lot of people is not having this awareness and knowledge that life isn't what you were told, what you learned in school, what you learned growing up is not the full picture. And it's not that there's some giant conspiracy to prevent you from knowing this stuff. It's just kind of how this is evolved. And this is something we talk about when, you know, people are chitting on the ego all the time.

The ego isn't something that is a terrible, horrible aberration. It's evolved over time to help us when we know that we're in clear and present danger from, say, a lion, you want to have your ego be like, I don't want to die, I want to run away. I got to get into safety so I can continue on. And that's a functional thing. But when that ego begins to take over and say, Oh, I am the creator of all, I'm the universe, me, I'm the most important thing. We lose touch with this aspect of reality that is far more subtle and interconnected than we can possibly realize. So that's just an important thing to remember when we're talking about these experiences that synchronicities can be a very clear and present reminder that we don't know exactly what's going on.

So it makes sense to me that when people kind of shift their consciousness to a mode that's a little more porous, a little more open minded, maybe putting a premium on other people's perspectives that synchronicities would tend to increase. In addition to synchronicities, I'd like to point out that other phenomena tend to happen when people shift their mindset into these states, often pre cognitive abilities, telepathic abilities, and I know this sounds can sound woo woo. But these are things that if you've experienced them and have reliably tested them, absolutely exist. You know, I had Dean Radon on here before and, you know, he's statistically trying to prove against chance that these things are actually testable and provable.

But for anyone who's experienced them, you know, you don't have to be convinced, so to speak, and you want to be cognizant of not going too much into the self-fulfilling prophecy aspect of these things, but these are phenomena that tend to exist. So here's my take on what I think happens when we're dealing with synchronicities and these type of states of consciousness. The best analogy I could give, and it's not mine, you've probably heard it before, is think of the mind, or your mind, individual mind as kind of a radio. And you can tune your radio to various frequencies, and normally we're stuck in the frequencies of just like, what do we got to do to get through the day? Like, we got to talk to these people, we got to do this, we have these responsibilities.

I got to pick up the dry cleaning, I got to get groceries. And we're stuck in this kind of earth level base reality that is incredibly practical and useful for us getting through our day-to-day lives. But sometimes something will happen, we'll watch a movie, we'll hear a song, we'll take a psychedelic...excuse me, we'll develop a meditative practice, we'll do these things that kind of shift our consciousness, either over time or dramatically in a short period of time, that make us aware of a whole other layer of existence, a whole layer of kind of energy that maybe we're not used to tuning into.

And that can really alter our consciousness. This is kind of the age-old story of, you know, don't take psychedelics, good, it's going to change who you are. This isn't high school what people would tell me after I would say, "Listen, I took some LSD, took some mushrooms, you got to try this out there, well, I don't want to be a whole different person." Well, newsflash, that is happening all of the time. It's just usually not happening in such a dramatic way that you're able to say, "Oh, well, before I did ayahuasca, before I did this..." You know, a completely different person. But this is a process that's happening all the time, and I think this is relatively easily explainable.

It's that we like to think of ourselves as static beings. "I'm Noah, I do this. I like this. I don't like this. I don't want to do this. I want to do that." But in reality, we're this complicated mass and swarm of ideas, emotions, feelings, and that is a nebulous thing. It's not a solid fixed identity. Much in the same way that if we're looking at the quantum world that, you know, it can appear as a particle or a wave, perspective can also alter kind of our conceptions of ourselves. So if we acknowledge that we're not this static type being, we're not this regular Newtonian block thing moving through time and that we shift and kind of morph as time goes on and through our experiences, that opens up a lot of complexity.

That opens up a lot of opportunity for us to experience the world in a different way. So when we shift our minds into this kind of more open, porous mode of being, things can get weird really quickly. And I don't mean just weird inside of our heads and kind of intellectually tossing back ideas over and over and kind of shifting our mind. I mean, things can start to be weird out in the world. This is when you can be thinking of someone and then they appear. You wanted a new job or, you know, you need more money in your bank account and all of a sudden these weird kind of magical things start to happen. And we've seen this resurgence of the term magic into our lexicon and into the culture.

And if you're paying attention, you know, modalities like astrology and tarot and all of these things are really kind of coming to the surface because I think people intuitively recognize that there is this whole other layer of reality that exists within and around us and being able to tap into it and having experience with it can really be a helpful thing. It also has a practical benefit of subverting the logical analytical parts of our brains, which, again, are very useful. They're not bad. They're not things we shouldn't be looking at. But if we're too -- you know, if we're too Aristotle in this stuff and not enough Socrates and Plato, we can end up with a lot of the situations we look at in the world and see these negative ramifications of kind of the reductionist scientific materialistic paradigm.

So there is a practical benefit to shifting into these mind states and that is that the intuitive capacity for recognizing things that aren't right in front of our face and overtly there have tremendous power in them. Anyone who's experienced extended periods of synchronicity or precognitive abilities or any of this stuff will attest to that fact. It's not a light state of mind that kind of doesn't have an impact on your life. It tends to take over and can kind of throw you for a loop, especially if you haven't had experiences with them before. It can really blow your fucking mind because it's like everything I thought is not the way it actually is. So, again, the practical benefits of seeing synchronicities can be tremendous because they upset and kind of subvert our train of thought, which, you know, people talk about mindfulness and all of these things.

What is the goal of mindfulness, if not to show you what your mind is doing and to show you that these patterns and ideas and kind of routines maybe aren't serving us, or maybe they are. Maybe we just want to see that too, but the ability to recognize and establish some type of daily practice or regular practice really is just designed to kind of help you recognize what's going on. So to get back to the original point of mental illness and psychosis and synchronicity, it absolutely seems that when people shift into what we call in the West, mental illness or mental disturbances, these phenomena can really ramp up.

And for an objective onlooker, someone who's not going through the experiences, this can be a very disconcerting thing to see a friend or loved one go through because all of a sudden they're talking about these things. In my case, it was, I couldn't shut up about unconditional love. All I would talk about is unconditional love. I wasn't really explaining it that well. I was just saying, "Listen, the foundation of the universe is unconditional love. I hope that you understand this." And I was just alienating people because they're like, "What is Noah talking about? Like, does this someone we know who likes to have a good time and joke around and likes to Miami Dolphins?"

And now he's talking about, you know, after lives and unconditional love and transcendent energy, it's like, "That's not going to be for everyone, especially in my case." When these are my friends, we're primarily people who just enter college. They're trying to craft their persona and identity in a new place. They don't want to be upset by some transcendent mystical insights from a loon. So why does this stuff tend to proliferate? Why does it tend to happen? Why do these phenomena tend to increase when we shift into these modalities? And again, going back to this idea of the brain or mind as a radio, I personally believe this stuff is always around us.

It's most of us. There's a Swami Vivekananda quote, which is, "It's we who've covered our eyes and cried out that God has forsaken us and we can't see anything." We're the ones kind of putting in these mental filters that prevent us from seeing some of these deeper truths. And again, it's not because we're bad people. It's not because we're ignorant. It's not because we're, well, maybe because we're ignorant in some way, but it's not because we're doing something actively wrong. It's just this is how we function in today's culture. This is how the world has worked for a considerable period of time.

So it's kind of what we're born into in a lot of ways. But when you do shift your mind into these other modalities, you open yourself up to a lot of things. And I would love to say that it's all positive and it's all light and love. And if there's nothing bad that comes along with it, but one of the first things that can happen is it can be very disorienting. What is going on? Why is this happening? Why are these things happening around me? What is the connection? Am I in control of everything and walking this line of recognizing that, whoa, there might be a whole other reality here that I hear before have an experience.

And trying to make sure that you don't go into that I am the creator and the originator of all of these things really is I think where we start to see people go from these open kind of very wonderful states of mind into darker kind of paranoia into a little bit conspiratorial things can happen. People can be worried that people are spying on them or looking, you know, keeping tabs on them, the government, whatever it is, and this happens a lot. And who's to say that there isn't some element of truth related to these things, but I think what ends up happening for a lot of people who have these experiences and don't have any context.

And this is the important thing I want to get across is the reason I talk about this specifically in this episode and a lot of times is people haven't heard any of this stuff before. They don't know that people have these experiences every single day and have been having them from time immemorial. So if you don't actually have these, you know, baseline anecdotes of people having these experiences, it can be super frightening. You can actually think that you're going insane. And in some ways, maybe you are, maybe you're going out of your mind and maybe that's a useful experience. But if you don't have any other knowledge of any of this stuff, it can get really creepy really quickly, especially when you recognize kind of the fundamental truth that you're creating your reality.

Yes, you're co-creating it with everyone else, but you're ultimately the person who decides where your mind is going to go, where your life is going to go, where your relationships are going to go. No one else is in control of that solely besides you. That's your thing, right? That's your responsibility and kind of prerogative. So it's important to recognize that when things can get a little weird, it can turn very quickly. And I think when things turn too quickly and people get too paranoid and too caught up in ideas that aren't present for other people, that's when we clinically, as a society, want to go, "Oh, okay.

This person, this woman, this guy is having a schism from reality. Things are not okay with this person. They're having delusions of grandeur. They think they're God. They think they're Jesus." Now, if we just look at someone saying, "Hey, I'm Jesus. I'm God." It's easy to write them off and saying, "Okay, well, this person has completely lost their mind." But if we look at some of the more subtle truths of, "You know what? Maybe we're all Jesus. Maybe we're all God. Maybe we are a universal consciousness expressing ourselves through different individual modalities, and not just write this off as loontalk.

Maybe we can get a little deeper into these experiences and begin to understand what's going on." Now, I don't have any grand contentions or revelations about exactly what these things are and what these experiences are, but I do know, at least in linear time. The more I speak about them, the more people reach out to me and talk about these experiences, give some perspective and insights. I'm very much looking forward to my conversation later today with one of these people who's a psychiatrist and has had many of these experiences, and essentially through sheer power of will was able to overcome and transcend very difficult mental states.

The more of these things that are discussed, I think the better chance we have of understanding or getting some insight and shedding light on what is going on here. Why are these experiences happening? What can they teach us? How can they help us? And those are the questions that I think are important. And a lot of time when we're talking about synchronicities, it's easy to get awed and blown away by the miraculous fashion of these things happen. The improbability of certain phenomena. And I think that's good. It's awed and wonder are things that help us capture our and focus our awareness on things.

And that's really important. But if we just constantly go back and are getting awed and blown away, we're kind of stuck in a holding pattern. We're stuck in this idea of, "Oh my God, there's so many amazing things." And you can't really necessarily grasp what's going on and try to figure out, "How do we use this stuff in a real way? What can we learn about it?" So that's something I always mention to people who get caught up in synchronicities and phenomena and pre-cog stuff and numbers and all of these things. If you notice yourself just kind of going around and around and doing this dance of getting blown away, there will come a point if this stuff is happening to you over and over again, that you'll be able to kind of ride with it, sit with it, hold space with these phenomena and get a little bit deeper into them to understand what's going on.

Drop into your intuitive capabilities and faculties to really get some other perspective on what's going on. So all I know is this. I think a lot of people who get diagnosed as bipolar or going through manic states or even schizophrenic, which I was never diagnosed as schizophrenic, I think they have access to other, I don't want to rush to saying realms of consciousness, but other things that maybe not all of us can tune into all of the time. And I think writing people off as just mentally ill or something wrong with them is dangerous. And I think it's ultimately counterproductive. And it can also be used as a cudgel to essentially stamp out radical modes of thinking.

And we see this all the time. I just finished Ron Turner's Ulysses S. Grant biography, which is incredible. I'm starting Frederick Douglass now, which is not by turnout, but also really, really shaping up to be great. And you recognize that society is not as great as we think it is. It's a slow moving kind of laborious process to shift cultural ideas. Hundreds of years, thousands of years, things don't shift as much as we think that they might. And when we're looking at kind of mental states through a particular lens, we can do a disservice to those actual states, right? We can kind of lop off a whole perspective because it doesn't fit in with our current cultural climate.

So the point of this episode, more than anything else, rather than bestowing any wisdom that I may have accumulated throughout the years, is to let people know if you are going through these states or if you have experienced them, you're not alone. I can tell you that with absolute confidence right now. This stuff is very, very common. It doesn't have to be brought on by a psychedelic experience. It can be brought on almost at any point at any time. And I'd say to embrace it on some level, right? And also, the only thing I can say that I know is absolutely useful to do if you're experiencing these things or have experienced them is talk to other people.

Reach out to people who you think will understand. Yes, be careful about the types of people you're mentioning this to. You don't want to just go be spouting this off to everyone who you come across all of the time. You know, because you want to use some discretion in there. But if you think someone maybe can add some perspective or some insight into what you're going through, that'd be useful. I reached out to someone when I was at right after immediately going after these experiences, like a year or so after, and they said something to me that really helped a lot, which is, you know, if you had gone through this experience, these manic states, these ultra high states, and you were born in India, you know, a few hundred years ago, you probably would have been put in a room.

People would have come and like asked for your insight and guidance and said, "Oh, well, of course, you've just popped open this chakra and you're in communion with Brahma or whatever is going on." And they wouldn't have said, "Hey, you know what? We got to give you pills and put you and make sure that you're going on." And I'm not saying one approach is better than the other, although giving people pills is usually not my preferred strategy. It's that there are nuances to this and there's subtleties to this that we can miss if we're just clinically diagnosing people. Now, this is not an invitation for people who are on medications to just full-sale, get off this stuff.

Something we lose if we write off full-sale, throw the baby out with the bathwater of our current kind of medical diagnosis of these things, is we might lose the ability to convince people, right, who maybe aren't far enough along to understand that these things aren't just bad states of mind that we want to eliminate, because we're not taking it seriously. We're not engaging with their modality. We're not understanding their perspective, and that's something that I think is really important. It's cool if you want to be a hippie and talk about mystic visions and states of mind and all these kind of woo-woo things.

That's great, and if you're a peer group and general kind of group in general, you're a social group, is accepting of that, that's wonderful. But if you want to interface with people who have more power in society, scientists, politicians, business people, not saying you have to do this, but those are people who hold traditionally a lot of power in our society, you may want to find another approach. You may want to be able to have these conversations with people in a more lucid fashion than just saying, "Oh, yeah, it's just God energy, and I'm just expressing it through my third eye, and this is how I've come to these conclusions."

I say that just from personal experiences. Being able to talk about an idea as nebulous and as tricky as unconditional love back when I was going through these experiences, my efficacy of communicating this was basically zilch. I just sounded like a madman. Now, if I'm talking about unconditional love, I can look at it from a lot of different perspectives. I can recognize if I'm talking about this stuff, and the person in front of me is just completely not getting it or loss. And maybe I need to change up my lexicon or nomenclature that I'm using so people can have a better idea of what I'm speaking about.

And also, always kind of flip both sides of it, all the sides you can, like the pros and the cons, you don't want to get too attached to one mode of thinking. Now, if something is very resonant with you, if you truly believe in a force of love and good, and that kind of sustains the universe, don't get rid of it just so it can be more palatable to other people, but try to find a way to speak about these things that makes a little bit more sense. The last thing I'll say about synchronicity is Jung, who had his own bout with what we would call mental illness when he was specifically writing it down in his red book, thought he was going insane. He was convinced he was losing his mind. He's talking to a God being called Filamon, and he still has a clinical practice, but is very concerned. He's kind of losing touch with reality.

And that should be a testament and kind of reminder to people that some of the most brilliant and insightful minds in history, when you start delving into this stuff, right, the cosmic control center, when you ping it and call it, it'll ping you and call you back. So that's not a warning so much as it is a reminder that when you delve into this stuff, whether you believe this or not, when you really start to kind of investigate this stuff, shit will happen, and I don't mean this is like, you know, a bad shit will happen, but stuff will happen, your life will be altered, and this is a weird idea, right, that something just by focusing and thinking about it can fundamentally alter the structure of your reality, that's pretty crazy, right? That's a radical thought in today's society. That's not how things we typically conceptualize things.

So it's just a reminder that if you're interested in this stuff, find a community if possible, find a group of people. My door is always open just to be clear. I don't know exactly what the function of this podcast is, but I know at least I can be a safe space for people to reach out with ideas, experiences, and talk about them, and anyone who's written to me will attest to the fact that I do. I honestly and honestly take the time to respond, and it may just be a couple of lines sometimes because I'm really busy, but I don't want to shortchange anyone who's reaching out and taking the time to do that.

So that's today's podcast. I know I drop a solo one of these in every few months, but it really got me thinking after this interview I did on this radio show with Dr. Bernie Baitman, just how present this stuff is for a lot of people and how it does shape our individual consciousness, but also our collective unconscious and consciousness, right? What we go through as individuals does have an impact on the greater world at large, whether we can recognize it or not. So just remember that just because you feel a little bit crazy doesn't necessarily mean you are. And the flip side to that is if you're going through a very difficult mental state of mind, talk to other people about it.

The more you kind of seclude yourself and go inside without kind of an understanding of why one would do that and the practical benefits of it, the greater the risk is for kind of falling into your own self-delusions. And that's where this stuff gets kind of dangerous, right? You know, just to put a buttonhole on this air is the manic states of mind, what would be classically, you know, diagnosis manic states of minds are often very pleasant and very cool. And you have so much creative energy, but the flip side is these depressive kind of woe is me very dark states of mind are the opposite of that.

And we want to do our best to pull the kind of alchemical goal out of each of those experiences, but we also want to be aware of when we're in each state. It's like a mindfulness thing, so it's important to do that. So that's it for this episode. I just want to say a big thank you to Forsegmatic. Again, go to Forsegmatic.com/sink. That's why and see 15% off any order you play. So get a lot of stuff. You got more money off. And that's it. I will have guests next week, but I thought this was a relevant and, you know, useful enough topic to discuss alone. So I hope you enjoyed it. Again, feel free to reach out to me at any point. If you're going through anything, know@sinkpodcast.com.

It's not that I will be able to help you per se, but I will at least be able to provide some perspective, at least on my own experiences, and hopefully be able to provide something that is helpful. So that's it. And I will see you next week. [Music] [Music] The world's biggest soccer tournament has arrived, and you can trade the entire tournament on Calche. Argentina is currently trading at over 8% to win it all, meaning a $100 trade pays out over $1,000 if they win soccer's biggest prize. On Calche, you're trading against other people on a live market, no-house, no-onsmakers. For a limited time, download the Calche app and use code hoops to get $10 when you trade 10. K-A-L-S-H-I. Calche, trade the beautiful game.

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