When Life Becomes One Giant Synchronicity

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This is synchronous.

This is synchronous.

This is synchronous.

This is synchronous.

This is synchronous.

This is synchronous.

This is synchronous.

This is synchronous. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)

Welcome to a very special Thanksgiving-ish type episode of Synchronicity. I guess it has really not that much to do with Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving, weird holiday. I love it. One of my favorites for all of the classic silly American reasons. I like the food and I like the football, like the family, like the friends. I like all that goes with it. It's one of my favorite holidays, but of course, really marks a terrible beginning to this country, which is the wiping out of the Native American, the beginning of the wiping out of the Native American population under the auspices of this very nice and thankful and appreciative, let's have these two worlds come together, type auspices, but no, not actually.

So not to be a downer about it, but we should acknowledge that that's actually what's going on. I like to take the time to, you know, potentially investigate some of the more Native American tribes that were here before and see what wisdom they have to offer. One of my favorites is Chief Seattle. What's the quote? Man did not weave the web of life, but is merely a strand in it. Whatever happens on one part of the web touches all of it. That's a good quote, Chief Seattle. I'm doing that from memory, so that could be a paraphrase. So this week on Synchronicity, this is what we're gonna do. I had promised an origin story for what I've referenced quite a bit on this show, which is this period of time in my life where everything was one giant long synchronicity in every sense of the word.

Not some like, oh, well, there were a lot of things. It was unceasing also through the dream state as well. There wasn't like, I went to sleep and this stopped. It was the most lucid I've ever been my dreams or as vivid as they had ever been and everything kind of took on this symbolic meaning of what was going on. Anyway, that's what we're gonna do. So what I'm thinking is, is I don't have an actual plan. I don't have stuff written out. I alluded to this before, but it's kind of hard for me to remember in linear time everything that happens. So what will often happen is someone will ask me a question.

It'll jog some part of my memory and I'll be like, oh, wow, yeah, okay, this is what was going on. And I kind of piece it together. It's a weird, I've spoken to more and more people who seem to have trouble doing this, which is sequentially and chronologically placing events in their life. Like obviously we have these big beacon kind of reference point like, you know, birth of a child, marriage, relationship, job, you know, meeting someone new. All of these things can kind of mark time in the past for us, but when you kind of go especially into psychedelic voyages over the course of years, that gets much more malleable and doesn't take on maybe the same importance, you know, in terms of where things came sequentially as it otherwise might.

So bear with me on this is essentially what I'm saying. And the other part is, is I'll probably add to this as the show continues because I'm gonna remember things. So I used to have actually some journals. I was extensively journaling. I never really journaled ever. I don't know that I had maybe in middle school, elementary school or something, you know, for class, but I never journaled, but during this period of time, I actually did do extensive journaling. Now, here's a human ego thing that happened. I had all these journals, I found them, I don't know, five, six years ago, and I was reading through them.

And I think it just stirred up all the memories of what was going on. And I think I got embarrassed and I threw them away. So I don't have those exact journals with me. So I can't go back and be like, oh my God, what the fuck was I talking about here? And some of the stuff was pretty embarrassing in there who not because I was losing my mind, but because I was writing down like very, you know, really, really earnest hopes and dreams and silly wants and things that looking back, it was pretty clear as what was going on as my ego was getting involved in a very transcendent process, which typically is not a good thing anyway, not to get off track, which I'm sure I'll do many times.

I don't know how long this is gonna be. I basically have until UI wakes up, which could be anywhere from, I don't know now, until an hour from now, but I think we're gonna be okay. So without further ado, let's just get started. Okay, so to the best of my recollection, I, not to the best of my, I've been taking psychedelics. I really haven't taken a macro dose of psychedelics in quite some time. I had, you know, a 16th and 8th, almost maybe two and a half grams of mushrooms a couple years ago was the most I've done in like 15 years. So I don't wanna be presenting myself as some, you know, psychedelics spelunker at present, 'cause that's not really what I'm doing.

You've heard in previous episodes, if you listen, micro-dosing, I'm a big fan of, but outside of cannabis, I'm not really super heavy into psychedelics these days. I'm not against them, but when you have an experience like I had, you tend to take them not more seriously, but you listen to when it would be the appropriate time. So I started taking psychedelics when I was 15 years old. I went to Berkeley School of Music. They had a five-week program in Boston where the campus is located, it's a city campus, beautiful, beautiful area, downtown, not downtown Boston, but in Boston, near Cambridge, just right over the bridge, just like Commonwealth.

That's where our dorms were. One of the most, it's the Back Bay. It's like incredibly rich people. I think Tom Brady and Giselle lived there, but smack dab in the middle of this was this building, 270 Com Ave, which is where they have the Berkeley dorms, and they're still there. They also had the radio station there, which I later became a part of, The Burn, which now is like a multi-million dollar facility. We were basically stuck in like a shoebox with like a smelly, smelly room, but I digress. So I went to this program really not knowing what to expect. So I played saxophone, I'd been doing it pretty much, since elementary school, I was good at saxophone.

I had a natural ability, I didn't like practicing, but still I was good enough that I could hold my own, I could sight read, and I liked it to an extent. So I went to this program to, it was like camp, but for music school. So I went and immediately met some friends. The first few days, my buddy Mike and my buddy Dan. I was friends, I was thinking about Mike the other day. I mean, I lost touch with these people probably a year or two after, whenever this was. This is 1998, right? It was a sophomore, maybe summer of '97, '98, so I'm 15. So I gotta be 98, '98 maybe going into '99. So I'm at this Berkeley, I'm in the city, kind of just dropped off, you get these food cards so you can eat, you have a place to stay, so everything is kind of taken care of, and it was okay.

And I think at this age, I'm 15, I probably still have some leftover bar mitzvah money. I didn't get a ton of bar mitzvah money, but I got a few thousand dollars, and I probably wasted some of it on a paintball gun. I'm sure other stupid shit, weed of course. I spent a lot of bar mitzvah money on that. Really crappy mid-grade weed back then. But I still had some, so I had like some spending money, not like crazy, but you know, 100 bucks a week, something like that for a five-week thing. So, immediately I meet these friends, and Dan was from San Francisco. Mike was from Boston, or right outside, a suburb, and Dan was like, "Hey, I have some acid."

And I'm like, "Oh, that's pretty interesting." And he's like, "Yeah, I brought nine tabs, "bladder of sunshine acid from San Francisco." And I'm like, "I don't know shit about this." And so Mike was a little more familiar. He was into electronic music and like massive attack, and you know, primarily ecstasy. He knew what ecstasy was, and he seemed like he had some familiarity with this. So I was like, "All right, cool." So like back, I don't know why I decided to do it. I'm kid alone, but this is what you do. So one night we decide to take some acid, and we each have three tabs. And I don't know what possessed me.

I remember taking the first one, and like we waited a while, and nothing happened, and then we took the other two. And it was just, and not insane, it was just a ridiculously cool experience. I trip for about 18 hours. I remember, you know, walking all up and down this unfamiliar place, this dorm. It's like, I don't know how many floors it was. Seven, eight, nine, it was pretty big. And there was this basement, and there was a rec area. And I remember before it kicked in, I went downstairs to go play pool. And as I was playing pool, which I'm pretty shitty at, like I'm not that good. I just remember sinking every fucking ball, like effortlessly.

Just like, just crazy, just the amazing, like the hustler level, you know, Paul Newman. I was just, I was crushing it. And I was like, wow, that's unusual. I would just think of where I wanted the ball to go, hit it, boom, went there. So that began a very long 18 hour voyage. During this voyage, I met my first real girlfriend at the time, who happened to live like 20 minutes away from me back in the suburbs of DC. She was in Virginia, I was in Maryland. And it was a very interesting, so something happens when I'm tripping, even on high dosages, I sound really normal. I seem like very cool, calm and collected.

That has, there's no bearing on what's going on in my mind. I can be cool, calm and collected, but I can also be totally just like freaking out inside of my head, but I seem super normal. So most people wouldn't know that I was tripping when they met me. And I don't think my eventual girlfriend then did. But a lot of things happen. I, you know, basically how I always described that first initial trip is my head was pulled out of my ass for the first time. I was walking around, living the illusion of central position, just thinking, the world revolved around me. Everything was for me, you know, everyone else was kind of a side player, basically a little teenage sociopath.

I'm sure we all are, when we're that age, for the most part, just like little sociopaths who don't understand the impact of our actions. Or, I mean, I know there's really good people out there too, but I wasn't. I really didn't know what the fuck was going on. But anyway, LSD jolted me out of that. Now I also want to point out, before I did LSD, I read about it a ton. I was, I was interested in psychedelics. The way people describe them, the way the culture impact they had had peaked my interest. So it wasn't like I went in completely foreign and had no idea what this was about. I had heard of set and setting, even though it was a good set and setting, but I don't know how much I thought about that before I did it, but I had some cultural, you know, perspective and personal experiential anecdotal perspective.

Okay, so that was my first trip. So it was 15, interesting time to do a psychedelic, especially what eventually was a very heavy dose. I remember towards the end of that trip, 16 hours I called my dad and I was like, oh, I think I'm like this forever, which is, you know, I'm a little foreshadowing if I'm thinking about it now. But anyway, I think I'm like this forever. And he's like, just go get some orange juice, a dunk in donuts down the street. And I went and I remember just being like, people were turning into like lizards, like not grotesquely, but like it was shifting. People's skin color was changing, slowly morphing.

And all my friends had gone to sleep at this point. So I'm like, okay, what the fuck is going on? And it did, did thankfully wear off a couple hours later and I went to sleep. So that started, anyway, I got back, this was a five week program. And so back, this is over the summer. So I go back to school, start my junior year and I'm just telling everyone, I'm like, guys, girls, this shit is out of control. There's, I took some LSD over the summer and shit is not what we think it is. This is quite different. And so this is right when I'm getting my driver's license, I'm having some autonomy, some, some freedom to kind of do what I want to do.

And I'm just evangelizing LSD to the nth degree. So over the next few years, I convinced many of my high school friends make the pied piper of LSD in my area. And that and mushrooms become more and more popular, not unique, right? This is a very common thing for people to do. So essentially over the next few years, I got more and more experience with psychedelic states. I always had a reverence for the experience, the ritual and kind of the importance of what was going on. Now, I say that, you know, I don't really think I have any idea what was going on in life until probably like 25, 26. And I'm probably gonna look back in 20 years and be like, God, I was a dumbass at 34.

But, you know, I always had an appreciation and respect for what was going on. Do some of my friends, for the most part, everyone did. But you know, I hear stories where people just like take a 10 strip of acid and just like, for no reason, just like, I'm gonna do it to get fucked up. I never understood that. So I did understand that there were some relevance to what I was doing and the importance of it. So what happened during many of these trips, I had read a story but I think it was in either a book called Acid Dreams or Storming Heaven. One of those two books, and it was the story of this guy, Richard Alpert, who had gone to India to go give LSD to various gurus to see if they knew what it was.

And there was just one story that stuck out to me, which was he gave it to his eventual guru. And the girl was like, no, this is nothing. This is like, there's no change. There's no, this is exactly, this isn't changing my perspective at all. And these was really strong, Al'sly Acid, so it wasn't like, and I've told that story many times that was eventually Rondas' guru Maharaji. But just a side note, the reason I bring it up now is most of the trips I would have from high school, really, I mean, all the way up to all of my trips, pretty much, I would tell that story. Just as it was something that held some importance in my mind that it was a reminder that as much as these substances or things that we're doing or taking or interacting with us, I didn't know the word endogenously that we could create those experiences, but that there was a barrier there that was really more in our mind, and this really just kind of lifted it rather than adding something to us that we didn't already possess.

So that's why I kept telling this story. I didn't know, I never thought anything about it. I just thought it was a cool story and was reeling it. So continuing into college, I decided to go to Northeastern in Boston, just a few blocks away from where Berkeley is. Northeastern actually had a campus. I went on an orientation, met one of my good friends, Ross there, we ended up hanging out and having a great time, remain friends to this day. And I went to Northeastern for psychology 'cause I did a two week application, got a decent scholarship, I think. It's like, all right, I guess I'm gonna go study psychology.

Got to Northeastern, meanwhile, I mean, what a crazy transition we asked kids to make. Really, I have no fucking idea what's going on, at least in my case. I get there, still find my crew, meeting people, everyone is just nuts in Boston. It's just like young people will, and it's just nuts there. There's a lot of alcohol, there's a lot of everything. And I continue to take psychedelics intermittently, decide very quickly that psychology at a big lecture hall type classes is not for me. Didn't seem like Northeastern was the school for me. However, there was a classical guitar class and also an ethnomusicology class, which I loved.

There were two classes that I actually went to and really enjoyed and picked up finger picking to this day, which still serves me well. So I went to the department of Northeastern, I was like, hey, I wanna switch schools to, not schools, I wanna switch majors to music technology. 'Cause the thing about Northeastern, the reason I went there also is, they had this work internship program. So you could get placed at real jobs while you're in school, which obviously, when you're leaving school, if you interned at a place and they like you, they might hire you. So that was a big sell, but they told me it was gonna take two years to switch into the music technology department.

And I was like, all right, done with this. So I left. Then, now see, this is where it starts to get a little hazy. Definitely taking psychedelics during this period. Not a ton, but enough that it, the chronology here gets a little messed up. I don't think I went into community college when I left. I think I left, took like the summer off, then enrolled at Berkeley. This must have been around 2002 or 2003. So I get to Berkeley and I'm taking, let's say, a moderate to heavy amount of psychedelics at this point, LSD and mushrooms. That is, those are the staples. I don't think I ever took anything else during that time period.

Going pretty deep into the rabbit hole. So there were times, one of my roommates at the time had, this guy came in, who he knew was a drug dealer. This guy was cutting up K, K powder back. I'm like, Jesus Christ, 2002, three, like 2001 maybe. 'Cause I was still at Northeastern, actually. And this is before I got to Berkeley. And this guy was bringing in a trash bag full of dried mushrooms. I mean, it must have been, I don't know, 25 pounds. And he was like, take as much as you want. Thanks for letting us do this here. I had no idea what was going on, who was doing what, but I had a lot of mushrooms for a few months.

So started taking those and sharing those with my friends. Really, I'm somewhat proud of myself that I didn't sell these. It didn't occur me until I turned a buck. I was just like, hey, see what's up with these. And those mushrooms carried our little group of friends for at least the semester. And, again, going pretty deep, finding out more introspectively as much as I talk now and as much as I can talk extemporaneously now and off the cuff, I really wasn't much of a talker. One-on-one with my friends, sure, but in groups, I was not gonna be the person at the party who was yak and up a storm, which I know many of you probably find surprising at this point.

But really, I am an introvert at heart. But during this time, I'm observing a lot. Really not saying anything. And I would refer to this as a meditative practice while taking psychedelics. Just watching what was around me, not judging. When I noticed that judging would come on, it was a witness consciousness. I was able to identify it and kind of separate myself from it. And I was doing this pretty naturally not thinking about it. So then when I went to Berkeley, this is 2002, 2003, I started taking, I think, more LSD. And there was a few experiences I had, one down in North Carolina, which I would describe as kind of the first of a series of downloads.

I know that's an overused term now, but that's legitimately what it felt like. Where I remember, it was March 17th because it was the day before my dad's birthday. And I was down in North Carolina at Duck with some friends. And I just remember, everything was pretty cool. Everything was normal, but then I remember just writing down like a bunch of things about triangles and pyramids and geometric shapes and time and meaning and love and all of these things. And it just felt like shit was coming pretty heavy and pretty strong. Stopped tripping, went back to normal, but definitely was kind of in, my foot was through to the other world that whatever I was in after that, I was already touched with it.

So like, you know, if you've seen Stranger Things and they had the upside down world and you can kind of like push through from either one, there's like these riffs that are created. Let's just say I had pushed through. I could go back, but I still retained some aspect of what was going on. So it's a decent analogy, I think. So I go back to school, 'cause this is again, that would be the summer, school's out, go back to Berkeley and continue taking LSD. So at this point again, my chronology is weird. I was living at the dorms originally at Berkeley on the fifth floor and was taking a fair amount of mushrooms and LSD is there as well.

And I'm guessing looking back now, I think this is when I took the dose, it is, it most certainly is, I can remember this now. Okay, this is when I took a modest amount of LSD, probably like 100 to 150 mics, nothing crazy and did not come down. So here's what ended up happening. And I remember this pretty vividly. Experiences that started happening around this time, I can't remember who was before or after, certainly during, but definitely after, I don't remember if it was before. There would be points where I'd be walking and it would feel like I would drop down like 10 feet. If that makes any sense at all, like I'd be walking on a flat ground, but it would feel like I had just dropped 10 feet.

And then I'd reorient myself and I was here and there's no physiological thing going on once in a while this will happen to me. So a few things that happened now, where I kind of have like a reminder that there's some other stuff going on around me. One is that one, sometimes my ears, it's not tinnitus, they ring in a very specific way and it'll kind of jolt me into like, "Oh, what the hell was that?" But this drop started happening. So I took this LSE at my friend's apartment in Charlesgate East, right near Fenway Park in Boston and take it, everything's cool, everything's normal. Not a vet at LSE at this point, but certainly confident enough to go out on my own and do whatever I need to do.

And I remember leaving and walking down the street, going back to the dorms, and there was always this homeless guy around there and he never talked to anyone, never talked to anyone. Didn't even ask for change, it was just out there. And I turned the corner, this is on Boylston Street and he immediately comes up to me, points at me and goes, "You know what I'm talking about?" And I'm like, "Hey man, how's it going?" Keep it moving and he just stares at me like the entire block, luckily, right across on Commav, the street is the dorm. So I go inside, I don't remember what happens, but I can tell you, from that point on for the next two to three months, every single thing that I experienced was one giant synchronicity.

And I'm gonna try to give his best of a description and review of what this felt like. In the hopes that if someone else and a few people have written me said they've had very similar experiences and had similar things happen afterwards and this is why I'm relaying this. And it was just to be clear at this point, there are unhealthy aspects of what's going on as well. This would classically, if we're looking at this in Western psychological AMA, classifications or APA, I'd be bipolar, I'd be entering into a manic state at this point. There were certainly things that you would point to and those are hallmarks of a manic state.

I was getting infatuated with various things consciously and egoically, and I think that ultimately was what made this an unsustainable state of consciousness. I also, what was I? I was 20, 21, like really young. Where do you think my mind was at? I'm at a music school. I'm getting into kind of, you know, into these realms where I don't understand what's going on, but really I'm interested in girls. I'm interested in women, right? Like I'm, this is what a normal person is gonna be doing. If you're gay, you're gonna be interested in whatever sex you're interested in. This is when those things tend to kind of flourish.

So that's certainly influenced, especially because I was really, really uninhibited and carefree, not in like I'm gonna take off all my clothes and run in the street way, but like I had no problem approaching women and girls and striking up a conversation and asking if they wanted to go somewhere or do something. Which for me, typically, up into that point, that was not my ammo. I was not gonna be going and not having inhibitions. I'd be a little anxious and scared. Like most people would be at that age. So that was a pretty fun aspect of what was going on. Furthermore, there were clear onsets of psychic abilities that for lack of a better term, I was really, really good, not only about being empathic and understanding what people felt like and understanding the perspective so I could have a conversation and connect with people, but I could pick up on, you know, where people were going, where they had come from, you know, what their names were, like really how old they are, where they were from, just like shit that I don't know exactly how I would describe it because it wasn't a conscious intention, but these things would come to my consciousness.

So there was, this is the onset of what was going on. I would say after this experience, you know, the first real kind of hallmarks of this being something more than just kind of like a little, you know, episode is I remember specifically one day and I hadn't really been into much of the occult at this point. I read something on astral projection, but really I wasn't abundantly interested in it. I think I'd read Robert Monroe's book, but like, you know, just like a passing casual interest. So at this point, I remember finding a website and it was talking about all of these kind of spiritual, you know, Vedic kind of concepts, but it was just kind of like this new agey looking back.

It was probably really like, I don't think she was a Huxter, but like, you know, it was, this is not one of the most, you know, authentic teachers who would be out there, but I found it really fascinating. And then one day I went to sleep. That's a fun way to start a sentence. One day I went to sleep. I went to sleep when I had a dream of seeing a college, no, an elementary school friend, but it was a very weird dream in which I was her, but I wasn't her, you know, like, not gonna go through a boring recap of a dream, but it was just a very odd and vivid experience where it felt like there was a connection between me and everything else in the world via this example of this girl.

So the next day I wake up and I'm walking down the street as usual down, I think, on like Newberry Street and this girl, I went to elementary school with her. I haven't seen her in 15 years at least. She goes, Noah, there she is. I'm like, oh my God, so stuff like that really happened more than I can possibly mention. And it became so common place that like it didn't even surprise me at a certain point. You know, you think of someone in the phone rings. Imagine doing that, but like testing it. Okay, well, I'm gonna think of this person at this time and then they call it like, it was such a weird and replicable phenomenon that I recognize something else was going on.

Also other weird stuff was happening. So I woke up one day and I knew all of the chakras in Sanskrit, their names. And I knew that they were chakras. And I'm sure I had seen in a book somewhere these names, I'm not claiming that they were directly downloaded into my brain and I'm some type of divine being. But the truth is I woke up one day and could go through them. Let's see if I can do it now. (speaks in foreign language) Did I miss any? Maybe. Manipura, did I miss Manipura? Anyway, regardless, I don't know why that happened. And I then that started launching me into really just trying to investigate via the internet.

And it was pretty early days back then, 2003. Things are not popping, aim is still going on, right? So yeah, I'm just trying to figure out what the hell is going on at this point. Now, also things are getting very, very weird with my relationship in the outside world. My friends will begin to tell you at this point that it seemed like I was in reality but talking about things that really no one had any idea for the most part. I also became obsessed, obsessed, obsessed with the idea of unconditional love as I was describing it. And I didn't feel it was a new age term. I didn't feel it was some hokey thing.

It felt like the source behind everything. And that I just felt like I had to communicate that to everyone regardless of the situation, regardless of whether I knew them, regardless of who they were, I was gonna be talking about that. And I also were talking about things like karma and death, ad nauseam. I also was really, really into numbers. I would constantly add up numbers. So if there was like a license plate, I'd add up all the numbers until it got to a root number. And this annoyed a fair amount of my family and friends for quite some time. I was obsessive about it. But it also felt at the time, like it had an incredible meaning underlying what I was talking about.

Also around this time, I began to feel that words themselves were essentially not like a joke. Like they were just ineffective tools for communicating experiences that seemingly I had no way of communicating. So that's the beginning of it. Did you think you would think maybe I would stop taking psychedelics at this period of time? Of course not, did not do that. So I then remember taking mushrooms and this is what I would describe as my Jesus trip. This launch probably about a month and a half experience where I was pretty damn sure I was Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior. So, and to be clear, I don't think I was far off.

I'm not claiming that I am Jesus. I'm the one Jesus, I think we're all Jesus. I think Jesus is a consciousness. I think Christ consciousness is something we can tap into at any time. I think this is mythically, mythologically related many different contexts, context through many different religions as to whether he was an actual person, I don't know, totally possible, somewhat irrelevant for me as a question anyway. This is when things really started to kick into high gear and what I typically would refer to as dimension shifting. That's what I would describe it as. It felt as though I could move through many different layers of our reality seemingly instantly.

About as simple as just kind of jumping, literally figuratively, literally jumping, like hopping, I could jump into a different dimension. So what the fuck does that mean? It means that I infinite possibilities began to seem less like a concept and more like a reality. So if I decided and could align with the fact that I could win the lottery, powerball, and really that was meant for me, that would happen effortlessly. And I was actually quite convinced I could win the lottery at a certain point that it wasn't farfetched. So you can see looking back and I can see these weird kind of egoic cracks.

Like why the fuck do I want in the lottery? Why would I want money at this point? Now in my head, I'm sure I justified a wolf. I had money, I could give it to all my friends, I could change the world, blah, blah, blah, blah. But really I'm just on a rocket ship here that I'm riding a very valid and real and transcendent experience, but my 20-something year old brain, adolescent brain, post adolescent brain, is starting to weave my personal narrative into the experience. I'm starting to elevate myself relative to everyone around me, including, you know, I'm having magical statuses, right? I remember one instance where I was walking down the street and like I can't tell you how many people would come up to me, unprompted on the street.

I think I was also making eye contact with a lot more people, which may be prompted some of this, but just sometimes it would be random. And this guy came up to me, older guy, probably in his 60s, maybe 70s. He's like, "Oh, excuse me, do you know where I am?" And I'm like, "What, no, I don't know where you are." And he's like, "Oh, it's you, I'm so happy to see you, "I'm so happy to see you." And this guy probably, it's likely he had Alzheimer's, it could have just been confused, but he really seemed to recognize me. And at the time I remember thinking, "What if that's me in the future?" And I've come back and I'm talking to myself to warm myself of some experience.

Do I think that's really what was going on? And no, but I was able to kind of weave those types of narratives that made a lot of sense. So I don't wanna discount from the fact because I really, there's two aspects of this. One is, there's maybe, if you wanna look at this from like a mental illness perspective, there are, you know, delusions happening. And I think there were a fair number of those, and I can pinpoint them, some major, some minor. But overall, looking back at the experience, there were things that happened that were not being filtered through my delusional mind that really were happening, you know, verified by other people.

But more importantly, I do trust my consciousness to be like, okay, when you thought of something and it appeared on a bus two seconds later, or when you hit the crosswalk and hit walked, you know, it would change to walk every single day, regardless of the time of day you were going out there, you know, that was, these things happened. Thinking of people and then running into them, having essentially just like magical voyages every day. I was meeting so many different people and finding out so many, it was essentially kind of the principle of just saying yes to everything. You know, sometimes people are like, hey, I'm gonna say yes to everything for the next month.

And that's just what I'm gonna do. It really does drastically change your life. I also remember specifically walking much, much more slowly than I ever have to the point where people get, I think mad at me on the street. I was going so slow and I loved it. I was not in a rush anywhere. I was incredibly present and it was an amazing experience for the most part. So this is kind of what I'm talking about when I say everything is one giant synchronicity. You could say I was living in the present and I had eyes to see that everything was a synchronicity. I was more in tune with it for sure. And I think this is something that doesn't just have to be brought on by a psychedelic experience but is accessible to all of us.

So after this, a crash came, right? This is the part that is, I wouldn't even refer to it as the not fun part of the story, but the necessary kind of reaction to being so elevated and starting to weave in kind of my own ego into it. I crashed, I had never been depressed before. I rarely been depressed afterwards, very infrequently, usually brought on by some legitimate reason. And I just got sucked into a deep despair. I was doing things at the time too that were just so unhealthy. I remember having a roommate who I had just moved in with. I was in a place that was incredibly dark. There was no natural sunlight.

I was staying in bed. I didn't even have a bed. I had a mattress on the floor. And I remember I was feeling weed. He was a drug dealer and I was taking weed from him and I was feeling terrible about it, but I was doing it. It was just awful and it was shitty weed. And he was just kind of a loser and it was just bad. It was just a bad situation. So I'm working myself into this worse and worse depression to the point where I can't, I get out of bed to go to the store. It must have been at least three or four days. And I guess I hadn't been out of bed and my knees were like super wobbly. And I'm like, oh my God, like something is really wrong.

So I eventually go back home, go move back in with my mom. My friend helps me out, moves back, and begin to see a psychologist, a waiter in rural and community college, and just begin basically a year long process of recovering and just kind of like, what the fuck just happens? Beginning, beginning to process what had happened to me during this period of time. And really, I don't think I got until I was stabilized and thank God I had friends and family who stuck by me this. I lost also a fair amount of my social group. I don't think I wouldn't say I lost them, but I think I justifiably freaked some of them out because I'm bucking every fucking trend here at this point.

Most people at my age then are trying to solidify their personas, trying to get a job, trying to meet someone, trying to have a family, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I'm just like, I'm like, what is this reality? What is going on? How does this all fit together? I've experienced things that seemed to me to indicate that maybe this trajectory that we've all been told isn't as real as it seems. And I'm also the type of person who had a sense of that in school before psychedelics, for any type of drugs. Like, what is this kind of a silly thing to do? But anyway, I'm putting myself back together and really takes about a year and a half.

I reenroll and Berkeley, I actually get into the music tech, what was it called? Like synthesis at the time, which you had to apply for. I had a terrible GPA 'cause I had all these incompletes. I had failed classes and you had to meet with every professor on a panel to get into this program. And I just was just candid with them. I was like, listen, this is what happened, you know? This is exactly what's going on. And I had a portfolio and they liked it and I guess they liked my candor and I got in and I graduated from Berkeley and all was okay. So, I would love to just say the story ends there and it was just this experience and that's all it was and I have reverence for it.

But the truth is, since that experience, even before, it's a constant reminder that the world we live in and perceive and create with our consciousness to filter everything down so it makes sense to us on a day to day basis, isn't as real as we like to believe it is. And anything, anything, a psychedelic, a death, love, any of these things can launch us into these realms. And to me, that's cool and it's useful and it can be practical and it can be, you know, integrative and all these things, but how do we do that? And what does that mean for our lives is kind of what I take away from the experience.

So, that to me is what, you know, I like to explore in the show and I don't have, I know a lot of people who are on podcasts, they have a specific perspective and agenda, you know, a format that they would like to adhere to to, to eke out their notion of what reality is. I call this show synchronicity not only 'cause Alexis gave me the great name to do it, reminded me I like the word, but because I do think that these things tend to lie, like weave together, they line up, right? And all I'm trying to do here is create as many opportunities for synchronicity to emerge so we can all collectively have an idea of what, what are these factors at play?

What are they revealing to us? What can we find out from these experiences? And if you're like me, you might be impatient. I like to know what is going on all the time. I like to have some semblance of control or at least know who's in control of the situation. So it can be, I'm really impatient, just flat out. But what I've learned is especially from the experience that happened to me and other psychedelic experiences, sometimes it doesn't come till years, decades later where you begin to understand the impact of what those experiences were trying to reveal to you. So I, there's a lot more. I've probably skipped over, I don't know, 80% of the experiences.

If you have questions, you know, if you've gone through something similar or you want to find out more, you want to know what I'm talking about. Again, the other ways I could use to describe it, what I was going to say is email me. Email me, Noah, it's in podcasts, if you have questions. But, you know, I was in an archetypal realm. I was in a symbolic realm. I was able to jump from our world of forms back into the underlying symbolic causes without getting caught up in my ego too much to actually kind of live and subsist off of whatever was going on for extended period of time. And I'm grateful for it.

I never look back at the experience and go, "Oh God, I wish I hadn't had that." Sometimes I'll get embarrassed about things I was doing, sure, who wouldn't, but I don't grip it as tightly. You know, I remember there was a great technique, someone, I don't know who it was. They talk about, you know, imagine gripping a pencil in your hand as hard as possible. You know, and, you know, sometimes you think about something where you did something like embarrassing or wrong or stupid and like you think about it and you get that grip, ah! Just imagine that pencil is in your hand and you can let it go. And it takes sometimes a really long time to be able to let go of that pencil just a little bit, but I will say those things, at least for this experience, have almost completely vanished.

And everything else that happened from it was really just an incredible thing. And this is also, I mean, one of the reasons, that's how weird of a long pause is that one of the reasons I can think I can speak about this and many things extemporaneously is because I did have these experiences. I tend, as you can tell, I didn't write any of this down, I just talk off the cuff. And I think the reason I like to do that is you catch yourself if you're gonna be spouting some bullshit, right? And if you catch yourself enough spouting some bullshit, eventually you begin how to speak with less and less bullshit.

Not all the time, but enough of the time where you at least hold yourself accountable. Other people are not always gonna know, this is the principle, I've learned this a long time ago, so don't think it's up to other people to call you out on your bullshit. I used, you know, plain saxophone and bands and school bands, you could get up there solo, you're a kid, you could fuck up crazy, 90% of the audience has no idea, unless you're just honking our totally wrong note, people aren't gonna call you on your shit. So try to hold yourself accountable, it's a really, really good thing to do. I don't know how we got there.

I don't know how we got to any of this, how long have we been speaking? Holy shit, I did not expect this. I'll have extra parts of the story and what's going on, you know, pepper throughout episodes and in future episodes. Thank you to everyone who wrote in and asked me to do this. If you like the show, rate, review, subscribe on iTunes. That would be amazing. If you wanna support Patreon, synchronicity, what is it, patreon.com/synchronicity, go check it out, see what I'm offering there. Doing some stuff, hope to have Eli, my son, if this is your first time listening, in daycare sometime soon, dedicate some music days so I can wrap up this album.

I got three tracks finished. What I'm really trying not to do is just push out like a track and two tracks. I really wanna get it out as an EP, but if this catches up to me and we're in December, I'm just gonna put out, you know, maybe a single with a B side. So we'll figure it out, either way. Thank you for listening. I'm really happy you did. Have a great Thanksgiving, you know, gratitude, I think it can get lost in the Thanksgiving thing and I know what are you grateful for? What are you grateful for? You know, just really try to bring gratitude into your life and gratefulness into your life as much as possible because that is a real alchemy that actually works.

Give it a shot and see if I'm making it up. How about that? Okay, I will see you next week. (gentle music) (gentle music)