April 21, 2021 • 40 mins
Charlie Marinelli’s story is not surrounded by theories. In a first hand interview, he provides answers about hitting a spiritual edge in India — a journey he barely survived.
Charlie Marinelli: Found Show Notes:
Charlie Marinelli ~ Contact Charlie at charliemarinelli@gmail.com.
Suzy Singh ~ Therapist, author and international speaker on karma and consciousness speaks about Black Magic.
Referenced Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS). A New York Times article about the ‘Psychedelic Revolution’ hitting psychiatry.
Astray Production Team:
School of Humans // iHeartRadio
Caroline Slaughter ~ Host, Writer, Producer
Ankita Anand ~ Producer
Gabbie Watts ~ Supervising Producer
Jason Shannon ~ Composer
Harper Harris ~ Sound Design, Audio Mixer
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
School of Humans. Charlie Marinelli is having a psychotic break
in India, a country halfway around the world, from his parents,
Nanette and Charlie Senior, who are frantically trying to get
to their son. On their layover in atam Bull, Nanette
facetimes with Rennick, a friend of Charlie's they sent from
(00:30):
Delhi to keep tabs on him until they got there.
Rennick is standing with Charlie outside of a hospital, begging him,
along with his parents, to go in, but Charlie refuses.
He believes he's the Messiah and whatever this hospital is
going to do to him will strip him of his enlightenment.
But this is not a state of enlightenment that anyone
(00:52):
can survive. If Rennick can't get Charlie into this hospital now,
then Charlie will be another missing person in India. I
went into psychosis, and there were definitely things that I
did that were not rational at all, But the experience
(01:12):
was very real and what I went through was very real.
This is Charlie Marinelli. He's back from India and integrating
after a psychosis. I got an email from him on
March twenty second, with a subject line that read India
Syndrome Survivor. Episode three of Austray just launched and I
had received a handful of emails and dms from listeners,
(01:33):
but this one, as you can imagine, stopped me my tracks.
When I got on a call with him, he told
me a story. I was on the edge of my
seat for every minute of that three hour call. Charlie
ended up going into that hospital with Rennick and his
parents eventually met him there, but how he got there
as a journey that's changed him forever. Last week we
(01:56):
heard Charlie's family speak and depth about their rescue mission.
But this week we'll hear from Charlie, who knows what
the cost of enlightenment is because he's lived it and
he's here to talk about it. I don't know if
I was running away from something or towards something, maybe
a little bit of both. That I was running towards
some promise of higher level of living or some you know,
(02:20):
higher mental state, and I was running away from the
emotions of my grandfather dying and all of that. After
his grandfather's death, he started to rethink at all and
going to India felt like the next step, a new phase.
It's the next level place, if you're a secret. For
(02:40):
me to go to India is to be away from
my family and to be able to think for my
own and to go more inward. On July ninth, twenty nineteen,
Charlie flew to Delhi. He spent one night there then
headed to Bagsu, which is a twelve hour drive through
the Himalayas from Delhi and it is about thirty minutes
(03:01):
from the Dalai Lama's temple in Darmshala. I got there
and started hanging out with a bunch of people community.
It was relaxing, it was meditating, it was hiking a lot.
It was just an adventure and there was so much
to do there. There were all these yoga classes, yoga
teacher training, massage training, this raiky instructors. There were all
(03:25):
of these different things and I never did any of them.
I just I was meditating and I was going and
visiting temples in the mountains. And so for about a
month there, it was just hanging out smoking chill them.
We've spoken about chilling before, but I didn't realize there's
a ritual around smoking it. Chillum is a ceremony when
(03:46):
you light up at chill em. You know, you say
one of the things was boom by way, not sab kissa,
and you say this before you are boom shiva, basically
saying you're smoking with shiva type of deal. Everyone sits
down in a circle, whether you're at a table or
you're on the ground, and one person lights it for you.
(04:06):
You have to get it going, get it going. It's
mixed with tobacco, so it's harsh. It hits very hard,
so it feels like, I guess smoking a decent amount
of not very good weed. So Charlie didn't listen to
his mom's warning not to do drugs in India, but
Chilham was his only vice. He wasn't drinking, he was
(04:29):
eating clean, meditating daily. It was exactly what he needed.
But he got a wake up call about a month
into his visit when he walked into one of the
cafes he frequented. An American woman in her sixties was
there and something wasn't right. She's very disoriented. And I
came in and this cafe I went to every day,
(04:51):
so they knew me, they trusted me, they liked me.
They're like, hey, this lady, I don't know if you
can help her out. She's an American and she's not
acting rationally. She's just got out of two silent meditations
and was doing a dry fast, which means that you
don't eat, you don't drink, you don't shower. It was intense.
She was scared. She didn't know where she was, She
(05:14):
didn't have her passport, her clothes. She had a little
bag of like one change of clothes. I was like,
where's your passport. She's like, I don't know where my
money is and I didn't. I couldn't pay them for
my room, so they kept my passport, so I can't
find a place to stay. And she's just like she's
out of her mind. She could not I mean, I
(05:34):
didn't even think I could get her name out of her.
And so we talked for a little bit, and she
was just really freaked out. She didn't know what to do.
She was basically in what I would call a psychosis state.
Even though this woman was acting off, he didn't want
to leave her stranded, so we let her use his
room to shower and hopefully sleep off whatever she was on,
if it was a drug or if it was due
(05:55):
to her dry fast, to drink some water, and acclimate.
But it wasn't that easy. My friends got me a
little paranoid because I was like, I have this person
who's in psychosis in my room in India. So they
got me a little paranoid as like what could happen?
And then the other thing was as worried that, you know,
I didn't know if she was gonna die or she
was gonna She didn't drink water for like I think
(06:16):
seven days or something. She was not looking well. So
the next morning I was like, Okay, we need to
go to a hospital, Like, come with me. We're going
to go down to town and I'm going to take
you to a hospital and we're going to figure this out.
She wouldn't come. She did not want to leave the room.
The people that I rented the room from, they were
like weirded out because they knew she wasn't in her
right mind. And I couldn't get her to leave to
(06:37):
go to the hospital. So I ended up calling the
US embassy. They called the local police. The police came.
The reason I told you that story is because these
police that came that were called from the US Embassy
to come and deal with this woman were the same
police that came and dealt with me later, and this
part I think is very important. Keeps this in mind
(06:59):
for later, but for now. Charlie, with the help of
the police, was able to safely remove the woman from
his room and she was taken to the hospital for
immediate care. So that was my first brush against psychosis
in India, but it didn't really trigger anything for me
at that time. Little did Charlie know this woman's delusion
would be his reality in just two months, because he
(07:23):
was about to meet someone who would change his life forever.
I think one of my main things was looking for
a teacher. I think that was one of my intentions.
Charlie came to India seeking more enlightenment or an awakening,
which is the word he prefers to use, and he
had heard these legendary stories of Baba's or holy men
(07:44):
who were able to transcend what we believe to be
humanly possible. I still can't place whether things are true
or false with India because I've heard stories of Baba's
levitating in the mountains and not eating. And there's a
hand printing I think it's in a Himalayan cave or
something of someone putting their hand through a wall. It
was an ancient teacher and just showing that these boundaries
(08:08):
that we have in our heads don't exist. Charlie didn't
know if these legends about baba's were true, but he
did want to meet one of these babas, someone who
could guide him on a spiritual path, a teacher. And
then finally, how did we meet? And eventually he found him.
He called his teacher the Baba and Black because he
(08:30):
wore black robes, as opposed to the handful of other
babas Charlie and matten Bagsu who all wore white. And
this kind of has some significance for some reason. I
think of the light in the dark side. The Baba
and Black goes by Baba Gee and at this point
Charlie was charmed by him. He provided the same spiritually
(08:50):
rich conversation that the other babas did, but there was
something more. Obviously, I had never met this guy before,
and immediately we had like this connection. It was like
seeing someone that you hadn't seen for a long time.
He was an intelligent person, he knew multiple languages. He
had like this playfulness to him right, he had this joyful,
kidlike spirit. Charlie felt a familiarity with Boba Gee and
(09:14):
eventually he knew. I was like, oh, I found my teacher.
He just came. He found me. For Charlie, being in
the presence of Baba Gee was an education in itself.
He was a sounding board and guided Charlie to trust
himself in his own spiritual insights. They were so connected
that eventually they didn't even have to use words to
(09:36):
express themselves. At a certain point, the Baba and I
weren't physically talking to each other in the most simple sense.
It was to me we were communicating through telepathy. See,
this is where it gets weird. We'll get into how
weird things got after the break. Charlie had set an
(10:00):
intention for India to find a teacher to guide him
on a spiritual path to an away makening. When he
met Baba Gee, he knew he'd found his teacher. What
he didn't know was what was in store for him next.
We were communicating through telepathy, but it felt perfectly natural.
It's like, whoa, this is interesting. I was hearing thoughts
(10:21):
and I was like, wait a minute, these are from him.
There were even points in time where I was like
physically voiced. I can't hear you anymore. He's like, get
out of your head. Your mind is too cluttered. So
there was a confirmation that we were talking right now.
That would seem a little weird, then it was perfectly normal.
At this time, reality was blurring with something Charlie didn't
(10:43):
understand and couldn't control. From this point in time, I
was still hanging out with the blah blah a lot,
and I no longer slept, you know. I'd hang around
the cafes during the day. I'd be walking in the
Himalayas barefoot and sometimes with no shirt all night. Things
took over when I was when I was in this
(11:04):
state of doing jewels that I didn't know what they were.
As he wandered at night, he would find these small
private temples on people's properties where he would chant and
perform rituals he had no prior knowledge of. He'd also
paint his face like different Hindu gods. He didn't use
any pictures of these gods to instruct him, or even
(11:24):
a mirror. It's like he already knew what he was doing.
At one point in time, I was absolutely convinced that
the Dalai Lama was a higher incarnation of my dad.
So at a certain point I was walking down to
the Dalai Lama at Dalai Lama Temple every morning and
waiting there. In my head, I had already had a
(11:47):
conversation with him, you know, and we both understood that
he was my dad. Finally I went up and actually
requested his presence from the guards, which I was obviously
very much denied. In this state, Charlie believed he was
connected to the Dali Lama because he saw himself as
(12:08):
one with everything, so there was no separation between himself
and the Dalai Lama, just like there would be no
separation between himself and the Messiah or Jesus, whom he
would eventually claim to be. So through this period of psychosis, india, syndrome,
whatever you want to call it, I started, you know,
very much believing I was enlightened, very much believing I
(12:31):
was some sort of reincarnation of Jesus or Buddha or whoever,
as very much believing that I was put there to
cleanse people of their demons. In his state, Charlie was
seeing physical manifestations of demons and people's faces and bodies.
(12:52):
I remember I was sitting in a cafe and this
guy walked in. He was wearing a fancy fedora, nice clothes,
but his face was completely dysform looked like it had
been through a fire. He was missing fingers, teeth, all well.
(13:12):
Being very well dressed, Charlie saw these man's deformities, which
made him look like a demon, as a manifestation of
the man's materialism or greed. So Charlie approached this guy
and asked him if he could perform a blessing on him. Surprisingly,
this guy accepted Charlie's offer. Charlie knew the owner of
the cafe and asked her to bring them a bowl
(13:34):
of soup. He performed a blessing or spell over the
soup and asked the guy to drink the whole cup.
After he did, the man went into the bathroom, and
from outside the door, Charlie could hear something happening in there.
Maybe he was throwing up or who knows, but there
were definitely noises coming from the bathroom, which in his state,
(13:54):
Charlie saw as part of the purification process or an exorcism.
When the noises died down, Charlie knocked on the bathroom door,
opened the door and sat down next to him, and
he was kind of freaking out, and I said, now
you go on this hike. And I told him to
go on this certain hike. It's, you know, a sacred
mountain right at the base of the MLAs in northern India.
(14:18):
And he left. Anyone on this hike and time was
irrelevant at this point for me. But a bit later
someone came walking through the door wearing very natural like
hemp clothing and very grounded looking person and no deformities,
and walks in and says thank you for telling me
(14:40):
to go on that hike, and thank you for everything.
And then it clicked that that was the same person.
And I did the cleansing on He just found himself.
He just went and did a spirit quest. So at
this point Charlie was living in a different reality than others,
and looking back on it, he can't decipher what was
real or what was a result of his psychosis. Some people,
(15:02):
like this man he had helped, saw him as he
I saw himself and enlightened being. These people identified him
as a baba. There were many more experiences like this,
and it went from being accepted to being I got
beat up by I don't know how many Indian people
(15:23):
at one point in time started hitting me till I
hit the ground. I mean, to them, it looks like
a psychowesterner trying to I don't know, cast spells on
someone type of thing. From what Charlie says, he was
walking into people's shops and cafes, trying to cleanse them
of their demons with various rituals he was pulling out
of nowhere. It was apparently disturbing to a few of
(15:45):
the people he approached, especially as the psychosis got worse.
During this time, there were brief moments where Charlie was
completely lucid, and one of these moments, Charlie remembers waking
up from his psychosis terrified. So I was sitting in
my room at this one night, and it almost felt
like I was coming down from a journey from a trip.
(16:08):
To be clear, Charlie's longest acid trip lasted twelve hours,
which is a really long time. But this psychosis Charlie
was in lasted at least two weeks, with brief moments
of clarity like this one. And I finally called my
dad and I told him I was scared of something.
I was like, I don't know if it's this Bamba.
I don't know what it is. I think someone's drugging me.
(16:29):
I'm not in the right state of mind. I don't
know what to do. I feel like it's all around me,
like I felt vulnerable, and I was scared, like really scared.
I did not know what to do. My dad he
got scared. He was like, hack up your stuff and
leave now. As we heard in the last episode, this
is when Charlie's parents went into rescue mode and started
(16:51):
their panicked journey to India to save him, which was
crucial because after this call an a lucid conversation Charlie
had with a friend about suspicions he was being drugged,
he fell right back into psychosis. Before we go any further,
I want to cover something else that might have been
(17:12):
going on between Charlie and Baba Ge. Now we've explored
a lot of facets of spirituality in this podcast, and
what we're about to discuss might be the most out there,
but I think it's valuable to share. Remember how Charlie
said that Baba G, who he referenced as the Baba
and Black, represented the dark side. Well, I was talking
(17:33):
to Suzi Singh, a New Delhi based therapist and author
who in Keita and I will be speaking to in
the next episode, and she mentioned something we haven't explored
yet which she thinks is important to identify, and that's
black magic and the occult, or as Charlie put it,
the dark side. The occult relates to magic and the
(17:54):
supernatural and falls outside the scope of religion and science.
The learned occultist is able to see here and do
things that I hidden from the eyes of ordinary people,
and that seemed like magic. So when occult practices are
used for the good of other people or for the
(18:14):
good of one's own self to gain evolution and enlightenment,
it is constructive, it's powerful, it's positive black magic. On
the other hand, it's the misuse of occult information to
cause harm to others through the manipulation of energy for
some personal game. Now, this distinction is really important, Caroline,
(18:38):
because just as fire can be used to cook a
meal or to burn down the house, occult practices can
be used for evolution often destruction. It depends entirely on
the intention. So as black magic really dangerous, and do
you have examples of this? Black magic is definitely dangerous
(18:59):
in India. People who practice it are often referred to
as panthrics. In November twenty twenty, there was a news
report about a six year old girl in Khanpu who
was raped and murdered on Devali night, which is a
festival of lights incidentally, and her liver was extracted for
a thumb thick ritual which involved eating the liver to
(19:20):
enable a childless couple to bear a child. I've heard
of several such instances where you can kill another person's
child just to become pregnant to yourself, so we can
see how destructive and how evil in darkness is saying.
Also had thoughts in charlie situation if in fact this
(19:40):
baba was performing some sort of black magic on him.
I think what you're referring to in Charlie's case is
something called Bashi curran, which is a hypnotic state brought
on by the Baba and Charlie, who then becomes like
a puppet on his chain. Once the barber has control
over his mind, Charlie has very little personal who were left.
(20:03):
He is going to be directed entirely by the magician himself.
In some ways, it can be compared to voodoo practice
So if this is what was happening, did Charlie, how
could he have protected himself? When we talk of black
magic in general, protection can become very difficult because one
may have no idea where the harm is coming from.
(20:25):
From the little experienced and exposure that I have in
this field, personally, I've come to conclude that one of
the most powerful protection arises from beaming blessings and love
to the sender. So, according to Saying, love is an
insulator against black magic, while fear enhances it. I had
(20:45):
an energy session with an Irish practitioner when I was
going through a tough spot in December. I was hoping
he could clear some stuff. I was feeling blocked, like
nothing was flowing. Things were either blowing up or they
were stagnant. And though this practitioner didn't use the term
black magic, he did identify what was going on between
(21:05):
me and another person he said was part of the
problem the same way Sing described the dynamic between the
Baba and Charlie, and the intentions this practitioner set energetically
were also the same as Sing just expressed. He took
me through a visual exercise of sending love and blessings
to this person with the intention to transform their negative energy,
(21:27):
and it worked. This practice of sending blessings is not
regulated to tantric or energetic healing. It's like prayer and religion.
So even though this idea of magic can be hard
to comprehend in our Western culture, if you view it
in a different context you're familiar with, it makes sense.
But what might make more sense in context to Charlie
(21:49):
in his situation is that he was being drugged, which
is something as dad believes he was drugged. Can I
prove it? No, I didn't go to Bagsue. The only
reason why I know that that happened to him is
because what he had done in the past, the experiences
that he had taken other people on and been on himself,
he always came back grounded. He journaled what had I learned.
(22:14):
This was not that type of experience. This was psychosis,
according to Charlie, and like nothing he'd ever experienced before,
and his parents knew it. So September twenty nineteen, after
Nanette and Charlie Senior both received those cryptic FaceTime calls
from Charlie, they were on a seventeen hour of flight
heading to India to track down their son. In the meantime,
(22:38):
they sent Rennick from Delhi to Bagsue to keep tabs
on Charlie. In the United States Embassy, it sent the
Indian police to help. Apparently this part the police got involved.
They found me. I'd disappeared from them for a few days,
like days, I don't know where I went. I think
this was the tipping point where it could have gone
(22:58):
really wrong and I could have disappeared. Charlie is lost
a lot of time and clarity due to the state
he was in, but he's been told that he was
found naked in the woods by Taurists who were hiking,
which Charlie's mom the Net confirmed in the last episode.
Something happened and they found me. And then the next
(23:20):
thing I remember is these police. So I knew these
police from before. These were the same Indian police that
the US Embassy had sent to help Charlie get the
American woman and psychosis out of his room and into
a hospital. They'd built her apport with Charlie through that,
so as you can imagine, when Rennick led them to
him and he was in the same psychotic state as
(23:43):
that woman, it was a shock. They came up to
where I was in a cafe. My friend brought them
to me. I was like, oh, these guys are my friends.
I already knew who they were, right. They were very nice.
I mean, these police were saints, and they're like, okay, cool,
come with us, and we're just like casually walking, you know,
(24:03):
like thinking nothing of it, and then we finally get
to their car, and then I'm like, WHOA, what's going
on here? This is when Charlie freaked out in his state,
he didn't know reality from delusion, and even though Rennick
and these cops were there to help, he was scared
and tried to leave, and they grabbed me and forced
me into the police cruiser. One cop got on one
(24:25):
side of any one cop got in the other. There
was two in the front seat and one in the back,
and then my buddy jumped in the back too, And
at this point I was bawling. I was crying. I
was like, I don't know what's going on. Eventually Charlie
calmed down, but when they pulled up to the hospital,
he had a very different idea about why they were there. Now.
Mind you, at this point, I think I'm like a messiah,
(24:46):
like Jesus so they bringing me to the hospital. I
think they're bringing me there to heal these people. I'm
like looking at these different people, like these very sick
people in these beds. Then I think I'm healing people.
They're looking at me like, Okay, what are we two
with this person? Like I was clearly out of my mind.
In the last episode, the nets spoke about what looked
(25:06):
like holes and the palms of both of Charlie's hands.
According to Charlie, this was from ashing chill him or
incense into his hands after a ritual, which usually didn't
leave a mark, but one time he accidentally burned a
hole into one of his palms. He did the same
thing either purposefully or not. He can't remember to the
other palm. In his psychosis, he believed this was a
(25:28):
sign he was the messiah. In this state, these public
hospitals didn't know what to do with Charlie. Rennick and
the Indian police tried at least two hospitals that wouldn't
take him, but the third hospital did. This is all
Charlie remembers about that hospital. I was refusing all of
their treatment that they wanted to give me. I ran away.
(25:49):
They grabbed me and drugged me back to this journey
or to this bed, threw me on it, held me down,
and they injected me of this stuff. Next thing I remember,
I woke up in a really nice hospital in Delhi
with my parents coming up. We'll find out how Charlie
came back from the brink of a spiritual edge, which
(26:11):
he was now experiencing as a psychotic break. Charlie lies
in a hospital bed in New Delhi and severe psychosis.
His parents, who are with him, believe he's in this
state because he was being drugged. So I asked Charlie
point blank, did he think he was drugged by his teacher,
(26:34):
Bob A. G. I don't know for sure, and that's
why I'm not going to say yes he drugged me.
Is he probably the top candidate for drugging me? Yes.
Boba Ge was with Charlie before he went into psychosis,
and he was with him during it, which we witnessed
on Charlie's call with his mom Nanette last episode, but
(26:58):
he vanished when Charlie was taken to the hospital by
the police. However, before things got bad, Charlie truly valued
bobba Ge and his guidance. I do believe that I was,
and still to this day, that I was achieving some
sort of spiritual awakening prior to what I've been described
(27:21):
as I fried circuits and I went too far too fast,
and dropped and went into psychosis. So on that side
of things, I do believe that he to a point
facilitated and awakening. And then on the other side he
was drugging me. That's not okay and very deceitful, and
(27:45):
and I wouldn't have subscribed to that. But Charlie didn't
know Boba G's intentions, and he still doesn't know. Whether
he had good intentions or bad intentions. I don't know.
But the one conclusion that we've all drawn is that
he did not help ground me. He did not do
any thing to pull me out of this space. The
(28:08):
therapist that I'm working with he had an experienced in India,
and he said, the Indians Sawdus. They're about up and out,
that's all. They're about getting to this highest level possible
as quickly as possible. They don't really think about the
coming back down to Earth. Their goal is to take
you as far as possible. Well, Charlie went as far
as he possibly could and He realizes now that in
(28:30):
this state of psychosis, there were many times when he
could have disappeared in India, like some of the other
stories we featured, but things lined up in his favor.
I think I got very lucky for certain reasons. I
got lucky because I knew these police, my buddy found me.
My parents cared it well. I think there's no lack
of caring when it comes to parents and children, right,
(28:52):
That's not the special part in my case. I think
the special part in my case was a fair amount
of luck me knowing the police and they saw me
held out this lady before. Earlier in this episode, Charlie
said how important it was that these specific police who
knew him were the ones that found him. It wasn't
just important, it was a vital because when the doctors
(29:15):
drew Charlie's blood, they found LSD. And though he did
one psychedelic journey in India, it was before a psychosis.
So he doesn't know how LSD got into a system
if it wasn't present from earlier, And this was not
why he was in a psychotic state. Like I've said,
a psychedelic journey can last twelve hours, not over two
(29:35):
weeks either way, He and his parents knew he was
in trouble. That's technically like a fifteen year prison sentence
in India, so I could be in prison right now,
but they didn't do that. They helped me out. Charlie
knew how lucky he was in this situation, but he
and his parents also knew they had to get him
(29:55):
out of India just in case anyone else got wind
of their being LSD in a system. So after antipsychotics
grounded him enough to get on a plane, they were
on the first flight back to the States. But things
weren't any easier there. I mean, things never stopped being
weird at this point. I was still kind of I
was like in a midway. I wasn't fully where I was,
(30:15):
but I wasn't back on my ground either. I was
just uncomfortable in this existence. When Charlie got back to
the States, he was staying with his mom in California,
but like he said, he wasn't completely with it, so
he thought his mom was drugging him, so he took
off for Austin, Texas and asked his fiance Michelle to
meet him there. Just to note his mom, Nanette was
(30:37):
definitely not drugging him. I was having anxiety attacks, panic
attacks all the time. I remember once my fiance got there,
like we'd go out for a walk and we'd get
out of the car and like five minutes in, I
was like, no, I gotta go back. Like I'd just
get this anxiety attack, just anxiety, anxiety, anxiety. I mean
in the apartment, I would get up from the couch
(30:58):
and I'd been pacing back and forth, and I would
like stand in a corner and like, I don't know
why a corner, but a corner hoop made me feel safe.
Charlie couldn't sustain this level of anxiety. My buddy he had,
he had had my gun for a long time. And
I finally when I was there, I was like, I'd
like my gun back, and it was just sitting on
my dresser and I was just waking up and just
(31:23):
looking at it. At this point, things were really bad.
Charlie wanted out. He turned to his dad for support.
He's like, you need to find a psychologist or a
psychiatrist or someone to talk to you right now. If
you know anything about the mental health system in this country,
it's not easy to find someone to talk to Even
(31:45):
as a middle class American with health assurance, there's waiting
lists for months just to get an initial appointment. So
he's like, well, you got to check yourself into a hospital,
and I'm like, no, but I guide no other option.
This is the time where I started questioning everything that
had happened. I was lucid enough and out of the
(32:06):
psychosis enough to be questioning what happened, but I wasn't
out of it enough to rationalize it or to like
make sense of it. I was still on this fence
where it was like magical thinking on one hand and
then thinking I'm crazy on the other side. The magical
thinking was that his spiritual awakening in India had him
(32:29):
living in a different realm than the rest of us.
But there's another side to that. So if you have
the whole population telling you you're crazy, you're gonna start
believing it. I didn't notice too. I trusted myself one moment,
and then I didn't trust myself the next moment. It
was just like this constant teetering, and I finally admitted
myself to the hospital in Texas. Charlie went to an
(32:51):
emergency room so we could be admitted to the psychiatric
hospital in Austin. At the hospital, a doctor diagnosed Charlie
as bipolar one, which is also known as manic depressive disorder.
Someone affected by bipolar one has at least one manic
episode in their life. Charlie didn't agree with his doctor's diagnosis.
What who are you talking about? Like, I've never had
(33:16):
anything similar to bipolar in my life. Oh well, I
can just come on and I'm like, okay, So what
Her explanation was that it didn't have anything to do
with the acid, except for the fact that the acid
made me not sleep that first night, and then it
threw me into a manic episode, which made no sense
to me. But I've learned now the only way to
get out of a psychiatric hospital is to accept whatever
(33:38):
diagnosis they've given you. Charlie left the psychiatric hospital, diagnosed
his bipolar one, and on twelve hundred milligrams of lithium
a day. To anyone who has not been on lithium before,
this feels like the pillform of a lobotomy. I didn't
care about anything. I didn't want to really live, I
didn't want to die. I just kind of was. There
(34:02):
was no emotion. It was gone and I was on
lithium for almost a year. Charlie eventually got off the
antipsychotics and found alternative therapy and healing modalities that have
helped stabilize him. I mean, I can't believe the person
sitting on the other side of this zoom went through
what he did less than two years ago. Regardless of
(34:25):
how intensive an experience this was. For me, it was
a pivotal point in my life. I mean, it's changed everything.
Charlie was chasing a spiritual edge in India, which ultimately
led to a psychotic break. But he came back from
this edge and now he wants to use his experience
(34:48):
to help others. He's going back to school to get
a degree in psychology so we can support those who
have had similar experiences to his own. And I know
those people are out there because of this podcast. I've
spoken to them. Charlie attributes where he is now to
a company nation of psychedelics and therapy, which he integrates
(35:08):
with a trained practitioner. I think they go hand in
hand really as a healing modality. One stirs things up
and the other makes sense of what comes up during
the experience. Though the idea of psychedelics can be taboo.
The use of drugs like LSD and psilocybin to heal
trauma is having a resurgence after a heyday in the
(35:30):
sixties and seventies with advocates like Ramdas and Timothy Leary,
who as clinical psychologists research the therapeutic effects of these
psychedelic drugs. Now, educational organizations like the Multidisciplinary Association for
Psychedelic Studies or MAPS are legitimizing the use of psychedelics
again through clinical trials that are proving these drugs, when
(35:53):
taken within a clinical or therapy setting, can help heal PTSD, depression, anxiety,
and more, and it helps integrate the experienced into everyday life.
I think that putting a proper container on the use
of these medicines, like having a safe space and proper
knowledge of use, and also having a good support system
(36:17):
is really key to using these medicines safely and effectively.
Because this therapy is the only thing that has helped
truly integrate Charlie's experience in India, It's something he eventually
wants to study so he can become a practitioner and
safely use psychedelics and his therapy sessions with others. But
for now, the way he wants to help others is easy.
(36:40):
When I've reached out to you, and you know, obviously
a lot of stuff started going through my mind. Is
this a good thing? This is a bad thing? Like,
you know, why do I want to be on a podcast?
And there is you know a couple of things that
really came up for me. And one is, if there's
other people that have been through what I've been through
(37:01):
and don't have the clarity around it, maybe the integration
that I've been able to have with therapy and really
moving through it. I mean, if one person or to
call me and I was able to have a conversation,
it was just able to shed some light on what
they've been through and maybe helped them in some small way.
(37:22):
I mean, I mean, it banged this whole podcast worth
it for sure. The day after Charlie and I had
this initial interview, he texted me. The text read, have
you heard of data? I replied no and called him,
so you've never heard of data? Wo Okay? I think
(37:44):
that this is very important information for this podcast because
no one's mentioned this so far. Data is a missing
piece of a puzzle that Charlie is just now putting
together as he starts to integrate his psychosis in India
with his current reality. Last night, going through the whole
(38:04):
story really like it got me thinking. So I remember
the story of the lady, the American woman Charlie helped,
who was in psychosis. The Austrian guy that I was
around when I was there, he suspected that she had
been given to Torah. So data is a flower, and
it's been compared to salvia. It's a hallucinogenic that you
(38:28):
don't want to take. It causes nightmarish hallucinations and the
effect on data can last six months a year and
it can never go away. Sometimes Tatora is also known
as I believe the Devil's trumpet. Data is a poisonous
flower that does look like a blooming trumpet. It's pretty,
(38:51):
but it's psychoactive and can cause hallucinations and psychosis. So
do you think Baba Gee was drugging you with data?
That's what I'm wondering. Either way, Data is something Charlie
thinks we need to explore further. I'm wondering how this
part slipped through the cracks about India because We're recording
(39:13):
this in real time as Charlie's story unfolds and my
team needs to do some digging on the Statira lead.
We'll be back in early May with the final episode
of Astray. If you've gone through a similar experience to
Charlie or just want to reach out to him, you
can contact him at Charlie Marinelli seven seven seven at
(39:34):
gmail dot com. Astray is a production of School of
Humans and iHeartRadio. Today's episode of Astray, Charlie Marinelli found,
was produced, written, and narrated by me. Caroline Slaughter and
Kita Nanda is my co producer, and Gavi Watts is
our supervising producer. Astray was sound produced by toone Mothers,
(39:57):
with score and sound design by Jason Shannon and mix
by Harper Harris. Executive producers are Elsie Crowley, Brandon Barr,
and Brian Lovin. Thanks for listening, School of Humans.
School of Humans. Charlie Marinelli is having a psychotic break
in India, a country halfway around the world, from his parents,
Nanette and Charlie Senior, who are frantically trying to get
to their son. On their layover in atam Bull, Nanette
facetimes with Rennick, a friend of Charlie's they sent from
(00:30):
Delhi to keep tabs on him until they got there.
Rennick is standing with Charlie outside of a hospital, begging him,
along with his parents, to go in, but Charlie refuses.
He believes he's the Messiah and whatever this hospital is
going to do to him will strip him of his enlightenment.
But this is not a state of enlightenment that anyone
(00:52):
can survive. If Rennick can't get Charlie into this hospital now,
then Charlie will be another missing person in India. I
went into psychosis, and there were definitely things that I
did that were not rational at all, But the experience
(01:12):
was very real and what I went through was very real.
This is Charlie Marinelli. He's back from India and integrating
after a psychosis. I got an email from him on
March twenty second, with a subject line that read India
Syndrome Survivor. Episode three of Austray just launched and I
had received a handful of emails and dms from listeners,
(01:33):
but this one, as you can imagine, stopped me my tracks.
When I got on a call with him, he told
me a story. I was on the edge of my
seat for every minute of that three hour call. Charlie
ended up going into that hospital with Rennick and his
parents eventually met him there, but how he got there
as a journey that's changed him forever. Last week we
(01:56):
heard Charlie's family speak and depth about their rescue mission.
But this week we'll hear from Charlie, who knows what
the cost of enlightenment is because he's lived it and
he's here to talk about it. I don't know if
I was running away from something or towards something, maybe
a little bit of both. That I was running towards
some promise of higher level of living or some you know,
(02:20):
higher mental state, and I was running away from the
emotions of my grandfather dying and all of that. After
his grandfather's death, he started to rethink at all and
going to India felt like the next step, a new phase.
It's the next level place, if you're a secret. For
(02:40):
me to go to India is to be away from
my family and to be able to think for my
own and to go more inward. On July ninth, twenty nineteen,
Charlie flew to Delhi. He spent one night there then
headed to Bagsu, which is a twelve hour drive through
the Himalayas from Delhi and it is about thirty minutes
(03:01):
from the Dalai Lama's temple in Darmshala. I got there
and started hanging out with a bunch of people community.
It was relaxing, it was meditating, it was hiking a lot.
It was just an adventure and there was so much
to do there. There were all these yoga classes, yoga
teacher training, massage training, this raiky instructors. There were all
(03:25):
of these different things and I never did any of them.
I just I was meditating and I was going and
visiting temples in the mountains. And so for about a
month there, it was just hanging out smoking chill them.
We've spoken about chilling before, but I didn't realize there's
a ritual around smoking it. Chillum is a ceremony when
(03:46):
you light up at chill em. You know, you say
one of the things was boom by way, not sab kissa,
and you say this before you are boom shiva, basically
saying you're smoking with shiva type of deal. Everyone sits
down in a circle, whether you're at a table or
you're on the ground, and one person lights it for you.
(04:06):
You have to get it going, get it going. It's
mixed with tobacco, so it's harsh. It hits very hard,
so it feels like, I guess smoking a decent amount
of not very good weed. So Charlie didn't listen to
his mom's warning not to do drugs in India, but
Chilham was his only vice. He wasn't drinking, he was
(04:29):
eating clean, meditating daily. It was exactly what he needed.
But he got a wake up call about a month
into his visit when he walked into one of the
cafes he frequented. An American woman in her sixties was
there and something wasn't right. She's very disoriented. And I
came in and this cafe I went to every day,
(04:51):
so they knew me, they trusted me, they liked me.
They're like, hey, this lady, I don't know if you
can help her out. She's an American and she's not
acting rationally. She's just got out of two silent meditations
and was doing a dry fast, which means that you
don't eat, you don't drink, you don't shower. It was intense.
She was scared. She didn't know where she was, She
(05:14):
didn't have her passport, her clothes. She had a little
bag of like one change of clothes. I was like,
where's your passport. She's like, I don't know where my
money is and I didn't. I couldn't pay them for
my room, so they kept my passport, so I can't
find a place to stay. And she's just like she's
out of her mind. She could not I mean, I
(05:34):
didn't even think I could get her name out of her.
And so we talked for a little bit, and she
was just really freaked out. She didn't know what to do.
She was basically in what I would call a psychosis state.
Even though this woman was acting off, he didn't want
to leave her stranded, so we let her use his
room to shower and hopefully sleep off whatever she was on,
if it was a drug or if it was due
(05:55):
to her dry fast, to drink some water, and acclimate.
But it wasn't that easy. My friends got me a
little paranoid because I was like, I have this person
who's in psychosis in my room in India. So they
got me a little paranoid as like what could happen?
And then the other thing was as worried that, you know,
I didn't know if she was gonna die or she
was gonna She didn't drink water for like I think
(06:16):
seven days or something. She was not looking well. So
the next morning I was like, Okay, we need to
go to a hospital, Like, come with me. We're going
to go down to town and I'm going to take
you to a hospital and we're going to figure this out.
She wouldn't come. She did not want to leave the room.
The people that I rented the room from, they were
like weirded out because they knew she wasn't in her
right mind. And I couldn't get her to leave to
(06:37):
go to the hospital. So I ended up calling the
US embassy. They called the local police. The police came.
The reason I told you that story is because these
police that came that were called from the US Embassy
to come and deal with this woman were the same
police that came and dealt with me later, and this
part I think is very important. Keeps this in mind
(06:59):
for later, but for now. Charlie, with the help of
the police, was able to safely remove the woman from
his room and she was taken to the hospital for
immediate care. So that was my first brush against psychosis
in India, but it didn't really trigger anything for me
at that time. Little did Charlie know this woman's delusion
would be his reality in just two months, because he
(07:23):
was about to meet someone who would change his life forever.
I think one of my main things was looking for
a teacher. I think that was one of my intentions.
Charlie came to India seeking more enlightenment or an awakening,
which is the word he prefers to use, and he
had heard these legendary stories of Baba's or holy men
(07:44):
who were able to transcend what we believe to be
humanly possible. I still can't place whether things are true
or false with India because I've heard stories of Baba's
levitating in the mountains and not eating. And there's a
hand printing I think it's in a Himalayan cave or
something of someone putting their hand through a wall. It
was an ancient teacher and just showing that these boundaries
(08:08):
that we have in our heads don't exist. Charlie didn't
know if these legends about baba's were true, but he
did want to meet one of these babas, someone who
could guide him on a spiritual path, a teacher. And
then finally, how did we meet? And eventually he found him.
He called his teacher the Baba and Black because he
(08:30):
wore black robes, as opposed to the handful of other
babas Charlie and matten Bagsu who all wore white. And
this kind of has some significance for some reason. I
think of the light in the dark side. The Baba
and Black goes by Baba Gee and at this point
Charlie was charmed by him. He provided the same spiritually
(08:50):
rich conversation that the other babas did, but there was
something more. Obviously, I had never met this guy before,
and immediately we had like this connection. It was like
seeing someone that you hadn't seen for a long time.
He was an intelligent person, he knew multiple languages. He
had like this playfulness to him right, he had this joyful,
kidlike spirit. Charlie felt a familiarity with Boba Gee and
(09:14):
eventually he knew. I was like, oh, I found my teacher.
He just came. He found me. For Charlie, being in
the presence of Baba Gee was an education in itself.
He was a sounding board and guided Charlie to trust
himself in his own spiritual insights. They were so connected
that eventually they didn't even have to use words to
(09:36):
express themselves. At a certain point, the Baba and I
weren't physically talking to each other in the most simple sense.
It was to me we were communicating through telepathy. See,
this is where it gets weird. We'll get into how
weird things got after the break. Charlie had set an
(10:00):
intention for India to find a teacher to guide him
on a spiritual path to an away makening. When he
met Baba Gee, he knew he'd found his teacher. What
he didn't know was what was in store for him next.
We were communicating through telepathy, but it felt perfectly natural.
It's like, whoa, this is interesting. I was hearing thoughts
(10:21):
and I was like, wait a minute, these are from him.
There were even points in time where I was like
physically voiced. I can't hear you anymore. He's like, get
out of your head. Your mind is too cluttered. So
there was a confirmation that we were talking right now.
That would seem a little weird, then it was perfectly normal.
At this time, reality was blurring with something Charlie didn't
(10:43):
understand and couldn't control. From this point in time, I
was still hanging out with the blah blah a lot,
and I no longer slept, you know. I'd hang around
the cafes during the day. I'd be walking in the
Himalayas barefoot and sometimes with no shirt all night. Things
took over when I was when I was in this
(11:04):
state of doing jewels that I didn't know what they were.
As he wandered at night, he would find these small
private temples on people's properties where he would chant and
perform rituals he had no prior knowledge of. He'd also
paint his face like different Hindu gods. He didn't use
any pictures of these gods to instruct him, or even
(11:24):
a mirror. It's like he already knew what he was doing.
At one point in time, I was absolutely convinced that
the Dalai Lama was a higher incarnation of my dad.
So at a certain point I was walking down to
the Dalai Lama at Dalai Lama Temple every morning and
waiting there. In my head, I had already had a
(11:47):
conversation with him, you know, and we both understood that
he was my dad. Finally I went up and actually
requested his presence from the guards, which I was obviously
very much denied. In this state, Charlie believed he was
connected to the Dali Lama because he saw himself as
(12:08):
one with everything, so there was no separation between himself
and the Dalai Lama, just like there would be no
separation between himself and the Messiah or Jesus, whom he
would eventually claim to be. So through this period of psychosis, india, syndrome,
whatever you want to call it, I started, you know,
very much believing I was enlightened, very much believing I
(12:31):
was some sort of reincarnation of Jesus or Buddha or whoever,
as very much believing that I was put there to
cleanse people of their demons. In his state, Charlie was
seeing physical manifestations of demons and people's faces and bodies.
(12:52):
I remember I was sitting in a cafe and this
guy walked in. He was wearing a fancy fedora, nice clothes,
but his face was completely dysform looked like it had
been through a fire. He was missing fingers, teeth, all well.
(13:12):
Being very well dressed, Charlie saw these man's deformities, which
made him look like a demon, as a manifestation of
the man's materialism or greed. So Charlie approached this guy
and asked him if he could perform a blessing on him. Surprisingly,
this guy accepted Charlie's offer. Charlie knew the owner of
the cafe and asked her to bring them a bowl
(13:34):
of soup. He performed a blessing or spell over the
soup and asked the guy to drink the whole cup.
After he did, the man went into the bathroom, and
from outside the door, Charlie could hear something happening in there.
Maybe he was throwing up or who knows, but there
were definitely noises coming from the bathroom, which in his state,
(13:54):
Charlie saw as part of the purification process or an exorcism.
When the noises died down, Charlie knocked on the bathroom door,
opened the door and sat down next to him, and
he was kind of freaking out, and I said, now
you go on this hike. And I told him to
go on this certain hike. It's, you know, a sacred
mountain right at the base of the MLAs in northern India.
(14:18):
And he left. Anyone on this hike and time was
irrelevant at this point for me. But a bit later
someone came walking through the door wearing very natural like
hemp clothing and very grounded looking person and no deformities,
and walks in and says thank you for telling me
(14:40):
to go on that hike, and thank you for everything.
And then it clicked that that was the same person.
And I did the cleansing on He just found himself.
He just went and did a spirit quest. So at
this point Charlie was living in a different reality than others,
and looking back on it, he can't decipher what was
real or what was a result of his psychosis. Some people,
(15:02):
like this man he had helped, saw him as he
I saw himself and enlightened being. These people identified him
as a baba. There were many more experiences like this,
and it went from being accepted to being I got
beat up by I don't know how many Indian people
(15:23):
at one point in time started hitting me till I
hit the ground. I mean, to them, it looks like
a psychowesterner trying to I don't know, cast spells on
someone type of thing. From what Charlie says, he was
walking into people's shops and cafes, trying to cleanse them
of their demons with various rituals he was pulling out
of nowhere. It was apparently disturbing to a few of
(15:45):
the people he approached, especially as the psychosis got worse.
During this time, there were brief moments where Charlie was
completely lucid, and one of these moments, Charlie remembers waking
up from his psychosis terrified. So I was sitting in
my room at this one night, and it almost felt
like I was coming down from a journey from a trip.
(16:08):
To be clear, Charlie's longest acid trip lasted twelve hours,
which is a really long time. But this psychosis Charlie
was in lasted at least two weeks, with brief moments
of clarity like this one. And I finally called my
dad and I told him I was scared of something.
I was like, I don't know if it's this Bamba.
I don't know what it is. I think someone's drugging me.
(16:29):
I'm not in the right state of mind. I don't
know what to do. I feel like it's all around me,
like I felt vulnerable, and I was scared, like really scared.
I did not know what to do. My dad he
got scared. He was like, hack up your stuff and
leave now. As we heard in the last episode, this
is when Charlie's parents went into rescue mode and started
(16:51):
their panicked journey to India to save him, which was
crucial because after this call an a lucid conversation Charlie
had with a friend about suspicions he was being drugged,
he fell right back into psychosis. Before we go any further,
I want to cover something else that might have been
(17:12):
going on between Charlie and Baba Ge. Now we've explored
a lot of facets of spirituality in this podcast, and
what we're about to discuss might be the most out there,
but I think it's valuable to share. Remember how Charlie
said that Baba G, who he referenced as the Baba
and Black, represented the dark side. Well, I was talking
(17:33):
to Suzi Singh, a New Delhi based therapist and author
who in Keita and I will be speaking to in
the next episode, and she mentioned something we haven't explored
yet which she thinks is important to identify, and that's
black magic and the occult, or as Charlie put it,
the dark side. The occult relates to magic and the
(17:54):
supernatural and falls outside the scope of religion and science.
The learned occultist is able to see here and do
things that I hidden from the eyes of ordinary people,
and that seemed like magic. So when occult practices are
used for the good of other people or for the
(18:14):
good of one's own self to gain evolution and enlightenment,
it is constructive, it's powerful, it's positive black magic. On
the other hand, it's the misuse of occult information to
cause harm to others through the manipulation of energy for
some personal game. Now, this distinction is really important, Caroline,
(18:38):
because just as fire can be used to cook a
meal or to burn down the house, occult practices can
be used for evolution often destruction. It depends entirely on
the intention. So as black magic really dangerous, and do
you have examples of this? Black magic is definitely dangerous
(18:59):
in India. People who practice it are often referred to
as panthrics. In November twenty twenty, there was a news
report about a six year old girl in Khanpu who
was raped and murdered on Devali night, which is a
festival of lights incidentally, and her liver was extracted for
a thumb thick ritual which involved eating the liver to
(19:20):
enable a childless couple to bear a child. I've heard
of several such instances where you can kill another person's
child just to become pregnant to yourself, so we can
see how destructive and how evil in darkness is saying.
Also had thoughts in charlie situation if in fact this
(19:40):
baba was performing some sort of black magic on him.
I think what you're referring to in Charlie's case is
something called Bashi curran, which is a hypnotic state brought
on by the Baba and Charlie, who then becomes like
a puppet on his chain. Once the barber has control
over his mind, Charlie has very little personal who were left.
(20:03):
He is going to be directed entirely by the magician himself.
In some ways, it can be compared to voodoo practice
So if this is what was happening, did Charlie, how
could he have protected himself? When we talk of black
magic in general, protection can become very difficult because one
may have no idea where the harm is coming from.
(20:25):
From the little experienced and exposure that I have in
this field, personally, I've come to conclude that one of
the most powerful protection arises from beaming blessings and love
to the sender. So, according to Saying, love is an
insulator against black magic, while fear enhances it. I had
(20:45):
an energy session with an Irish practitioner when I was
going through a tough spot in December. I was hoping
he could clear some stuff. I was feeling blocked, like
nothing was flowing. Things were either blowing up or they
were stagnant. And though this practitioner didn't use the term
black magic, he did identify what was going on between
(21:05):
me and another person he said was part of the
problem the same way Sing described the dynamic between the
Baba and Charlie, and the intentions this practitioner set energetically
were also the same as Sing just expressed. He took
me through a visual exercise of sending love and blessings
to this person with the intention to transform their negative energy,
(21:27):
and it worked. This practice of sending blessings is not
regulated to tantric or energetic healing. It's like prayer and religion.
So even though this idea of magic can be hard
to comprehend in our Western culture, if you view it
in a different context you're familiar with, it makes sense.
But what might make more sense in context to Charlie
(21:49):
in his situation is that he was being drugged, which
is something as dad believes he was drugged. Can I
prove it? No, I didn't go to Bagsue. The only
reason why I know that that happened to him is
because what he had done in the past, the experiences
that he had taken other people on and been on himself,
he always came back grounded. He journaled what had I learned.
(22:14):
This was not that type of experience. This was psychosis,
according to Charlie, and like nothing he'd ever experienced before,
and his parents knew it. So September twenty nineteen, after
Nanette and Charlie Senior both received those cryptic FaceTime calls
from Charlie, they were on a seventeen hour of flight
heading to India to track down their son. In the meantime,
(22:38):
they sent Rennick from Delhi to Bagsue to keep tabs
on Charlie. In the United States Embassy, it sent the
Indian police to help. Apparently this part the police got involved.
They found me. I'd disappeared from them for a few days,
like days, I don't know where I went. I think
this was the tipping point where it could have gone
(22:58):
really wrong and I could have disappeared. Charlie is lost
a lot of time and clarity due to the state
he was in, but he's been told that he was
found naked in the woods by Taurists who were hiking,
which Charlie's mom the Net confirmed in the last episode.
Something happened and they found me. And then the next
(23:20):
thing I remember is these police. So I knew these
police from before. These were the same Indian police that
the US Embassy had sent to help Charlie get the
American woman and psychosis out of his room and into
a hospital. They'd built her apport with Charlie through that,
so as you can imagine, when Rennick led them to
him and he was in the same psychotic state as
(23:43):
that woman, it was a shock. They came up to
where I was in a cafe. My friend brought them
to me. I was like, oh, these guys are my friends.
I already knew who they were, right. They were very nice.
I mean, these police were saints, and they're like, okay, cool,
come with us, and we're just like casually walking, you know,
(24:03):
like thinking nothing of it, and then we finally get
to their car, and then I'm like, WHOA, what's going
on here? This is when Charlie freaked out in his state,
he didn't know reality from delusion, and even though Rennick
and these cops were there to help, he was scared
and tried to leave, and they grabbed me and forced
me into the police cruiser. One cop got on one
(24:25):
side of any one cop got in the other. There
was two in the front seat and one in the back,
and then my buddy jumped in the back too, And
at this point I was bawling. I was crying. I
was like, I don't know what's going on. Eventually Charlie
calmed down, but when they pulled up to the hospital,
he had a very different idea about why they were there. Now.
Mind you, at this point, I think I'm like a messiah,
(24:46):
like Jesus so they bringing me to the hospital. I
think they're bringing me there to heal these people. I'm
like looking at these different people, like these very sick
people in these beds. Then I think I'm healing people.
They're looking at me like, Okay, what are we two
with this person? Like I was clearly out of my mind.
In the last episode, the nets spoke about what looked
(25:06):
like holes and the palms of both of Charlie's hands.
According to Charlie, this was from ashing chill him or
incense into his hands after a ritual, which usually didn't
leave a mark, but one time he accidentally burned a
hole into one of his palms. He did the same
thing either purposefully or not. He can't remember to the
other palm. In his psychosis, he believed this was a
(25:28):
sign he was the messiah. In this state, these public
hospitals didn't know what to do with Charlie. Rennick and
the Indian police tried at least two hospitals that wouldn't
take him, but the third hospital did. This is all
Charlie remembers about that hospital. I was refusing all of
their treatment that they wanted to give me. I ran away.
(25:49):
They grabbed me and drugged me back to this journey
or to this bed, threw me on it, held me down,
and they injected me of this stuff. Next thing I remember,
I woke up in a really nice hospital in Delhi
with my parents coming up. We'll find out how Charlie
came back from the brink of a spiritual edge, which
(26:11):
he was now experiencing as a psychotic break. Charlie lies
in a hospital bed in New Delhi and severe psychosis.
His parents, who are with him, believe he's in this
state because he was being drugged. So I asked Charlie
point blank, did he think he was drugged by his teacher,
(26:34):
Bob A. G. I don't know for sure, and that's
why I'm not going to say yes he drugged me.
Is he probably the top candidate for drugging me? Yes.
Boba Ge was with Charlie before he went into psychosis,
and he was with him during it, which we witnessed
on Charlie's call with his mom Nanette last episode, but
(26:58):
he vanished when Charlie was taken to the hospital by
the police. However, before things got bad, Charlie truly valued
bobba Ge and his guidance. I do believe that I was,
and still to this day, that I was achieving some
sort of spiritual awakening prior to what I've been described
(27:21):
as I fried circuits and I went too far too fast,
and dropped and went into psychosis. So on that side
of things, I do believe that he to a point
facilitated and awakening. And then on the other side he
was drugging me. That's not okay and very deceitful, and
(27:45):
and I wouldn't have subscribed to that. But Charlie didn't
know Boba G's intentions, and he still doesn't know. Whether
he had good intentions or bad intentions. I don't know.
But the one conclusion that we've all drawn is that
he did not help ground me. He did not do
any thing to pull me out of this space. The
(28:08):
therapist that I'm working with he had an experienced in India,
and he said, the Indians Sawdus. They're about up and out,
that's all. They're about getting to this highest level possible
as quickly as possible. They don't really think about the
coming back down to Earth. Their goal is to take
you as far as possible. Well, Charlie went as far
as he possibly could and He realizes now that in
(28:30):
this state of psychosis, there were many times when he
could have disappeared in India, like some of the other
stories we featured, but things lined up in his favor.
I think I got very lucky for certain reasons. I
got lucky because I knew these police, my buddy found me.
My parents cared it well. I think there's no lack
of caring when it comes to parents and children, right,
(28:52):
That's not the special part in my case. I think
the special part in my case was a fair amount
of luck me knowing the police and they saw me
held out this lady before. Earlier in this episode, Charlie
said how important it was that these specific police who
knew him were the ones that found him. It wasn't
just important, it was a vital because when the doctors
(29:15):
drew Charlie's blood, they found LSD. And though he did
one psychedelic journey in India, it was before a psychosis.
So he doesn't know how LSD got into a system
if it wasn't present from earlier, And this was not
why he was in a psychotic state. Like I've said,
a psychedelic journey can last twelve hours, not over two
(29:35):
weeks either way, He and his parents knew he was
in trouble. That's technically like a fifteen year prison sentence
in India, so I could be in prison right now,
but they didn't do that. They helped me out. Charlie
knew how lucky he was in this situation, but he
and his parents also knew they had to get him
(29:55):
out of India just in case anyone else got wind
of their being LSD in a system. So after antipsychotics
grounded him enough to get on a plane, they were
on the first flight back to the States. But things
weren't any easier there. I mean, things never stopped being
weird at this point. I was still kind of I
was like in a midway. I wasn't fully where I was,
(30:15):
but I wasn't back on my ground either. I was
just uncomfortable in this existence. When Charlie got back to
the States, he was staying with his mom in California,
but like he said, he wasn't completely with it, so
he thought his mom was drugging him, so he took
off for Austin, Texas and asked his fiance Michelle to
meet him there. Just to note his mom, Nanette was
(30:37):
definitely not drugging him. I was having anxiety attacks, panic
attacks all the time. I remember once my fiance got there,
like we'd go out for a walk and we'd get
out of the car and like five minutes in, I
was like, no, I gotta go back. Like I'd just
get this anxiety attack, just anxiety, anxiety, anxiety. I mean
in the apartment, I would get up from the couch
(30:58):
and I'd been pacing back and forth, and I would
like stand in a corner and like, I don't know
why a corner, but a corner hoop made me feel safe.
Charlie couldn't sustain this level of anxiety. My buddy he had,
he had had my gun for a long time. And
I finally when I was there, I was like, I'd
like my gun back, and it was just sitting on
my dresser and I was just waking up and just
(31:23):
looking at it. At this point, things were really bad.
Charlie wanted out. He turned to his dad for support.
He's like, you need to find a psychologist or a
psychiatrist or someone to talk to you right now. If
you know anything about the mental health system in this country,
it's not easy to find someone to talk to Even
(31:45):
as a middle class American with health assurance, there's waiting
lists for months just to get an initial appointment. So
he's like, well, you got to check yourself into a hospital,
and I'm like, no, but I guide no other option.
This is the time where I started questioning everything that
had happened. I was lucid enough and out of the
(32:06):
psychosis enough to be questioning what happened, but I wasn't
out of it enough to rationalize it or to like
make sense of it. I was still on this fence
where it was like magical thinking on one hand and
then thinking I'm crazy on the other side. The magical
thinking was that his spiritual awakening in India had him
(32:29):
living in a different realm than the rest of us.
But there's another side to that. So if you have
the whole population telling you you're crazy, you're gonna start
believing it. I didn't notice too. I trusted myself one moment,
and then I didn't trust myself the next moment. It
was just like this constant teetering, and I finally admitted
myself to the hospital in Texas. Charlie went to an
(32:51):
emergency room so we could be admitted to the psychiatric
hospital in Austin. At the hospital, a doctor diagnosed Charlie
as bipolar one, which is also known as manic depressive disorder.
Someone affected by bipolar one has at least one manic
episode in their life. Charlie didn't agree with his doctor's diagnosis.
What who are you talking about? Like, I've never had
(33:16):
anything similar to bipolar in my life. Oh well, I
can just come on and I'm like, okay, So what
Her explanation was that it didn't have anything to do
with the acid, except for the fact that the acid
made me not sleep that first night, and then it
threw me into a manic episode, which made no sense
to me. But I've learned now the only way to
get out of a psychiatric hospital is to accept whatever
(33:38):
diagnosis they've given you. Charlie left the psychiatric hospital, diagnosed
his bipolar one, and on twelve hundred milligrams of lithium
a day. To anyone who has not been on lithium before,
this feels like the pillform of a lobotomy. I didn't
care about anything. I didn't want to really live, I
didn't want to die. I just kind of was. There
(34:02):
was no emotion. It was gone and I was on
lithium for almost a year. Charlie eventually got off the
antipsychotics and found alternative therapy and healing modalities that have
helped stabilize him. I mean, I can't believe the person
sitting on the other side of this zoom went through
what he did less than two years ago. Regardless of
(34:25):
how intensive an experience this was. For me, it was
a pivotal point in my life. I mean, it's changed everything.
Charlie was chasing a spiritual edge in India, which ultimately
led to a psychotic break. But he came back from
this edge and now he wants to use his experience
(34:48):
to help others. He's going back to school to get
a degree in psychology so we can support those who
have had similar experiences to his own. And I know
those people are out there because of this podcast. I've
spoken to them. Charlie attributes where he is now to
a company nation of psychedelics and therapy, which he integrates
(35:08):
with a trained practitioner. I think they go hand in
hand really as a healing modality. One stirs things up
and the other makes sense of what comes up during
the experience. Though the idea of psychedelics can be taboo.
The use of drugs like LSD and psilocybin to heal
trauma is having a resurgence after a heyday in the
(35:30):
sixties and seventies with advocates like Ramdas and Timothy Leary,
who as clinical psychologists research the therapeutic effects of these
psychedelic drugs. Now, educational organizations like the Multidisciplinary Association for
Psychedelic Studies or MAPS are legitimizing the use of psychedelics
again through clinical trials that are proving these drugs, when
(35:53):
taken within a clinical or therapy setting, can help heal PTSD, depression, anxiety,
and more, and it helps integrate the experienced into everyday life.
I think that putting a proper container on the use
of these medicines, like having a safe space and proper
knowledge of use, and also having a good support system
(36:17):
is really key to using these medicines safely and effectively.
Because this therapy is the only thing that has helped
truly integrate Charlie's experience in India, It's something he eventually
wants to study so he can become a practitioner and
safely use psychedelics and his therapy sessions with others. But
for now, the way he wants to help others is easy.
(36:40):
When I've reached out to you, and you know, obviously
a lot of stuff started going through my mind. Is
this a good thing? This is a bad thing? Like,
you know, why do I want to be on a podcast?
And there is you know a couple of things that
really came up for me. And one is, if there's
other people that have been through what I've been through
(37:01):
and don't have the clarity around it, maybe the integration
that I've been able to have with therapy and really
moving through it. I mean, if one person or to
call me and I was able to have a conversation,
it was just able to shed some light on what
they've been through and maybe helped them in some small way.
(37:22):
I mean, I mean, it banged this whole podcast worth
it for sure. The day after Charlie and I had
this initial interview, he texted me. The text read, have
you heard of data? I replied no and called him,
so you've never heard of data? Wo Okay? I think
(37:44):
that this is very important information for this podcast because
no one's mentioned this so far. Data is a missing
piece of a puzzle that Charlie is just now putting
together as he starts to integrate his psychosis in India
with his current reality. Last night, going through the whole
(38:04):
story really like it got me thinking. So I remember
the story of the lady, the American woman Charlie helped,
who was in psychosis. The Austrian guy that I was
around when I was there, he suspected that she had
been given to Torah. So data is a flower, and
it's been compared to salvia. It's a hallucinogenic that you
(38:28):
don't want to take. It causes nightmarish hallucinations and the
effect on data can last six months a year and
it can never go away. Sometimes Tatora is also known
as I believe the Devil's trumpet. Data is a poisonous
flower that does look like a blooming trumpet. It's pretty,
(38:51):
but it's psychoactive and can cause hallucinations and psychosis. So
do you think Baba Gee was drugging you with data?
That's what I'm wondering. Either way, Data is something Charlie
thinks we need to explore further. I'm wondering how this
part slipped through the cracks about India because We're recording
(39:13):
this in real time as Charlie's story unfolds and my
team needs to do some digging on the Statira lead.
We'll be back in early May with the final episode
of Astray. If you've gone through a similar experience to
Charlie or just want to reach out to him, you
can contact him at Charlie Marinelli seven seven seven at
(39:34):
gmail dot com. Astray is a production of School of
Humans and iHeartRadio. Today's episode of Astray, Charlie Marinelli found,
was produced, written, and narrated by me. Caroline Slaughter and
Kita Nanda is my co producer, and Gavi Watts is
our supervising producer. Astray was sound produced by toone Mothers,
(39:57):
with score and sound design by Jason Shannon and mix
by Harper Harris. Executive producers are Elsie Crowley, Brandon Barr,
and Brian Lovin. Thanks for listening, School of Humans.
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