P.D. Newman Explains Theurgy and Neoplatonism Episode #298

Episode Transcript
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(00:16):
Welcome to Mind Escape. Are you ready?
Are you ready to escape your mind?

(00:49):
All right, folks, welcome back to Mind Escape.
I am your host, Mike, and Happy New Year.
I know we're almost halfway through the month and probably
some people don't like that, butwe haven't done an episode yet,
so I am feeling better. Thank you to all the people who
reached out, sent nice messages and everything.

(01:11):
I'm feeling a lot better. Completely changed a lot of
stuff in my life. Working out, taking supplements,
doing some stuff. So I'm feeling good, so I'm
excited. That was a new intro, by the
way, Created that myself. The music, did all of the
instruments on logic and everything, and so I'm gonna

(01:33):
maybe make a full song at some point and put it up on our
Patreon. But yeah, I did that.
And then my wife contributed a little bit of vocal action in
there. Yeah.
And shout out to Maurice, who helped me figure out a few
things on Premiere Pro as well. So thank you, Maurice.
Maurice is out of town, but whenhe comes back, we're going to

(01:53):
have him on as well. So that'll be, we got 300 coming
up. It's a big one.
We've been doing this six years now.
Episode 300, it's quite the milestone.
So it's the longest creative project I've ever been a part
of, and I've been in bands my whole life.
So exciting stuff. But tonight we have special

(02:15):
guest in front of the show, PD Newman is back on and we're
gonna discuss his new book, Theergy.
Let me pull it up here. This thing's a badass hardcover
book. Theergy.
Theory and Practice. The Mysteries of the Ascent to
the Divine, where you know the bottom part.

(02:36):
He has Homeric Epics, the Chaldean Oracles, and the
Neoplatonic ritual. So when we've had PDN recently
with a lot of psychedelics, ancient psychedelic symbolism,
stuff, I feel like this is kind of a little bit of a, you know,
change up from what you normallydo.
But I really enjoyed it. I learned a lot, even though I

(02:59):
do know a decent amount about the topic.
But well, first of all, welcome back on the show dude.
How are you? I'm good.
Thank you, Thank you. And that intro is fantastic.
Oh, thanks, man. Yeah, put a little bit of time
into it and maybe it'll keep evolving too.
We'll see. But let me know what you think.
I mean, we had the same old intro for a while, so if you

(03:21):
like the new intro, you know, give a nice nice review or send
us a message. And if now we've still got the
old one of people who really don't like it, so, so let's talk
about this new book. I did know some about Theergy
just from going back four or five years ago.
I went through all the pre Socratics and Platonic dialogues

(03:44):
a ton and stuff like that. What got you into the topic and
why don't you kind of explain what it is?
Because people might have heard the word before, but I I don't
think a lot of people actually know what Theo G is.
Sure. In in one regard, I think it is
like you said kind of a departure from what I normally

(04:07):
research. But in an in another sense it's
really not. Because the kind of the
underlying theme of all of my work has been this notion of
transcendence, you know of of transcendence of of self and
breaking out of limitations of self.

(04:27):
And I think this fits right in with that in terms of
psychedelic and just or if entheogenic right.
Entheogenic specifically refers to the the generation of the
divine within oneself. And just that alone is very

(04:48):
similar to the meaning of of theology.
It means to work with the gods. And this work is an an internal
work, even though it's ritualized and there is some
import given to the manipulationof material things as symbols

(05:08):
that transcend their basic stations.
So they're similar. But you're right, it is.
It is different from anything I've done in the past because
it's not really about psychedelics, but it is very
psychedelic, the content of it and what it's actually
describing theurgy itself, like I said, it means to work with

(05:34):
the gods or the work of the gods.
It's a combination of two Greek words, one meeting meaning
deities or deity and the other meaning work.
So you could spin it a number ofways, but those are the basic
concepts in that conjunctive word and it first the the term

(05:57):
itself first appears in the 2nd century with this father son
ritual team that are known as the Giuliani because they're
both their names are Julian. Not to be confused with Emperor
Julian who was also a theologistand existed around the same time

(06:18):
but different different Julian's.
And what it basically consists of is their contacting certain
deities, in this case largely Apollo and Hecate, and the
deities speaking through them inthis oracular form and these

(06:41):
divine utterances and so. A lot.
A lot like the way. John D and Edward Kelly would
work where you'd have John D doing the these invocations to
the deities or to the angels in his case and and Edward Kelly
being the seer, the one who could actually see and hear
them. It it worked a lot like that
with this call and response kindof technique.

(07:06):
And the predominant philosophy of the day was, of course Plato.
And Plato is not really read in this way much these days, but
his metaphysical teachings are very heady, very kind of, for

(07:29):
lack of a better word, psychedelic.
And they. Use were we talking like Theory
of forms or. The well, the that's the basics
of it that. The.
That there's there's the sensible reality which is the
world of the senses and objects that we can perceive with our
senses and touch them and and but behind that is this ultimate

(07:54):
reality that is more real than this one.
And in that reality of course the like you said the forms or
the ideas these it's been interpreted as number for neo
Pythagoreans ratio. But these forms that inform the

(08:16):
way everything happens here, youcould almost think about it like
a blueprint for reality. And what the theorists are
actively trying to do is explorethis, this blueprint and Plato
and his Phaedrus dialogue, whichis where we get the famous Soul

(08:40):
Chariot idea that the the soul has this vehicle that can that
can carry it to the station of the gods, where one can not only
just directly perceive but participate in these divine
actions. In the realm of the gods, which
is in pre Socratic thinking, that's not how things worked.

(09:04):
You know you you have this concept of going into the
underworld and facing divinitiesand things.
But prior to Plato there really wasn't any talk about man going
up Mount Olympus that that was for the gods and and it it's
normal for a post Christian world to think about.

(09:28):
Oh well you know in the in the Christian model man dies and he
can go to heaven or sometimes have visions of heaven as a as a
living person. But those ideas in Christianity
were largely influenced by this.Christianity is thoroughly
Platonic in a number of different ways, but Plato

(09:49):
introduced this idea that that man could ascend and be at one
with the gods and have this experience of the divine.
Yeah, so basically Theurgy is human beings trying to interact

(10:09):
with the gods in their favor. What I found interesting though,
so one of the we've got some main players, we've got
Platinus, we've got Porphyry, we've got Prokhilis, we've got
Iamblichus. So supposedly it would came
first was Platinus, then Porphyry was a student and then

(10:32):
Iambicus was his Porphyry student right?
Is that how that goes? His?
Successor And then following on,we have Proclus and then some
less heavy hitters after that. Damascus, Olympiodorus, Hermias.
But those are the main guys. After Plato was gone, the

(10:53):
Academy had kind of been taken over by Stoics and skeptics that
weren't really doing what Plato was doing.
And when Platinus enters the picture, he sees himself as
correcting this, this mistake that's happened in the Academy.
And along with that, he really introduces this idea that is

(11:17):
very similar to Eastern modalities and Eastern
philosophies that that you can contact and become one with God
experientially that you and this, this ties right in with
what we talked. About with ego.
Death. You know, lots of new Age folks
think about ego death in a very kind of immature and not

(11:40):
philosophical way. The ego doesn't die.
If it did, we'd have no interface with the world.
We we would have no point of reference.
Yeah, you need some ego. You're never gonna get anything
done. It's like, you know, it's kind
of right what you feed your ego,right?
You know, if you've got good feedback and you're

(12:00):
introspective, I think you're good.
You know, kind of a thing. Yeah, that's exactly right.
And and we do have experiences of ego death, especially in
meditation and and psychedelics and magical ritual, but it's not
a death, it's a temporary abeyance.
It's kind of in psychedelic language.

(12:22):
This. Is discussed as being the
experience of the DMN, the default mode network.
That is kind of the locus of thebrain where the experience of
the self takes place. When you're experiencing what we
call ego death that goes silent,it's usually full of this, all

(12:46):
of this activity, this static. But once that static goes away,
usually after congesting A tryptamine or or LSD that will,
on brain scans go silent. And that's the moment at which
the individual reports later of having experienced what we call

(13:06):
ego death. But Platinus was doing this
through purely contemplative practices, and there's a big
kind of argument about whether or not Platinus was totally
against ritual and only espousedan internal contemplative
process. But I don't think that's the

(13:28):
case. There's plenty of plenty of ways
to approach Platanus that's clear that he wasn't completely
opposed to ritual, and moreover,internal contemplative processes
can be ritualistic. A good example is in Vajra
Vajrayana Buddhism. Many of these rituals involve

(13:50):
ritual implements that are in the mind that you, you're
imagining doing it, going through these motions.
Instead of sitting in a temple and manipulating adores, for
example, they would do this internally.
And that makes it no less ritualistic just because it's
happening inside and the mere act of of sitting silently, you

(14:15):
know, this is, this is ritualistic in itself.
But after Plotinus, it really takes a heavy ritual turn.
And this happens with the introduction of the Chaldean
oracles. And we really learn about that
from Plotinus's student Porphyry.
He wrote a book that's now save a few fragments, is lost.

(14:39):
It's about the philosophy of oracles behind producing
oracles. And many of the oracles he dealt
with in this text were from the Chaldean oracles, from these
two, these Giuliani and and it especially focuses on rituals.
Specifically there's this death ritual that they would do where

(15:03):
the the personal station would be transcended and they would
have this experience of again, you know, not just leaving the
body but of leaving time, getting outside of time and
space. And you know, concepts that are
really familiar to someone who meditates or does psychedelics

(15:24):
and or does certain forms of ceremonial magic.
But beyond that it's really hardconcepts to to discuss and wrap
your head around but that's whatthey were doing.
And and Porphyry he he's the onewho really broke down the theory
behind theory and the theory is this cosmological picture that

(15:47):
he paints of the soul that fallsfrom divinity, enters a body and
then has to climb back up these levels of the heavens.
It falls through like it's climbing a ladder and and that
image still exists in a lot of mystery schools and masonry.
For example, there's the ladder with 7 rungs, and each of those

(16:10):
wrongs represents a level of theheavens.
And there's seven because they refer to the seven visible
planets, the seven planets visible to the ancients.
And as the soul descends througheach of these levels, it
acquires a layer of pneuma of ofthis airy kind of mist.

(16:32):
Fiery, airy mist. You can think of it as that
weighs the soul down. So you can if you're familiar
with the myth of Ishtar Inanna, who descends into Kerr, the
Mesopotamian underworld. And she does this by walking
under 7 arches and at each arch she has to take off an article

(16:53):
of clothing until she gets all the way at the bottom and she's
completely nude. So it's like the.
Reverse of this, for incarnation, you're acquiring a
layer and another layer and another layer until you're heavy
enough to stay down here in a body.
And these planetary layers, theycome with the virtues and the

(17:13):
vices associated with these. And this is this.
This thinking is the origin of the seven deadly sins, for
example, Those seven deadly sinsor those seven vices that come
from each of those planets. There are also seven virtues
that come with them. But once you have them, once
you've acquired them, the only way to get back up there without

(17:35):
physically dying is by casting them off 1 by 1.
And this idea also shows up in the Corpus Hermeticum, for
example, in the Divine Poymentres, where each planetary
vice and virtue are cast off, and the soul gets lighter and
lighter until it can ascend. And what the these vices and

(17:56):
virtues? You'd think virtues are a good
thing. The more virtues would make you
lighter. But no, they both of them tie us
to sensible reality. They they tie us into the good
and the bad are equally distracting in this context.

(18:17):
So a lot of these guys have different thoughts though, even
though they all were teachers and students, I think Was it
Platinus and Proculus? Maybe they both believed in the
monad or the one, the intellect or noose and the solar psyche.

(18:42):
And then I Is it with The Who was it?
I think it was maybe porphyry that kind of dismissed the
Egyptian mysteries, like the ritual.
Maybe I'm getting that wrong. But.
The. Well, that might not have even

(19:02):
been in your book, by the way. That might have been something I
saw somewhere else. The.
Well, it is true that that therewas this dismissal of ritual,
but yeah, that's the earlier Platonian and and and again,
it's not 100%. Correct.
Yeah. OK.
So that's it was, Yeah, it was. Putinus and Porphyry were like
against like animal sacrifice and like.

(19:24):
Oh, definitely, yeah. Stuff like that.
That's what it was. Now in the animal sacrifice,
animal sacrifice was the name ofthe game and and public religion
in both Greece and in ancient Judaica.
You know the the the sacrifice was necessary and it was true in

(19:44):
Egypt also. But a lot of people have
difficulty, especially now, withanimal rights and things,
discussing that kind of thing and without discussing it.
It's really hard to wrap your head.
Around it in the way they were thinking, but their cosmos was
divine. So even though we have the
sensible and the intelligible inPlato, we've got the material

(20:07):
world and we've got the intellectual.
World of ideas. Everything here only exists here
because it originates over there.
So in the final analysis for them, everything is divine.
Everywhere you look around, every tree you see, every animal
you see is a kind of a fractal of a God.

(20:31):
And a lot of people are familiarwith the Egyptian idea that the
God Thoth or Tahuti, he's represented often by an Ibis
Ibis bird. And in modern magical orders,
like for example, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, you're
taught that every Kingdom of nature, everything in it,

(20:54):
corresponds to a certain God. But they use it more as a
mnemonic, A symbolic mnemonic. So if they saw an Ibis they
would know to think Thoth like it jogs the memory kind of and
reminds you of Thoth. But for the earlier way of
looking at this was more that that Ibis is Thoth and and

(21:17):
Prokhilis talks about this when he's using the sun as an
example. The sun God isn't the sun
itself, but the sun is under theif we think about it as a chain,
the sun would be a pendant belowthe God of the sun and then
below the planet the star would be.

(21:40):
If we wind up the kingdoms as animals, plants, metals,
minerals, well in the animal Kingdom the rooster which crows
with the stations of the sun would be considered solar, would
be considered an avatar of Apollo or Helios and so would
the lion. Because of his mane he looks
like the sun and the they only sign the sun rules as Leo for

(22:04):
instance, which is the lion. But in the plant Kingdom it
would be heliotrope which is sacred to the sun, sunflower and
the metal Kingdom. It would be the the metal gold
each and this continued into alchemy.
Each planet has its own metal, but they don't correspond to it
in the way they think of it. It is it in in in in a lesser

(22:31):
kind of not so loud tempered form.
So they're when they sacrifice an animal that the animal that
they are sacrificing is one thatis that God and and we get that
this this transfers into Christianity even when you know

(22:52):
that with Christ being sacrificed and you consume his
body and his blood and what whatis called theophagia God eating
and this is true also in Greek religion when they eat the when
they sacrifice the animal it's not just burned to a crisp it's

(23:12):
divvied up and certain portions go to certain types of people
but it has to be eaten without the people eating it there's no
communing with the God. So the God is literally killed
and eaten for his own honor. And and you know, that's a kind
of a far out notion in itself, but that's what they're doing

(23:35):
is, is participating in the God by taking him into their body,
which in turn shows them that they are inside of his body,
that we're all inside the God and that that's something that
yarmulkes talks about. That man's soul is contained in
his body, but for a God, his body is contained in his soul.

(23:58):
And in a sense we would be his body.
And this translates again in the, you know, man made in God's
image and the Jewish teachings. So.
Internal logic to it, you know. So I Amblicas, he thinks that

(24:18):
you can't, you can't get the gods to do something, like
you're not gonna do something that's gonna get the gods to do
what you wanna do. It's almost like you have to do
something and then they realize it themselves or something.
Like can you explain that? Divine persuasion.
It's this persuasive thing with him.

(24:40):
Yeah, I think that's like the most complicated aspect of this
whole thing. Can you like kind of unpack that
aspect of it? Prior to that, if you look at,
for instance, the rituals in theGreek magical Papyri, which is a
kind of a recipe book for all these different magical
operations, in a lot of cases, the God is being compelled by

(25:02):
the priest or the magician to dothese things, often under
threats and yombuchas is like that.
Obviously that's absurd. You you can't make the God do
something. You can't threaten a God.
You know that even if you could go through with it, you couldn't
even go through with it, but it it it complicates matters

(25:24):
because in Neoplatonism they they teach that the God teaches
their mode of invocation. So in their mind, in a state of
trance, the deity would communicate to you how they want
to be invoked. And these communications can

(25:46):
sometimes include compulsions. But they told you to.
So long as they told you to, then you can compel the God.
But beyond that, that the divinedivine persuasion is central to
what Yarmulkes said, and it shows up in Porphyry also.
And there's a section in his philosophy of oracles where

(26:08):
you're kind of like in Parmenides, when Parmenides
descends into the underworld andhe needs the the guard, the
goddess that's standing there guarding the gates to Hades to
open the doors of Hades for him,and they persuade her, they
charm her, and finally convince her to do it.

(26:31):
They don't compel her. But that persuasion shows up
even as early as the Pre Socratics.
Kind of. Again, charming them and even
tricking them if you can. And tricking them, compelling
them, also carries with it an element of daring.

(26:52):
You know that you're courageous enough to, even though you
couldn't trick God, you can try to trick them, and it's almost
you could think about it as a parent whose child we're trying
to trick them, and you see immediately what they're doing.
But it's cute a little bit, so you let them do it.
You know, kind of like that. They saw that as.

(27:15):
A better way of going about it rather than just saying you
don't, you don't do anything with the gods.
You don't invoke them. They invoke you.
You know they have all the power.
But again and they're thinking if you're invoking the God,
that's the God making you invokethem in a way you know, we have

(27:37):
no power. We're just lowly physical beings
and and all of our drives and motivations are the result of
the interplay of these divine forces in our world.
So where we might think we have free will to do a thing, our
feeling of free will, of acting on the impetus to invoke a God

(28:02):
could just as much be said to bethat God's participation in our
world through. Us.
Yeah. Oh, so Iambicus was a
philosopher, Neoplaton, Neoplatonic philosopher from

(28:25):
what's now, I think, Syria. And he was also like a
Pythagorean biographer, if you will.
He was fascinated with Pythagoras and held a lot of the
similar philosophies and stuff like that.
Who do you think is the most cause like?

(28:46):
From what it seems like, Iambicus made it like this like
complex thing where he's got like the monad at the top and it
works its way. Like I said, the intellect and
then the soul and all that, but seemed like his is more complex
than like Platinus's, which would make sense.
I mean, it's later on, but you know.

(29:07):
Yeah. He.
He. Brings in.
He. He.
His argument is that all true priests are theologists, and
that all of these priestly acts basically amount to theurgic
acts, and he's the one who brings in, like you said, for
Platinus it's it's simple. You have the three hypostasis,

(29:30):
which are the monad, the one. Who would be the Father God at
the top Below that you have. The noose or the intellect or or
mind, almost in the kind of the Buddhist sense of mind in the
second station. That's what becomes known as the
demiurge in Plato and and. But keep in mind they're all one

(29:52):
thing. It's like this is the source of
the Christian Holy Trinity with three persons but one entity,
one being, and then under. Mind you have Suke or Soul,
which is the world soul and and the Neoplatonist this becomes
Hecate and they each also represent levels of the heavens.

(30:17):
So all of those seven planetary heavens, That's the realm of
Hecate of Suke and beyond that? The realm of the fixed stars.
That's the noose with all each star being an idea or a form in
the mind of God. And then beyond that is the, you
know what Aristotle called the the prime Mover, the unmoved

(30:40):
mover, the the One, the Father. And you can see why Suke would
become Spirit, Holy Spirit and the Holy in the Christian model.
So yeah, his is very simple. His is simply transcending the
body and participating in each of these hypostasis sequentially

(31:04):
until you unite with the One. But for yarmulkes, He he brings
in this idea and it doesn't start with him.
It's present in the middle. Plate in this, but he's the one
who really kind of lays it all out into.
A philosophy. A big grand, workable
philosophy. Remember we said that all of the

(31:24):
things here are the gods and andkind of fractal form?
Well, he refers to these as Sunta Mata, which means tokens
or signatures. In alchemy, they talk about the
signatures. A sunflower carries the
signature of the sun, which is why we call it a sunflower
anyway. Or sumbola, which are symbols in

(31:48):
the sumbola tend to be words, phrases, prayers, utterances by
the gods and Homer or Hesiod, things like that.
Those become sumbola, and in theChristian model, you have
Semaeon, which is a sign, but they're all basically this idea

(32:11):
of participating in that divinity.
Through its emanations, through its tokens, its symbols and its
signs. And that's basically what what
theurgic ritual. Amounts to is manipulating those
objects, and the reason they do this is because in, for example,

(32:37):
in the Chaldean Oracles, it talks about how the Father, the
One, has sown these Suntemata into the cosmos and into our own
souls, but we're not aware of that.
We're asleep to the capacities of our souls because we're so
into our bodily drives. And Plato had this concept

(32:58):
called an amnesis, which means to not forget to remember to
specifically to remember your divinity, the divine origins of
your soul. So by properly engaging these
Suntemata and sumbola, you can awaken the corresponding token

(33:19):
in your. Soul it's a it's a strange idea
but with the more you kind of sit with it the more it makes
sense and that that anemonesis again I I keep bringing this
back to Christianity because I think that's going to be more
familiar. To your viewers, even if they're
not Christians, because we're surrounded by it.

(33:40):
But when when Christ is performing the Last Supper, for
instance, and he says this, do in remembrance of me well.
The. Word he uses for remembrance is
a conjugation of anemonesis. So he's literally saying by
consuming these Suntemata, the symbola, the bread and the wine

(34:04):
you it will cause you to have a divine remembrance of your own
origins, your own divine origins, and anybody at the time
who was remotely educated. Would have immediately thought,
oh, he's talking about Plato, you know, by by using a word so

(34:25):
platonic. Anybody hearing it would have
thought, yeah, that he's, he's talking about what Plato was
talking about, Which in a sense I call it meta language because.
By using one word. So suggestive of Plato, you
basically evoke all of Plato andit.
Becomes glaringly obvious. How?

(34:47):
Christianity is standing on Plato's shoulders with a lot of,
you know, tweaks and and rules broken.
But that's what the the purpose is to awaken those tokens sown
in our own souls, which in in essence means realizing that we

(35:07):
are the gods kind of masquerading as puppets down
here and. I think that's too is a very
psychedelic revelation. You know, anybody who's taken
enough LSD that they become God in a sense where you start to

(35:27):
see the world through your own with your own illusion, your own
clouds out of the way, and everybody does become sort of
sort of puppet and actor that you've been you you you get the
real sense on a lot of psychedelic experiences that
you've you're not working them right now.
You've always worked them, you know, and I don't mean take

(35:50):
advantage of them. I mean everyone is you
interacting with itself. And if we're going to really
talk about divinity at all and what that means to to be with
the divine, that I think that's really the only way to

(36:11):
understand it. Because when we say the
theorist, for the theorist the goal is to unite with the gods
or with a God, well, that doesn't mean to hug them.
Or to have. Sexual intercourse with them.
Even though these are great metaphors, but they're literally
saying to become one with them. And that's not a two headed
monster with a man's head and a God's head.

(36:34):
It's to completely shed the illusion of being an individual
person. And remember that you are the
one thing behind all things thatthe game you played before this
happened and the experience was just that something that you did

(36:57):
that feels almost like a distraction, you know?
You hear people who have had. Near death experiences, you know
talk about that, how how they look back and they see.
The. Body.
They previously carried around with them as almost like a a
suit they've taken off and you know and and the personality

(37:18):
attached to it is no longer so important for them there.
It's not such a. How would you how would you
distinguish those? I I always think about this like
if conscious, if your consciousness were to survive,
OK, And you know, you're saying that the personality or whatever

(37:43):
wouldn't be attached, but like, what does that even mean?
How are you still? Because I feel like part of who
we are are the collections of all the things that we've done
and learned, right? So, like if you take away like,
what's left, I guess would be myquestion.
Just pure consciousness. And if that's the case, what
what? What's What's going on?

(38:04):
Like, what's the next step? What's the point?
Yeah, it's problematic. And it brings in, it's
paradoxical in the extreme and it brings in the question of,
you know, I I think anybody who purports to know what happens
when you die or what happened before you were incarnated in
this life has has settled on something.

(38:25):
They've settled on an answer, but we don't.
We don't know. And I'm not saying there aren't
people out there who claim to have memories of a past life.
But let's just entertain the notion for a moment that
reincarnation is real, that that's the model.
Well, what part of this personality is more important

(38:48):
than the previous 500? You know, why would this one be
so important? And in.
In terms of what survives consciousness itself, you know,
with without a body, the body's endocrine system is what gives
us our experience of a lot of emotions and it gives us a lot

(39:10):
of our drives. And you know so.
I personally, you know I can't answer that.
I don't think it's answerable. What would a what would a person
look like without a person attached to it?
And yet there are many. Descriptions of this happening,
I've experienced it myself. I was, I was struck by lightning
back in 2015 and I had the experience of leaving my body

(39:35):
and hovering above my body, laying on the balcony where I'd
been struck and it was like a full on psychedelic experience.
I mean, that's the closest thingI can describe it to.
It was like a very heavy dose ofof mushrooms or LSD and what I

(39:57):
felt in that moment I was I was seeing something specific in
front of me in the sky. And it wasn't I I had thoughts
running through. Dude, it was aliens.
Dun Dun Dun. It it was.
Know what it looked like was like a it was like a golden like

(40:18):
a building that was a mountain that was also kind of like a
mosque or a temple and it was made out of.
Liquid gold. That was all.
Turning and shifting and had patterns all over, rippling all
over it. And my thought in that moment
was. Has that always.
Been there. How have I not seen that before?
And the next feeling was of vital interest.

(40:43):
Like, I really wanted to know what that was, and I began
moving. Towards it, you know, But there
was never a feeling of, oh shit,I'm dead.
You know or. I need to.
Get back in my body like none ofthose thoughts were part of that
experience and that nor was there any fear.
It was literally just the most potent curiosity you could ever

(41:06):
imagine wanting to know. What is that that I'm looking
at, you know, but there was. A sense of self.
It felt, I felt like there was. A point of reference, but.
Fear. It seems like would only be
possible in a body because of the endocrine system, because of

(41:28):
these juices flowing through us that give us a feeling of fear
or love. Does something give us
curiosity? I don't know, but that that was
all emotion I had was just curiosity and interest.
Or just real juicy, just juicy, juicy meat suits.
That's the new metal band name Juicy Meat.

(41:48):
Suits, that's what the meat puppet.
So back. OK, so Platinus, I did wanna ask
one more question like nerdy question.
Platinus talked about the mind and you know like objective,
subjective and then the realizedintellect, right.

(42:11):
And he separated it and then Iambicus and and Proculus kind
of messed with that a little bittoo.
And they divided them into 212 spheres and then maybe added
like a third sphere, like separating and connecting those
worlds. But I mean, that seems like
that's a huge part of what led to what we know is like

(42:33):
Christian Gnosticism. Sure.
Yeah, the, the, the, especially.The Sethian Gnostics were part
of Plotinus's school. They were in the Academy and
several of the Gospels that appear in the Nag Hamadi texts
that were discovered in Egypt in1945.
I think we didn't know about those texts.

(42:56):
We knew their titles because Porphyry talks about them
circulating in Plotinus's Academy.
But when the actual books were found, it was like, oh, they do
exist. And when you start looking at
them, they are Platonic and in the extreme.
And Platinus famously has this chapter in his Iniads, which is

(43:20):
his collection of writings that Porphyry organized, called
Against the Gnostics. You know, But what he's against,
even though he does have this streak of dualistic Gnosticism
about his own teachings about matter kind of being evil and
the the intelligible being the good, he does have that same

(43:43):
Gnostic tendency. He's against this idea that that
there could be an evil creator God, for instance, which is what
the Gnostics get from Plato's Timaeus in his Timaeus.
It's basically the book that became the Chaldean Oracles, the

(44:05):
metaphysics behind the book, theTimaeus dialogue, is really what
informed the Chaldean oracles. It's the underlying philosophy,
but in it you have this demiurge.
And Demiurge, remember, is the noose the 2nd party of the three
Hypostasis. And Demiurge means the builder,

(44:25):
the Craftsman, the same thing Freemason means.
And when the Freemasons pray to the great architect of the
universe, they're praying to theDemiurge.
And when Christ is called a Carpenter, he wasn't.
The word isn't Carpenter. The word is tecton, which means

(44:45):
Craftsman and the father. The 2nd party being the son, is
the Craftsman, is the demiurge, is the noose, the logos.
Well, that's interesting. Well, I know the the Greek word
techne, which is like your your thing.
Like if you're a sick musician, that's your techne or your.
Technology. It's the same group technology,

(45:07):
right? And so in this, the Demiurge
shows up and matter is eternal. In Plato's model, it's not an
illusion, it's this eternal stuff that has no form of its
own, no qualities of its own. But through the interaction of

(45:28):
the forms, the Platonic forms that exist in the mind of the
one, in the Demiurge, those Forms reflect back off matter
and give us all of these quantities and qualities and
objects and things. So the Demiurge and the Timaeus
dialogue organizes all of this stuff into what we see around

(45:49):
us, into the cosmos. And then he attaches A chariot
to each one, which this chariot is soul.
He makes the world soul and animates everything by attaching
a soul, a chariot to it. Remember the chariot is that
soul vehicle and we say animate.That's really where's anima

(46:14):
means soul. So he's in soul in everything
giving it life and and being. And he that's what becomes for
the Gnostics, the evil creator. You know this evil demiurge this
because he's lesser than he's this he's under the highest God.

(46:34):
So they see him as like. A Well, isn't it because too, I
mean, obviously there's different explanations, but also
because he's, he's ignorant to this one true God, right?
So like, he's created an inferior product, basically.
And people are like, whoa, what are we doing here, you know?
Yeah, yeah, there. There are Gnostic myths where

(46:55):
Sophia, the female part of Divinity and Logos, the male
part, they're like a married couple.
Sophia wants to have a child, but the Logos does not.
So she goes and reproduces on her own.
But because it's produced from only half of Divinity, it comes
out lopsided and half developed,and she's embarrassed by it, so

(47:21):
she hides him in his own little cosmos.
Yeah. Is that Is it because Sophia
emanated without the Christ aspect of the consciousness or
something? Yeah.
And young and young. It's kind of complicated, right?
I mean, like it does. They're getting people.
Like if you're on board with this back in the day, you're
you're, you're probably one of the top thinkers too.
Because it it's not as simple as, oh, there's a God, let's

(47:43):
worship this God. It's like really complex
metaphysical, you know? They're trying to rectify it
with Jewish teachings too. So here they have the Timaeus,
which is a very really focused creation story, and then you
have floating around outside Genesis with the Jews and these

(48:05):
texts are all circulating, so. When these these these?
Gnostic Christians who were Platonic but also this.
In the early stages of this post.
Jewish religion that was formingthat we call Christianity.
They took what they had read from Plato and they go back and
they read Genesis. Well guess what?

(48:28):
In the original text it says that man is created by Elohim,
the word used for God. In the beginning of Genesis God
created the heavens and the earth.
It says Elohim. Well Elohim is complex.
Anyway, it's a problem because it's it's a plural for one, so
it means gods, but it's a feminine plural.

(48:49):
So it almost would mean goddesses create man and female
as a hermaphroditic spiritual being.
Well, by the time we get to chapter 2, Elohim disappears and
now the word that is that shows up is Lord God.
And in the English translation, the King James Version, it

(49:10):
doesn't explain that well, Lord God is a different deity called
Yahweh or Yaldheva. There are lots of different
pronunciations, but it's the Yodhevaohe, the Tetragrammaton
God, and it says in chapter 2 that he created man of the dust
of the ground and then breathed life into him.

(49:32):
So the Gnostics. The people who would be who
would? Become the Gnostics.
They see this and they say, Oh well, that's a second God.
And he took something that was already a spiritual being and
perfect because it's hermaphroditic and has male and
female components. He trapped it in matter, created
it of the dust of the ground, and then separated the female

(49:52):
out in the form of Eve and put these restrictions on them in
this little garden, you know, sothat for them he's the demiurge
and Elohim is connected with thehighest deity.
And and of course, Jehovah tellsAdam and Eve, don't go eat from
that tree. If you do, it'll kill you.

(50:14):
And the serpent comes along and he says, you know that's not
true, Eat it. You'll see you won't die.
And they didn't die when they ate it.
They might have introduced the possibility of death, which is
how it's explained in Christianity and Judaism.
But they didn't die after they ate it.
And their eyes were opened, and they became as gods, knowing

(50:35):
good and evil. So for the Gnostics, that
serpent, they reasoned, Oh well,that serpent must have been one
of those Elohim, one of those goddesses, or at least they're
emissary. And they sent this being down
into this realm where Jehovah had trapped Adam and Eve and

(50:55):
sent them. They sent them down to come and
say, hey, if you would eat this fruit, if you'd take this
psychedelic, it would open your eyes and you'd realize your
origins are his origins, that y'all both come from the same
place, which is this highest Godrealm you know.

(51:15):
So you can see how with the Timaeus coming along attempting
to reinterpret Genesis with thisnew information, how that
Demiurge character becomes Yahweh, becomes Yalda bad,
becomes this blind idiot God that has motives that are

(51:36):
different from the Elohim who created man, male and female.
As a spiritual. Being, you know.
Yeah, interesting stuff. You know, not to get like down
the religious path, but like youknow what's always intrigued me
when I was getting, reading through all the stuff like
especially when we started this podcast, was the character

(51:57):
Melchizedek. And I think it's been like
bastardized through like New Ageshit.
But like if you if you go back and you look at like it's only
referenced a couple times, it means like a high order priest.
Some even say Jesus was a part of this order.
Yeah, so like that's interestingto me and I wish there was like

(52:17):
more on that. But it like I said, it seems
like I found a few esoteric things, but it's more aligned
with crazy stuff. Do you do you know anything more
about that or just kind of that?It's it's associated with Jesus
because when Abram before he becomes Abraham, his name is

(52:39):
Abram. He gets initiated into this
order of Melchizedek by Melchizedek himself or
Melchizedek as you hear it pronounced both ways.
And the way he initiates him is by sitting down and having bread
and wine with him. That's the initiatory process.
And it's at this point that he is given one of the letters of

(53:01):
Yahweh's name. Is YHVH.
Is his name Yode Vaohe? He's given one of those Hays.
One of those HS is placed in themiddle of Abram and it becomes
Abraham. And you see a similar idea with
Jesus. This came about with with the
Florentine Platonic Academy. There was a man named Johann

(53:25):
Royklin who wrote this book called De Art Kabbalistica and
in it he argues that the name ofJesus, Yeshua is just those same
4 letters Yode Vaohe Yahweh withthe letter Sheen which makes the
SH sound inserted in the middle of it, just like Abram got

(53:47):
Abraham with the H inserted in it.
Now, Sheen isn't a letter that'sin the divine name, but by
inserting that letter in the middle of the divine name, you
get a new name, this Yeshua. So it's an interesting,
interesting thing. Melchizedek he's he plays a
larger role in the the esoteric side of Judaism, but he does

(54:13):
show up in the Bible when he initiates Abram.
Interesting. So, all right, now let's get
down to business. What was actually going on?
Do you think that these ancient,you know, Proclus, iambicus,

(54:34):
porphyry Platinus, do you think they're actually communicating
with any sort of God or metaphysical entity?
Do you think it's all just psychological in the mind?
Do you think that there was possibly psychoactive compounds
at play as well? Like what?
What do you think was happening here?
There were definitely psychoactive compounds involved

(54:55):
and back then they called them pharmaca.
Pharmaca gets translated in the Bible, for instance, as sorcery.
When you see the word sorcery, the word used is pharmaca, and
that's the root of our word for pharmaceutical.
It it means magic plants. Now, later, it can come to mean

(55:15):
any magical act that has an effect by a means that can't be
seen, like the way a drug works.You take the drug and you feel
different, but you don't know what it did or how it makes you
feel different. The mechanism by which it works
is invisible. So that became, in later times

(55:37):
anything like that, a a poem. If you read a poem and it made
someone feel different, that could technically be a pharmaca.
But in the beginning it's specifically magical plants.
And in theogy they have this practice of animating statues
and not making robots of of and filling them with anima.

(55:59):
In the means by which they do this is with pharmaca.
They use drugs. They put drugs in the in the
statue of these gods in the sameway that we put drugs in
ourselves to animate ourselves under those contexts.
And Yambulcas talks about, you know, the use.
Of. Pharmaca in theogy and we know,

(56:20):
remember we said that they they ascend through these levels of
the heavens that was basically laid out by porphyry the the the
system. Well, when Christianity first
came along, it was a mystery school.
It was secretive. Nobody knew what they were
doing, and if you hadn't been initiated, you weren't allowed

(56:42):
to see or hear about what they were doing.
The first time we get a picture of what the early Christians
were actually doing comes from abook by this philosopher named
Celsus, who is a Platonist. In Celsus, he describes this
ritual that's familiar to Christians now in Orthodoxy and

(57:04):
Catholicism, where you're you'rebaptized and immediately after
baptism you're anointed with oiland a chrismation, and then you
participate in the communion, the Lord's Supper.
Well, in some of the forms of these baptisms we see in in this
one type of Gnostic group, they hold certain plants in their

(57:28):
mouths while they're being baptized.
We don't know what the plant is,but we know that that same plant
according to plenty the elder was used in necromancy
specifically to call up the soulof of Homer from Hades.
So it's it's already associated with magic and with visions and
things. But when Kelsa starts talking

(57:50):
about their ritual, he says whenthey get to the consecration
with that oil, he says that theyrub this, what he calls the
white unguent of the tree of life all over their body.
And when this happens, they leave.
Their soul leaves their body andtravels up through the seven
heavens, and they have this ascent ritual.

(58:12):
This is scent experience. Well, that we don't know what
that white unguent of the Tree of Life is, but we have
precedent for it in other contexts, and it's it's flying
ointment. Basically.
It's the use of various psychotropic visionary compounds
that are taken in the body topically by infusing them into

(58:36):
an unguent or an ointment. And this is what we when we hear
about the witches flying by, covering their bodies in this
ointment by them leaving their body and travelling through the
heavens, that's that motif of flight that survives in in the
the later witchcraft in. Europe just smearing detera oil

(58:56):
all over there. Natura, Mandrake, belladonna,
henbane, and henbane. Sounds terrible by.
The way yeah it does and Delphi when the when the Lithia the
Oracle at Delphi when she would prophecy.
She would burn. Hin bane seeds and inhale them.

(59:17):
And and this was this association between Delphi and
hin Bane was so tight that hin bane back then was known as the
herb of Apollo. Apollo being the God who was the
God of Delphi, the God of oracles also, but this infusing
hin Bane in an ointment and putting it on their bodies, I

(59:41):
wouldn't put that past them. But we know that if the early
Christians were doing it, we know how much they were
borrowing from Platonic practicealready from Platonism and
Neoplatonism and theology in general.
It stands to reason. That that this practice also

(01:00:03):
existed in. The Pagan quote UN quote Pagan
side of it too. So I absolutely am under the
impression that they were using psychedelics and and even if we
go back before the Neoplatonates, we go back to the
pre Socratics with Empedocles. You know in the in the fragments
of Empedocles, one of the fragments is he says that he's

(01:00:25):
going to teach his student all manner of Pharmaca, all manner
of doing magic with plants with these magical plants.
So it it's it's very tightly woven connection with with
psychedelics and these ascent motifs, so.

(01:00:46):
Yeah, I mean I'm just curious cause like I don't know like
four years ago, I'm just thinking like who are these
gods? Where were The Who, what were
these, you know? And then like I just that sent
me on the path and now you were even in our documentary as
within. So without where we're
analyzing, you know, are UFOs like the kind of the modern day
Greek God in the sense that people you know will believe

(01:01:09):
that there's this thing even though, OK, yeah, I've had weird
experiences, you've had weird experiences, but can you put
your hand on that, on that experience and be like, hey,
check this out, No, you can't. So it's more of like a gnosis,
you know, like a, a knowledge from experience which you can't
really share with other people. So back then, is that the same

(01:01:31):
thing? And like, the other thing is, is
like, OK, so Apollo, did enough people get together and just
like, you know what I'm saying, like, 'cause think about modern
Christianity, OK, let's believe there's one true God or
whatever. You know, is this.
People have different perceptions of God.

(01:01:52):
Oh, he's a bearded Zeus looking gun in the clouds.
Or he's, you know, primordial energy.
Or whatever the case may be. There's not like a consistent
thing. Like how how were these gods so
consistent and how were people interacting with that?
Consistency, I guess, is the best way to phrase what I'm

(01:02:16):
trying to say, if that makes sense.
Well the the the way the gods looked in ancient Greece were
given to us by Homer and Hesiod when they describe them.
Then they describe their epithets like when he when Homer
would say Gray eyed Athena. So this, this Gray eyed goddess.

(01:02:38):
If you saw something like that in a vision and you were Greek,
you would naturally think, oh that's that was Athena I just
saw. But once you're given a picture
of what the gods should look like in a visionary experience,
you you've already been kind of programmed to see it that way.
But I think it's important to point out that, so it's.

(01:03:00):
Like a Machine elf type thing. Like a Terence McKenna
mentioning machine elf and then just the mind.
So suggest, suggestible kind of a thing.
Yeah, yeah, I think so. But at the same time, seeing
Gods wasn't. The norm.
I mean, very few times you see somebody saying they saw gods

(01:03:21):
rather they would interact with the gods through oracles who
would do drugs, go into trance, and then utter something that
was so seemed so nonsensical at the time.
And then later something would happen and you'd say, oh, that's
what she meant, you know, or through just divination
practices. All of these were how they would

(01:03:42):
interact with the gods, but nobody was really seeing gods.
Now that's not to say nobody was, I mean, but it wasn't the
common thing. And in regard to UFOs, you know
that the the the common vision of of the circular object that
that circles in the heavens. You know when Plato describes

(01:04:04):
the gods, he describes the perfect, the motion of the gods
as being circular in orbit. You know that that anything
that's perfect would basically be circular and make circles,
and I think that fits very well with the visual of the classic

(01:04:25):
UFO that people tend to report. You know, when I saw, I saw.
It didn't. Look like that.
But but yeah, Young is drawing on Plato and he gives that
interpretation, you know, of course, for him, it's no longer
a God. It becomes the archetype of the
self, you know, the complete self, the the person who has
integrated all of his archetypesthat he previously had projected

(01:04:48):
onto the world, and it becomes the perfect circle or sphere.
But that mode of thinking began with Plato.
Yeah, I just, like I said, it's just something.
That's why I've come to the conclusion.
I mean, we've done enough episodes on it.
We've had you on a million times, too.

(01:05:09):
That for me, altered states of consciousness is kind of the
only way to even experience metaphysics.
I don't know how you could experience something like that
in day-to-day consciousness and then even like people that are
talking about like, you know, night time stuff.

(01:05:30):
It's just it makes me wonder what are they tired?
Is it sleep paralysis? That, again, Not that that
couldn't be some sort of vehicleto connect with some other realm
or whatever or some sort of, youknow, chemical gateway to
whatever. But it just makes me wonder.
Like, you know, I know I'm, I want, I want truth.

(01:05:51):
So I'm going to be fully So like, when I had my UFOI, like,
I didn't know or orb experience with my dad where we saw in his
back here, like, I didn't be like, oh, I saw a UFO.
And that's like, oh, let's try and, you know, put a whole
mythology behind what just happened.
But we just both kept saying, like, that was weird.
That was bizarre. You know we just kept looking
into like that was fucking weird, you know, So it's like,

(01:06:13):
but I think the problem lies when when people do create that
mythology or they're maybe not as curious, so they're not
willing to to go through the steps of trying to understand
what happened or look into it deeper if that makes sense.
You know, it makes you wonder how many people have experienced
weird things that just don't have any interest of you know,

(01:06:38):
what happened to them. And then there's people that's
like that's their wake up call or that's the the initiation or
that's the paradigm shift or whatever, you know.
So I think, I don't know, I think life's weird and I think
that the mind is such a powerfulthing.
It's so easily influenced. And when I look at these ancient

(01:06:59):
people, it's so hard to even think about somebody else's
consciousness. Today, when I have everything at
my fingertips on the Internet and I can look anything up to go
back 4000 years, 5000 years, whatever, is is insane to try
and even think about what those people, what mindset they were
in. And and I think you hit the nail

(01:07:19):
on the head when you said that, you know, to experience these
things implies an altered state of consciousness that that can
mean drugs, that can mean meditation, that can mean sleep
deprivation that can mean a whole host of things and
transmit through theater music, all of those things induce
altered. People get runner's high.
I mean, there's so many different ways to get to achieve

(01:07:41):
altered states of consciousness,but they didn't have the.
Problem of you and your dad. Like, I'm sure y'all weren't
meditating when you saw the orb.No.
So yeah, no, we were. We were awake.
We were. I was about to have.
I don't drink, really, but it was his birthday and I was about
to have a Stella and I. We didn't.

(01:08:02):
My wife went to go grab it from the kitchen and came back and
she had her, she had her back turned to it, and my dad and I
were facing out of his backyard.And yeah, we saw this orange orb
hover. I looked it up afterwards.
It was where the Scorpius constellation was.
But it wasn't this was like, close.
This was this couldn't have beensome star.

(01:08:22):
And it just darted off before, like, I went to grab my phone.
And I wasn't even thinking on the level, like, oh, I'm gonna
try and take a picture or video.I was actually trying to pull up
the star chart to make sure to see what I was looking at.
And by the time and I knew it wasn't really a star.
But by the time I pulled it up, this thing was already gone.
And like I said, we just kept saying how bizarre it was.
But, you know, I'm not gonna sithere and say, oh, it was this or

(01:08:45):
oh, it was that. I don't know.
It could have been ball lightning.
It was, you know, it could have been a lot of different things.
But what I know is it made me feel weird.
I had a weird feeling. My dad had a weird feeling, You
know, I don't know, but. And you you know, if one person
is in an altered state of consciousness, it it's a common

(01:09:08):
trope that it can influence other people.
We that's what contact. Hire It did put me in like a
state though. Now that you're so like not like
anxious, but just like an an excitive, an static state, I
guess is that's what I would saystatic.
And you've heard of Filia do theit's a psychological concept

(01:09:34):
using psychiatry, it means madness shared by two or you.
It can have Filia tois madness shared by three.
But it's generally that two persons share in in what for
psychiatry is obviously an illusion something an imagined
thing but for them it's real andit seems real, you know and

(01:09:58):
those things can't be easily explained away.
But you you see it with for instance the the those convents.
There's been a couple of convents where the whole all of
the nuns go into this frenzy andare are seeing the devil and and
desecrating the the temple, you know, and they all go through it

(01:10:19):
at once, all because one person starts doing that and it spreads
like crazy And you know, of course we can't, we can't just
explain it away. It could be ergot poisoning, it
could be any number of things. But those things do seem to
happen spontaneously, without any real reason to find, you

(01:10:42):
know, and I think that's why I said I doubt you and your father
were meditating. I'm sure you weren't out there
tripping on acid with your dad, you know?
So to see something, to be able to be in what feels like
baseline consciousness and then enter what Or see what you would
normally need to be in an altered state of consciousness

(01:11:04):
to see it. Just it raises questions again
about the the. Even if it was a perceptional
thing, that what does that say about us, you know, that we can
just get jacked off of seeing, you know, and I mean to you
know, what it felt like too. For on some level is like seeing
like a picture of a like a scarygrey out of nowhere or like

(01:11:27):
being in your room and seeing like a shadow and thinking, Oh
my God, what was, you know, something like that.
You know how you get that, like you're you're you're you're
pumped up a little bit. That's kind of like what it was.
But that's after it. Though, right, Right.
That's what I'm saying. So that's what I was.
That's why I brought this up, 'cause this is the only time
I've ever had anything in day-to-day consciousness that
was like that. Because all the other

(01:11:48):
experiences that I've had were, whether, it's, you know,
psychedelic or meditation or, you know, like we said, there's
so many way lucid dreaming. There's so many ways to induce
it. I've tried most of them at this
point. Breathwork.
I mean, you name it, dude, I didit live.

(01:12:10):
We had this guy Ben Holton, who runs these like, you know, they
do like getaways and stuff or whatever you want to call them.
And I did alkaline breathing on our Patreon and I was like fully
like geometric patterns coming at me just just from breathing,

(01:12:30):
just from breathing. Just like deep 40 deep breaths
in and out. And I was dude, I was jacked.
I got on a kick with doing it was with just basic pranayama
when I was get first getting into yoga about 20 years ago, a
little over 20 years ago and I had just gotten on Adderall.

(01:12:52):
I was taking Adderall for. I'm the most distractible person
on the planet and they're so they were trying me on Adderall
and that stuff. I couldn't sleep in on it, you
know, and and especially it being a new something.
Out it's interesting and. It and it's.
Given it's chemical composition that you couldn't fall asleep.

(01:13:13):
I see. Yeah.
That's curious but I I I had been awake for like 3 days, no
joke and I I didn't have anything to do.
I didn't know what to do with myself and and the only thing I
was interested in at the time was yoga.
So I sat there and sit asana anddid pranayama non-stop that

(01:13:35):
whole time. And at some point it was like
the physical sensation was like a tree limb snapped in my chest.
And as soon as that happened I felt my face get hot, like it
was on fire. My ears got hot, my lips got
hot, my nose I can feel my eyebrows.

(01:13:56):
Everything had this heat coming off of it.
And I went into this state of absolute ecstasy It.
I've done a lot of drugs. There ain't a single thing I've
ever taken that felt like this. And it lasted for just about as
long as I've been doing it for, right?
At 72 hours, I was walking around like like I was in

(01:14:18):
fucking heaven or something. I mean, it was the most
incredible experience of my whole life just from sitting
there breathing, you know? Yeah, that's like my I'm trying
to get back there now and work out since I've had my incident.
But back in the day, I used to go to Lifetime Fitness.
Like after I would go out and party downtown Chicago, and on

(01:14:41):
the way back, because it's 24 hours, I would go work out.
Dude. I would, after I did a full
workout, did like a steam, everything would, I'd walk out
of there. Dude, you couldn't feel better
than I felt, you know, having a great night on your belt and
then getting feeling great knowing you're just going to go
home and pass out. Like there's no better feeling
than that in the world. And and all of that it's worth

(01:15:02):
saying all of that was sacred back in the day you when you
read about the therapeutic wherewe get our word therapy from you
know all of these deep tissue muscle massages soaking in a
sauna. You know these were religious
practices couple thousand years ago.
You know, our modern condition, we we can't get a hold of

(01:15:26):
anything sacred without turning it into a a treatment, a therapy
kind of, you know, and it doesn't.
I don't think it detracts from its effectiveness, but I think
it's it's interesting to consider how these things were
once religious practices. You know, It's no wonder they
well. We're so distracted.

(01:15:48):
Look at all the the stuff we've got around us.
We've got gadgets and toys and phones and you know, that's the
other thing is how much knowledge do we have now
compared with a lot more? But doesn't mean we're applying
it to anything for most people, you know, like, so like, that's
the problem. I feel like back then you kind
of had to apply what you knew and now you don't.

(01:16:09):
You can just know a ton of shit and not do anything about it.
That's the difference and and knowledge and and wisdom.
You know you you can. You can know everything in the
world about mountain climbing. Read every book on mountain
climbing. But until you're on that
mountain with your knuckles white frozen to the rock, trying
not to fall off, you don't know shit about mountain climbing.

(01:16:32):
You know. It's like, have you ever heard
that young story? I think it's from modern man's
search for a God maybe or no? Is that what it is?
Let me see if I. Search for a soul.
Oh yeah, modern man, search for soul.
I think that's what it is. Let me see if I can pull it up
on my thing. But, you know, in terms of

(01:16:59):
there's a story where, yeah, it's it's a modern man's in
search of a soul. So the story goes young.
Obviously in a large part of this book he's talking about
dream analysis and this person who's a a mountain climber, this

(01:17:20):
guy keeps having these dreams that he, you know, is gonna die
up there alone on the mountain. So he has a couple close calls
and then, you know, Young's like, well, just don't go up
alone, you know, always bring a partner with you and then you
won't fulfill that aspect. And so he does that.

(01:17:41):
He keeps going up and he goes upwith other people and
everything's fine. And then one time nobody else
can go and he goes by himself and he dies alone up there and
as as he said in his dream. So that begs the question, did
he realize that? Did he see it ahead of time and

(01:18:02):
have some sort of precognition? Or did he succumb to the
influence of the mind and it's just something that happened
because of, you know, his awareness?
I don't know. That's that's my question with
all oracular processes is it is it predicting or is it
programming, you know the the the event Young talk Young

(01:18:24):
discusses a bunch of cases like that in different books of
people come in and saying that they they're they've dreamt this
or they're terrified this is gonna happen.
You know. And he always gives them that
same kind of advice, you know, well don't do exactly what you
saw there and it won't happen. But they always tend to.

(01:18:46):
I'm doing it. Yeah, they do it.
Crowley, Aleister Crowley. He was a famous mountain climber
at one time and there's actuallya death that is associated with
his time as a mountain climber. Some people believe he he killed
the guy on this mountain. There's and there's evidence to

(01:19:07):
to back that up that he he may have murdered somebody on a
mountain. That's crazy.
So is this, is this how do you think this ties into?
We kind of mentioned it before, but how do you think this ties
into like all your other research?

(01:19:29):
Like, do you think because I mean, I'm just trying to think
like in terms of obviously a lotof your other stuff's been, you
know, like masonry and symbolismand more not medieval, but like
more alchemy and esoteric and Hermeticism and stuff like that.

(01:19:50):
Do you think that these two things are tied together or do
you think you're going to do something in the future on that
in terms of like obviously because the reason why I ask you
because it's kind of what like shamanism.
Basically is right I. Mean and that that's what my
I've got a book that I've finished shortly after I
completed the book on theurgy and it's on Native American

(01:20:12):
shamanism in the Mississippi Valley and.
Because that ancient theurgy is just like the Western version of
shamanism, right? Like that.
Yes, Soul Flight. You know the the Axis Mundi
going up or down. Obviously there's a lot of
differences too, but that's kindof it's all about divination.

(01:20:33):
Yeah. Mm hmm.
And and you know, we've talked about this before, when Greg and
I were on Greg Little after I wrote this book on theurgy, I I
was in Yorkshire. I was speaking at the Tyranium
initiative up there. And Graham Hancock and Dennis

(01:20:55):
McKenna were standing nearby having a conversation.
And I was standing there with Brian Murarescu, who wrote the
Immortality Key. And I was telling him about my
book on theurgy and what the theme, what it was about about
this soul flight idea. And Graham and Dennis both kind

(01:21:18):
of turned around and were like listening to our conversation
and one of them interrupted us and said, are you oh, you're
talking about the Path of Souls.And I said, I don't, I don't
know what that is, What it what are you talking about?
And he said, well, everything you just said is what happens in
this Path of souls. He said, you need to go research

(01:21:39):
the Path of Souls. So the first thing I did when we
left the tearing room Initiativewas get on the phone and look up
Path of Souls. And that led me to Greg Little's
book and by the time I got back to Mississippi.
The book was. Waiting on me and I read it and
I was astounded that they're describing the exact same thing.

(01:21:59):
Something we didn't get into with the orgy thing is that once
the soul can get out of its out of the body, there are these two
gates in the skies at certain constellations and the soul
enters these gates and it leads them to the Milky Way and it's
in the Milky Way where souls that are dead.
Tibetan Book of the Dead. Very similar or souls that are

(01:22:23):
either dead or people who haven't been incarnated yet
constantly circle in this Milky Way orbit.
Here and in the Native American model, which is for them
primarily an after death model, but it's the same.
There's the gates are in the twosame places.
They lead onto the Milky Way which is the technically the

(01:22:47):
path of souls. And that's where they don't just
orbit forever. But it still is so
overwhelmingly similar that I I dove in my head first.
You know, I thought, this is incredible.
How, how is this same model showing up in on the Mississippi
River Valley? And it was going on in ancient

(01:23:09):
Greece, you know, and I still have trouble wrapping my head
around that. But.
But yeah, so I wrote a book on this topic as well with and and
made some revelations. We've talked about my Mesawaska
hypothesis that it really makes a lot of sense of a lot of what

(01:23:30):
they're describing and based on these, the use of these
entheogens. Within the Native American.
Traditions. But that being said, this book
that I have coming out on this phenomenon in the Mississippi
Valley, it is the same as what I'm describing in the theology
book. And what they're doing, I

(01:23:50):
believe is the same as what was happening with alchemy.
With alchemy, they're putting the these plants through these
processes, but it's ultimately to ingest them, to take them and
give them these, it's. Out of body.
Experience to separate the soul from the body, the subtle from
the gross, as they would say you.
Don't have to tell me, bro. That's what mind escape is.

(01:24:12):
Yeah, yeah, y'all do a great jobtoo.
Well, no, I mean that's what thethe title is was if you.
Can get I know. If you can get outside of your
own mind, you can kind of figureout what.
That's the only way to see what's going on.
I got news for everybody. You ain't figuring out
consciousness until you get outside your own mind.
So if that's right, good luck, Good luck.

(01:24:32):
But that's what we try and do here, you know?
They do think it's all the same,I think.
I don't think my research is changing.
I think I'm just keep taking another step back and another
step back of what is this phenomenon that that I'm really
just fascinated with getting outof your own way transcending

(01:24:53):
your limitations and and of course death is hopefully a long
way away you know. So I won't have first hand
knowledge and for a hopefully a long time but when I do it's not
like I can come back. I just.
I just met up with that bastard a couple months ago and let me
tell you, I ain't ready. Either.

(01:25:14):
I ain't ready either, but no. So actually, if if anybody
listening hasn't checked out, gocheck out our last episode I did
with PD and Doctor Greg Little. It's on our YouTube channel and
all the podcast platforms there is slides with it too.
So I recommend either watching it on YouTube or Spotify.

(01:25:38):
And yeah, it's a it's a it's an excellent episode and PD walks
us through Missawaska and the Yao Pan and the Black drink and
all that kind of stuff. So very, very excellent.
As well as we've done a million now, I think you've been our
most, you might have been, you might have been our top guest
now. I think you're 8 appearances.

(01:26:00):
Maybe I don't even know how many.
Do I get a prize? You do get a prize.
Like I said, you can continue toCo host this thing that we were
doing, the Psychedelic Gnosis series.
We got to continue that here too.
Yeah, let's do it. Schedule.
But yeah, no, man. I mean, honestly, I love this
book. I love when you're on.
I always learn new stuff and I like nerding out with you.

(01:26:24):
And yeah, I'm looking forward tothe shamanism one and all the
stuff you're, you know, I know you, you like, you said you were
in contact with Greg and you know, we when we had you on
before, it sounded like you had a, you know, a a real good grasp
on everything. So I'm looking forward to that
and future projects and yeah, man, I mean New Year, you know,

(01:26:51):
I think for Mind Escape here, we're just gonna keep doing what
we're doing. Some minor changes and I might
be a little bit more fickle withwho I have on, but that doesn't
mean that we're not gonna have fun.
It doesn't mean we're not gonna explore all the, you know, the
usual topics that we normally do.

(01:27:12):
You know, I'm going a more positive route this year.
I feel like last year I kind of did a little bit of, you know,
piling on and shitting on peopleand just aggravated with the
world. I think this year I'm going
positive. I'm gonna, you know, I'm just,
I've had a rough year. Obviously I almost died.
Watched the near death experience a few episodes ago.
If you don't know what happened,you know there was no theurgy

(01:27:36):
happening there. But yeah, I don't know.
Let's just let's keep doing whatwe're doing here and we'll have
PD back on soon. When does your shamanism book
come out? Do you know?
They just finished editing it soI I'll have a an official
publication date. In the Is that one coming
through inner traditions as well?

(01:27:58):
Yep. OK, cool.
And yeah, so check out this bad boy.
It's nice card cover. Thicky they.
Did a great job with cover. Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah. Inner Traditions does an amazing
job in bearing company, I believe.

(01:28:18):
But yeah, no, I I'm really looking forward to this year and
lots of cool guests coming up. And yeah, just you're obviously
going to be coming on a lot. We'll talk about psychedelic
stuff next time. I know people probably that's
what they really want to hear. But the Urgy, this was
interesting, man. Like I said, I think there's a

(01:28:40):
nerdy component to what we just talked about.
But I think it's important to understand the origins of
things, and I don't think enoughpeople do.
I think you would agree with that.
Like when I learn something new,I immediately go into how did
this come to be? You know, like, what's the
origin of this thing? And then I can figure out, is
this bullshit, is this worth my time?

(01:29:01):
Is this you know, whatever. So.
And the the way we experience the world, I mean, we take a lot
of it for granted. We don't realize how many Giants
shoulders we're standing on. You know, and it's been said
that everything following Plato was basically commentary on

(01:29:25):
Plato, whether they agreed with it or disagreed with it, it
changed everything. So it is worth knowing and it
does give some insight into our current predicament, especially
in regard to Christian religion.You know, what is that and how
did that happen and what it whatshould it really be?
You know, we, whether we like itor not, we do live in a very

(01:29:48):
Christianized world now. And just for that reason alone,
I think Plato is is worth an an hour or two, Yeah.
Yeah, well, again, my favorite is Euthydemus.
Talks about aristic rhetoric. And if you read that dialogue,
you're like, this is what's happening on the Internet right

(01:30:10):
now. This is exactly what's happening
on the Internet right now. And it's frustrating, 'cause
it's like this old motherfucker knew what was going on so far
back then, you know? So I don't know, it's just
frustrating. But yeah, Go Euthademus is a
great one in my I mean, there's so many.
Obviously The Republic. Probably one of the most well
written, you know, pieces of literature maybe ever.

(01:30:37):
Yeah, there's. I mean the Timaeus if if you.
Like, it's a good good place to start if you're not familiar.
Is the Euthyphrus. Yeah, Euthyphro.
Oh, Phaedrus. That's like, more.
He has a couple quotes, even onefor maybe the Lucidian mysteries
in there, Yeah? The Symposium.

(01:30:58):
Symposium about love. Lucidian mysteries is the real
theme that there's a there's a great dialogue, a great speech
in there given by Socrates, but he's parroting Deotima, who is a
priestess at the Eleusinian mysteries.
So you get kind of an inside picture of what kind of lectures
were given in those halls. You've got that, You know,

(01:31:21):
there's so many Meno. If you want to learn about
virtue and get frustrated, Yeah,I mean and look, people wanna
take, you know, with the Atlantastuff.
And some people wanna take this stuff word for word and they
say, Oh well, Plato never made stuff.
Well, everything is made-up in the dialogues.

(01:31:42):
Literally everything. Because, I mean, you have to
read them, but it's all Socratestalking to people that didn't
even live at the same time as him.
So how is that even possible? And was Plato there to take
notes, you know, during these dinner parties and all these
things that happened? No.
Like, it's just this dude was just a master at writing and

(01:32:04):
understood philosophy. And yeah.
He the dialogue form allows him to not argue one point.
He he's able to put the oppositeargument in somebody else's
mouth. And I I I have yet to meet a
person that whose position on the matter wasn't addressed by

(01:32:27):
one of the people arguing in there.
So it's a really great way to cover a lot of ground on a topic
and get it from multiple angles.Yeah, that's really Plato's
brilliant. So you're you're getting it.
It's like you can hold the problem and turn it and look at
it from every side. Yeah.
And we keep saying, you know, we've been talking about

(01:32:49):
Neoplatonism, and that's part ofthe, you know, bottom part of
the title of his book. That's actually like an 18th
century word too. So don't if you're looking up
stuff, I would actually look up the people that we were talking
about. Platinus, Porphyry, Iambicus,
Plato. You know, I would look these
people up directly and not look up just the topic because again,

(01:33:12):
you want to get to the origins and not necessarily the final
product, so. But.
Yawn Book is. His book Day Mysterious, I think
is probably the best introduction to this mode of
thought. And it's it's it's a hard read,
but it's comprehensive. And if if you can understand one

(01:33:35):
paragraph and walk away, chew onthat for a day or for a week,
you know, and come back, The time is going to pass,
regardless whether you read it or not.
But a paragraph, even a sentencea day, is progress with this
stuff because it's dense. Dense as hell, you know, But de
mysterious Yombukis. And anytime you're reading

(01:33:58):
something that's translated fromGreek or Latin or, it's almost
better to. And I've learned this from
listening to professors and stuff too, to read multiple
translations. Or if you're in like a book
club, have two different people read two different translations,
say, maybe you come to some sortof difference, or you come to
some sort of under even understanding of a common word

(01:34:21):
between the two or a common phrase or something like that.
So that's a good way at truth too, because everything is kind
of like a game of telephone and languages and time and
everything so. That's a great point, Yeah.
But yeah man, is there anything else you want to add before we
wrap it up here? No, You know, if you want to

(01:34:41):
keep up with my, my research, I'm PD Newman on all my
platforms. My book on the.
RG was released December 5th with inner traditions, and it's
doing really well. I'm getting a lot of positive
feedback and I should have in the next few months my book on
Native American shamanism and the afterlife journey in the

(01:35:04):
Mississippi Valley. I don't know what the title will
be, but that's what it's going to be about and.
Your titles are all super long. That is going to be the title.
It probably will be, but I thinkthat'll probably be my most
accessible work. You know, the theory is,
admittedly, there's a small demographic of people already
interested in that. But Native American shamanism?

(01:35:27):
I think a lot more people will be able to get into this realm
of thought through this book a lot easier than some of my
previous efforts. Well, no, man.
You got to write what you're passionate about.
If you were interested in theater, had to get it out you,
that's what. That's that's why.
Those are the books I love reading, 'cause I can tell
whoever wrote it like totally nerded out figuring this thing

(01:35:50):
out. Or and I read mostly non
fiction, so it's kind of easy totell who's done their homework
and not. But yeah, I love reading your
books because I know you've justdone the deepest dive into this
stuff. And I see, I see all the books
that you've read that you're posting to sell to buy new books
for the next topic or category. So it follows.
If you're into all the stuff too, follow PD because he will

(01:36:11):
post his books for sale and they're usually great books at a
great price. So that's right.
But yeah, if you want to buy hiscurrent book Fear G, go down all
the way to the bottom. I have two links, One of the
inner traditions, Support Inner Traditions, and then one for
Amazon If you know you can't do anything and that's it.

(01:36:33):
If you want to support Mind Escape, the best way to do is
just to click the link tree linkdown below.
We've got merch. We've got oh, check out our
documentary as within So Withoutfrom UFOs to DMT PDS in it.
We've got a lot of amazing people in it, minds and
thinkers, and we put a lot of time into it.
And yeah, we're probably gonna be working on a new project

(01:36:54):
starting this year, and it mighthave to do something with near
death. Possibly.
So look for possibly that, but yeah again, best way to support
Mindscape. Just click the link tree link
down below. We do our shows live on YouTube
and then we also have video podcasts up on Spotify, and

(01:37:15):
other than that we are on all audio platforms.
And yeah, I can't really think of anything else.
So we're gonna wrap it up here. On the way out I will play our
new outro. And yeah, let me know what you
think of the new intro song. If you like it, you don't like
it, Don't send me anything. If you don't like it, but if you

(01:37:37):
like it, send me. Send me something.
No, but seriously, I I put a lotof time into it.
That's all me. That's me playing the guitar.
That's me playing the piano. That's me playing, you know,
using the MIDI controller to create the drum tracks and the
horns and everything. So that's it.
We love everybody. Stay safe out there and we'll

(01:37:58):
catch you next time. Peace.
Thank you. The.

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P.D. Newman Explains Theurgy and Neoplatonism Episode #298

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