The Secret Teachings Of All Ages | Manly P. Hall | w/ Ronnie Pontiac - Meta Mystics

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
You've created everything. What but a powerful being you are.
You did these things, but now you're in a human body.

Speaker 2 (00:11):
You forget the power you have.

Speaker 3 (00:14):
What you do is what the whole universe is doing
at the place you call here, and now you are
something the whole universe is doing, in the same way
that a way is something that the whole ocean is doing.

Speaker 2 (00:32):
You're doing doing what you imagination.

Speaker 1 (00:38):
Welcome to Meta Mysteries, where you don't know what you
don't know. My name's Jonathan, I'm Sean and today we
are pleased to have you as our guest today, mister
Ronnie Pontiac. How's your day going today, Man.

Speaker 2 (00:52):
It's been really good. I'm looking forward to this conversation.

Speaker 1 (00:55):
So let me tell you a little a little story
about us. We are, you know, about a hundred and
thirty five hundred and thirty six episodes into this spiritual
journey of a podcast, and we come into it very
open minded, you know. We want to get to the
you know, kind of like the absolute truth if there
is such a thing, which I think there has to

(01:16):
be right and we love going into all of the
wild things, whether it be witchcraft or magic, with all
the different religions, all the different philosophies, all the different
like you know, psychic abilities and telekinetic or telekinesis and
all that fun stuff. It's just so much fun to
learn about. And I know that you know everything that

(01:39):
you have studied and everything that you know, you've really
been involved in. It kind of dabbles into all that, right.

Speaker 2 (01:47):
Yeah, yeah, I've been on that same path.

Speaker 1 (01:50):
That is awesome. So if you don't mind, could you
tell our listeners we call them the one could you
tell them a little bit about yourself if they don't know.

Speaker 2 (02:00):
I usually tell people just to google my name. But
I guess the reason I'm here is probably and not dead,
is probably because Manley Hall, who was an esoteric philosopher
of the twentieth century, his life like spanned the whole
twentieth century, was my mentor when he was very old
and I was very young, and his kindness and generosity

(02:25):
changed my life completely and set me on that path
because the path that you just described as the same
path that he was on, because he loved to collect
all the information about everything and just found inspiration and
beauty and all kinds of knowledge. So I worked with
him for seven.

Speaker 1 (02:42):
Years that is so awesome. Like you worked with him
for seven years, that is, and I.

Speaker 2 (02:47):
Just recently assistant for research, right, So when he was
working on stuff, he'd sent me to get books and
he'd just all the busy work that goes with research,
which was an incredible education. And he also made me
his screener later on, which was a whole different kind

(03:08):
of education. And then he also made his substitute lecturer,
like I was his designated substitute lecturer. There are a
couple other guys that he used to have do it too,
but I was sort of the one that he wanted
to have do it and that was interesting too, to
have to step in where he was expected, right. And
he even sent me to do funerals for him when

(03:30):
he was too sick to do them. Wow, that was
another whole education. I think he did all these things
very deliberately and was kind of shaping me and helping
me to evolve. And after that, I've let's say I'm
a musician. Played guitar and sang, but mostly played guitar
in a band called Lucid Nation that started out as

(03:52):
a great riot girl band in the nineties and then
morphed and kept morphing, and we became like the Times,
we were a stoner band, and we became later like
a garage rock band, and then we went full on
experimental and really had a blast and played with some
amazing musicians known and unknown. And we've produced some documentary

(04:16):
films about different subjects, like The Gets, a great band
from Seattle who unfortunately lost their lead singer me as
a Potter to a murder that wasn't solved for years,
and they would have been a huge band. They were
really incredible. But she without her the whole Seattle scene.
I mean, she was part of the reason that that
scene chilled the way it did because no one knew

(04:39):
who had committed the murder, so everybody became paranoid. And
so we did a film about that and about other
kind of difficult subjects. But really I think important subjects.
And then books now are kind of the main thing
I've written. Let's see, there's two some of them that

(05:00):
are out. One called American Metaphysical Religion. Is this like
six hundred page book on all the stuff that we're
talking about and showing how it goes all the way
back to the earliest days of our history, like pre
colonial and there were people in America all the way
through American history who were into this kind of stuff.

(05:23):
They were into psychic and witchcraft and Kabbalah. I mean
all the way back then, these traditions were in America.

Speaker 1 (05:31):
I yeah, I can't imagine that, you know when I
One thing that really chaps me a little bit is
whenever people start saying, oh, you're into all that New
age woo woo, it's like this stuff goes back farther
than you think, you know what I mean, Like this
stuff is, this stuff is rooted within I mean, humanity,
dating back to probably close to the beginning once we

(05:53):
were able to talk.

Speaker 2 (05:54):
I would imagine, Yeah, I think so too. And you
really see it if you go into studying Egypt, Samaria,
you can see the sinews of what's going to develop
into this animal that we've got of Western esotericism. But
it's been there the whole time, and I mean at
the heart of it. Like if you're looking at great artists,

(06:15):
great writers, moments of revolution where people decide that cultures
have to be completely transformed, you find the tradition in there.
You find that people are inspired over and over again
by the same ideas, and America in particular has been
just an unbelievable magnet for all kinds of I mean,

(06:38):
basically every kind of religious belief from around the world
came here and found a foothold at one time or another,
and especially the more underground ones. And people came here
to get away from authorities, government and religious that were
telling them that they couldn't practice or believe what they wanted,

(06:59):
but they had to do exactly what they were told
to do or else. And America was a place where
people came to get away from it and wound up
inventing religions hybrids and people were taking bits of indigenous
and bits of African and bits of rosicrusion and mixing
it all together into something new. And it's really exciting.

(07:23):
I mean, I think it is. To me. It's one
of the most hopeful things about human beings is that
we're interested in these things. Because the difference between somebody
who's going to tell you, you know, look all those
pagan beliefs, all that New Age stuff, that's all the devil,
that's all wrong, and if you get into that, you're

(07:45):
going to ruin the country, and you're going to ruin yourself,
and we all have to do exactly what I believe
because there's only one true way. That was fine, but
we can't do that anymore, and why should we when
we have the heritage of the whole world, all the
religious traditions of the entire history of humanity pretty much

(08:06):
are just a Google search away. You know.

Speaker 1 (08:09):
That's what I always say too, is that we are
in the age of information and misinformation, of course, and
this stuff is literally rate at our fingertips. We can't know.
We can no longer go on with just saying, well,
this is the right thing, and everything else is is
the devil. It's like, you can't do that because there's
too much evidence dating back farther, like even way farther

(08:33):
beyond any religion. It seems like, and you know, I
always you know, I have a bunch of Christian friends.
My other podcast, Culled of Conspiracy. My co host is Jacob.
He's a he's a Christian. I have nothing wrong with that.
But whenever you say that you know, the devil place
that there before the Bible was written in order to
deceive us, It's like, how far can we really take
that story? You know?

Speaker 2 (08:54):
Yeah? Yeah, And what what purposes is it serving and
what and also judge it by its fruit. And you
can see the division that is sown everywhere, and you
can see the paranoia and the fear and all kinds
of things that don't really help us during this crucial

(09:15):
point in human history to do what we need to do,
which is to look past blaming each other and hating
each other and being so hateful and instead find common ground,
find the truth, which is that all these different ways
of describing, all these different paths are all describing the

(09:37):
same thing. They're different because they're from different times and places.

Speaker 4 (09:42):
Right right, you know, there's different context and everything else
that kind of applies with that. And like Jonathan always says,
you know, we're over here just trying to be that
coexist bumper sticker, you know what I'm saying. It's like,
there's some truths here, there's some truths there, there's some
good information there. It's like, let's just pull from wherever
we can and make the best of this thing call life.
That work exactly. We're stuck here, you know, until we're not,

(10:04):
so why not make the best of it?

Speaker 2 (10:06):
Yeah, And it's exciting, I think. I mean, when you
are exploring all this heritage and you start to find
these amazing connections. It's really inspiring. So many times when
working on our books, myself and Tamera, who I work
with on everything, including if she was there with the
Manley Hall stuff too, we just love to suddenly see

(10:32):
these connections and history, these things revealed moments of influence
between people or ideas and how it led to something
beautiful happening in history instead of something horrible. And over
and over again we've seen this and the high quality
of people it seems to me. I mean, one thing
that my book taught me was that there were a
lot of frauds, for sure in American metaphysical religion. Even

(10:55):
the frauds had some truth to tell, and the truth
tellers sometimes slipped into fraud here and there, like human beings.
It made me realize that that expectation that our teachers
be perfect. So, for instance, a lot of people ask
me about Manley Hall, and some people say, well, look,

(11:17):
you know, if he was so brilliant and so enlightened,
well you know, why did he have a weight problem
and how did he get into that situation at the
end of his life, and why above all was his
wife so awful. And at first I tell them, well,
to begin with, his wife wasn't awful. She was actually

(11:38):
a wonderful human being, brilliant, and they loved each other deeply.
He got involved with that terrible person at the end
of his life consciously, and I don't know why, but
maybe that's how he chose to go. And it is
true that he took this guy out with him. And

(11:58):
then ultimately I feel that his weight problem came from
the fact that he had very primitive surgery done on
his thyroid way back in the day, and so he
had a real problem. And I never saw him eat
a lot. I saw him eat a little bit of sweets.
I mean, put away a couple of burgers maybe, But
he was a big dude. I mean, you know, to him,

(12:19):
that was nothing. And I never saw him like really
pig out in any way. He was very restrained about
his food intake. So, but I also tell them, but
besides all that, of course, he's imperfect. He's a human being.
I mean, it's a compliment to him and to how

(12:40):
great he is that you want him to be perfect.
He's so close. But he's a human being and we're
all like that. We're all in this boat, like you
were saying, Sean, I mean, we're all here trying to
figure it out, and our greatest wisdom, some of our
greatest teachers, like Socrates. You know, Socrates at least I
know that. I don't know that's the most important wisdom.

Speaker 4 (13:04):
It's brilliant, it is. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (13:08):
We I just love learning about all this stuff. And
would you know, I've always kind of really looked at
Manly p. Hall As as like a maybe the the
western version of Paramahansa Yogananda, you know, kind of in
the same sense of going around and gaining information and
learning from other, you know, ascended people.

Speaker 2 (13:31):
Yeah, I say what you're saying. Yeah, well, there's a
rich tradition of it. I mean you can look at Blovotsky,
who was a huge influence on him and who took
stuff from all over the place and kind of weaved
it into theosophy. But it's funny you mentioned Yogananda because
they were they were a little competitive in Los Angeles

(13:51):
in the early days, because they were both establishing themselves.
And even when I knew him late in his life,
he sort of had a he'd say, he'd say, like,
funny little things about Yogananda, and you could feel that
there was still a sense of competition going on in
some way there, which I found very interesting for two
people who were that way. But the funny thing is,

(14:12):
I've heard the same thing about Yogananda toward him, So
I think they must have been like the stars on
the scene way back in the day. And I love
these early stories about him when he was a kid,
and he showed passions that later I think kind of
embarrassed him. He was very occulty, you know, he'd wear
a little cape and he was he just really loved

(14:34):
to look like Omegas, you know. And later when I
knew him, he was so down home and I mean
just folks, I mean, really a cool guy.

Speaker 1 (14:46):
Would you say that, I know that, you know, we've
we've read a couple of chapters here on, you know,
from The Secret Teachings for All Ages, And would you
say that was he ever into anything being like super
dark or super like negative occult or anything like that,
Because that's something we get a lot whenever, whenever we

(15:08):
start referencing Manly p Or or the or the book,
it's that, oh, that's that's that's an evil book. And
whenever we read it, we don't necessarily feel that way,
and I don't really know where that comes from.

Speaker 2 (15:19):
Well, I have a funny story about that, which is that, now,
if you know the book, you know that there's an
illustration of it of a wizard kind of a magician
raising and elemental and it's usually thought of as being
a satanic scene by people who don't don't know the history.
And we used to always laugh in the library at PRS.

(15:41):
The librarians were always laughing because people who came in
for some reason, who were afraid that this might be
a cult and bad, would inevitably turn to that picture
first and get scared. Instead of looking at Pythagoras or
all the other like wonderful inspiring things in there, they

(16:02):
went right to that when I went, oh my god,
that's a demon being raised, and that really wasn't what
was going on there, and they didn't bother to read
what it really was, and they'd usually get scared off,
but we just sort of shrugged. And they used to say,
maybe we should like put like actual bookmarks in here
so that people will turn to the right pages when

(16:22):
they first opened this copy that's out in the library.
But no, I never knew him, and nothing that I
know about his history indicates that he was ever into
anything very dark. He's very quite the opposite. He did
know about it. I mean, he had books and had
had awareness of the dark side of all these things,

(16:42):
and partly because he had to because as he evolved.
It's really interesting about him, you guys, because he when
he starts out, you know, he's a kid. He's nineteen
years old when he comes to la he told me
that the sidewalks were still wooden in many places.

Speaker 4 (16:58):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (16:59):
Yeah. And he didn't know he was going to be
into this. I mean, he had studied the occult already
pretty much all his life because his grandma, who raised him,
was way into the Blovotsky and theosophy and all kinds
of stuff that was available then.

Speaker 1 (17:12):
So, I mean it was fascinating. If you really start
to read it with an open mind, you're like, oh,
my god, is this really is this storytelling?

Speaker 2 (17:20):
The storytelling is amazing in there. And also it's got
a lot of truth about life and about about the world.
And so he started to like hang out on the
boardwalk by the beach where there were a lot of
palm readers and all sorts of specialists and psychic readings,
and he got a friendship going with an older man

(17:45):
who would lecture just out there on the boardwalk and
there was nothing there. I mean there were flowers going
all the way up to the ocean, like to the
beach in those days. Nothing It wasn't built up. But
there was a pier there that had some carnivalies stuff
like there is now and that's where these fortunes tellers were. Well,
this old man kind of took him underwigh and said,
you know, kid, you have a lot of knowledge. You

(18:05):
should try to lecture. And he got invited to this place.
It was this mansion run by this guy that was
way into the occult in terms of like let's have
a night of luija board, let's invite over a psychic
and have our friends over that kind of thing. And
he also encouraged writers and artists like Raymond Chandler. When

(18:26):
he first came to La lived in this guy's house
and this guy tried to get him a job, but
Chandler drank himself out of the job and into being
the famous mystery writer and Manley Hall's first lecturer, one
of the very first was given in this guy's house.
And apparently from the first lecture he was brilliant. It

(18:46):
was just exactly the way he was at the end,
ninety minutes, no mistakes, tons of interesting things with dates,
and I was just born to do it. And so
of course he started to attract a following, and eventually
he was on this thing called the Church of the People,
and they loved him so much in his lecturing, so
much they asked him to be their pastor, the minister,

(19:08):
and so he was. And he got various from from
like just you know, working class people gave him money,
but also super rich people gave him money, and they
wanted to go travel around the world and buy books
and and you know, b manly Hall. And he did it,
and he collected amazing books and artifacts and learned incredible

(19:31):
things and then came back and shared them and eventually
produced this book that we all know him by because
there's over a million of them in print, of the
Secret Teachings of All Ages. And he did that with
a group of people. They would like, he told me,
they would like. They had a house at one of
his followers from the church had and they would all
get together like in a living room and lay it
out and look at what they were putting next to what,

(19:53):
and it was really cool. His wife at the time, Faye,
was his secretary and she was super involved in helping
him organize it. The book was an instant hit, even
though it was during the depression, and he went from
being like this you know, kind of young guy that
people thought was really brilliant, to being like the man, like,
this is the guy if you want to know anything

(20:14):
about these subjects, This is the guy like audiences. Yeah,
touring all over the US. In nineteen forty one or
forty two, he played Carnegie Hall and sold it out
for a lecture about America's Secret Destiny and yeah, and
he was just suddenly famous. And the weird thing that

(20:38):
happened because of that, though, was that he immediately became
a magnet for tortured people, people who had messed up.
Maybe they brought pre existing problems into things like ceremonial
magic or into spiritualism. It could be anything any spiritual path,

(20:59):
including the regular religions. We also saw people coming out
of Catholicism or other religions who were messed up from
that and they would go to him. He was like
the last guy you would go to when you were desperate.
They would come to him with ghost hauntings or entities
that were disturbing them, and he would counsel people. And

(21:21):
that started way back then and he continued it all
his life. That's how he became a screener because he
still had so many people coming to him for help
that he needed somebody, and more than one. He got
Tamera also to do it, to talk to them, to
read the letters, to take the phone calls, and to
let him know, yes, this one's you should talk to

(21:41):
this one, but no, don't talk to this one. And
so he learned a lot about the dark side of
magic and the damage that it does. And he was
very much about the light, the rational, about beauty, the good,
the true, the beautiful. He was when I knew him,

(22:03):
he was deeply into Buddhism and Taoism, and he was
somebody who undoubtedly practiced compassion and kind of was in
a constant state of meditation. And I think that's how
he was able to do those wonderful lectures the way
he did. And by the way, one of the things
that was crazy about those lectures was and it happened

(22:24):
to me. I mean, I'll tell a little story about
how I got there. So where do I come from.
I come from a family of war survivors. I was
the only kid that they had, and they were much
older when they had me, So it was weird. And
I was a runt. I was premature and all that,
and I got beat up like all the way through

(22:45):
until I got into high school. And then I started
to morph and I turned into this musician, and I
got very dark, and I became aggressively nihilist, like when
I studied at that time, I looked into Crowley and
Anton Levy and it's the darkest shit I could find,
you know, I was looking for. I remember reading Ivola,

(23:07):
and I thought they were all just ridiculously romantic, Like
they weren't what I was looking for. I was looking
for humanity is useless, you know. I was looking for
something more like Smith, right, you know, you're a virus.
You need to be eliminated. And so I had a
band when I was seventeen that had a big biker following,
and there's a lot of violence around us, and I

(23:29):
basically wanted to be like this voice of hatred and
nihilism out there and it had a strong response amongst
angry people, and I got lucky because Tamra, who later
would become my wife because of Manly Hall, she walked

(23:49):
up to me at a club. You know, I'm standing
there all in black, smoking a black Russian cigarette and
staring at everybody like like I wanted to kill him.
And she walks up to me, this kid who doesn't
belong there at all, and she says, please help me.
I'm in serious trouble. And she was. She had been
cornered basically by five guys who thought, you know, wow,

(24:11):
this innocent idiot is going to be an easy victim,
and so she thought I was the right guy to
talk to, even though the club owner told her, do
not talk to that guy. He's bad news. But in
me this woke something like maybe it's chivalry, I don't know,
but nobody ever done, No girl, innocent, scared girl, had

(24:32):
ever walked up to me and said please help me,
And something in me said I'm going to protect you,
and I did, and eventually, pretty quickly we wound up
living together and going down our path. But even then
we were both super cynical, super I was like, for instance,
we were like let's be drug dealers and used up

(24:53):
all the drugs, you know, that kind of thing.

Speaker 4 (24:55):
And though like nice ones, you know.

Speaker 2 (25:01):
Yeah, so totally aimless, you know. And then this is
when the manly Hall thing came into my life because
I happened to find a copy of The Secret Teachings.
My parents had given me money to get a haircut,
and I did the obvious thing, took it to buy
a book I wanted, and because I had the records

(25:21):
I wanted, and so I found this book. I didn't
know anything about it. It was an older copy and
it was looked like it was ancient to me. And
when I got it, I remember reading each chapter and
I felt like somebody had like lifted the top of
my skull off, like I turned into a big eye,

(25:42):
you know, and each chapter did that to me. I
would read it to Tamar and we would just go wow,
you know, just total massive change. Like I think the
intro says it all. I mean, where he dedicates it
to the rational soul of the world, and that's what
it kind of clued me into. Wow, It's not what
I thought it was, you know, like there is something

(26:02):
going on here. And then I happened to mention it
to someone who was a friend of mine. And she
was a woman, older woman who had been a carnival dancer,
and she was really into Aggar Casey. And it scared
the shit out of me about California falling into the ocean.
And I was actually thinking, oh my god, I got

(26:23):
to move to Virginia Beach with her and her family
so that I don't get killed in this huge earthquake
in California. I was just paranoid. But when she saw
the books, she said, oh, wow, you know Manley Hall.
I used to go to his lectures back in the day.
And she said, oh, all my girlfriends that were dancing
at the carnival always used to try to hook him,
you know, because he was so cute. And she said,

(26:46):
you know he's still lectures. I was like what, and
she said, yeah, it's not far from where you live.
He lectures every Sunday morning at eleven am for a dollar.
He did that so cool. So when I found out,
I didn't go because I was like, oh, man, I
can't go and meet that guy, like I know who
I've been, i know what I've done, Like I'm ashamed.

(27:10):
And eventually Tamer said to me he's really old man, like,
don't you want to go hear him? I mean, won't
you feel horrible if like you don't? And that convinced me.
So we went down there and it was amazing. But
the point of all that story was to tell you this.
He looks right at me during his lecture, I mean
right at me, and he says people who are paranoid

(27:33):
of natural disasters such as earthquakes because of the guilt
that they feel about how they've been living their lives.

Speaker 4 (27:42):
Wow, that's pretty specific.

Speaker 2 (27:44):
I don't know. And later I find out that he
couldn't see me, I mean his vision was not good
when he was reading the books were like here, you know,
And I asked him, can you see people in the eyes?
Said no, he said, they're kind of just colors to me.
But I also spoke to many people who have the
same experience over the years where he would deliver personal
messages to him to them and what was that, you

(28:07):
know that we used to talk about it at PRS
Like some people said, well, he's an initiate, you know,
he's got this consciousness and he's able to deliver the messages.
And other people said he's channeling. It's totally psychic. I mean,
look at it. He's a pisces. He must be channeling.
And other people said, well, I think it's because you know,
he's in the dow I mean, he just that's what
I kind of think now. He's just so in the

(28:30):
dow man. I mean, he was so in the moment,
so fully spiritually present in life that magical synchronicities happened
around him a lot. And I saw it. I saw
how they're just little things that you wouldn't notice, but
they were amazing, how the right thing showed up at
the right time. And according to him, I was one

(28:50):
of those things. Because he was in a situation where
he had now chemical bibliography being published of all his
amazing collection about chemical books and manuscripts and Rosicrucian books
and manuscripts, and he had a guy doing it who
was wonderful Bennett, really talented. But the guy had put

(29:12):
in it all this information about bodily fluids being used
in alchemical recipes, and Manley Hall said, I think that's dangerous.
I don't want that in there. This isn't a recipe book.
And the guy refused to take it out because he
was an academic, and he said, no, this is golden.
I mean, we need to put this information in here. Well,

(29:33):
so he needed somebody to take over, right, and I
go walking in there because after the lecture, Tamer and
I came out the very next day and volunteered. And
they wanted her because she had office skills and stuff,
but I had nothing. But they did ask me the
question do you have any familiarity with foreign languages? And

(29:53):
I said, well, yeah, I said, I grew up around
a bunch of them. And they were like, well what,
and I was like, well, German and French and some Russian,
some Polish, and they said, oh interesting. They called the
next day and they offered camera a job, and being
a dick, I said, I said, no way, man, You're
not going to go work there and I'm going to
sit here with the cats. You know, forget it. The

(30:17):
next day they called for me and they said, Manley
Hall wants to meet you, and I said, oh, why
because he has something he liked to talk to you about.
So I didn't know any had no idea, of course
at the time what was going on, nor did I
have any knowledge of alchemy except what I read in

(30:37):
his book, and they ushered me into his office, this beautiful,
big office filled with the most amazing art, like a
Japanese altar, and his desk was this amazing card with dragons,
just beautiful, and he's sitting behind it, and there's these
four women, two on either side, these older women with
crossed arms, who were looking at me like, what are

(30:58):
you doing to hear you a little hunk, And he
did this. He was a funny guy. He would sometimes
do this like W. C. Fields, barrymore kind of accent.
And he looked at me and he said, he said,
come on in and make yourself miserable. So I can't
eat that down. He pushes this galley of paper in

(31:21):
front of me, this stack of papers, and he said,
you know what this is? I said. He said, this
is my alchemical bibliography, and I need somebody to edit
it for me. And because you have familiarity with languages,
I think that you're the one. And I said, I'm
not educated. I can't I ad no, And he said, no,

(31:45):
You're going to be fine, believe me. Just you know what,
take it in the library and look it over, and
then you come back and talk to me a little later.
So I took it as I walked out of the room.
The vice president of the society, who was a war veteran,
and it really a wonderful woman, pat Irvine was her name.
She went running around the side of the office to

(32:05):
the library front door and stopped me and like grabbed
it from me. And she said, that was a mistake.
I said, thank you, Yes, I believe it was a mistake.
I get home, there's a phone call Manley Hall, your office,
first thing in the morning, okay, So this time I

(32:27):
walk in, it's just him, and he says to me,
very seriously, a young man. From now on, whenever I
tell you something, if anyone contradicts it, you come to me.
You take orders only from me, the boss. But she
said it was amazing. I mean I still get goosebumps
when I tell the story. And then pushes the thing

(32:48):
in front of me again and said, you'll be fine.
And he said, in the morning, we'll look at it
and we'll decide what you're going to work on. You'll
go work on it, and then in the afternoon we'll
see how you did. And then he said the clincher,
you can also have lunch with me in the vault.
And you can ask me questions about any of the

(33:08):
books or manuscripts in there.

Speaker 1 (33:12):
God, that is golden right there, Sol.

Speaker 2 (33:15):
I mean, I don't know what to say. I mean,
that's like if we live a hundred lifetimes. That kind
of experience is one of a kind. And his generosity,
I mean, And it turned out he was right that
I was a skillful scholar and I was able to
very quickly rise the occasion. That's how I became his
research assistant because he depended on me because I was

(33:36):
really good. And he was amazing to work with, by
the way, because here was a man that was in
his middle eighties and he would call me in the
office and he would say he always called me the boy.
He said get the boy. And then I would come
in and he would say, there's a book I need
for the article I'm working on. It's on the second
shelf on the second story, on the far right with

(33:59):
a red cover. I knew were like every book in
that library was and could direct me to them. And
we did have amazing lunches in there where he showed
me like a real Ripley scroll, this incredible alchemical uh
scroll that just what a work of art. And of
mysticism and if science really of early science, and he

(34:20):
he just just gave me life.

Speaker 1 (34:23):
You know, that is amazing.

Speaker 4 (34:27):
That is I like to touch on something real quick.
I'm sorry, Jonathan. The simple fact that in the beginning
you were like, no, no, I'm not good enough to
be able to take this on. You know, your ego
was like there ain't no way, you got the wrong
guy type of thing, and he was like, no, no, no,
like this is you're You're the guy.

Speaker 2 (34:41):
You know.

Speaker 4 (34:41):
It's like that just goes to show like a simple
example of how other people can see the true light
within you and you that you don't see in yourself.
So that's just great. I'm really glad that you didn't
take no, no, uh no for an answer, you know
from mister Smith. It was trying to tell you otherwise,
you know.

Speaker 2 (34:57):
Yeah. Yeah. And his his yes thing is that his
faith in the synchronicities that came around him. Like later
I met a guy who worked with him much earlier
than I did. His name was Art Johnson, and this
guy was a character man. He the first time I
saw him, He's the guy would set up the audio
for all the lectures, all the lectures that you hear

(35:18):
like after the maybe nineteen seventy or something like that
of Manley Hall are recorded by him, and he had
a limp. He had to wear a leg brace. So
he's this really cool looking guy with kind of longish hair,
and he would always wear shirts with like leave me Alone,
like a written auditor and stuff like that. It was
a funny dude. You see him out back smoking a cigarette.

(35:39):
I later found out that he was one of the
greatest guitar players who ever lived. Like Miles Davis, admired
his guitar playing. He was somebody who played with people
like Lena Horn, and he played with Paul Horn and
Willie Bobo, I mean, all these amazing artists, and he
could play almost any instrument. He played amazing ren s

(36:00):
loot like he would transcribe Ficino things at Ficino played
during the Florentine Renaissance and then play them at PRS
for Christmas celebrations. And he was also somebody who, according
to his story, walked into Manley Hall's office after same

(36:21):
kind of experience, came into volunteer and somebody said, well,
Manley Hall wants to meet you. Walked into the office
and The first thing that Manley Hall said to him
was there you are. I've been waiting for you.

Speaker 1 (36:33):
That's awesome, dude, Oh my god. These stories are just
like timeless and so great just to it's like a
little window into the past and just really understanding the man.
I mean, I know a lot of people probably like
to villainize him, usually, you know, the people who are
all fire and brimstone and all that kind of stuff, But.

Speaker 2 (36:56):
I never them. Well, there's a lot of you know,
people who think that he's a reptilian, illuminati, elitist and
all that stuff. So as part of the reason that
actually I started to come out with my books and
writing and I just felt like, well, really, what started
it was Tamra wrote a book about our experiences there

(37:16):
that was published by Inner Traditions, and she wrote the
book partially because of that. One reason was because at
that time Art Johnson was dying and he told us
you two had an incredible unique relationship with that man,
and you need to write it down. And to Tamra especially,
he said, your relationship with him was completely unique because

(37:41):
you weren't some occultist guy. You became his pal, like
you were really his friend. And you have in a completely
different way, and you got to write about this person
that you knew, his kindness and his humor, especially because
one of the things he loved about Tamra was he
could crack her up up like Marie Hall. His wife

(38:03):
was notorious at prs as mad Marie and is still
considered by most most to be like, well, she's not
quite as bad as Socrates's wife, but but and she
was a tough really a tough nut to crack. But
but he loved her, and she loved him. And her
passion was very much in metaphysics and was driven by

(38:24):
these these diabetes sugar spikes that she didn't know she
was having. But often after dinner she would like go
off on these she'd stand there and like give a lecture,
you know, and like talk about her beliefs and and
what in history and what America's destiny was going to
be and and and really get passionate about it. And

(38:44):
he would he would seem to be as sleep sometimes,
but if she said something like what was a date
on that? Manly he'd be right there with it. But
the funny thing was that Tamra, poor Tamor, is sitting
there getting a headache from these these run on Germanic
sentences that Marie is trying to explain her metaphysics with

(39:06):
Manley Hall's turning around and like suddenly makes a face
at her, or he just does these weird side comments
or things and she starts laughing, and of course he
never gets caught. So Marie is looking at Tamra saying,
what's the problem, why are you laughing? Which is makes
Tamra laugh harder. He thought that was hilarious. So he

(39:26):
was that kind of a person. I mean, he was
so fun to be around. I got the since we
were allowed the run of their house, they treated us
like grandchildren. I saw his bedroom, you know, I used
to He had an office right off there, and sometimes
he met with me there when he wasn't well enough
to go into work. And so I got to see

(39:48):
what books did he have by his bed, right because
I was always interested in things like that, like what
are you reading when you're going to sleep? And he
had stamp albums and he had joke.

Speaker 1 (40:00):
Books of all things, that's what he had by his bed. Wow. Well,
I mean, I guess it makes sense to go a
little bit more lighthearted, or yeah, you know, just because
he's looking into all of this a could and all
of this spiritual stuff all day. I mean, what are
you going to do.

Speaker 2 (40:17):
For following people's problems? And you know, so now let's
have a few laughs before we go to sleep. I
thought that was so cool. So yeah, he really was
a I consider the word wholesome to fit with him,
and other people may have had different experiences with him.

(40:37):
I was only there those seven years, and I do
believe I got there when he was much mellowed. The
place was being run by women at that point because
the man had all died off and the widows were
running it, and it was a super friendly home. Ye
kind of an environment that was so welcoming. I mean

(40:58):
I never would have been allowed through that door, you know,
ten twenty years earlier, when he was way more important,
and there were politicians showing up and men who were
running everything, and they were busy and trying to kind
of make things happen. And when I was there, it
was perfect. It was like this autumn kind of just

(41:18):
harvest time of mellowness where everybody was so sweet, and
I mean people gave us incredible books. I mean, like
rare collectible books were just handed to me by these
women because they respected my intellect and they wanted me
to have every possible advantage. It was like a mini
version of what he had experienced. And their generosity still

(41:41):
blows me away. I mean I remember one of them,
his secretary took me to a warehouse because she used
to run a bookstore, and she let Tamer and I
go through the whole warehouse looking for books and then
sold them to us for pennies on the dollar. Wow. Yeah,
I mean that's the kind of thing that happened. And
he would do things like that too, Like he he
would find some He had so many art treasures that

(42:04):
were gifted to the society in wills or that he
himself had collected when he was young and he was
traveling with money behind him from the DuPonts, and he
he would find some little treasure that for him was like, oh,
you know this little thing, we have so much stuff,
put it out in the gift shop and sell it

(42:25):
cheap so people would stumble on these amazing treasures from Asia.
I actually have a couple of them from Europe that
he put out there for for just you know, just
so they could have it. Really that in some regular Yeah,
it's so cool. I mean, just somebody who just liked it,
and you know, a working person who can afford it.

(42:47):
You couldn't afford it otherwise could have it, you know.
It's just yeah, amazing guy, I mean at that time, amazing.

Speaker 1 (42:55):
Yeah, Oh my god. I mean to to have stumbled
across the wealth of knowledge that he had, he had
looked into and studied and everything. I mean, I'm sure
he knew that, you know, uh, giving things away and
not expecting really much in return, It's it's gonna come
back to you one way or another. I mean, you
you study that stuff so deep. It's that's that's one

(43:16):
of the inner core knowledges of almost all forms of
religion and spirituality is that like, give freely, don't expect
anything in return. In the universe will will reward you.
And and I just love that kind of mentality. I
try and do that as much as I possibly can.
You know what we uh we actually our favorite chapter
in that book, I can't remember exactly what it was called,

(43:38):
but it was.

Speaker 3 (43:39):
It was.

Speaker 1 (43:39):
It's based on both the Atlantean and and talking about
Atlantis and you know, the like that whole story so
we we've talked a lot, a good bit about Thoth
and Atlantis and the Emerald Tablets and stuff like that.
And you know, something that that we always get caught
up on is all right, so there's the Emerald Tablet.

(44:02):
But then there was the Maurice Dorriel version of the
the the what was it called Emerald Tablets of the Atlantean.
And you know, some people will say that that Maurice
Doriel he was kind of full of shit because it
was kind of some kind of channeled information or something
like that. And I don't know what, I mean, what

(44:22):
do we know? I mean, I believe that some people
can't channel I mean, who's to say that that guy couldn't.
But even still, it seems as though The Secret Teachings
of All for All Ages had a lot of that
same kind of rhetoric in that chapter as Maurice Doroiel did.
So would you say that he really took a liking

(44:43):
to that book or did he stumble across, you know,
information even before you know that kind of stuff was available.

Speaker 2 (44:50):
I think he was pulling a lot of I mean,
in the early days when he was writing The Secret Teachings,
he was really into theosophy and the theosophical viewpoint of
initiates and secret orders and hierarchies of gods and such.

(45:11):
And I asked him once, if he had anything to
do differently, what would he have done differently? And he
said that he wouldn't have glamorized that stuff so much
when he was young, that he felt like he had
gotten a little too into it, and that he wasn't
giving people what they really needed. That it could be

(45:31):
hurtful to people because what they give away their own agency. Right, So,
you want to be an initiate, you want to achieve,
you want to be this, and you forget that will
go ahead, like what's stopping? You're waiting for the guy
to show up. You're the guy that has to show up, right.
I talk a lot about in my book about John

(45:53):
Winthrop the younger, who's a great example of an American
who is totally misunderstood by history as it's taught in
our schools. And they'll tell you something briefly about him. So,
his father was the first governor of Boston's Massachusetts Bay Colony.
He at the age of like eighteen, is already into

(46:15):
the occult. He found some Rosicrucian books, and he's into
John D's library and acquires a bunch of John D's
alchemical equipment and library. He goes to Europe to try
to meet Rosicrucians, but he's very disappointed by the people
he meets. He decides, well, if I can't meet Rosicrucians

(46:35):
to initiate me, then I'm going to try to live
like a Rosicrusian. He's a Rosicrucian. Say what you're supposed
to do. You're supposed to heal people without charging them.
You're supposed to help the innocent, defend the innocent. You're
supposed to help bring knowledge to people. You're supposed to
help forward science, and on and on. So his father

(46:56):
finally says maybe he's like nineteen twenty, Now, come on
down to the United States. What's going to be America,
But at that time was only Massachusetts Bay Colony. When
he shows up, he's got crates full of John De's
books and alchemical gear that he's bringing to America. His
crates are marked with John De's famous alchemical occult symbol,

(47:20):
the monus hieroglyphica, which is like having pentagrams all over
your luggage and your dad as a pastor. Yeah right,
I mean it's weird, but nobody thinks twice about it,
which tells you something about the Pilgrims, that they weren't
exactly the way we're told they were. Because his father
says to him, sure, set up the alchemical shop in

(47:43):
my home. So the governor, the first governor of Massachusetts
Bay Colony, had an alchemical laboratory in his house, and
the son was running whoa. But nevertheless his son finds out, Wow,
Boston is uptight right, and I don't like it here.

(48:04):
What am I going to do? I'm going to go
start my own colony. He basically, I think, imitated the
invention of Rhode Island right by Roger Williams. And he said,
I'm going out into the territory, which turned out to
be Connecticut. He became the first governor of Connecticut Territory.
In Connecticut, he became famous for making gold, but more

(48:30):
importantly for making medicine, alchemical medicines that made him such
a famous doctor that sick people who could stand the
voyage traveled all the way across the Atlantic to get
to him. He tried to create a college of Light
He wanted to bring all the most intelligent people from

(48:51):
Europe to America and put them all in one town
and have them all working together to break science and
everything else through to a new life. Unfortunately, that was
around the time that there was a huge indigenous reaction
to all the destruction that the colonists were bringing, and
it scared everybody, so they stayed in Europe. He also

(49:12):
protected people. He protected a tribe, the Pequots, who had
been decimated by disease, and then Uncas of the Mohegan tribe,
who some people might know from the Fenimore Cooper story
the Last of the Mohicans. He was not a hero.
He was actually a bully and a sadist, and under him,

(49:33):
the Mohegans became really pretty nasty and they tried to
enslave the Peaquots and a great personal risk. John Winert
the Younger protected the pea Quats and had to maneuver
around Boston and the Mohegans that were very powerful in
order to protect them. And he also protected women who

(49:55):
were accused of being witches and helped in the defense
of them and helped to get them out of the
territory where they were being killed and so he really
was living the life of a Rosicrucian as the governor
of the Connecticut Territory.

Speaker 1 (50:12):
And in that time is so crazy too. I mean,
that's and it wasn't long after that that you know that, well,
I guess it would be around the same time that well,
I don't know, I'm very bad at dates and stuff
like that. King James writing the Demonology book and getting
into what he sees as witches and everything are crazy.

(50:33):
And this guy was out there protecting these these poor
women who were like, oh, well, I guess what they think.
You know, they're they're witches.

Speaker 2 (50:40):
It's like, yeah, Well, he protected them, and he protected
his soldiers. Rather quite the opposite, he protected the people
living in his territory from becoming soldiers for the crown,
because part of the thing about being a territorial governor
was whenever the King of England said I need soldiers,
you had to send over people. Bull and Winthrop Junior

(51:02):
was famous for first he would ignore the first order,
right like, oh, I never got that, And then he
would say, oh, but I need these guys because you know,
we're building a new iron foundry and you guys need
iron for your armies, don't you? So I need him
over here? And then oh did I get another notice?
I didn't get that one, and they never would go right.

(51:24):
So it was amazing what he was doing. I mean,
it's such an amazing human being that I wish more
Americans knew about. Here's the weirdest thing of all the
Cotton Mather. And apparently that's how it's pronounced. According to
an ancestor of his, I met, rather a descendant of his,
I met, Cotton Mather was friends with John Winthrop the younger,

(51:46):
and when John Winthrop the Younger died, he eulogized him
as the Christian Hermes. Hermes christianis who Now Hermes is pagan?
You're taking the Egyptian Hermes or the Greek Hermes. It's pagan.
So here is this like total pilgrim you know, judge,

(52:08):
you know religious authority from our history. Cotton May they're
calling his friend, Oh, this guy, he was a Christian Hermes.
That is not what we've been taught about the Pilgrims
or about the occult the Pilgrims. That that all these
people who are trying to say that the occult is
should be outlawed and such are are appealing to We're

(52:31):
more tolerant.

Speaker 1 (52:34):
Unreal, dude. And this is why I always have the
biggest problem with history in general, because it's you know,
the old the old adage, it's the history is told
by the victors. And you know, it's amazing how you know,
the people who are writing our history books like we're
always the good guys. Like that's that's crazy. I mean,
how we can just always be the saints and the

(52:54):
angels of the world. It's it's unreal.

Speaker 4 (52:57):
But no, I have been going there for a while though,
you know what I mean, for a good minute, I
was like, Oh, we're the good guys.

Speaker 2 (53:03):
Are what you want to be?

Speaker 4 (53:05):
We are?

Speaker 2 (53:06):
Yeah, yeah, we all want to be. I mean that's
the thing that one of the things that really bothers
me about what's going on in the country today is
I know, everybody I know is polarized, Like everybody's like
I hate them, and you know, well I hate them.
Now I look at them both and I go, you
you both really want the country to be great? You
really do? You both really care about the future of America.

(53:29):
You both care about America. You have super different ways
of thinking it's going to be better. But can't we
begin with we all really want a better America instead
of saying, no, they don't, they want to ruin it.
No they don't. They have a different way of making
it a great America. And there's so much common ground
that could be found. One of the things I used

(53:49):
to love about working with Tamera and music and Riot
Girl particularly was I guess partly because of her upbringing,
because her dad and her oldest brother were Marines, and
and I mean, this is an American, you know. She
used to always say, like when Obama was president, she'd say,
uh uh, she'd go, my relatives are out there, and
someday you're all going to be hearing from them. They're

(54:12):
gonna they're gonna come knocking on the door of power
because they've been treated very badly. And and sure enough
they did. And one of the wondrous things to me
about her was she would come out with this ultra feminist,
hilarious stuff that she was doing punk rock, and she
would offend, you know, these people, and sometimes they would
go after her. They would send her pictures of themselves

(54:33):
standing with Confederate flags and all this, and and and
her responses to them were always so funny and so
like in the wheelhouse of their own world that they
wound up liking her and liking the band. And I
I saw her turn around hecklers at our shows right
with what she said back to them so cool. But

(54:55):
part of the way she did that was that she
was looking at them and going, ah, man, you and
me have a lot in common. You know, you think
we don't. But but and then she like name things
and they would realize, well, yeah, you could be my
little sister.

Speaker 1 (55:11):
Exactly. And that's something that I've you know, I have
been trying to get across the point that we are
so much more alike than we are different. Anybody, it
doesn't matter if you're a human. You have so much
more alike with even the most opposite person you can imagine.
Then you do your differences, and you know, I mean,
anything political, it just seems so on purpose to divide.

(55:37):
And it just seems every single election year people fall
for it again and again and again. And I'm not
gonna lie. I used to fall for it. I used
to fall for it very hard. I think that it's
so easy to just get sucked into that madness. But
after a while you start really searching inside of yourself
or meditating or learning about different spiritual philosophies or anything

(55:58):
like that. You start to really go oh wow, like
it almost seems as if none of it's real, you
know what I mean, Like it's just all a show,
and it is it.

Speaker 2 (56:06):
It's let me tell you a story that I think
illustrates it for me. This was a real eye opener.
So of course, you know, being in the musical world
that I was in, sort of somewhere between punk and grunge,
there was everything was activism in our world. Everybody was
writing zines. All our shows, I mean almost all of
our shows were fundraisers for one thing or another. And

(56:27):
we used to play shows and get paid and give
the money to our fans who were like selling their blood.
They were so poor. And we we had this attitude,
you know, we're we're rock for choice, we're food not bombs,
We're you know, save the animals, like we're the good guys.
And later on, as we got into making documentaries, we

(56:50):
stumbled into a documentary that we produced about this horrible
aspect of Obama's immigration policy, and we've been we Tamra
helped to elect him. I mean She worked with Danny Goldberg,
who managed Nirvana and led Zeppelin, to bring like Bruce
Springsteen with an acoustic guitar to some county that they
needed and things like that, because we felt it was
so important to stop the GOP from getting yet another term,

(57:14):
and we thought it made a big difference. And maybe
it does, but not in the way we thought. And
so we find out, Okay, so what basically what Obama's
doing is he's taking these kids whose parents neglected to
register them when they came here, who have spent their
entire lives here, who some of them don't even speak
Spanish or speak it badly, and they they played baseball.

Speaker 1 (57:39):
They're US Americanized all the way.

Speaker 2 (57:42):
Yeah, totally Americanized. And they threw them out because they
did not have the proper documentation. Well Mexico didn't want
them because they didn't have relatives who would take them in.
And these people wound up living in the sewers of
Zona Norte, right next to the cartel controlled area. And
I knew this filmmaker, Charles Shaw and this incredible photographer

(58:05):
who was living down there and documenting what was going on.
I met through Charles and Charles was crazy enough to
go down there and film, and this film that came
out of it really documented these tragedies that were going on.
It was just horrible to see some poor guide like

(58:25):
crying because he misses his children, he misses his friends,
and he's living in a sewer. And we thought, wow,
what a film. Right, So we had a few small
connections that we had made in film and I let
people know about it, and to my shock, one morning

(58:46):
I had a letter from Edward James almost and he said,
I saw the teaser and I want to see this film.
So we got him a copy and he said, I'm
going to be your narrator and I'm going to be
executive producer, and I'm going to go straight out and
get you money, and we're gonna get this film scene.
I've been waiting for this film. You know what happened, Well,

(59:10):
it's none of why they stiffed him. Man, the whole
liberal freaking I thought, open minded. You know, all the
Obama supporters were like, uh uh, we're not going to
criticize him. We need him, and they they shut down
Edward James almost. We got nothing that made me go okay,

(59:33):
wait a minute. We got a big problem there. It's
not a good guy and a bad guy.

Speaker 1 (59:40):
Yeah, it's and that's the thing that uh that that
with politicians and you know, people who are running for president,
everybody wants to look at at these uh, these political
candidates and presidential candidates as if they're gonna save us.
They're gonna they're gonna get us out of all of
you know, everything that we don't want, because they stand
for everything that we do want. And then you start,
really he's really noticing that. Well, a lot of those

(01:00:03):
a lot of the followers, they they somehow have merged
their beliefs with the political uh person that is running.
And so now they're starting to say everything that you know,
Trump was saying, or Biden was saying, or this person
was saying that person was saying. And now you don't
have an original thought. It's because you like this guy

(01:00:24):
so much that and you put so much value and
you believe that he's going to save us, that you
don't have an original thought anymore. And he's taken you.
And that's so unfortunate because we are It's almost like
uh from men in black you know, like, uh, what
was it like a group of people you know, they're
they're stupid or whatever. But the singular person, that's that's

(01:00:48):
who you can talk to. But groups of people, man,
we just we don't do well in groups. As far
as group it's just so it's.

Speaker 2 (01:00:55):
So young young chat you know, he's young. Said that
the bigger the crowd, the low the IQ. But let
me tell you a story from esoteric history that's the
same thing, to show you this is the human predicament. Man.
So I have a book coming out next year that's
about Rosicrucian origins and context. It's about what happened in

(01:01:18):
Europe that caused these Rosicrucian manifestos to come out and
create this crazy thing to turn into the Thirty Years War.
And there's been a lot of new research. And back
in Manly Hall's day, for example, people thought, well, these
were written by Rosicrucian initiates. These were high level people

(01:01:38):
who anonymously put out these manifestos because it was time
to change human society. But these days we have all
this incredible research that's been done by Academia's academia is
now finally paying attention to all this history that was
neglected forever and we're seeing that it may have actually
been something very different. And my argument is with some

(01:02:01):
of these academics, is that really what happened there was
more similar to something like the creation of Howell by Ginsburg.
We had students and teachers who were radical for the
period they were reading Giordano Bruno, who the Catholic Church
had burned at the stake. They believed in science, they

(01:02:22):
believed in what they called a universal Reformation, which would
reform government, it would reform business, it would reform medicine.
Everything would be better because of it. And the books
that were written, the manifestos, the three of them are
kind of humorous. I mean, there's funny stuff in it.
There's even some sexual content in places, and stuff that

(01:02:45):
would not have been natural if there was this high
initiatory scripture that people try to make it out to be,
and maybe it is that as well, but it also
had this side to it that was this wonderful kind
of creation. Some have called it the first science fiction,
right because it's the story of this amazing master and

(01:03:06):
he lives for hundreds of years and he knows all
the secrets, and then this brotherhood of Rosicrucians who are invisible,
and they have an invisible college. It's everywhere but nowhere,
and it was kind of science fiction. And the idea,
I believe of these books was to awaken this desire
for universal reformation. We see them do what they were

(01:03:30):
meant to do in the life of John Winthrop the younger, Right,
he reads the books and he goes, right, I do
I want to be that? So I'm going to be it.
That's what they wanted. They wanted every single person who
read those books to go back in their lives and
be a little Rosicrucian and start a universal reformation in

(01:03:51):
that little corner of the universe that they live in.
But what happened was ext very, very different. What happened
was this porters, the people who believed in what they
were saying, they all started writing books and pamphlets saying,
I should be a Rosicrucian and here's why, and you
should include me in your brotherhood. And then the people

(01:04:13):
who hated it were calling them the Devil's Jesuits and
were saying that it was all the Satanic plan to
undermine the Catholic Church. And hardly anybody took it the
way it was meant, which was, why don't we all
go home and live better lives? Like awaken to living
a worthwhile life, you know, be like one of the
great traditions of all the religions, right this metaphor, try

(01:04:37):
to be a son in your in other people's lives, so,
you know, bring light, bring warmth, Let people smile when
they see you walk in the room because they know
that something good is going to happen. That's how I
felt about Manly Hall. I mean, he was a son
in my world, right. He was somebody who brought so
much light, so much warmth, so much general city, and

(01:05:02):
whose seasons ruled my world for a little time, right
And and so I saw how he shed so much
goodness into the world and inspired me to try to
in my own ways to bring support where I could
to people and wanting to be that and and it
was quite a path, because I have a lot of

(01:05:22):
shadows I'm even still dealing with, and so exactly, but
what a what a great path, you know, what a
wonderful experience to be on that path. And I think
that's the key to most of these these spiritual and
I know I know a bunch of them. We could
talk about all kinds of things, you know, the Secret

(01:05:42):
of the Golden Flower, which is a beautiful uh meditation practice.
And but on the other hand, we could be looking
at ancient Egyptian religion or at Neoplatonic theogy, and they're
all teaching this this kind of getting out of the
particular you to reacquaint yourself with a universal you, and

(01:06:03):
then getting back into particular you to help to make
to make everything in this school or whatever prison wherever
we are work better and and be a better place
to live. And you know, go save some people, Go
save some cats, go save some dogs, like show mercy
to the living, and and make yourself somebody that that

(01:06:23):
when people in your town see you come and it
makes their hearts glad.

Speaker 4 (01:06:27):
I love that, you know, And deep down I think
there is that I really like what you said there,
that that universal you, you know, like we experienced that.
I believe when when we meditate. When we meditate, I
feel like, I don't know, I feel like I'm something
better than the idea I have of myself. And so
when I'm in a deep meditation, I don't know, there's
something too that there's a there's a feeling I get that.

(01:06:50):
I'm just like, oh, I am a lot better than
I than I think, you know, And there is this
universal want to to help people to make I mean,
imagine if everybody did that. Yeah, sure you might not
be one hundred percent every day, but then the guy
next to you is you know what I'm saying. And
so if we all just did that, if we were
all everybody's light when they didn't have enough light that

(01:07:13):
they like, I mean, that's all there is to it.

Speaker 1 (01:07:16):
We make it so hard, just batteries for each other, dude,
that's it.

Speaker 4 (01:07:19):
Yeah, so easy. Damn. Yeah, it's love.

Speaker 2 (01:07:26):
I mean, that's the word. And and that's you know,
we mentioned Facino earlier. The other book that I didn't
mention that I worked on, like co authored with Tamera,
is called The Magic of the Orphic Hymns. And this
is our kind of translation and the history of this
amazing tradition that has influenced the West over and over

(01:07:47):
and over again. Really amazing influence from this orphic tradition
always seems to spark a renaissance. And if that's true,
the huge amount of interest going on right now comparatively
and or if is bodes wealth for the next decade
or two. But these studies led us to seeing this

(01:08:12):
statement that Ficino made. He was kind of the father
of the Renaissance. He translated the Orphic Cams and would
play them for Lorenzo the Magnificent, for Leonardo da Vinci,
for Michelangelo. I mean, all these people were together listening
to the Orphic Cams and reading Plato thanks to his translation,
and talking about how do we live a great life,

(01:08:33):
how do we have a better society, how do we
make better art? And getting really inspired. And Ficino said
that the Orphic Hams taught him that the essence of
magic is love.

Speaker 1 (01:08:48):
I could not agree more with that. Yes, because you know, we've,
like we said, you know, we've read obviously a bit
of the Secret Teachings, but we've also read this book
called The Magic by Philip Cooper, and that's it's it's
really a lot like that. And it's not just love
for everybody else, but love for yourself is so incredibly

(01:09:11):
important because if you don't believe in yourself, if you
don't treat yourself like you know, like you should be,
then yeah, of course none of your magic's gonna come true.
Like you gotta you gotta be the one that's going
to diffuse, like infuse rather all of that emotion into
whatever kind of practice you're gonna do or else. It's
not gonna work. It's like, you know, they say that whenever, whenever,

(01:09:34):
like you're praying or whatever, you got to imagine it
already happening in this moment, and it's hard to imagine,
you know, any kind of blessing or good thing happening
to you if you don't love yourself. So it absolutely
is like it's a huge deal, for sure. I love
that you said that.

Speaker 2 (01:09:52):
Well, let me let me share with you guys a
brief version of the Secret of the Golden Flower, because
this is such a wonderful meditation technique and a lot
of the metaphors here and experiences here I think you
will recognize. And we're kind of talking around the corners
of it anyway, So oh yeah, I was, oh, okay,
thank you, Okay, cool. So this is an ancient Chinese

(01:10:18):
Daoist alchemical text. It may go back as far as
the twelve hundreds. It wasn't written down though, until the
sixteen hundreds, and then again in the eighteen hundreds more certainly,
and the basic idea of this is that we have
what could be called metaphorically a lower soul and a

(01:10:40):
higher soul. It's one soul. But when we enter into
the body, when we were here in the world of incarnation,
the lower soul is so involved in the intricacies of
keeping this universe of our bodies going, keeping all the
organs and cells and the red molecule and atom functioning

(01:11:02):
in harmony, so that our bodies can sustain through time,
and also through that body learning to navigate society, language
and writing, and driving, and your job and your relationships.
And the lower soul often becomes lost there and forgets

(01:11:25):
completely about the part of itself that's still there outside it.
In the reg Veda, that Hindu scripture they call this
that have this great little phrase two birds on a branch,
one eats, the other watches. Right, So the part of
the soul that eats can forget itself. The part of
the soul that watches never forgets itself. So what is

(01:11:47):
it like when you forget? Well, when the lower soul
is identified with the body and with the life, this
is what it looks like. Wow, this is scary. I
could get run over any minute by anything. This is
an uncaring world where horrible things happen every minute, and

(01:12:08):
I've got to take care of myself. I got to
take care of my own I can't can't worry about
what else is going on. This is a dangerous situation.
And besides that, God, I hate everybody. I hate my
own family, I hate my kids, I hate my job,
I hate everything. It's just this is such a burden.
The only thing that I like to do I like
to watch it die. I like murder movies. I like

(01:12:30):
murder TV shows. I like killing games, I like anything.
I like hunting. I like anything where I can go
out there and I can kill shit or see shit die.
I like that. Why, Well, the lower soul subliminally understands
that that's freedom. The death is when you get out

(01:12:50):
of this claustrophobic predicament.

Speaker 1 (01:12:53):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (01:12:54):
And so now here you are in this world, hating it,
missing out all the incredible, the synchronicities, the manly halls,
the adventures. Living in fear of the world. As so
many religions teach us, it's all a snare. Don't enjoy life,
don't have pleasures, don't try anything different. You'll be in trouble.

(01:13:14):
This is all danger. And in that space, we are destructive.
We're destructive to ourselves, we're destructive to other people, and
we love judging other people. From that space, we love
criticizing ourselves and others. We're failures. They're failures, they're stupid,
you know, just this kind of reaction where you look

(01:13:38):
at something you just dismiss it over something like people
who there are people who think somehow that if they
tell me that I look like I somehow resemble Howard Stern,
that that's going to hurt my feelings or something. I
really don't care, but they will notice that instead of
listening to what I'm talking about.

Speaker 1 (01:13:55):
Right, Yeah, just very surface level at that point exactly.

Speaker 2 (01:13:59):
And so so now how do we get out of it? Well,
we've got to awaken our higher soul, the golden flower.
And it's a very simple meditation technique. It's called one
hundred days, and you start out by doing these meditations
where it's so simple. It's called put your mind on

(01:14:22):
your breath and put your breath on your mind. So
now you're just watching yourself breathe, and what you do
with your breathing is you slow it down. You keep
it deep, and you make it very soft so that
you try not to even feel it as it is
in your nostrils. You don't worry about thoughts that float by.

(01:14:45):
You just don't attached to them, just let them go.
And you are to do this for one hundred days.
And when this happens, there are often experiences of luminosity,
light and the sort of the inner lights or liked
it isn't actually in the room in a physical sense,
but you have these light or warmth experiences.

Speaker 1 (01:15:08):
And how long how long are these meditations?

Speaker 2 (01:15:11):
It's really it's not so important how long you do it,
just the consistency and the fact that when you do it,
that you're there in this peaceful state wanting to awaken
the golden flower and the intent that is really the
most important part. And the one hundred days isn't the
end of the practice, it's the beginning. After that, you're

(01:15:34):
pretty much just trying to do it all the time,
whenever you think of it, and when you think of it,
it doesn't have to be all the time, but the
frequency of it eventually builds and builds, and you sometimes
get glimpses of the golden flower, and it's this ecstatic,
amazing thing, which I'll describe in a moment. And then
you also sometimes fall away from it. You come back

(01:15:56):
down to what you've earned, and then you climb back up,
but you do climb. And one of the amazing things
about it is that now this is this is quite
a story. So they say that when you really achieve it,
like you do achieve various powers like you do in yoga,
that you may become more telepathic, or you may become

(01:16:20):
more creative, or you may have Claire audience and these
kinds of things. But don't be any attention to that
anymore than you do to the thoughts, right, because that's
not the goal. The goal is to awaken the golden flower.
And when you awaken it, what you're supposed to be
able to do amazing is you're supposed to be able
to have a consciousness that is at will. You can

(01:16:44):
kind of move out of your body and be anywhere.
In other words, you are everywhere. When you are that
higher consciousness, you can be anywhere you want. You can
do anything you want. You can you can be on
another planet and see what that's like. You can you
can do whatever you wish. Because the soul is part

(01:17:06):
of the infinity of the universe.

Speaker 4 (01:17:08):
I love it.

Speaker 2 (01:17:09):
And so when you achieve that, you have this skill
of being able to you know, I'm in here in
the particular, but now I'm back in the universal, and
in my particular case, I had a terrible time with
that last part of it. I got a lot of
great things out of the meditations and it changed my life,

(01:17:31):
but I could not get to that that out of
my body kind of Okay, now I'm out here, and
this is such a strange little story, but I think
maybe we'll appreciate it.

Speaker 1 (01:17:41):
So I love it already.

Speaker 2 (01:17:44):
So back in the day, Tamer and I had this
black feral cat named Jet and he was a great cat,
so great that we never fixed him because he was
just he was just amazing. And we said, someday we'll
get you when we're not touring and all. We'll get
you a wife, you could have some kids. We want
more of you. And so when time came to do that,

(01:18:07):
we got ourselves an f five Bengal cat, which is
like these crazy sort of wild cats, and they were
amazing together, and they made three great kittens. So we
had all their lives and really had it was the
best family we ever had. It was just great. And
one of them was this cat named Flower. And we
just named her Flower because it looked like she had

(01:18:27):
a flower on her head, and we were trying to
tell the difference between the three who looked so similar
when they were kittens. We just never changed the name.
She became Flower, and she actually could say her name.
Someday I'll put up the videos of her repeating her name.
That's pretty great. But this cat, who she was like
my first cat, because all cats love Tamra, and our

(01:18:47):
cats were all Tamra's cats, and I was sort of
just the bystander, like if Tamar wasn't there, okay, I'll
come bother you.

Speaker 4 (01:18:55):
Just to all this cat.

Speaker 2 (01:18:57):
But this cat was like, you're my human and I'm
your cat. And she also loved our music. She would
come to every rehearsal. She didn't matter if it was loud.
She would lay there in there with just she was
so cool. Man. She would lay and I'd be sitting
on the ground across like writing songs with Tamer and
she'd come and lay on her back, like right in
my lap while I was playing guitar. Just wonderful So

(01:19:23):
November of last year, of Flower left us after a
very long life and even kicking coyote ascid at the
age of seventeen, and I had a dream where she
showed up. I'm not surprised because I was constantly reading
the Secret of the Golden Flower out loud and ow's
to damn rod stuff. And she in this dream, she

(01:19:44):
taught me how to do it, and I in the
dream I experienced, I experienced leaving my body and being
out there with the universe and coming back in and
getting back out and coming back in. She had shown
me how to do it. And when I woke up,
I can't do it in the way I did in
the dream in the waking state. But now I get it,

(01:20:07):
like I've experienced it and I have a vision of it,
and it is this incredible thing, this incredible experience to
still be you. You know, that's really what it's about
to like, you know, I don't need all this to
be me. I'm still me. And so now to continue
with the story of the Golden Flower. So what is

(01:20:29):
it like when you awaken this? Well, first of all,
no longer do you feel that the world is going
to run you over? Because Oh, how fragile you are,
and how strong and omnipotent and forever the world is
now you feel, Oh wow, the world it's so frail,
it's so fragile, it's always changing. And I love it.

(01:20:53):
I love everything about it. I even love the bad
things because it's so beautiful. It's so amazing. I mean,
what's even going on? We're not even sure.

Speaker 1 (01:21:01):
Just to talk about crazy ass movie.

Speaker 2 (01:21:05):
Yeah, it's just the ultimate, right, we're all creating it together.
And then you can you can have you know, you
can fall in love with a cat who teaches you
the secret of the Golden Flower. You know, there's no
limits in this crazy world. And and that's this falling
in love with life. Is what I saw in Manly
Hall like to me, and he did write about the

(01:21:25):
Secret of the Golden Flower. He described it as every
soul has a little trap door that allows you to
escape into the universe when you want to.

Speaker 1 (01:21:35):
Ah, that's awesome, that is wild, man. I tell you what.
I had always tried to have those kind of out
of body experiences. I mean, whether it be by hypnosis
or past life regression or meditation or you know, taking
some mushrooms or DMT or any of these things. I'm
trying to do my best to just see what it's

(01:21:56):
like to be outside of my body. And I know
that like we dream and everything, and it feels I
guess you could call that somewhat of an out of
body experience. It's not necessarily in your physical body, but
even still, you're attached to a body most of the time.
And so I really wanted to see you that that
freeing feeling. And one night, I'm sleeping and I told
this story already, but i'll tell it to you. One night,

(01:22:17):
I'm sleeping and for some reason, I wake up. I
think I wake up, and I wake up, and I
realized that, oh wow, like I feel like I could
let me see if I can jump out of this body,
you know, because I'm raiding that you know, half sleep
half awake stage and the theata state of mind that
if there was ever a time to do it, it's

(01:22:38):
right now. Like I just some reason knew that. And
so I felt myself starting to like try and protrude
from my body. And it was almost like a like
I'm trying to just get out, you know. And I
tried to push and push and push, and I think
on the third push, I was able to get out
of my body, and so I go through I'm laying
in my bed. I get up off my bed, and

(01:22:59):
I go through my bedroom door and I go out
to the living room, and I'm like, I gotta I
gotta leave some proof that I actually did this. Like
they're like, I it feels amazing. I know that it's real,
but how can I convince that that part of myself
that will always question it? How can I do that?
And and for some reason, my my living room TV

(01:23:20):
was on and this dream or not dream not sure,
and and I was like, oh, you know what, I'm
gonna turn the TV off. That's how I'm gonna prove
it to myself. And I was like, I don't know
if I left the TV on or not, but for
some reason at that time, I knew that that would
be all I needed. And so then after I did that,
I was like, all right, because I for some reason

(01:23:40):
I knew that I only had a limited amount of
time until I can go back into my body. So
then after that I went back in my body, I
wake up and I'm like, oh my god, that was
so amazing that I really do that, like it it
felt so real and and you know, and I was like,
what what clue did I leave for myself?

Speaker 2 (01:23:58):
Oh?

Speaker 1 (01:23:58):
I turned that Oh I turned that TV off. I
don't even know if I left it on.

Speaker 4 (01:24:02):
You know, thing's got a timer. It turns off by itself. Right.

Speaker 1 (01:24:05):
I'm just like, Oh, I wish that I would have
wrote something down or knocked something off the shelf or
something like that. But then I open my eyes and
I look around my room and my bedroom door is
wide open. I sleep with my bedroom door closed every
single night. There is never a night that my bedroom
door is open. I sleep naked. I mean, what if
my one of my kids come into my room? You
know what I mean? Like, I don't need that. And

(01:24:26):
so so that was all the proof I needed. And
I will always remember that feeling of just being so
free and just free of worry and free of free
of you know, just tasks that just take up the day,
and you know what I mean, Like it was just
a beautiful feeling and I try to to get there
as often as I possibly can. From really, from that

(01:24:47):
moment on that was only like a month ago.

Speaker 2 (01:24:50):
It is it's you know, we're so brought up in
a culture that teaches us to be afraid of it
and to not believe in it. And I know my
own like one of my earliest experience and says around
these kinds of freedom of the body moments, uh, free
of the body moments was when I was at PRS
and Tam and I got married because Manley Hall called

(01:25:14):
us into his office one day and Marie and he
were standing there and they said, we've been looking at
your charts and we think you should be married. And
we picked out the dates and so we didn't really
believe in marriage, and we were like, no, no, we
don't want to do that. But then when you know,
Manley Hall's saying this, and we kind of thought all right,
we really we were like maybe, and Tanner was like, oh,

(01:25:36):
I don't know, and and and then they said, well
how about this, you can have the wedding at our house.
And we were like, wow, okay, well maybe and then
then they said and Manly will officiate.

Speaker 4 (01:25:53):
Wow, fl deal there it is.

Speaker 2 (01:25:56):
Yeah. So then we took a honeymoon after that and
we just drove north. And it was funny because later
when we were touring, we would constantly start our tours
the same ride going up to Seattle and from down
from La and here we were in Agate Beach, Oregon,

(01:26:17):
and I had this weird experience where I noticed that
the sand and the waves, and the fire and the
bonfire and my fingers all had the same pattern, that
swirling swirl of kind of pattern of nature, which I
later found out is called by the Chinese lee, and

(01:26:40):
it's the pattern of all things, the movement of the dow.
But I'd never seen it before. And seeing this same
pattern in earth and water and my own fingers and
this in the fire itself, I suddenly the only way
I can describe it, was like its just everything shifted

(01:27:02):
and like this world went flat and like black and white,
and I felt like I was rising through clouds in
some kind of ultra violet like light. And the feeling
what you described, Jonathan, that the freedom, Oh wow, Like

(01:27:24):
I feel like I could breathe for the first time.
Just just so amazing. And then it's a cliche, but
I actually felt the tug that they say, you know,
this is where the cord is supposed to be. I
felt a tug right where this would be, and next
thing on you bam. There I was in this little
rented room that we had and that was amazing, But

(01:27:48):
I kept trying to get it, you know again like
in meditation, like can I can I? Can I visit this?
Can I get because some of my teachers were saying, well, yeah,
but keep going, like you should have. You know this
this pulled you back, but you got to go into it,
you know, and really you know, have both sides going.
But I found that even now, you know, it's it's

(01:28:10):
difficult to get there because of how much our culture
and the atmosphere of the society that we live in
makes those kinds of experiences difficult, and you have to
let go. You have to have the faith and the
feeling of safety to let go and to know it's

(01:28:30):
going to be okay. Now, if you're raised in a
mystery tradition in ancient Egypt or something, and they're teaching
you about this since you're a child, and maybe you're
even trained as a child on how to do some
of these things, you're going to have a very different
experience than people like us and where our training came from.

Speaker 1 (01:28:48):
Nothing to let go of.

Speaker 2 (01:28:50):
Exactly.

Speaker 4 (01:28:52):
Yeah, that's compared that to like also like trying to
learn a new language at the age of thirty seven
or whatever, as opposed to learning two three languages when
you two to five years old. You know, like there's
something to the mind at that age. It's so open.
You don't have to say you don't have to let
go of something, You're already kind of free.

Speaker 2 (01:29:11):
Yeah, And just I think there's the repetitive quality of
the way our societies work, like in the sense of,
you know, you have to do this, there's consequences, you
have to do this, what don't do that? Don't do
you know, And we're in this constant state of mind
of stay out of trouble, do the right thing, and

(01:29:32):
and that puts us in a state where it's hard
to just feel that sense of I can just let
go because this is my birthright. You know, I am
a soul and there's no soulfulness in the culture. I
mean even you know, all musicians complain about music of
every decade. That's that's I've experienced it myself amongst my friends.

(01:29:53):
I had many friends who were like musicians in the sixties,
like Art Johnson, who in the nineties were telling Tam
and I, oh my god, you guys missed everything. I
mean everything, the best drugs, the best music. It's all over.

Speaker 4 (01:30:07):
The drugs were way better back then, exactly.

Speaker 2 (01:30:11):
And so you but I do look around now and
I just go, wow, man, the drugs suck, and you know,
the music does now have the same soul in the community.
I mean, just in my world, we saw the whole
freaking DIY Indie world disappear. I mean our last national tour.
All the all ages clubs were closing down. This would
be like around two thousand and these famous clubs that

(01:30:34):
had been the minor leagues for all these big bands
like Nirvana were all closing in all the cities because
for some reason, I think it was scripted. The city
councils and the fire marshals all started invoking laws that
everybody had ignored for years and let the kids have
a good time. But now all of a sudden, it
was a you don't have enough parking.

Speaker 4 (01:30:53):
Spots, that's by design. Yes, I think so too.

Speaker 2 (01:30:58):
In the around the same time, Live Nation and Ticketmaster
took over. They and I can tell you from what
I saw, they killed live music. I mean killed it
because you used to be able to go to a
good show for ten twenty bucks. I mean it's yeah,
money is much different now than it was in the nineties.
But they have made it into this thing where it's
it's like this amusement park entertainment as opposed to a

(01:31:22):
vital living culture. And all the kinds of people that
used to write for magazines or publish magazines, or photographers,
t shirt makers, just so many people that were part
of your world and all just gone. I mean I
saw musicians like one of our we were so lucky
with drummers, and we've just played with some amazing drummers.
And one of our best drummers was a woman named

(01:31:46):
Tia Sprockett who played for Ministry and who played with
Luscious Jackson and some other bands. He was an incredible musician,
great drummer, but could also play guitar and sing and
just about to play anything. An incredible looking I mean,
she was just this the ultimate rocker, you know, just
really wonderful character. You can even look her up, Tia Sprocket.

Speaker 4 (01:32:07):
And.

Speaker 2 (01:32:10):
She wound up homeless. Dude. She went from like touring
like that because there were no jobs, I mean, there
was no touring. There was no uh place for a
drummer who you know wasn't already in the system, and
she she was big, but she was female, and she
was you know, now she was a little too old
maybe because you know, her heyday was back in the nineties,

(01:32:33):
and and then that's all she knew.

Speaker 3 (01:32:35):
You know.

Speaker 2 (01:32:35):
She was a brilliant musician, and she wound up dying
in the streets.

Speaker 1 (01:32:41):
Wow, that is that is very unfortunate. You know, I
really wanted to go back to what you were saying
about the two birds on the on the branch in
the tree. That is so synchronistic to me for some reason,
because so I used to I used to podcast studio
used to be inside of a crystal shop. It was

(01:33:02):
in the back of a crystal shop. And you know
in those crystal shops you get all the psychics and
all the intuitives and all the card readers and you know,
reiki masters and all that fun jazz. I loved it.
That's that's my people right there. You know, even if
you're a little crazy, I love the crazy. But there
was this woman and I had never seen her before,
but I think that she was a regular. It was

(01:33:24):
one of my first probably in the first couple of
weeks that I had been shooting there, and she comes
up to me, and she just has these super like
brilliantly blue popping eyes and I thought, oh my god,
your eyes are so blue. I mean, I found out
later that she had contacts. But anyway, it's beside the story.
But she comes up to me. She doesn't even say hi.

(01:33:45):
She looks at me and she goes, you know, you
have like your guides are right next to you. And
I was like, oh, that's interesting. I mean, I don't
know how to feel about that. And you know, anyway,
she goes on to tell me the story about who
my guides are and how they're going to present themselves
to me and all this kind of stuff. And she goes,
she goes, if they're ever trying to get in touch

(01:34:05):
with you, they'll send, they'll send you'll see a cardinal
just on you know, any given day, that'll be like
the sign. And they said, and she goes, and they
also said, if you ever see a blue jay, then
the sign or the that's like a more important sign
that you can get.

Speaker 3 (01:34:21):
Right.

Speaker 1 (01:34:23):
So, during this time, I was still I wasn't podcasting
full time yet, I was still working for Uber Eats
and delivering food and stuff like that. And so she
told me that the day before the next day, I
go on a delivery, my first order, my first drop off.
I walk up to this house and has this little tiny, yeah,
I don't know, probably seven foot tall tree outside of

(01:34:43):
outside of their front door. And wouldn't you know, I
went to go drop their food down at their doorstep.
I look back up and there are two blue jays
playing right on a on a branch on a branch,
right next to each other, And I thought, what are
the odds? The next day, I mean, it's easy to
see one blue jay, but two of them together right
in my line of sight. I'm talking about what and

(01:35:05):
what with my eyes. It was just the craziest sign
I ever got. I went back and told her. I
was like, I don't know what people say about you,
but you are spot on, like with your your readings
and your messages that you give. And so whenever you
say that message about the one bird is eating, the
other one's watching, and it's like, man, I really relate

(01:35:26):
to that because we all have that time where we
blue pill and you know, we were we kind of
we obsess about things that don't really matter. We get
involved in certain topics or certain talking points that are
not really like great for our soul, so to say.
And you know that other bird. It's just good to

(01:35:47):
know that other bird's always there, you know, always paying
attention exactly. I love that.

Speaker 4 (01:35:52):
We're gonna have to get that book, dude, you know
what I mean.

Speaker 2 (01:35:56):
Yeah, let me recommend it to you. It's called The
Secret of the Golden Flower. And you want to get
to Thomas Cleary translation. And I also I go into
depth on this. You can find on YouTube and interview
I did with Jeffrey mish Love about the Secret of
the Golden Flower. So if you just look my name
and Golden Flower, you'll get it. Yeah, And there's some

(01:36:19):
links in there to books and things too. It's great stuff.
I really it's been a life changer for me.

Speaker 4 (01:36:25):
I wanted to ask you actually real quick. We were
talking about dreams and out of body experiences. Do you
feel as though when we dream and we are having
some wild experience or something that we just can't really describe.
Do you think we're actually having some sort of an
out of body experience or is it just a dream
or sometimes it's an out of body experience? Like what

(01:36:46):
do you think about that?

Speaker 2 (01:36:48):
That is such an interesting question? And I can't say
that I have a solid answer for that, because I'm
also undecided about what's going on. I think that there
are different kinds of experienceperiences. I think that they're definitely
on the low level sort of what you might call
the Freudian wish fulfillment dreams or the compensation dreams, or

(01:37:10):
to let out tension from things that are happening in
your life. I think that those are basic symbolism, and
they may call back to earlier themes in childhood or
people that remind you of those situations, of those difficulties,
and I think they're a separate thing. And then there
are dreams that are like, I mean, you are in

(01:37:33):
a different world, and they are intensely detailed and vast
experiences usually, and I think that those could very well
be explorations of areas of the psyche or of the
universe that our waking mind is not aware of. And

(01:37:54):
then there's also the kinds of communications like I had
with my cat. But I've also had with human beings.
I mean, I've had people who passed on who came
to me in dreams and said things, or you know,
for instance, I had this uncle I loved very much.
It was this bomb yvant kind of European guy who

(01:38:16):
had an amazing life. And when he passed, I dreamt
about him and he came to me and he said,
he said, well, you know, here I am on the
other side. You can have anything you want to eat.
But it's not solid, it's not the same. And it
was so him, you know, And I think that was
really him. Or another example, maybe an even better example,

(01:38:38):
and it's not even involving a dream, but just to
show you how these things can be. My father was
he was a child in a war. He was a
slave laborer. He was just, you know, really messed up
by the war. Came to America, worked very very hard,
and made a success of himself, and was a pure atheist,

(01:39:01):
just you know. He used to say, I don't care
if the whole human race dies, as long as I
don't get singled out. And I could never really understand
his feeling of just utter resignation. And he could enjoy
little things about life, but in general he just felt
like life sucked. And he really hated that I was

(01:39:22):
into music and I was into all this woo stuff
and even as a kid, and he thought I was
just really ruining my life. And he would always tell me,
you're so smart, you know, why don't you, you know,
go to a good school and make yourself a doctor
or something. I mean, you could really make something of yourself.
And he did not like the term imagination like many

(01:39:45):
people of his generation. To him, the word imagination meant effeminate, crazy,
weak minded. And to me, imagination I was with William Blake,
imagination there's the greatest human power. It's how we apprehend
the universe. It's how we create and change. And we
always would argue about these things. And he would often

(01:40:07):
say to me when I would say something to him
like you know, oh, I just learned something amazing about
the afterlife, and he would say, I don't have that
kind of imagination, right. And well, eventually he got sick,
and in the process I proved myself to him, and
he was very regretful of having been a dick most

(01:40:28):
of his life. And he passed and left me with
a huge mess. And so I had a perfectly symbolic,
minor but painful back issue and I went to a
chiropractor and she said, you know, this is trauma, and
you need somebody who releases trauma. And she sent me

(01:40:48):
to this guy who lived in Laurel Canyon and his
specialty was trauma release. So I'm laying there on his
contraption and he's standing there. He kind of looked like
Christopher walk and actually and he said right away, he said,
the only thing I told him was I said, my
father died, got some big mess and my backers. And

(01:41:11):
he said, okay, I'm not a psychic, but your father
is standing here and he is telling me to tell
you something. And I said, okay. I thought, oh god,
you know, like really, and then he says, do you
want me to tell you what he's saying? It's like sure,

(01:41:34):
and he said, your father wants you to know that
he's learning to enjoy his imagination.

Speaker 4 (01:41:39):
Oh that gave me chills. Dude, shit, that was like
instant chills. Due Oh shit, God damn it. Man. The
mind is so fucking interesting, you know, like as far
as uh, you going to somebody to heal almost your
mind for a physical ailment, you know. And then it's

(01:42:02):
like what Laura's Cannon says. We say, we go over
these types of things all the time, how we make
ourselves sick and we can also make ourselves well. And
so that's just so interesting. And there's a lot of shows,
you know, uh, these six hundred pound life shows where
they they'll send the person to a psychiatrist because obviously
there's something going on up here that's causing what people

(01:42:23):
are doing. They're eating too much or whatever it is.
So it's so fascinating. I think the power of the
mind is just just the best, you know what.

Speaker 2 (01:42:32):
And the power of the soul to the soul, the mind,
the soul breathing through the mind and the heart and
the motions. You know that it adds this this incredible
dimension of compassion and awareness that the change is life.
That's that's the golden Flower really is. It's bringing that
awareness into everything and that's beautiful. It's it is.

Speaker 1 (01:42:55):
Well, i'll tell you what. I think. We found our
meditation that we're going to be listening to here in
just a little bit. Found a little Golden Flower meditation.
We'll see where it takes us. We always like to
just kind of test it with, you know, whatever the
vibe of the actual episode is. And I think that's perfect.
But while while y'all were talking, I was shuffling some

(01:43:17):
cards and I got one that came out and it's
it is the Queen of Pentacles. Now it's not the
traditional riderweight tarot deck. This is actually a deck from
five below. But it's a funny inside thing that me
and Sean have and it's a great deck. It's it's
become my favorite deck. But the Queen of Pinnacles, I

(01:43:39):
got a little book that I like to read because
I'm still learning how to read specific cards, but it
says the Queen of Pinnacles. The feminine energy of nurturing
and dependability, as well as a strong connection to nature,
are held within the Queen of Pinnacles. Queens in Tarot
represent feminine energy that includes receptivity, creativity, nurturing, and love.

(01:44:00):
Connected to the element of water, this queen is deeply
connected to nature in the element Earth, as shown by
the beautiful flowers and vines surrounding her throne. She has
a healthy relationship with her body and follows her instincts
when making decisions. She is grounded, dependable, responsible, and wise.
The Queen of Pinnacles holds her pentacle lovingly. She gazes

(01:44:22):
at the pinnacle as well as beyond it, toward the
Earth itself. Her feet are firmly planted on the ground,
and she knows that her unlimited resources should be shared
by everyone. If that's not the dealing with I'm telling
you that we always get these synchronistic things that happened
every episode. Dude, it's I don't know what it is.

(01:44:44):
And you know, for for the longest time, what we
would do is because I never really trusted myself to
like get the right card while I'm shuffling, you know,
like what is my mind doing to try and manipulate
it or whatever, And I wanted to just completely exclude that.
And so what we would do is we would go
onto the random number generator dot com or dot org
whatever it is, right, and we would just one to

(01:45:06):
seventy eight, you know, randomize it, pick up.

Speaker 2 (01:45:09):
That's cool.

Speaker 1 (01:45:09):
And it worked really well until we had we had
this psychic on and she was teaching us. She goes,
you know, like you really should start shuffling them yourself
and not relying on that, like that's that's cool, you know,
it's pretty you know, pretty smart. I guess to think
about it if that's the problem you're having, but like,
you know, you should really become like one with the

(01:45:29):
cards in a sense and in the right card will
pop out at the right time. And so I've been
doing that ever since, and it's been working even better
than when whenever we were, you know, messing with the
random number generators. So yeah, I love it, dude, I
really do. And and so.

Speaker 2 (01:45:43):
It's such a great practice, you know, because you said that,
I think I'm gonna tell you one more story, yes,
please always. So earlier today I did another interview with
Jeffrey misch Love about the revival of this ancient Egyptian
guy as Segment. And since you're wearing this onc I

(01:46:03):
will tell you a little bit. And so this is
such an amazing thing that's happened. And for me, it
started around the time I was at PRS. I had
a dream in which I saw a lioness headed goddess
and I heard the name Segment. Went to Manley Hall

(01:46:27):
and said, what is this? Then he did not know,
went into the library, started looking at books, couldn't find
it anywhere. Well, at that time, it was almost impossible
to find Segment anywhere. Over time, unbelievably, Segment became more
and more popular. So at first this was subtle. So

(01:46:51):
like one day I walked into a bookstore and there
was a book about Segment. Wow, book about Segment. Okay,
And it was a book saying, Segment's come back, the
Divine Feminine. Here's some things you need to know, okay.
And then we're on tour and we run into people like,
for instance, one of the people that was a great

(01:47:13):
mentor to us, especially to Tamra, was a poet by
the name of Randy Rourke. And this guy worked with
William Burrows and with Alan Ginsberg for like years and
it was an amazing guy and very you know, really
an encyclopedia and he saw in Tamra a great talent
with words, and he was like, here, read Gertrude Stein

(01:47:34):
and do this and do that. And we finally find
out that he's got like this big tat of Segment
on him. And a bunch of people that we were
running into in the world of punk rock and of
course in Riya Girl were Segment people. We were shocked.
We thought we were like the only ones in the world,
you know. And now Segment is like everywhere, like there's

(01:47:59):
millions of hashtags on Google or Segment. There's millions of
views on TikTok that are Secmet. You can buy sec
Met cups and sec MET keyholders and segment you know,
t shirts, and there's there's a whole new segment priesthood,
and there's Segmet Temple where they used to test nuclear
bombs and Nevada and as a return of the divine feminine.

Speaker 1 (01:48:28):
Oh yeah, go ahead, I was just trying to show
pictures of it.

Speaker 2 (01:48:31):
Yeah, please do You can see all this stuff and
with the different ways she's being like she sometimes she's
a babe, and sometimes she's sexy, and sometimes she's angry,
and sometimes she's destroying the planet. And you see, the
Egyptian ones are a little bit more simple. You have
just this slender, usually bare breasted woman with a lion's

(01:48:53):
head with a sign above her head. And what she
represents is her name literally means power, with the female
ending for female, and she is the ultimate invincible justice
goddess and her job is to preserve the balance that

(01:49:15):
makes life possible. So the ancient Egyptians believed that when
societies became evil and they lost the balance of nature
and they lived by hurting and cheating and lying and exploiting,
that segment punishes through pandemics, through wars through natural disasters,

(01:49:40):
and that when societies live that pay attention to the
balance needed for life, that the societies flourish and segment
blesses them with wisdom and ecstasy and books and intoxicant
and great music and great festivals. They used to celebrate

(01:50:06):
her festival four thousand years ago in ancient Egypt. Herodotus
says that seven hundred thousand people would attend, and these
huge parties that were adults only, and they were all
playing these music and frame drums and simple primitive harps

(01:50:27):
and flutes and voices and clapping, and they were drinking
intoxicating alcohol with probably blue lotus in it, which is
a hallucinogen, and they would like party all night, and
then there's like free love was going on. It was
like this huge demonstration of it. And then in the morning,
the priests would bring out the statue of sec Met,

(01:50:50):
which was just sparkling in the sun, and it was
all covered with gold and with textiles and jewelry, but
it's actually was made of black granite with silver flex
all through it. And they would start banging these giant
barrel drums and blowing these primitive trumpets to wake everybody up,

(01:51:10):
and people had amazing experiences where they thought they saw
the statue move or the eyes open, or it was
talking to them, or they would they would fall weeping,
and it was getting rid of the bad of the
old year and greeting the new year with this great
appreciation for the beauty of life that the Catharsis of

(01:51:33):
the festival gave to people. And secondment was forgotten. I mean,
she was worshiped for over two thousand years and then
almost completely forgotten for about two thousand years, and her statues,
for instance, in the British Museum were covered with blankets
in the basement and were not shown. And since then

(01:51:55):
she's just become more and more visible and more and
more present. One of the weirdest things is that in
academia they're discussing like, well, what do we do about
the fact that we display these statues in a secular
setting in our museums, but we have people who are
showing up and worshiping these statues, And the statues that

(01:52:19):
have the best segmet statues have taken to training the
people that work there on how to deal with these
people who come in bringing flowers or bringing wine or
who fall on their knees and start crying in front
of the statue and Tam and I did interviews with
a lot of segment devotees and it's amazing, like who

(01:52:44):
they are and what they're doing and the fact that
they are like so many of them. First contact, like
with me, came in a dream, like they had no
clue that there was anything called Segmet and they suddenly
had this vivid dream that gave them the name, the
image or something, and then they went looking for it.

(01:53:07):
And I consider this kind of I mean, obviously it's
the return of the divine feminine in a big way,
but also I think it has something to do with
what I consider the vanguard of post patriarchy. And what
I mean by that, I'm not doing this in a
cliched way. What I mean by patriarchy is we have
a long period of history where hierarchies of men have

(01:53:30):
been controlling everything. And it's a corporate structure, it's a
church structure. It worked very well for a long time.
It doesn't work so good now, and we're trying to
grow past it. We're trying to grow beyond this you
versus me kind of mentality and So what I found
amongst the people that we interviewed who are into this

(01:53:52):
segment approach, they seem to be the vanguard of this,
Like all of them are doing things that are like
like they don't even care, like you know, it's to them,
it's over, like we have a new world. We do
what we want, and the feminine is empowered, and we
do incredible art projects, or we save children, or like

(01:54:13):
one person I interviewed was many of them were trauma survivors,
by the way, like severe trauma survivors, And one of
them that we interviewed was a person who, after severe trauma,
was dream of segment segment experiences, starts worshiping Segmet, and
she evolves into a person whose job is helping prisoners

(01:54:35):
in prisons deal with trauma, something that would have terrified
her when she was a kid in the midst of
all our trauma. So seeing this this motion of like
again we talked about that you mentioned Sean the beauty
of the human mind, and seeing it's not just women
but predominantly women, but also men too who are responding

(01:54:56):
to this archetype of segment and who have this really
liberated approach because of it and it's so different, you know,
from this fear of my God, you know, as a
demon what you know, you don't know what that is.
I mean, it's an alien, it's something that's harmful. I mean,
how can you trust this ancient Egyptian deity in any

(01:55:18):
possible way, especially a deity that can be so violent,
you know that that that kills the unjust. And I
think of it as it's exciting to me that humanity
is appreciating our incredible heritage. As we mentioned towards the

(01:55:39):
beginning of our talk, that all of these gods, all
of these traditions, all of these ladders of transcendence are
available to us. I mean for our ancestors, you know,
they they didn't have access maybe but to one or
two if any of these these were secrets or they

(01:55:59):
were forgot, And now they're all here. And so people
can have a dream about a lion as God is
and go on Google and find segment and go, wow,
that's the one for me, and then change their lives
and learn from this. And it's fascinating and to me,
it's hopeful. That speaks to me. You know, so many
people complain, for instance, about which talk and stuff and

(01:56:21):
they say, oh, man, these kids, they don't know what
they're doing.

Speaker 3 (01:56:23):
You know.

Speaker 2 (01:56:24):
I think it's wonderful because one they're not ashamed, right
like I even remember in the nineties, like you were,
you know, you weren't too easily admitting your tarot deck.
I mean, now it's not a big deal at all.
People think it's cool, and I think that's wonderful, and
I think it's very hopeful for the future that we

(01:56:47):
can draw on this wisdom. Wouldn't it be necessary for
us when we're facing this great moment of human history
where we need it's kind of evolve or die almost
that all the wisdom of antiquity is brought to us
now to enrich our souls.

Speaker 1 (01:57:06):
So Ronnie, I'm I'm I might trip you the fuck
out with this, dude, But this is a crazy, crazy,
really weird synchronistic kind of story. And so it was
a few earlier on in the year, I think some
sometime in January or so, my wife and I split

(01:57:28):
up and we you know, no longer together anything like that.
And I was going through a really hard time with
it because you know, at the time, I was living
in a trailer inside of a trailer Park, just trying
to save up as much money as I could. And
so you know, I, you know, I have I have
two kids, one with her, and whenever, whenever we broke up,
you know, she moved to Texas and ultimately I eventually followed,

(01:57:52):
and and that's why I live in Texas now. But
at the time, you know, I was so used to
having you know, everybody around in the house, and you know,
just it was never quiet, you know, kids running around,
dogs running around, god knows what. Right, And so you know,
after she moved out, I uh, I like, I well,
I did a little d MT and and it was

(01:58:15):
it was a wild experience because you know, it's it's
the like it's the great teacher, and and I wanted
to be taught, like what this lesson is? Did I
did I make a mistake? Did I do it the
right way? You know, you question everything, especially in marriage, right,
And and so I ended up I took the d
MT or it's four acho DMT, it's kind of like
a variant, but I took it. And I was just

(01:58:39):
sitting on my couch in my house that has now
been hollowed out, and she's she's taken all of her things,
and there's no kids running around, It's just me and
the dogs in there. And I felt so empty, as
if I was just in a hollow tin can and
and what did I do? And I can't believe that,
you know, all like it's gone this way, and and
it was really forcing me to go inside and really

(01:58:59):
hand into all that, you know, and and after a while,
I got so depressed and so like so low. It
was just the lowest part I've ever felt in my life.
And so I go in my bed and I'm trying
to go to sleep because I just want this feeling
to be over. It is just so sad and just
I felt so pathetic, you know. And and I was

(01:59:20):
just like I was like almost hyperventilating at the thought
like of what did I've what have I done? You know?
And I was just like I was like, dude, I
can't handle this right now. And I just started like
just saying out loud, like I I need help right now,
like somebody please come and like talk to me or whatever.
I'm asking for any kind of help. At this point,

(01:59:40):
I was desperate. I didn't care who it was. I
just wanted some kind of message, somebody that to just
tell me that, like, yo, like this is all part
of the plan. It's okay, you're you're good. I mean,
you know, it's good that you're going through that. Like
I just wanted somebody to say something like that, and
I shit, you not, dude. You know, after I kind
of screamed out for help, I'm laying in my bed
and right in front of me, I see like this

(02:00:03):
cat person and it's the trippiest thing. And I've never
looked into cat people. I've never really I don't even
particularly like cats, to be honest with you, and so,
but I see this cat and for some reason, I
see her and I'm like okay, and she's like calming
me down, and I feel her purring up against me,

(02:00:24):
like literally physically, I'm feeling a purring vibration up against
my body. I don't know what the hell's going on.
And I'm like, you know, I'm starting to calm down
and everything's starting to be all right again. And I
just remember thinking, like, dude, I mean, this is comforting.
But why am I Like it's gonna sound a little weird,
but like, why am I a little turned on right now?
By this? It's like really sketchy you know, and I
was like, dude, I like, this is some kind of alien,

(02:00:46):
hybrid cat looking thing. Why would I ever be attracted
to this? You know? And and then after a while,
you know, I turn over on my side and I
can feel like her purring, like up against my back,
and I'm like, dude, I'm like, it's weird, but it's
comforting at the same time. And so ever since then,
and I didn't I don't know if I ever if

(02:01:06):
I got any messages from it or anything, but I
was comforted in a time that I absolutely needed by.
And I'm looking at these pictures and I shake you not, dude,
like this looks familiar. I've never seen this before, Like
I think that. I mean, I'm not going to say
it was Segmet, but I'm also not going to say
it wasn't. I don't know, but it's it's pretty wild, dude,

(02:01:28):
How all this just really comes together the more you
look into all this. You got a little seg Met there.

Speaker 4 (02:01:35):
Huh.

Speaker 2 (02:01:35):
This is boss. This is Secmet's sister, And what you
describe sounds like boss to me. So when you get
a chance, b ast one of the most wonderful goddesses,
and she is an erotic goddess as well as a healer.

Speaker 4 (02:01:51):
Let's go on there, you go, dude, Yeah, that's crazy
because you know, up and up until then, we had
never even heard of anything like this. You know, we
we were starting to cover certain alien races and different
different things like this and different entities, and we had
no idea of there being any kind of cat beings

(02:02:11):
or anything like that. So for him, for Jonathan to
have this experience out of nowhere and in the time
of need that he was in, it was just like,
you know, afterwards, we were like, holy shit.

Speaker 2 (02:02:22):
I think sometimes we get answers from deities that we
were connected to in past lives. I think they remember us.
I really do. You know, when when you get a
name of a deity and a dream and you've never
run into that deity before, especially at a time when
it wasn't available anywhere, that's like they're remembering you. And

(02:02:45):
I would suggest to you, Jonathan, and maybe that's what
you had Boss remembering you, and maybe you did have
a relationship in some way with Boss. I mean Boss
was worshiped for four thousand years in Egypt, so there's
plenty of time. Was the earliest bost Is mentioned in
the Second Dynasty, and she is She is also depicted

(02:03:09):
with a lioness head, but mostly with a cat head,
and there was a whole city devoted to her called Bubastis,
and the priestesses from Bubastis would go down the Nile
for the big New Year's festival. We discussed. It's so funny.
It's like Lake Havasu.

Speaker 1 (02:03:27):
That's where I'm at right now. That's funny.

Speaker 2 (02:03:29):
They would flash people on the banks, right, and they
would also taunt the wives right like joke at them
and stuff. It was so funny, and so this these
were it was an amazing goddess in ancient Egypt, who
is one of the most popular ancient Egyptian goddesses. Now

(02:03:51):
there's many people who are way into bost So.

Speaker 1 (02:03:55):
Wait, you were saying that they would they would have
this kind of stuff in Lake Havasu.

Speaker 2 (02:04:00):
Well, I know I'm saying that that that that what
was going on there reminds me of Lake Habit.

Speaker 1 (02:04:05):
Okay, Wow, I was gonna say, yeah, I'm actually in
Lake Havasu right now. My yeah, And I was actually
born here in Lake Havasus, so I was really places.

Speaker 2 (02:04:16):
So you live in the city of a sec MET festival,
because the whole thing in those BOSS and sec Met
festivals was you know, flashing and getting drunk and.

Speaker 1 (02:04:26):
Girls gone wild, party.

Speaker 4 (02:04:29):
Sons crazy. Dude, what are the odds of that? You know,
like Jonathan was probably the only person ever born there,
that's what we're thinking.

Speaker 1 (02:04:36):
You know, I don't know any other person that was
actually born here because it's normally just.

Speaker 4 (02:04:41):
Like, yeah, that's that's so random that you brought it
up though, and then he's actually in like I don't know,
there's I'm here synchronousy on top of synchronicity, you know, God,
And we're talking about creativity before this, and you know,
Jonathan was saying, oh, maybe you should give me an
on tattoo, and I give him the tattoo, and then
that kind of sparked your your story with that.

Speaker 2 (02:04:59):
Yeah, oh my gods, that's to me, that's the soul,
the higher soul is here with us. And and you
see that this magic happening, right, it's so beautiful.

Speaker 4 (02:05:12):
That's great, And what the what the the deities and
things like that? What what is that as far as
it coming into someone's awareness, is as something because this
person or entity was worshiped for so long, it's almost
just like the energy is just in the ether at
all times.

Speaker 2 (02:05:31):
And I don't know. You know, there's different different interpretations.
I'll share some of them with you, and I'll tell
you what I think. So some people in the occult world,
there's a lot of nervousness currently about what's called. They're
calling Eggrigors collective thought forms take on a life of

(02:05:51):
their own, have their own ends in mind, and don't
care who they have to hurt to get there. I'm
not a real I mean, the history of is a
little different actually from that. This is a more recent
development of the definition. And I don't think it really
meets Okham's raiser like. I think it's needlessly complex. I

(02:06:13):
think you can explain a lot about human beings without
Eggrigor's But really, some people say segments in Egrigor and
they say, oh my god, don't wake up that egrigor.
That's a dangerous egregor. I don't think that's the case.
Some people say it's the collective unconscious. It's an archetype, right, so, uh,
segment is the archetype of literally the archetype of female power,

(02:06:35):
the lioness headed woman you know, the leader, the warrior woman,
and there were there's the famous African queen who took
on Augustus, the Roman emperor, and was one of the
only people to beat him in warfare. She was a
great hero. She lost her eye in battle, and I
mean one of the stories told about her is that

(02:06:55):
she would feed Roman captives to her lion cubs, person like,
cut them up alive and toss them to the lions.

Speaker 1 (02:07:03):
Savagery.

Speaker 2 (02:07:05):
Savagery. But it had worked. It made the Romans terrified
in battle to be captured. And so there could have
been a women a very earlier warrior cult based on lionesses,
on observation, right, but it turned into this kind of religion.
And the thing about segment is that in the very

(02:07:28):
earliest versions where she sort of accepted into society as
an important goddess, she's a part of a trinity. There's
a mother that's her, and she's a loving mother, but
also she's a war goddess, so she defends the city
and the family. She was the goddess of Memphis, which
was this beautiful city with shining white walls and the

(02:07:52):
Nile delta, and her husband was Petah, a creator god who.
They say that when the the waters of endless chaos
finally gave up one little tiny piece of fertile land,
there was ta standing on it. And Patah creates people
and cities and religions and everything all to amuse segment,

(02:08:15):
and they adore each other. And they have a son
named nepher Tum, who is the blue lotus and who
is a god of healing and intoxication. So Memphis must
have been a fun place to live. I mean, look,
compare that to the Catholic tri Trinity, right, I mean, wow,
I mean, which city do you want to live in?

Speaker 4 (02:08:34):
Exactly?

Speaker 2 (02:08:35):
But Heliopolis, which was nearby, became the political capital of Egypt,
and their Segmet and Petah were worshiped with a son
named Mahis, who was a war god who carried two scimitars,
so different. Heliopolis took over everything and became the official religion,
while Sekmet becomes this kind of story that they try

(02:08:57):
to rework and make fit into the patrin because she's
too important to let go of. But they try to
keep saying, well, she's really just her father's energy and
that kind of thing. I think she's probably a glimpse
at a pre patriarchal, matriarchal goddess, some kind of an

(02:09:17):
Amazon like vision of a war goddess. And actually, interestingly enough,
female war goddesses are very common in the ancient world,
like Athena, for example, a better warrior than Ares. And
so we have some kind of this this female power
floating around in cultures like Greece where women were disempowered.

(02:09:42):
There weren't female warriors in Greece while they were worshiping Athena.
It's weird, it's like this disconnect. And so now as
the world is changing and we're getting female fighter pilots
and we have a female vice president and women are
kind of rising all over the world, here we have
this goddess rising who represents this not just this power,

(02:10:06):
but power in the service of the preservation of the
balance of life. That that that you know, she was
said to be the friend of the common folks. She
hated liars, she hated cheaters. And you always hear so often, unfortunately,
you will hear a Christian, Catholic or evangelical writers talking about, oh,

(02:10:28):
you know, America is going to go pagan, It's going
to be terrible. It's going to be. So you know,
there's no morals, there's no ethics. There's a lot of ethics.
There's a lot of ethics in the pagan world. There's
there's this Goddess is literally the ethics of living a
good life where where you are respectful of nature and
of each other and of the balance of it all.

(02:10:51):
And so the awakening of these ideas and forms that
speak to people who don't respond to the existing religions
right who they just don't talk to them is exciting.

Speaker 1 (02:11:06):
Yeah, that's exactly where I'm at, dude. I mean, whenever
I first got into spirituality at all, I think that
a lot of people, especially in the United States, maybe
you look at Christianity, and that's really where I went,
and I really enjoyed it. I went to church every
Sunday for a year, maybe a little bit more, and
I really did enjoy it. But there was aspects of
it that you know, didn't really connect with me in

(02:11:28):
some ways. And so then I started really you know,
branching out looking other places, and here.

Speaker 2 (02:11:34):
We are, Yeah, which is great. You know, I find
I have Christian friends, and I mean some of my
Christian friends are some of the I always tell people
like there is nothing better in the world than a
sincere Christian, like a real Christian like they who has humility,
it doesn't judge other people. I mean, they are a
blessing on the planet. Oh yeah, wonderful people. But it's

(02:11:56):
only that many of them, Like there's a whole bunch
of crazy people using Christianity for ulterior motives.

Speaker 1 (02:12:02):
Yep, that's yeah, unfortunately. But hey, dude, I mean, you
know it's I think that it's beautiful that all this
information is really out. I'm very thankful for you and
all of your life experiences and and coming on and
having this conversation with us. This is by far one
of my favorite conversations we've ever had on this show.
And you're so You're so intuitive, and you the way

(02:12:25):
you just effortlessly just give us this information and you
know it helps it will help us, it's already helping us.

Speaker 2 (02:12:32):
On any time, Jonathan, anytime you guys, Sean, I mean,
I'm happy to talk to you. I really like what
you're doing. I think it's great.

Speaker 4 (02:12:38):
Thank you man, thank you man, thank you. And I'll
and I'll say just pretty much what Jonathan said, Yeah,
we really appreciate you man, and the wealth of knowledge
and how well spoken you are. It's it's what I
would like to be able to. Uh, you know, you'll
get to do.

Speaker 2 (02:12:53):
I was not anywhere like this and I'm still not
where I'll be and you'll get there.

Speaker 4 (02:12:58):
It's a long path, right, Yeah, I was gonna ask you,
how did we do? You know what I mean?

Speaker 2 (02:13:02):
Oh you're great.

Speaker 4 (02:13:03):
You nailed it.

Speaker 2 (02:13:04):
Yeah you did. I love what you what you all drew,
and I love where you're coming from, what you're I mean,
everything about it I think is great. I really do.

Speaker 1 (02:13:11):
Thank you man. That means a lot. Well for at it.
We definitely will. This is going to be till death.
This is this is what we love this. But if
any of the one wants to be able to get
in touch with you, be able to find you or
any of your information, I mean, feel free to just
tell them where they can.

Speaker 2 (02:13:27):
Sure, I probably if you want to ask me questions
or stuff, probably Instagram, which is at the Ronnie Pontiac
because there was already another Ronnie Pontiac and and then
you can find me on YouTube Ronnie Pontiac. I have
a channel I just launched that has some content about
some projects that tamer and I are working on I

(02:13:50):
might find interesting. The stuff on the Unobstructed Universe would
probably really be interesting to you guys, because it's it's
similar to what we're talking about. And then trying to
think there's anything else. I'm sure I'm going to kick
myself or not mentioning something, but that's all I can
think of right now. So but if you google me too,
like if you're interested in the music or the films
or any of that stuff, just Google and you'll find

(02:14:11):
a bunch of information.

Speaker 3 (02:14:13):
Great.

Speaker 1 (02:14:13):
Great, Yeah, I saw that you were all also on
Medium dot com as well.

Speaker 2 (02:14:18):
Yeah, I do. I do a weekly astrology report, just
like what's going on in the stars, and I try
to put inspiring quotes in there, and sometimes I have
other content and Medium, so yeah, you can definitely follow
me there also, and I can be found on threads,
and I can be found on Facebook and eventually probably

(02:14:38):
on TikTok. I actually have a TikTok account. I just
haven't had time to get stuff.

Speaker 1 (02:14:43):
It's a lowed to keep up with everything. Brother, I
know exactly what I mean.

Speaker 4 (02:14:46):
Crazy.

Speaker 2 (02:14:46):
And we have a book out too, you know, books
just a process of getting the thing through the old
fashioned style of publishing like Inner Traditions does as a
whole grueling, time consuming but you know, amazing process.

Speaker 1 (02:15:00):
Oh yeah, I mean I will definitely be ordering that
book and I cannot wait to read it, man, because
thank you.

Speaker 4 (02:15:07):
I mean, if it's writing a book alone just seems
to me as something that would be so impossible, you
know what I'm saying. So someone that's actually done it, Like, I'll.

Speaker 2 (02:15:15):
Tell you though, what happens, it's not you know, it's funny,
like the the American Metaphysical Religion book started because I
was in Manley Hall's vault having lunch with him, and
I pointed to this big leather book and I was like,
what's that and he said, oh, that's a good one.
You should pick it up. And it was called The Platonist.
It was a newspaper published in the eighteen eighties in

(02:15:37):
Saint Louis when it was a cowtown that was filled
with translations of Plato and Platinis. It's all this pagan stuff,
and I could not It just rocked my world because like, why,
during the year when the gunfight at the Ok Corral happened,
did somebody publish a freaking newspaper of Plato, you know,

(02:16:00):
through us. Yeah, and it took me years to find out,
you know, taking notes and even like when we were touring,
Tamra and I would go to like university libraries and
stuff during the day trying to find information about things
we were interested in and including that. And since then
there's been this this revolution in academia. So all this
information came out just amazing. And I found out that

(02:16:23):
Plato was actually a huge fad in America in those days,
and people like even like housewives were into Plato and stuff.
It's really a trip and they used to celebrate Plato's birthday.
But anyway, the the so this, this this kind of

(02:16:44):
material was was out there all the way back then.
Like you know, so I start taking notes. I'm not
writing a book, you know, I'm just wow, what you know,
I just throw the notebook somewhere. And then eventually, like
you know, years later, I came back to the notebooks.
We found them basically going through stuff from touring and everything,

(02:17:07):
and we were like wow, you know, wow, Wow, Tamora,
You're like reading it to each other. Wow, look at this,
you know, and it was almost like the book had
half written itself. And so also I was very lucky
because back then, when I first started working on it
in the twenty tens, late twenty tens, Google and Amazon
would let you search any book that they had all

(02:17:30):
the way, like, so I got to like all these books,
any book I could think of, all the academic books
were available for me to read all the way. Now
you can't do that anymore. But that was amazing because
I could never have afforded all the books that I
was able to consult. And so then you start taking
notes from those books, right, And then that's how books starts.

(02:17:52):
And you have ideas, you talk to your friends, you
talk to people are into it, and they tell you, oh,
you should do this, and then next thing you know,
there's a book.

Speaker 1 (02:18:01):
Yeah. I think that eventually, you know, the Meta Mysteries
podcast is going to just take on so much information
that there's gonna have to be a book written. I
think that, you know, with all the stuff that we
talk about, all the really great guests and all the
really great information that we come across, it's like the books,
you know, it does seem that they really would seem

(02:18:22):
to kind of write themselves. And I mean, hey, whenever
you get in that flow state and you're writing a book.
Who knows where that's even coming from anyway, You know
it is.

Speaker 2 (02:18:30):
It pops in your head. I'm not kidding, man, I
mean you you know those lines are given to you.
In fact, one of my friends, there's an amazing human
being named John Trudell who he was, and he was
one of the founders of the American Indian Movement, and
he was a poet, a sue indigenous poet and a

(02:18:51):
real activist for Native rights. Really amazing human being. And
so he told me that his poems all arrived to
him like ropes, one sentence at a time that were
let down to him by his late wife, who had
been killed by the FBI, and he lived in constant

(02:19:12):
mourning for her, but that it kept him alive to
have her dropping these ropes of lines down to him.
And he said, I never know what it's going to be,
you know, until it's finished. And I often think about
that when I do my writing, because it's the same.
I mean, it's the weirdest thing, especially when you get
used to it. You know, you put your notes down
there and then you sit in front of it, and

(02:19:33):
then suddenly it just starts going, you know, and I
never questioned it. I just write down when I'm hearing
in my head, and it's always better. Part of that's because,
you know, this was Tamoro's thing in music, Like she
loved improv and I don't mean like jamming. I mean
she wanted to make up real songs in the moment
and we could do it. We got good at it,

(02:19:54):
and her lyrics were incredible when she would do that.
And this is partly under the influence of the guy
mentioned before, Randy Rourke, who taught her about how Kerouac
would work. And you know, she was like, let the
unconscious guide you. It's always better. The conscious mind is
out here parsing everything, but the unconscious will just be
a river that gives you what you need. Oh yeah,

(02:20:16):
So when you're ready to write a book, Sean, that
river will flow. Oh yeah.

Speaker 4 (02:20:20):
I imagine just sitting in front of the computer or
no pad and just start writing.

Speaker 2 (02:20:24):
You know, exactly.

Speaker 4 (02:20:25):
You can't. You can't learn to play the piano unless
you're sitting in front of.

Speaker 2 (02:20:27):
The pig exactly. That's it.

Speaker 4 (02:20:29):
So I love it, I'm inspired, I'm doing it.

Speaker 2 (02:20:32):
Cool manjin It's all right. We'll hope to see you
guys soon. I really like you, and I really enjoyed
this conversation and keep on going.

Speaker 1 (02:20:41):
Thank you, brother, This was an absolute pleasure. I mean
it's gonna be something that we never forget, so thank
you so much.

Speaker 3 (02:20:47):
Man.

Speaker 1 (02:20:47):
It was absolutely great and uh, definitely we'll do it again.
But look, if Ronnie Pontiac came here and he taught
you anything, it's that you don't know what you don't know.
So I'll just get with weird.

Speaker 4 (02:21:01):
Stay weird.

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The Secret Teachings Of All Ages | Manly P. Hall | w/ Ronnie Pontiac

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}The Secret Teachings Of All Ages | Manly P. Hall | w/ Ronnie Pontiac