September 18, 2024 • 64 mins
Come hang out with my guest Conner Kees while we talk about aspects of religion, living life and more!
Check out Conner right here.
Www.connerkees.com
Check out Conner right here.
Www.connerkees.com
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:05):
The whole point is the shirt on here. Oh yeah, yeah,
that's right. Embarre's the out of yourself. Keep the conversation,
you know.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
Pot and you're doing your friend job line the man.
Speaker 1 (00:22):
I always love doing that introduction. Man, it's so fun. Hey,
welcome back to JG's Lounge, everybody. I'm your host, jukebox.
We are back with another episode of Stardom, and I
am super stoked tonight. I've been hanging out in the
background for the last few minutes with Connor keys. Man.
How the hell are you?
Speaker 3 (00:38):
I'm doing fantastic, brother, and I am stoked to be here.
This is gonna be a lot of fun, man.
Speaker 1 (00:42):
Yes, yeah, I'm looking forward to it. I didn't even
prep for this, just as much as I know you didn't,
which is going to make this whole episode just flow,
so smoothie.
Speaker 3 (00:51):
Absolutely.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
First off, the shirt, I saw you post it on Facebook. Yeah,
can we get that out of the way.
Speaker 3 (00:58):
Yeah, So.
Speaker 1 (01:02):
What about the shirt off you kind of fucked this
up if you tried, And then it's got a website
underneath it.
Speaker 3 (01:09):
Correct correct, correct, correct, So the shirt says you couldn't
fuck this up if you tried, You couldn't fuck this
up if you tried is a recapitulation of the third
premise of my book. My book has three main premises
(01:29):
that I kind of put out there, and the third
premise is that there's no possible way that you could
mess this up, this life, what we're doing here. Yeah,
there you go.
Speaker 1 (01:42):
Yeah he's got there.
Speaker 3 (01:44):
I don't sure sure, So I decided to put premise
three of the book in some spicy language, and uh,
I love the way it's turned out. And what I
posted today is that this is actually my first day
(02:04):
wearing the shirt in public, and within ten minutes of
sitting down at a coffee shop, one of the employees
walked by me and said, I love your shirt. So yeah, this, really,
I think is I couldn't. I couldn't necessarily say that
this particular premise of the book is the most important premise,
(02:27):
or that there's any one particular most important premise in general.
But I think that having a strong statement and wearing
it on your chest, you know, that points us at
a kind of self forgiveness and ease and the innate
(02:48):
knowing that each of us has. That there's a way
of being in the world which can be easy. You
know we can essentially, we can lighten up. And and
this isn't this is something that is inherent in us,
something some this innate ability that we have to take
(03:08):
our hands off the wheel, you know, and quit night
white knuckling this ride. And that is an extremely important
message of mine. And so I decided to put it
on a shirt.
Speaker 1 (03:21):
You know. It's it's funny. We were talking a little
bit before, kind of about backgrounds and stuff like that,
and I was telling you about kind of my upbringing
a little bit. Well, my grandpa was my father, figured
and when I was thirteen is when he passed, and
about a week it's about a week week and a
half before he passed. I remember going and seeing him,
and the last thing that he said to me before
(03:43):
he passed was don't waste your time being a negative
person because it takes too much energy. And I've lived
by that pretty much my whole life from thirteen. Yeah,
I mean, yeah, there things happen. I mean what sucks
is reality is reality. Things things hit us. You know,
there's priorities that we have, there's bills that things coming up.
(04:04):
But stressing about it doesn't make it any easier either,
you know. So I mean I've I've always kind of
had a different sort of outlook on on on things,
I guess, and it's actually caused conflict in some relationships
of mine because I don't react how how some people
want me to react. You know, it's like, sure, oh
my god, there's there's six bills coming up, but I
should freak out. Well, you know, it's not really the
(04:25):
way to handle it.
Speaker 3 (04:27):
Correct, correct. Yeah, I think that's fantastic. And hats off
to your grandpa, you know. Uh, and and for you
to have received that message at such a young age
and then taking it to heart, right, you know, because
one of one of the interesting things that we see
(04:47):
in culture, and it's it's it's an American phenomenon. It's
actually something that began after the Civil War in America,
uh with the kind of on set in the wake
of Mesmerism from France and when the when the uh
(05:09):
Mesmers came over and influenced Phineas Quimby, and then he
had the New Thought movement start with Warrenfeld Evans. And
so people today might know people like Napoleon Hill or
Neville Goddard or Dale Carnegie and some of the authors
of things like think and grow rich, right, Napoleon Hill,
we know, we know some of these names. Some of
(05:30):
your listeners may know people like Nevill Goddard if they're
into this kind of thing. That is sort of the
intellectual tradition. That one of the intellectual traditions that I'm
most interested in. And we take it for granted that
this that this intellectual movement had such an impact on culture. Right,
(05:54):
so you have things like uh, MasterCard, imagine the possibility,
or you have the Army be all you can be
right right, you have you have this, or you have
these motivational posters in corporate offices and things like that.
That isn't that is at its roots, that's an American
phenomenon positive psychology and positive thinking, and we kind of
(06:18):
take it for granted. And one of the things that
I don't think it's an issue, but I think that
it's something to consider that when we are kind of
inundated with this kind of lukewarm positive psychology from Disney
movies and things like this, or from Hallmark and and
this kind of thing, there is an actual boots on
(06:42):
the ground way of coming into right relation with these concepts,
with what we would call positivity or what we would
call faith even right, And I'm not going to go
and say that like it's too bad add that you
have this positive thinking movement and in Hallmark on it's
(07:04):
not too bad, because that would be to miss that
would miss the point. And yet it's actually what we've
done is we've created for ourselves a situation which finding
the thread in that kind of heap of positive thinking
and heap of sort of mundane kind of these aphorisms
that point us to all this this positivity, What does
(07:27):
it really mean? What's really being gotten at by these
by these statements like the army saying be all you
can be? We just take that for grafted right, right.
Speaker 1 (07:38):
Well, And it's funny you mentioned like a little bit
of religion in Disney and stuff like that, and there's
actually I read an article about the Christian a good
check of the Christian belief not being fans of the
Disney Network, because Christianity is all about, like you know,
(07:59):
believing in God and putting out faith in God. In Disney,
it's all about believing in yourself and putting faith in yourself.
Have you ever heard anything about that?
Speaker 3 (08:09):
Sure? Yeah, sure, for sure, sure.
Speaker 1 (08:11):
And I think there's I mean, I don't know, I
how what is your religious beliefs? I mean, you don't
have to say it or I mean, I'm like, I'm spiritual,
but I don't believe like there's a certain God that's
right wrong. I believe there's other stuff out there. I
also believe like reincarnation and coming back.
Speaker 3 (08:29):
Okay, juke, you might want to check out my book.
Uh I am that is hysterical, man. I have never
been asked on a podcast what my religious beliefs are.
And it's and it's apropos because one of the things
I'm kind of excited to be on here and to
(08:51):
announce that. Look, I mean, I haven't done a podcast
in a couple of months now, and it's really fun
to reflect on all the changes that have happened in
the past couple of months with my brand and in
my message and the things that we're doing out there
in the world, and actually to I suppose kind of
announce you know, I have I have spoken a lot
(09:13):
on other podcasts about how I consider my message and
what I do to be a ministry. What do I
mean by ministry? I suppose we can talk about that,
but just you know, allow that word to have whatever
neural connections are Simmler, however it needs to. I consider
my message a ministry. Ye, my mother who's in heaven
(09:33):
considered my message a ministry. And my message has in
this ministry has evolved into what Laura was gage and
I who's a partner mine and someone who I work
with very closely, has we have sort of evolved this,
(09:57):
this brand, this message, this this thing into a ministry proper.
And that ministry is called Inspiritist Ministries, And you can
go to Inspiritist Ministries at Oregon learn about how we
are essentially making really explicit what the philosophy is here
that we think is so so delicious and feels and
(10:23):
feels so and feels so right. And it's not that
there's anything wrong with the world that we're evangelizing in
service of fixing anything, you know, that's not what's going on.
But what's going on is passion, and what's going on
is a desire to be in deep relation with that thing,
(10:45):
that thing at the center of all this. Call it God,
call it whatever you want to call it. I call
it God, you know, and I don't and I don't
care what anybody calls it. I care about us knowing
that there is something else entirely going on here, which
is also one of the premises of my book. There's
(11:06):
something else entirely going on here. What you think metaphysically
that means, whether it's reincarnation and all this kind of
stuff can actually if we take that too seriously, it
can cause us to kind of miss the point of
the something else entirely that's going on here. And yeah,
(11:29):
so my religious beliefs, what are my religious beliefs? God
is good, right, and God is as the kind of
not just this singular event of creation, big bang type,
(11:52):
you know, watchmaker God that created all this somehow and
then stepped away from it. That creation is is both
complete and an ongoing process. And there's something unique about
human consciousness that has a relationship with that, to the
extent to which it sees itself as being a part
(12:13):
in that. Right. So the more we kind of consciously
situate ourselves as agents and participants in this big picture, well,
something emerges and something happens, and people call that manifestation.
These days, people call that blessings and providence and serendipity
(12:36):
and abundance and all of these things, and I think
that society and culture and global culture are moving in
that direction and there's going to be interesting repercussions that
we're going to see play out with that. I mean
the Pope recently. Do you hear what the Pope said recently? No,
the Pope recently came out saying that all religions are
(12:58):
path to God. All religions are paths to God. And
I personally don't care what the Pope says, because I
don't care what anyone person says. What I care about
is what you know to be true in your heart right,
you know what I mean. And at the same time,
I know that that's going to rustle the feathers of
(13:21):
a people who are beholden to their particular theology and
cosmology and Christology and metaphysics as the one that which
is correct. That's going to be upsetting and at the
same time, it's also indicative of something. And again, like
(13:43):
I said, I don't necessarily care what the Pope thinks,
but I am excited that we're seeing this kind of thing. Yes,
at that level, So.
Speaker 1 (13:51):
That's that's big. Do you want me to kind of
break down what my view is because I would like
to critique me and like even maybe pick my brain.
That's perfect, sounds fantastic. So I believe we are created
as as an energy, and I think that our energies
(14:12):
are created to learn life lessons, and in order to
learn all those lessons our life, our life, our physical
forms don't live long enough for us to learn all
the lessons that we need to learn before we can
ascend to heaven or whatever it is. So you know,
we do reincarnate, and I think, in my opinion, until
(14:35):
we learn everything that we need to learn and have
lived all the lives and experience all experiences that we
need to experience before we can get to that next level,
whether that's heaven or whatever it is. Sure, yeah, so
I mean that's that's basically in the nutshill for me.
Speaker 3 (14:52):
Yeah, well I think you're wrong.
Speaker 1 (14:56):
That's fine, that's great.
Speaker 3 (14:58):
I think you would be you would be banned and
from our fellowship, you would be disfellowshipped, you would you
would be stamped as a heretic. Okay, I'm being facetious.
Speaker 1 (15:11):
That's fine, it's being clear.
Speaker 3 (15:18):
Yeah, you know, I love it.
Speaker 1 (15:19):
Let's uh roll on it. You can dish whatever you
want me. I promise I've never had never kicked somebody
off the show, or that they left so.
Speaker 3 (15:28):
Good good, Well I'm leaving. So, you know, I think Jukebox,
I think. I think that I think that the sort
of story that you just reiterated to us is one
that we see a lot of that has been kind
(15:48):
of repackaged from Western interpretations of of Vedic cosmology about
karma and dharma and reincarnation. What's called the givat on.
The jivatman is the kind of personal individual soul which
is recapitulated in in these human lives, uh, to kind
(16:11):
of I'm not sure, you know, kind of get squared
up with Brahman or something in a way that sort
of like be free, be free of karma in other words,
to be free of the cycle of cause and effect.
So so essentially, can you can you be so non dualistically, uh,
(16:34):
a non agent in the world that your being in
the world no longer carries any weight and therefore, you know,
you kind of become one with the with with v one.
Now that's my that's my reiteration of kind of where
I think some of these ideas come from. It's probably
(16:55):
totally it's probably totally wrong. But I know that what
we are seeing in this kind of like the kind
of average person's New Age spiritual not religious cosmology does
often involve reincarnation, and it involves metaphysical concepts like energy
(17:22):
like you said, and vibration and things like that. And
there's also this I don't know the history of this.
I don't I don't know where this comes from. But
for some reason, this is extremely common. When asking people
about what their spiritual beliefs are, if there's something like yours,
(17:43):
they will often say that we are here to learn lessons.
And you may be able to tell by what's written
on my shirt that I think that that I think
that what's going on here is a whole lot less
(18:04):
serious than what people often call Earth school, you know,
Earth school. So I I don't I think that it's
uh uh incorrect, only in so far as it creates
(18:24):
unnecessary suffering, Right if I position myself in the world
as someone or something who is here to improve, but we.
Speaker 1 (18:35):
Don't, so hold on, go ahead as as okay, So
if we're talking as far as a physical form and suffering, okay,
but as as us like take us out of these
ship you know, these shells of our bodies. We don't
experience pain and suffering like our physical form does. I mean,
(18:56):
we learned to understand it, but we don't. We don't
physically at us us as a being. We don't. We
don't feel that.
Speaker 3 (19:05):
You don't see, Yeah, totally, I agree, I agree completely.
Let me be a little more let me be a
little more clear, because I also that's a that's a
term I will sometimes use, you know, because it's it's
also the uh, the the aim of say, Buddhism is
to end suffering in the world, right and so uh,
(19:27):
and to end suffering in the world by a relationship
with the world like what we might call like non
attachment and these kinds of things. I often say things
about ending suffering because it's relatable when I'm when I
say suffering, there's also a Buddhist notion that goes, pain
(19:48):
is inevitable, like pain of the body, but suffering is optional.
Suffering is something that happens in this kind of personal narrative,
this cognitive fault realm of my my crafted kind of
ego based relationship with the world, and this story that
I think that I'm living. That's where that's where the suffering.
(20:10):
That's where the suffering is, right, So there's a distinguishing
between pain and suffering. Right. So the way in which
I think that a the way in which I think
this narrative about learning lessons can actually facilitate a person's suffering,
(20:30):
to be specific, to be more specific, has to do
with the fact that if we take that on as
a story, what we're doing is we're taking on an obligation.
We're taking on an obligation to behave or to perform
a specific task, in this case learning right in this
case kind of like self improvement, self development, learning lessons,
(20:55):
all this kind of thing that you can you can fail,
you can you can there. If it's a if it's
a performance based thing which we're being invited to participate
in here, then my performance has some bearing on on
(21:15):
what If you ask certain certain religious backgrounds, they might
say it the terms actually whether or not you go
to heaven or hell, depending what they believe, or a
softer version of that might just say it determines whether
or not you are reincarnated as a millionaire or someone
(21:37):
who lives in the slumps yea or a rock or
or or and I have that's a joke, you know
from you know, I think the wrong.
Speaker 1 (21:46):
Hey, pet rocks are pretty popular for a long time man.
Speaker 3 (21:49):
Not only that, I mean, what what does the rock
know that we don't know with our with these conscious
minds of ours. So so what's going on here? I
think is is both more complex than that and infinitely
simpler than that. Right what So, I'm obviously, for lack
(22:12):
of a better word, I'm opposed to this idea that
we are here to learn lessons. And I think part
of what this comes from is this kind of deep
seated notion that a lot of us have inherited from
our religious upbringing. That you asked me what my religious
beliefs were, and the first thing I said was that
(22:32):
God is good. And if God is in some sense
so intrinsically not just connected to everything, but from I mean,
if you really want to drill in there, you really
want to go cosmologically deep, God in some sense, and
I don't care about reason and logic necessarily either. I'm managested,
(22:55):
but you could form a case that God can't necessarily
create anything that's not also God, because God, God is
this kind of one singularity at the center of all
of this ineffable as it may be. And yet to
say that this world that we're experiencing is so other
than God is actually to contradict what we mean when
(23:18):
we say God. This is why people, a lot of
people in the spiritual not religious or slash New Age
kind of whatever that we're seeing just call it the universe. Yeah, right,
they just call it the universe, right, and so and
that's fine, that's fine. That actually gets for some people
(23:41):
more at what it is that they're trying to get
in touch with than the word God does. So what
I think that a lot of this stems from this,
like this learning of lessons is kind of this weirdly
packaged Western theory. And and I don't care about East
(24:04):
and West necessarily, but I'm just using this as a
kind of trope because a lot of people understand this,
this difference between East and West. I don't think it's real.
But that's another story, right, And that is to say
that we inherited this kind of notion of reincarnation, which
by the way, is not entirely Eastern. Pythagoras and and
some of the Greeks, you know, believed in reincarnation. They
(24:26):
had this theory we we bring it over into the
Western world, so to speak. You know, Nietzsche was reading
the Bagavad Gita and the Upanishads and stuff, and Schopenhauer
kept the bagavat Gita under his pillow. You know, we've
we've we've got this stuff. And yet as oh man,
(24:51):
this is this is deep, This is good. As as
people who have this is good. I love how different
podcasts bring different things out of me. So so as
as people who have this, these Abrahamic faiths kind of
running in our blood be then what people call Judeo Christian,
(25:11):
which is not really correct. A lot of people think
it's really silly to say something like Judeo Christian. So
I'll I'll just find them. I'll just umbrella all of
them and say, Abrahamic faiths. We've kind of inherited that.
That's really deep in there. We in the sixties and
seventies and in the late eighteen hundreds even inherited these
(25:33):
Eastern concepts. We kind of mixed them together. And the
issue is, I think the issue is is that somehow
subconsciously buried in here is the notion that God is
an asshole.
Speaker 1 (25:50):
You know, it's I had a so I'll interview anybody.
Speaker 3 (25:55):
Yeah, I have this.
Speaker 1 (25:56):
Real nice guy on his name's Richard Lei Lilert. He's
a Satanist. I was scrolling root TikTok and he was
sitting down in a group interview with some Christians and
some Satanists, and he said something that really caught my attention.
Not that I believed it, it was just the view
that he expressed. I was like, I have to get
this guy on my show. He said, one day his
(26:20):
dad came home upset and he drowned his brother, and
he drowned his mom and his dog, and then he
killed himself. And he said that that wasn't actually my dad,
that was God. He drowned his own, his own children.
And I was like, well, that's an interesting take on that.
(26:42):
I mean, but that's just him saying that. I was like, oh,
that's it was intense because he the way he explained it,
like you thought he was talking about his parents. So
you had all these Christians, the Christians over here, and
they're all like, oh my god, I'm so sorry, almost
feeling bad for the guy. And then he said that,
and it just kind of flipped a switch. Now I
(27:02):
don't necessarily I don't agree to that point, but it
was interesting to hear him say that.
Speaker 3 (27:08):
Sure. Yeah, and a lot of people are wrestling with
these kinds of things. They're wrestling with what we would
call like the left hand path. They're wrestling with things
these days like gnosticism and not familiar with that one,
Oh God, Narcissism is actually an academic turn for a
(27:34):
spiritual movement that happened in response to some of the
things that ancient Judeans found reprehensible. Yes, there's the famous
painting blah blah blah blah blah. It's a reaction to
it's a big, deep rabbit hole. But but essentially, essentially
(27:57):
it's pretty fascinating. I used to study this stuff a
lot because I'm fascinated by spirituality and religion, always have been.
And the one of the ways that the Gnostics were
kind of spiritual rebels is they created a completely revisionist
(28:19):
now they First of all, some of the people who
are listening to this may be familiar with nassism. One.
Gnosticism is a is a term that was created in
the seventeen hundred by by academics. It's not an actual term,
not even the people that Irenaeus referred to as the
nose Tacoi in his against Heres. He's referred to themselves
as gnostics. No one has referred to themselves as gnostics
(28:41):
in history other than modern not modern, but contemporary people.
So that's a new thing. And two, there was no
one Gnostic movement. It's incredibly it's incredibly diverse. There's Sethian
and Valentinian and all this kind of stuff. And so
but one of the ways, just to give you the
short version, is to say that the way that one
(29:02):
of the ways that these Gnostics were spiritual rebels is
they looked at the stories of the Old Testament and
did a completely revisionist history of Genesis and said, for
instance that actually, just to give you the really really
(29:22):
cliff notes version, that Aba and Eber essentially enslaved rather
than in paradise, that the snakes as a symbol of transformation,
was actually the true God coming to rescue them from Jehovah,
who is actually a sort of the bastard child of Sophia,
(29:43):
and to rescue them from the from the kind of
the garden of medi in which they were imprisoned, who
also created the world, and that the world is essentially evil.
It's a very platonic idea. You have, you have in
a lot of and it's actually something that very platonic
idea that I love. Gordon White's kind of synopsis stuff.
Speaker 1 (30:04):
He says, uh.
Speaker 3 (30:08):
Uh, matter, matter bad, spirit good, you know, and so
and so so you have, so you have right, you
have this metaphysical and cosmological notion of the world in
some sense being corrupted. This is very characteristic. In fact,
it's considered the extent to which that's the that's the
(30:31):
prevailing notion, is considered the extent to which a movement
is considered gnostic by academics, but even Christians in the
New Testament. In the Old Testament, there's this notion that
the world belongs to the devil, to memon and stuff
like that. So you see, you see some parallels there. Anyway, Look,
people are wrestling with this kind of thing because they're
(30:52):
trying to find within the world, which is interesting, they're
trying to find within history and within the spiritual religious
movements some hint at something that actually feels true and
right to them. Some people, in doing this come back
to their roots. They come back to their their Christian roots.
I mean there's an incredibly strong movement back to Christianity
(31:14):
as we speak. People, there's Ortho Bros. And there's people
who are attending church, these very very kind of just
love oriented non denominational Christian churches. Right. So, and you
have people who identify as Satanists. Why because they there's
(31:37):
something And I'm gonna and you can correct me on this,
I'm gonna finish this and then hand it over again.
But my understanding is that one of the reasons why
Satanism is such a prevailing force in some in the
hearts and minds of some people, is because they see
culture and society as a suppressive force that has stifled
(32:03):
this kind of sacred energy, this force within them, which
is their desire to live and to be and to
feel good and to experience pleasure and these kinds of things,
which is really interesting, right Yeah, Because it says in Psalms,
God will give you the desires of your heart, and
(32:25):
he has plans to prosper you in Jeremiah. So, so
I see what's going on here. And my basic premise
is that you don't have to go looking outside of
you for a tradition or a set of beliefs to
know the truth and we can get more into that.
(32:47):
That is my message. But yeah, I'm curious to know
what you think about all that.
Speaker 1 (32:51):
Yeah, No, and I actually agree with and then a
lot of the as far as like the Satanists go,
even as I'm very intrigued at looking into different ROAs,
re legions and all that stuff. I grew up really
strict Pentecostle. I went to church four days a week.
My mom's side comes from a Mormon background. I went
to church four days a week, We went to holidays,
(33:13):
were at church. I mean, we were there all the time.
The biggest issue was was if you weren't The view
of the church that I grew up in was that
if you weren't speaking in tongues or if you didn't
have that, yeah, you didn't have that relationship with God,
then you weren't doing things right, and you weren't cleansed
and you weren't pure. And then you know, I'd have
(33:36):
my stepfather be you know, be there, and then we'd
go home and I'd get beat and then so that
was for about seven years. A lot of my family
did that. And then one of my cousins came out
and said, Hey, I'm gay, but that wasn't okay, so
they locked her in a room for two weeks and
told her she couldn't be she wasn't allowed to be gay.
When they couldn't break her, they decided, well, maybe we
(33:57):
should find a church where it's okay for there to
be gay people. So then we hopped around churches, and
we hopped around churches until we found one that was
kind of okay with it. And then I had another
cousins and come out about being gay, and they weren't
okay with that either. They said that you don't know
what you're talking about. So, you know, I came from
a very hypocritical, weird Cultish would have felt like upbringing
(34:24):
in my opinion, yea. And you know, I've I've went
to school with, you know, atheists. I've had friends that
were Satanists and we all got along fine. I mean,
your beliefs are your beliefs. But a lot of Satanists
that I've met don't even believe in Satan. That they
just want anti anti Christianity or anti religion is really.
Speaker 3 (34:46):
What it is.
Speaker 1 (34:47):
Majority Obviously, there's the groups that do dabble and you know,
witchcraft and all that stuff, which is, in my opinion, terrifying,
because I do believe that if there is, if if
that stuff exists, I'm not I don't want to.
Speaker 3 (35:04):
Mess with that, right, good for you?
Speaker 1 (35:07):
Yeah, yeah, and I think it does. I think that. Sure,
I don't necessarily believe. I don't believe in Hell. I
do believe that there are evil forces out there, but
I don't believe in Hell. The reason I say that
is because you know that the idea of hell is
you know, this eternal pain and suffering. But like, in
(35:30):
order to to live eternally and in pain and misery,
like you have to have a physical form to process
those emotions, so you can't.
Speaker 3 (35:39):
So yeah, uh, that is that is a that is
a common Protestant view of what hell is.
Speaker 1 (35:46):
Really. Did I know that?
Speaker 3 (35:48):
Yeah? So, for instance, there are Orthodox Greek or Russian
Orthodox priests who you can ask what hell is and
they will give They'll tell you, I'll get about Christian priests,
right they would. They'll say, I don't know, but as
best as I can tell, one of the most beautiful
(36:10):
definitions I've ever heard of hell came from a Greek
or one of these Greek Orthodox priests. There's a YouTube
channel called ten Minute by ten Minute Bible Hour. It's
really good. And he interviews a Greek Orthodox priest in
there and he the priest says, I think hell is
(36:35):
I'm going to paraphrase what he says, but I'm gonna
I'm gonna say it the way he said it, which
is that to sort of to die right, which means
maybe to kind of like be be as naked as
you could possibly be right in consciousness and the spirit
and and so so free of the physical things that
we have a new relationship with here on this in
(36:57):
this kind of what we call three D experience whatever
that means two be naked in front of the full
might of God and refuse God's love simultaneously. So this
(37:20):
is the definition of hell according to at least one
you know, Greek Orthodox priest that I've heard. So so
that is so this Dante's Inferno kind of notion of
of of hell is is one is one version of it.
Speaker 4 (37:36):
And there's you know, yeah, I mean I and I've
done a little bit of research on the Dante obviously,
I mean I haven't read the book, but I know
of it and I've done.
Speaker 1 (37:47):
Some some research. But a lot of like that a
lot of the stuff that he talks about in there
is really just jealousy and rage against things that actually
happened in his actual life. Sure, so you know, even
in politics, like even in some of the circles he
was in when he was going through hell, like, there
are politicians that he hated and grudges that he held
(38:08):
that were all brought into that. So on a religious level,
I feel like a lot of that could be thrown
out the window and because of how we interpreted it.
Speaker 3 (38:18):
Yeah, I've i you know more about Dante's peron than
I do. I'm aware at least that that there's a
lot of people who think that this has been kind
of a misappropriated kind of and that it was a
whole lot more tongue in cheek and stuff and the
way that it was written was never meant to be
kind of received the way that it was. At least
that's what I've heard. I don't know, but I mean yes.
(38:44):
And at the same time, you know what juke, there
are there are movements out there, even within a Protestant
Christian denominations who are increasingly what we call universalists. Now
they have scriptural reasons for doing this. There's plenty of
(39:06):
mainline churches who say, no, we've pretty much you know,
you can read Jesus talk about Gehenna and what is
it the Valley of Henham and or I think and
then all this kind of stuff from from the New
Testament and say that, yeah, I even Christ talked about Hell.
And they're like, well, actually this is a reference to
(39:28):
something else. There's like the the gnashing of teeth and
all this kind of stuff. And look, I mean there
are Protestant Christian nominations who also say that all dogs
go to Heaven. And I am I am, I am
very much sympathetic to this notion. I believe this is true.
(39:50):
And I one of the ways that I love to
pitch this to people is I say, yeah, man, I
think Hitler and Mary Teresa or Hell. You know, Hitler
and Christ are sitting up there having tea listening to
this conversation, and that, of course.
Speaker 4 (40:08):
Is.
Speaker 3 (40:09):
Would be terrifying. You know, it's kind of a terrifying
thought to ah an ego, who really ah is has
itself beholden to It's it's what it thinks of as
(40:30):
its right to judge. And I just don't think that's
what's going on here, you know.
Speaker 1 (40:40):
And and you talk about judge too, and I think
that that's a big term that not just Christianity, but
in general, many people judge, you know, especially in today's
today's age. I feel like majority of people, like they
look at their screens on their phones and expect the
world to be a certain way, and they judge people
(41:03):
based off a lot of the things that they see.
Whether it's subconsciously or not, they do it. And that's
where you get your clicks and your stuff like that.
But I mean even I mean, we're not supposed to
shut you know, we're not supposed to just see somebody
got their shit, you know, Like that's not how we're
supposed to be.
Speaker 3 (41:25):
It's we have outsourced our sense of safety, our sense
of belonging to whether or not a set of conditions
that we have constructed out of our memory or out
of what we've been told is right. We have outsourced
(41:47):
being okay to a perception of whether or not these
certain conditions are being met in our experience. Does that
make sense? Yep? So that right there is really a
huge part of what I love to talk about. It's
a big part of my message that again, to say
(42:10):
that there's something else entirely going on here, is to
say that the contents of your experience do not necessarily
aren't necessarily accurate reflections of the fullness the whole thing
(42:31):
that's actually at play in these lives of ours. And
people might say, you know, of course, yeah, we've got
wavelengths of light and the human eye and all this
kind of stuff. And yes, I even played to that
trope in Trusting your Foundation in my book. And at
the same time, to really sit with that and and
(42:51):
to kind of you know, there's a line in my
book where I say, simulation theorists eat your heart out,
you know, right, because I present some kind of theories
that are that play with notions like digital physics and
these kinds of things. And while all that's fine, to
sit here and really grow even for a moment, that
(43:14):
this is in some sense like some kind of something
somewhat name it simulation hologram, a dream inside of the
mind of God. To know that atoms are empty space
and none of this is touching, right, To know that
time is not necessarily linear, and that time is a perception.
(43:38):
You really take this kind of worldview that's really big
and you zoom out and you want to go read
quantum stuff. That's fine. What we're not interested in is
getting back into my conscious mind and forming some some
system of thought about what it is I think is
actually going on here. What I'm interested in is feeling it.
Speaker 1 (44:03):
Do you think the humans like look for something to
give them the answer rather than find it themselves.
Speaker 3 (44:17):
I think that it's just part of the experience that
we have chosen to take part in. So it really
is just a kind of like the counterbalance to the
expansion that the universe that is inherent to the universe.
(44:42):
It is sort of just the nature of what it
means to be conscious in a world that I think
of as separate from me. Right to think that you
and I are separate?
Speaker 1 (44:53):
Are you okay with a comical comment that somebody popped
up here?
Speaker 3 (44:58):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (44:58):
Absolutely, Yeah, what Brian Clouder said. Do you do much?
That's good? That's good, Thank.
Speaker 3 (45:15):
You, Brian.
Speaker 1 (45:16):
Yeah, you know I have, by boy, Brian, I've done
him absolutely man.
Speaker 3 (45:21):
Uh. For a while there there were some of my
dearest friends I you know, while I was getting my
bachelor's degree in psychology, uh from the you know, State
University at the time, it had maybe eight thousand students,
you know, the kind of state university in my in
(45:43):
my hometown.
Speaker 2 (45:46):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (45:48):
I was getting a bachelor's degree in these classrooms where
when Carl Jung was brought up, people would snicker, you know.
So I was very much I was reading. I was
studying Western philosophy and the occult in esoterica, and reading
Houston Smith and Mercelle Eliotta in my free time. And
(46:09):
one of the other things that I did is I
described this period in my life as my as getting
my self study bachelor's in McKenna studies, and that is
Terence McKenna. So Terence McKinnon is a huge influence on me.
Not because I think he's you know, some some guru
or had everything right, but I think he's definitely one
(46:31):
of the greatest orators of maybe of recorded history. I mean,
Terrence McKenna was an entirely different kind of speaker and
so so so yes, I have great love and affinity
for mushrooms. And at the same time, by mushrooms, of
course we mean Silosi, Bikubnsis and all those friends of
(46:54):
ours are kind of I jokingly refer to them sometimes
as our sort of hyperdimensional extraterrestrial artificial intelligence whatever my head.
Speaker 1 (47:11):
Yeah, my first time doing them, I took way too
much cool. I took five grams.
Speaker 3 (47:19):
Yeah, holy and.
Speaker 1 (47:21):
There was about fourteen hours eight of those. I had
no control of my body. I mean it was it
was pretty intense. Yeah, No, it was fun. It was
a great experience, and I didn't I learned. I learned
I wasn't scared because I was I knew where I
was and I was in the comfort of my home.
When it first hit me. I was terrified because I
(47:41):
didn't know what the hell was happening, and it felt
like I was sinking into the floor. It was hilarious.
And then I was like crawling to my room and
my roommate had to like help me. But I realized,
you know, you can have an amazing experience with these
things if it's controlled and you know what you're doing.
So I did. I started doing the two or three grams. Occasionally.
(48:06):
I'm putting myself in these peaceful surroundings. In the middle
of winter, I'd go out in the snow and just
sit there in the snow and just listen and just
have like these hypnotic realizations of clarity almost So, yeah,
it was.
Speaker 3 (48:21):
It was good.
Speaker 1 (48:22):
There are good things to it.
Speaker 3 (48:24):
I can count on one hand my total number of
journeys with these things, and and never five grands. But
you know the thing is, here's what's really okay. I'm
gonna tell a story. This is really fun. I did
not expect to be going here.
Speaker 1 (48:43):
Shows all about that.
Speaker 3 (48:44):
Yeah, good job, Duke So and thank you Brian So.
My last encounter with the mushroom it was important to me,
ah for this reason, the criteria by which I knew
(49:06):
that my reasons for wanting to do them. I knew
that my timing was perfect because I had one objective
in mind, and that objective was to enjoy myself and
(49:28):
to have fun. Right, So what a lot of people,
A lot of people are using these psychedelics. Here's the thing.
I'm not a fan. I'm not a I'm not some
psychedelic super fan to be someone who I'm not a
you know, I I'm not some psychedelic super fan. I
(49:49):
think that actually psychedelics because we have this kind of
journeying in ayahuasca culture. In fact, he's mckinna referred to
psychiatry and psychotherapy. He referred to psychiatrists as an incipient
shaman class. Now that's always stuck with me. Now again
(50:14):
no judgment, of course, and people who choose to go
down that career path, and I've absolutely none. And at
the same time, I don't think it was necessarily McKenna's
goal that this stuff be integrated with the same level
of kind of both medical so mental health and kind
(50:39):
of medical mindset that it's been integrated with, or the
same kind of commercial mindset that it's been integrated into
culture with. What a lot of people are doing with
psychedelics is they are searching for answers. And what's interesting
is they're searching for answers ironically side of themselves, right
(51:03):
when that is so, what I'm saying is that ayahuasca
is not going to give it to you. Mushrooms are
not going to give it to you, right, It's already
in you and so and so for us to double
down on these modalities, this is something that I've said
(51:25):
in a number of my interviews in the past, where
I've talked about, you know, you've got your kind of
this kind of archetypal burrow or person out there who's
who's searching from one modality, whether it's they see an astrologer,
they see a you know, they go to a sound
(51:46):
bath healing, they do cold plunges or sensory deprivation, they
do ayahuasca, they do ayahuasca again, they go again and again.
And what it is is, it's they are hungry for
something and they're shopping at the kind of buffet of
tools that we have that provided by culture and the
market to supposedly get at that thing, and it doesn't.
(52:12):
As a matter of fact, Duke, I used to be
a professional and astrologer. I had a stint there where
you know, I've studied astrology for over a decade and
I decided at one point in my career to open
up astrological services to the people that to my clients
and the people that I worked with. And so I
was doing my own little fusion of Western astrology and
(52:33):
human design and these kinds of things. And you know,
I came to the same conclusion that I came to
actually in my medical career. So I'm you don't know this,
I don't think, but I'm an acupuncturist by training. I've
been an erbalist and an acupuncturist, been a verbalist for
over a decade, and in you know, in twenty fifteen,
(52:55):
I began my master's degree.
Speaker 1 (52:57):
And yeah, look at that, told you little research.
Speaker 3 (53:04):
Cool man. That's my that's my alumni right there, that's
my alumnus. Look a little bit, that's cool man. That's
really neat. I love it. So you know, I'm an
acupuncturist by training. You know, I do Chinese medicine. And
I have come to the same conclusion again and again
and again on this sort of journey of my message.
(53:27):
What I now see as this ministry of mine, and
it's that to the extent to which I participate in
the conversation with someone as someone who has something that
they don't have, well, I am incorrect, and that that
to be in right relation with the fullness of what's
going on here in a conversation with someone else, is
(53:50):
to hold that space. I called the work that I
do one on one, I call it feet to the fire,
because what I want to do with people is I
want to hold their feet to the fire of their
own innate and inherent divinity and the parts in them
that have this intrinsic connection and knowledge about what is
(54:12):
actually going on here, rather than thinking that there's something
that I can tell you that you don't already know.
Speaker 1 (54:18):
Right, So, you got astrology, You've got acupucture, You've got
these Chinese herbs, You've obviously done a lot of reading.
Where are you from? Man? Tell me about you? I mean,
where are you from?
Speaker 3 (54:35):
Dude?
Speaker 1 (54:35):
How'd you get? How did you get?
Speaker 3 (54:37):
Like?
Speaker 1 (54:38):
I want to know, like what's your childhood like? Because
I imagine you didn't just hit ten years old? Like
you know what? I got this list and I'm this
is my checklist right here. I'm hitting every one of
these things.
Speaker 3 (54:48):
Actually it's funny. I talk about this in the book too,
But at ten years First of all, good on you juke.
Because often, depending on the interview, these are often the
they can be the kind of questions where I'm actually
saying no, no, no, no, it's not about this isn't
about me. But I'm but you ask in a spirit
of curiosity and fun, and that's what I'm here for,
(55:11):
you know, like a like why I did mushrooms? You know? Yeah,
you know, it's not about It's not about arriving at
some destination, because this present moment is where it is
at right. So it's funny you mentioned ten years old.
I I did actually write at the age of ten
(55:39):
a treatise on the Nature of God in a a
in a word document which has been lost to corrupted
hard drives and and all that kind of stuff. But
I grew up during drawing angels and reading the Dalda
Jing in the middle school. In middle school, Yeah, you
go religious family then, Like no, I can still count
(56:02):
on one hand the number of times that I've been
to a formal church service. Okay, so my but my
mother was a woman of deep faith. She was a
woman of deep, deep faith, and she believed that God
is good and that people are good. And there were
angels all over the house, you know, little angel statues,
(56:24):
and and she would talk about this about God and
what God wants for us, and so my faith. One
of the interesting things is when my relationship with religion
(56:45):
has been a very very very liberal one and kind
of one that has I've been kind of on the
outskirts of it, like kind of the outside looking in.
I was never someone who age what age?
Speaker 1 (57:03):
Your age?
Speaker 3 (57:04):
Oh my age, I'm I'm gonna guess you're my age.
How old are you.
Speaker 1 (57:09):
I'm thirty six.
Speaker 3 (57:10):
I'm a little bit younger than that. I'll be uh,
I'll be thirty four in November. Yeah close enough. Yeah, yeah, so,
and I'm a Georgia peach. By the way, you ask
where I'm from, I'm a Southerner kah been.
Speaker 1 (57:24):
All over the place. I do like that you were
like you were interested in the religion, like religion, rather
than being forced into it.
Speaker 3 (57:37):
Yeah, yeah, I have I have no idea what that's
what that's like really, and and it's a blessing because
I feel like my relationship with God is between God
and I and uh, I'm gonna say this, it's a
(57:59):
little odd. I've said this on a couple of interviews,
and it's that Emerson. Emerson said that for a man
to believe that the contents of its of his private
mind is true for all people is genius. And I've
that for a man like so that for a man
(58:19):
to believe the contents of his private mind are applied
to everyone, right, that that that is genius. Well, I've
thought about this and I said, well, you know what,
I'm I'm pretty damn convicted to this message. And what
is what has kind of arisen in me at this
point in my life and my career, whatever the hell
(58:41):
is going on here. Yeah, that I I think that
what I know to be true is true. And I
think that what's fascinating about that is that it's not
something I can tell you. Yeah, because as you know it.
Speaker 1 (59:03):
Yeah, I mean that when you when we talk about
like prayer and stuff like that, and people praying and
you know, I've seen people, you know, speaking in tongues
and things like that. To me, it almost feels like
it's a self self awareness more than it is like
(59:26):
praying to something else. It's more like praying within yourself
more answer, what do you mean? I don't think that
you're you're not praying to an entity out there like
you think that you might be, but in reality, you're
you're looking within to to find the answers. Because I
(59:46):
don't think what I've seen, in what I've experienced with
these kind of things, it almost seems like people expect
results from their prayers mm hmm. But in order to
get the results, you have to be the one to
go do it. Like it's not just going to be
(01:00:07):
handed to you by some malevolent entity, like it's it's
you know, if you're looking for cleansing or you know,
that's that's just my view on it.
Speaker 3 (01:00:17):
That's interesting. I'm I didn't jump ship with you there
until you said that it isn't a given because I
think that mhmm, you're right that that to be in
relationship with this experience with the world that we're living, uh,
(01:00:42):
in a way that has that carries this resonance, that
carries this truthfulness about the nature of life, about the
nature of God, about the nature of the mind, about
the nature of consciousness, about the stories that we're living.
To kind of like just feel into what's actually going
on here and come to the conclusion. Yeah, of course
(01:01:03):
I can look out in the world and see suffering
and see pain, but I know that there's something else
going on here, and that actually, if I want to
shine a light and be what it is I actually am,
then I can point my sales in the direction of
(01:01:24):
this force of something that will move me if I
just get out of the way and allow it to.
Now that is available to everyone, That is absolutely available
to everyone. And I think that that movement, the wind
in those sails, actually is free and automatic and effortless,
(01:01:47):
and it is a given. There is this notion about
God helps those who help themselves. There is this notion
of you know, you have to meet the kind of
like there's a social of like you kind of meet,
have to meet the divine halfway at least. And while
I think that that's pointing at action, that's pointing at
(01:02:10):
something that is a very complicated and not complicated thing
in life, doing versus being right, I think that we
were not going to construct something that's true about life
(01:02:32):
from looking only at the doing or only at the action,
and then trying to fit being into that. I think
that what's true is that getting out of the way
and letting go of the wheel and stopping this white
knuckling of the wheel, discovering that this is a self
driving car. That is where our inspired action and and
(01:03:01):
you know, that's where inspiration and creativity and imagination and
bliss and ecstasy and all the good things in life
like being a child. Right, The child does not come
at life with all the sense of obligation that we
as adults do.
Speaker 1 (01:03:17):
Right.
Speaker 3 (01:03:18):
And it says not just in the New Testament you
must become like children. It says not only the New
Testament says it's in the dewda jing can you be
supple as a newborn child. So it's the mystical traditions
and the religions of the world are pointing at you
know that. It's a huge theme in Daoism. It's a
huge theme in Daoism that there's something special about consciousness
(01:03:39):
before it's in some sense not corrupted. Some people might
say that, I don't believe it's corrupted. I just believe
that we for some reason begin to take the contents
of our conscious mind for granted and then impose the
structure of our experience on to uh subsequent experience. So
(01:04:03):
we we tend we tend to believe that this is solid.
We tend to believe that we are somehow situated in
this linear flow of time. And when you were a child,
you didn't give a shit about any of that. You
did not give a ship about any of the things
that we as adults, uh take so seriously, right, And
(01:04:24):
and I'm really passionate about that. I'm really, I really
I call it. I call it picking up the stick.
And I think that at some point for all of us,
A lot of people talk about this, you know, in
our child work and all that kind of stuff. I
call it dropping the stick and picking up the stick,
that at some point in our development there was some
(01:04:47):
moment perhaps in which we the stick that we had
was the
The whole point is the shirt on here. Oh yeah, yeah,
that's right. Embarre's the out of yourself. Keep the conversation,
you know.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
Pot and you're doing your friend job line the man.
Speaker 1 (00:22):
I always love doing that introduction. Man, it's so fun. Hey,
welcome back to JG's Lounge, everybody. I'm your host, jukebox.
We are back with another episode of Stardom, and I
am super stoked tonight. I've been hanging out in the
background for the last few minutes with Connor keys. Man.
How the hell are you?
Speaker 3 (00:38):
I'm doing fantastic, brother, and I am stoked to be here.
This is gonna be a lot of fun, man.
Speaker 1 (00:42):
Yes, yeah, I'm looking forward to it. I didn't even
prep for this, just as much as I know you didn't,
which is going to make this whole episode just flow,
so smoothie.
Speaker 3 (00:51):
Absolutely.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
First off, the shirt, I saw you post it on Facebook. Yeah,
can we get that out of the way.
Speaker 3 (00:58):
Yeah, So.
Speaker 1 (01:02):
What about the shirt off you kind of fucked this
up if you tried, And then it's got a website
underneath it.
Speaker 3 (01:09):
Correct correct, correct, correct, So the shirt says you couldn't
fuck this up if you tried, You couldn't fuck this
up if you tried is a recapitulation of the third
premise of my book. My book has three main premises
(01:29):
that I kind of put out there, and the third
premise is that there's no possible way that you could
mess this up, this life, what we're doing here. Yeah,
there you go.
Speaker 1 (01:42):
Yeah he's got there.
Speaker 3 (01:44):
I don't sure sure, So I decided to put premise
three of the book in some spicy language, and uh,
I love the way it's turned out. And what I
posted today is that this is actually my first day
(02:04):
wearing the shirt in public, and within ten minutes of
sitting down at a coffee shop, one of the employees
walked by me and said, I love your shirt. So yeah, this, really,
I think is I couldn't. I couldn't necessarily say that
this particular premise of the book is the most important premise,
(02:27):
or that there's any one particular most important premise in general.
But I think that having a strong statement and wearing
it on your chest, you know, that points us at
a kind of self forgiveness and ease and the innate
(02:48):
knowing that each of us has. That there's a way
of being in the world which can be easy. You
know we can essentially, we can lighten up. And and
this isn't this is something that is inherent in us,
something some this innate ability that we have to take
(03:08):
our hands off the wheel, you know, and quit night
white knuckling this ride. And that is an extremely important
message of mine. And so I decided to put it
on a shirt.
Speaker 1 (03:21):
You know. It's it's funny. We were talking a little
bit before, kind of about backgrounds and stuff like that,
and I was telling you about kind of my upbringing
a little bit. Well, my grandpa was my father, figured
and when I was thirteen is when he passed, and
about a week it's about a week week and a
half before he passed. I remember going and seeing him,
and the last thing that he said to me before
(03:43):
he passed was don't waste your time being a negative
person because it takes too much energy. And I've lived
by that pretty much my whole life from thirteen. Yeah,
I mean, yeah, there things happen. I mean what sucks
is reality is reality. Things things hit us. You know,
there's priorities that we have, there's bills that things coming up.
(04:04):
But stressing about it doesn't make it any easier either,
you know. So I mean I've I've always kind of
had a different sort of outlook on on on things,
I guess, and it's actually caused conflict in some relationships
of mine because I don't react how how some people
want me to react. You know, it's like, sure, oh
my god, there's there's six bills coming up, but I
should freak out. Well, you know, it's not really the
(04:25):
way to handle it.
Speaker 3 (04:27):
Correct, correct. Yeah, I think that's fantastic. And hats off
to your grandpa, you know. Uh, and and for you
to have received that message at such a young age
and then taking it to heart, right, you know, because
one of one of the interesting things that we see
(04:47):
in culture, and it's it's it's an American phenomenon. It's
actually something that began after the Civil War in America,
uh with the kind of on set in the wake
of Mesmerism from France and when the when the uh
(05:09):
Mesmers came over and influenced Phineas Quimby, and then he
had the New Thought movement start with Warrenfeld Evans. And
so people today might know people like Napoleon Hill or
Neville Goddard or Dale Carnegie and some of the authors
of things like think and grow rich, right, Napoleon Hill,
we know, we know some of these names. Some of
(05:30):
your listeners may know people like Nevill Goddard if they're
into this kind of thing. That is sort of the
intellectual tradition. That one of the intellectual traditions that I'm
most interested in. And we take it for granted that
this that this intellectual movement had such an impact on culture. Right,
(05:54):
so you have things like uh, MasterCard, imagine the possibility,
or you have the Army be all you can be
right right, you have you have this, or you have
these motivational posters in corporate offices and things like that.
That isn't that is at its roots, that's an American
phenomenon positive psychology and positive thinking, and we kind of
(06:18):
take it for granted. And one of the things that
I don't think it's an issue, but I think that
it's something to consider that when we are kind of
inundated with this kind of lukewarm positive psychology from Disney
movies and things like this, or from Hallmark and and
this kind of thing, there is an actual boots on
(06:42):
the ground way of coming into right relation with these concepts,
with what we would call positivity or what we would
call faith even right, And I'm not going to go
and say that like it's too bad add that you
have this positive thinking movement and in Hallmark on it's
(07:04):
not too bad, because that would be to miss that
would miss the point. And yet it's actually what we've
done is we've created for ourselves a situation which finding
the thread in that kind of heap of positive thinking
and heap of sort of mundane kind of these aphorisms
that point us to all this this positivity, What does
(07:27):
it really mean? What's really being gotten at by these
by these statements like the army saying be all you
can be? We just take that for grafted right, right.
Speaker 1 (07:38):
Well, And it's funny you mentioned like a little bit
of religion in Disney and stuff like that, and there's
actually I read an article about the Christian a good
check of the Christian belief not being fans of the
Disney Network, because Christianity is all about, like you know,
(07:59):
believing in God and putting out faith in God. In Disney,
it's all about believing in yourself and putting faith in yourself.
Have you ever heard anything about that?
Speaker 3 (08:09):
Sure? Yeah, sure, for sure, sure.
Speaker 1 (08:11):
And I think there's I mean, I don't know, I
how what is your religious beliefs? I mean, you don't
have to say it or I mean, I'm like, I'm spiritual,
but I don't believe like there's a certain God that's
right wrong. I believe there's other stuff out there. I
also believe like reincarnation and coming back.
Speaker 3 (08:29):
Okay, juke, you might want to check out my book.
Uh I am that is hysterical, man. I have never
been asked on a podcast what my religious beliefs are.
And it's and it's apropos because one of the things
I'm kind of excited to be on here and to
(08:51):
announce that. Look, I mean, I haven't done a podcast
in a couple of months now, and it's really fun
to reflect on all the changes that have happened in
the past couple of months with my brand and in
my message and the things that we're doing out there
in the world, and actually to I suppose kind of
announce you know, I have I have spoken a lot
(09:13):
on other podcasts about how I consider my message and
what I do to be a ministry. What do I
mean by ministry? I suppose we can talk about that,
but just you know, allow that word to have whatever
neural connections are Simmler, however it needs to. I consider
my message a ministry. Ye, my mother who's in heaven
(09:33):
considered my message a ministry. And my message has in
this ministry has evolved into what Laura was gage and
I who's a partner mine and someone who I work
with very closely, has we have sort of evolved this,
(09:57):
this brand, this message, this this thing into a ministry proper.
And that ministry is called Inspiritist Ministries, And you can
go to Inspiritist Ministries at Oregon learn about how we
are essentially making really explicit what the philosophy is here
that we think is so so delicious and feels and
(10:23):
feels so and feels so right. And it's not that
there's anything wrong with the world that we're evangelizing in
service of fixing anything, you know, that's not what's going on.
But what's going on is passion, and what's going on
is a desire to be in deep relation with that thing,
(10:45):
that thing at the center of all this. Call it God,
call it whatever you want to call it. I call
it God, you know, and I don't and I don't
care what anybody calls it. I care about us knowing
that there is something else entirely going on here, which
is also one of the premises of my book. There's
(11:06):
something else entirely going on here. What you think metaphysically
that means, whether it's reincarnation and all this kind of
stuff can actually if we take that too seriously, it
can cause us to kind of miss the point of
the something else entirely that's going on here. And yeah,
(11:29):
so my religious beliefs, what are my religious beliefs? God
is good, right, and God is as the kind of
not just this singular event of creation, big bang type,
(11:52):
you know, watchmaker God that created all this somehow and
then stepped away from it. That creation is is both
complete and an ongoing process. And there's something unique about
human consciousness that has a relationship with that, to the
extent to which it sees itself as being a part
(12:13):
in that. Right. So the more we kind of consciously
situate ourselves as agents and participants in this big picture, well,
something emerges and something happens, and people call that manifestation.
These days, people call that blessings and providence and serendipity
(12:36):
and abundance and all of these things, and I think
that society and culture and global culture are moving in
that direction and there's going to be interesting repercussions that
we're going to see play out with that. I mean
the Pope recently. Do you hear what the Pope said recently? No,
the Pope recently came out saying that all religions are
(12:58):
path to God. All religions are paths to God. And
I personally don't care what the Pope says, because I
don't care what anyone person says. What I care about
is what you know to be true in your heart right,
you know what I mean. And at the same time,
I know that that's going to rustle the feathers of
(13:21):
a people who are beholden to their particular theology and
cosmology and Christology and metaphysics as the one that which
is correct. That's going to be upsetting and at the
same time, it's also indicative of something. And again, like
(13:43):
I said, I don't necessarily care what the Pope thinks,
but I am excited that we're seeing this kind of thing. Yes,
at that level, So.
Speaker 1 (13:51):
That's that's big. Do you want me to kind of
break down what my view is because I would like
to critique me and like even maybe pick my brain.
That's perfect, sounds fantastic. So I believe we are created
as as an energy, and I think that our energies
(14:12):
are created to learn life lessons, and in order to
learn all those lessons our life, our life, our physical
forms don't live long enough for us to learn all
the lessons that we need to learn before we can
ascend to heaven or whatever it is. So you know,
we do reincarnate, and I think, in my opinion, until
(14:35):
we learn everything that we need to learn and have
lived all the lives and experience all experiences that we
need to experience before we can get to that next level,
whether that's heaven or whatever it is. Sure, yeah, so
I mean that's that's basically in the nutshill for me.
Speaker 3 (14:52):
Yeah, well I think you're wrong.
Speaker 1 (14:56):
That's fine, that's great.
Speaker 3 (14:58):
I think you would be you would be banned and
from our fellowship, you would be disfellowshipped, you would you
would be stamped as a heretic. Okay, I'm being facetious.
Speaker 1 (15:11):
That's fine, it's being clear.
Speaker 3 (15:18):
Yeah, you know, I love it.
Speaker 1 (15:19):
Let's uh roll on it. You can dish whatever you
want me. I promise I've never had never kicked somebody
off the show, or that they left so.
Speaker 3 (15:28):
Good good, Well I'm leaving. So, you know, I think Jukebox,
I think. I think that I think that the sort
of story that you just reiterated to us is one
that we see a lot of that has been kind
(15:48):
of repackaged from Western interpretations of of Vedic cosmology about
karma and dharma and reincarnation. What's called the givat on.
The jivatman is the kind of personal individual soul which
is recapitulated in in these human lives, uh, to kind
(16:11):
of I'm not sure, you know, kind of get squared
up with Brahman or something in a way that sort
of like be free, be free of karma in other words,
to be free of the cycle of cause and effect.
So so essentially, can you can you be so non dualistically, uh,
(16:34):
a non agent in the world that your being in
the world no longer carries any weight and therefore, you know,
you kind of become one with the with with v one.
Now that's my that's my reiteration of kind of where
I think some of these ideas come from. It's probably
(16:55):
totally it's probably totally wrong. But I know that what
we are seeing in this kind of like the kind
of average person's New Age spiritual not religious cosmology does
often involve reincarnation, and it involves metaphysical concepts like energy
(17:22):
like you said, and vibration and things like that. And
there's also this I don't know the history of this.
I don't I don't know where this comes from. But
for some reason, this is extremely common. When asking people
about what their spiritual beliefs are, if there's something like yours,
(17:43):
they will often say that we are here to learn lessons.
And you may be able to tell by what's written
on my shirt that I think that that I think
that what's going on here is a whole lot less
(18:04):
serious than what people often call Earth school, you know,
Earth school. So I I don't I think that it's
uh uh incorrect, only in so far as it creates
(18:24):
unnecessary suffering, Right if I position myself in the world
as someone or something who is here to improve, but we.
Speaker 1 (18:35):
Don't, so hold on, go ahead as as okay, So
if we're talking as far as a physical form and suffering, okay,
but as as us like take us out of these
ship you know, these shells of our bodies. We don't
experience pain and suffering like our physical form does. I mean,
(18:56):
we learned to understand it, but we don't. We don't
physically at us us as a being. We don't. We
don't feel that.
Speaker 3 (19:05):
You don't see, Yeah, totally, I agree, I agree completely.
Let me be a little more let me be a
little more clear, because I also that's a that's a
term I will sometimes use, you know, because it's it's
also the uh, the the aim of say, Buddhism is
to end suffering in the world, right and so uh,
(19:27):
and to end suffering in the world by a relationship
with the world like what we might call like non
attachment and these kinds of things. I often say things
about ending suffering because it's relatable when I'm when I
say suffering, there's also a Buddhist notion that goes, pain
(19:48):
is inevitable, like pain of the body, but suffering is optional.
Suffering is something that happens in this kind of personal narrative,
this cognitive fault realm of my my crafted kind of
ego based relationship with the world, and this story that
I think that I'm living. That's where that's where the suffering.
(20:10):
That's where the suffering is, right, So there's a distinguishing
between pain and suffering. Right. So the way in which
I think that a the way in which I think
this narrative about learning lessons can actually facilitate a person's suffering,
(20:30):
to be specific, to be more specific, has to do
with the fact that if we take that on as
a story, what we're doing is we're taking on an obligation.
We're taking on an obligation to behave or to perform
a specific task, in this case learning right in this
case kind of like self improvement, self development, learning lessons,
(20:55):
all this kind of thing that you can you can fail,
you can you can there. If it's a if it's
a performance based thing which we're being invited to participate
in here, then my performance has some bearing on on
(21:15):
what If you ask certain certain religious backgrounds, they might
say it the terms actually whether or not you go
to heaven or hell, depending what they believe, or a
softer version of that might just say it determines whether
or not you are reincarnated as a millionaire or someone
(21:37):
who lives in the slumps yea or a rock or
or or and I have that's a joke, you know
from you know, I think the wrong.
Speaker 1 (21:46):
Hey, pet rocks are pretty popular for a long time man.
Speaker 3 (21:49):
Not only that, I mean, what what does the rock
know that we don't know with our with these conscious
minds of ours. So so what's going on here? I
think is is both more complex than that and infinitely
simpler than that. Right what So, I'm obviously, for lack
(22:12):
of a better word, I'm opposed to this idea that
we are here to learn lessons. And I think part
of what this comes from is this kind of deep
seated notion that a lot of us have inherited from
our religious upbringing. That you asked me what my religious
beliefs were, and the first thing I said was that
(22:32):
God is good. And if God is in some sense
so intrinsically not just connected to everything, but from I mean,
if you really want to drill in there, you really
want to go cosmologically deep, God in some sense, and
I don't care about reason and logic necessarily either. I'm managested,
(22:55):
but you could form a case that God can't necessarily
create anything that's not also God, because God, God is
this kind of one singularity at the center of all
of this ineffable as it may be. And yet to
say that this world that we're experiencing is so other
than God is actually to contradict what we mean when
(23:18):
we say God. This is why people, a lot of
people in the spiritual not religious or slash New Age
kind of whatever that we're seeing just call it the universe. Yeah, right,
they just call it the universe, right, and so and
that's fine, that's fine. That actually gets for some people
(23:41):
more at what it is that they're trying to get
in touch with than the word God does. So what
I think that a lot of this stems from this,
like this learning of lessons is kind of this weirdly
packaged Western theory. And and I don't care about East
(24:04):
and West necessarily, but I'm just using this as a
kind of trope because a lot of people understand this,
this difference between East and West. I don't think it's real.
But that's another story, right, And that is to say
that we inherited this kind of notion of reincarnation, which
by the way, is not entirely Eastern. Pythagoras and and
some of the Greeks, you know, believed in reincarnation. They
(24:26):
had this theory we we bring it over into the
Western world, so to speak. You know, Nietzsche was reading
the Bagavad Gita and the Upanishads and stuff, and Schopenhauer
kept the bagavat Gita under his pillow. You know, we've
we've we've got this stuff. And yet as oh man,
(24:51):
this is this is deep, This is good. As as
people who have this is good. I love how different
podcasts bring different things out of me. So so as
as people who have this, these Abrahamic faiths kind of
running in our blood be then what people call Judeo Christian,
(25:11):
which is not really correct. A lot of people think
it's really silly to say something like Judeo Christian. So
I'll I'll just find them. I'll just umbrella all of
them and say, Abrahamic faiths. We've kind of inherited that.
That's really deep in there. We in the sixties and
seventies and in the late eighteen hundreds even inherited these
(25:33):
Eastern concepts. We kind of mixed them together. And the
issue is, I think the issue is is that somehow
subconsciously buried in here is the notion that God is
an asshole.
Speaker 1 (25:50):
You know, it's I had a so I'll interview anybody.
Speaker 3 (25:55):
Yeah, I have this.
Speaker 1 (25:56):
Real nice guy on his name's Richard Lei Lilert. He's
a Satanist. I was scrolling root TikTok and he was
sitting down in a group interview with some Christians and
some Satanists, and he said something that really caught my attention.
Not that I believed it, it was just the view
that he expressed. I was like, I have to get
this guy on my show. He said, one day his
(26:20):
dad came home upset and he drowned his brother, and
he drowned his mom and his dog, and then he
killed himself. And he said that that wasn't actually my dad,
that was God. He drowned his own, his own children.
And I was like, well, that's an interesting take on that.
(26:42):
I mean, but that's just him saying that. I was like, oh,
that's it was intense because he the way he explained it,
like you thought he was talking about his parents. So
you had all these Christians, the Christians over here, and
they're all like, oh my god, I'm so sorry, almost
feeling bad for the guy. And then he said that,
and it just kind of flipped a switch. Now I
(27:02):
don't necessarily I don't agree to that point, but it
was interesting to hear him say that.
Speaker 3 (27:08):
Sure. Yeah, and a lot of people are wrestling with
these kinds of things. They're wrestling with what we would
call like the left hand path. They're wrestling with things
these days like gnosticism and not familiar with that one,
Oh God, Narcissism is actually an academic turn for a
(27:34):
spiritual movement that happened in response to some of the
things that ancient Judeans found reprehensible. Yes, there's the famous
painting blah blah blah blah blah. It's a reaction to
it's a big, deep rabbit hole. But but essentially, essentially
(27:57):
it's pretty fascinating. I used to study this stuff a
lot because I'm fascinated by spirituality and religion, always have been.
And the one of the ways that the Gnostics were
kind of spiritual rebels is they created a completely revisionist
(28:19):
now they First of all, some of the people who
are listening to this may be familiar with nassism. One.
Gnosticism is a is a term that was created in
the seventeen hundred by by academics. It's not an actual term,
not even the people that Irenaeus referred to as the
nose Tacoi in his against Heres. He's referred to themselves
as gnostics. No one has referred to themselves as gnostics
(28:41):
in history other than modern not modern, but contemporary people.
So that's a new thing. And two, there was no
one Gnostic movement. It's incredibly it's incredibly diverse. There's Sethian
and Valentinian and all this kind of stuff. And so
but one of the ways, just to give you the
short version, is to say that the way that one
(29:02):
of the ways that these Gnostics were spiritual rebels is
they looked at the stories of the Old Testament and
did a completely revisionist history of Genesis and said, for
instance that actually, just to give you the really really
(29:22):
cliff notes version, that Aba and Eber essentially enslaved rather
than in paradise, that the snakes as a symbol of transformation,
was actually the true God coming to rescue them from Jehovah,
who is actually a sort of the bastard child of Sophia,
(29:43):
and to rescue them from the from the kind of
the garden of medi in which they were imprisoned, who
also created the world, and that the world is essentially evil.
It's a very platonic idea. You have, you have in
a lot of and it's actually something that very platonic
idea that I love. Gordon White's kind of synopsis stuff.
Speaker 1 (30:04):
He says, uh.
Speaker 3 (30:08):
Uh, matter, matter bad, spirit good, you know, and so
and so so you have, so you have right, you
have this metaphysical and cosmological notion of the world in
some sense being corrupted. This is very characteristic. In fact,
it's considered the extent to which that's the that's the
(30:31):
prevailing notion, is considered the extent to which a movement
is considered gnostic by academics, but even Christians in the
New Testament. In the Old Testament, there's this notion that
the world belongs to the devil, to memon and stuff
like that. So you see, you see some parallels there. Anyway, Look,
people are wrestling with this kind of thing because they're
(30:52):
trying to find within the world, which is interesting, they're
trying to find within history and within the spiritual religious
movements some hint at something that actually feels true and
right to them. Some people, in doing this come back
to their roots. They come back to their their Christian roots.
I mean there's an incredibly strong movement back to Christianity
(31:14):
as we speak. People, there's Ortho Bros. And there's people
who are attending church, these very very kind of just
love oriented non denominational Christian churches. Right. So, and you
have people who identify as Satanists. Why because they there's
(31:37):
something And I'm gonna and you can correct me on this,
I'm gonna finish this and then hand it over again.
But my understanding is that one of the reasons why
Satanism is such a prevailing force in some in the
hearts and minds of some people, is because they see
culture and society as a suppressive force that has stifled
(32:03):
this kind of sacred energy, this force within them, which
is their desire to live and to be and to
feel good and to experience pleasure and these kinds of things,
which is really interesting, right Yeah, Because it says in Psalms,
God will give you the desires of your heart, and
(32:25):
he has plans to prosper you in Jeremiah. So, so
I see what's going on here. And my basic premise
is that you don't have to go looking outside of
you for a tradition or a set of beliefs to
know the truth and we can get more into that.
(32:47):
That is my message. But yeah, I'm curious to know
what you think about all that.
Speaker 1 (32:51):
Yeah, No, and I actually agree with and then a
lot of the as far as like the Satanists go,
even as I'm very intrigued at looking into different ROAs,
re legions and all that stuff. I grew up really
strict Pentecostle. I went to church four days a week.
My mom's side comes from a Mormon background. I went
to church four days a week, We went to holidays,
(33:13):
were at church. I mean, we were there all the time.
The biggest issue was was if you weren't The view
of the church that I grew up in was that
if you weren't speaking in tongues or if you didn't
have that, yeah, you didn't have that relationship with God,
then you weren't doing things right, and you weren't cleansed
and you weren't pure. And then you know, I'd have
(33:36):
my stepfather be you know, be there, and then we'd
go home and I'd get beat and then so that
was for about seven years. A lot of my family
did that. And then one of my cousins came out
and said, Hey, I'm gay, but that wasn't okay, so
they locked her in a room for two weeks and
told her she couldn't be she wasn't allowed to be gay.
When they couldn't break her, they decided, well, maybe we
(33:57):
should find a church where it's okay for there to
be gay people. So then we hopped around churches, and
we hopped around churches until we found one that was
kind of okay with it. And then I had another
cousins and come out about being gay, and they weren't
okay with that either. They said that you don't know
what you're talking about. So, you know, I came from
a very hypocritical, weird Cultish would have felt like upbringing
(34:24):
in my opinion, yea. And you know, I've I've went
to school with, you know, atheists. I've had friends that
were Satanists and we all got along fine. I mean,
your beliefs are your beliefs. But a lot of Satanists
that I've met don't even believe in Satan. That they
just want anti anti Christianity or anti religion is really.
Speaker 3 (34:46):
What it is.
Speaker 1 (34:47):
Majority Obviously, there's the groups that do dabble and you know,
witchcraft and all that stuff, which is, in my opinion, terrifying,
because I do believe that if there is, if if
that stuff exists, I'm not I don't want to.
Speaker 3 (35:04):
Mess with that, right, good for you?
Speaker 1 (35:07):
Yeah, yeah, and I think it does. I think that. Sure,
I don't necessarily believe. I don't believe in Hell. I
do believe that there are evil forces out there, but
I don't believe in Hell. The reason I say that
is because you know that the idea of hell is
you know, this eternal pain and suffering. But like, in
(35:30):
order to to live eternally and in pain and misery,
like you have to have a physical form to process
those emotions, so you can't.
Speaker 3 (35:39):
So yeah, uh, that is that is a that is
a common Protestant view of what hell is.
Speaker 1 (35:46):
Really. Did I know that?
Speaker 3 (35:48):
Yeah? So, for instance, there are Orthodox Greek or Russian
Orthodox priests who you can ask what hell is and
they will give They'll tell you, I'll get about Christian priests,
right they would. They'll say, I don't know, but as
best as I can tell, one of the most beautiful
(36:10):
definitions I've ever heard of hell came from a Greek
or one of these Greek Orthodox priests. There's a YouTube
channel called ten Minute by ten Minute Bible Hour. It's
really good. And he interviews a Greek Orthodox priest in
there and he the priest says, I think hell is
(36:35):
I'm going to paraphrase what he says, but I'm gonna
I'm gonna say it the way he said it, which
is that to sort of to die right, which means
maybe to kind of like be be as naked as
you could possibly be right in consciousness and the spirit
and and so so free of the physical things that
we have a new relationship with here on this in
(36:57):
this kind of what we call three D experience whatever
that means two be naked in front of the full
might of God and refuse God's love simultaneously. So this
(37:20):
is the definition of hell according to at least one
you know, Greek Orthodox priest that I've heard. So so
that is so this Dante's Inferno kind of notion of
of of hell is is one is one version of it.
Speaker 4 (37:36):
And there's you know, yeah, I mean I and I've
done a little bit of research on the Dante obviously,
I mean I haven't read the book, but I know
of it and I've done.
Speaker 1 (37:47):
Some some research. But a lot of like that a
lot of the stuff that he talks about in there
is really just jealousy and rage against things that actually
happened in his actual life. Sure, so you know, even
in politics, like even in some of the circles he
was in when he was going through hell, like, there
are politicians that he hated and grudges that he held
(38:08):
that were all brought into that. So on a religious level,
I feel like a lot of that could be thrown
out the window and because of how we interpreted it.
Speaker 3 (38:18):
Yeah, I've i you know more about Dante's peron than
I do. I'm aware at least that that there's a
lot of people who think that this has been kind
of a misappropriated kind of and that it was a
whole lot more tongue in cheek and stuff and the
way that it was written was never meant to be
kind of received the way that it was. At least
that's what I've heard. I don't know, but I mean yes.
(38:44):
And at the same time, you know what juke, there
are there are movements out there, even within a Protestant
Christian denominations who are increasingly what we call universalists. Now
they have scriptural reasons for doing this. There's plenty of
(39:06):
mainline churches who say, no, we've pretty much you know,
you can read Jesus talk about Gehenna and what is
it the Valley of Henham and or I think and
then all this kind of stuff from from the New
Testament and say that, yeah, I even Christ talked about Hell.
And they're like, well, actually this is a reference to
(39:28):
something else. There's like the the gnashing of teeth and
all this kind of stuff. And look, I mean there
are Protestant Christian nominations who also say that all dogs
go to Heaven. And I am I am, I am
very much sympathetic to this notion. I believe this is true.
(39:50):
And I one of the ways that I love to
pitch this to people is I say, yeah, man, I
think Hitler and Mary Teresa or Hell. You know, Hitler
and Christ are sitting up there having tea listening to
this conversation, and that, of course.
Speaker 4 (40:08):
Is.
Speaker 3 (40:09):
Would be terrifying. You know, it's kind of a terrifying
thought to ah an ego, who really ah is has
itself beholden to It's it's what it thinks of as
(40:30):
its right to judge. And I just don't think that's
what's going on here, you know.
Speaker 1 (40:40):
And and you talk about judge too, and I think
that that's a big term that not just Christianity, but
in general, many people judge, you know, especially in today's
today's age. I feel like majority of people, like they
look at their screens on their phones and expect the
world to be a certain way, and they judge people
(41:03):
based off a lot of the things that they see.
Whether it's subconsciously or not, they do it. And that's
where you get your clicks and your stuff like that.
But I mean even I mean, we're not supposed to
shut you know, we're not supposed to just see somebody
got their shit, you know, Like that's not how we're
supposed to be.
Speaker 3 (41:25):
It's we have outsourced our sense of safety, our sense
of belonging to whether or not a set of conditions
that we have constructed out of our memory or out
of what we've been told is right. We have outsourced
(41:47):
being okay to a perception of whether or not these
certain conditions are being met in our experience. Does that
make sense? Yep? So that right there is really a
huge part of what I love to talk about. It's
a big part of my message that again, to say
(42:10):
that there's something else entirely going on here, is to
say that the contents of your experience do not necessarily
aren't necessarily accurate reflections of the fullness the whole thing
(42:31):
that's actually at play in these lives of ours. And
people might say, you know, of course, yeah, we've got
wavelengths of light and the human eye and all this
kind of stuff. And yes, I even played to that
trope in Trusting your Foundation in my book. And at
the same time, to really sit with that and and
(42:51):
to kind of you know, there's a line in my
book where I say, simulation theorists eat your heart out,
you know, right, because I present some kind of theories
that are that play with notions like digital physics and
these kinds of things. And while all that's fine, to
sit here and really grow even for a moment, that
(43:14):
this is in some sense like some kind of something
somewhat name it simulation hologram, a dream inside of the
mind of God. To know that atoms are empty space
and none of this is touching, right, To know that
time is not necessarily linear, and that time is a perception.
(43:38):
You really take this kind of worldview that's really big
and you zoom out and you want to go read
quantum stuff. That's fine. What we're not interested in is
getting back into my conscious mind and forming some some
system of thought about what it is I think is
actually going on here. What I'm interested in is feeling it.
Speaker 1 (44:03):
Do you think the humans like look for something to
give them the answer rather than find it themselves.
Speaker 3 (44:17):
I think that it's just part of the experience that
we have chosen to take part in. So it really
is just a kind of like the counterbalance to the
expansion that the universe that is inherent to the universe.
(44:42):
It is sort of just the nature of what it
means to be conscious in a world that I think
of as separate from me. Right to think that you
and I are separate?
Speaker 1 (44:53):
Are you okay with a comical comment that somebody popped
up here?
Speaker 3 (44:58):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (44:58):
Absolutely, Yeah, what Brian Clouder said. Do you do much?
That's good? That's good, Thank.
Speaker 3 (45:15):
You, Brian.
Speaker 1 (45:16):
Yeah, you know I have, by boy, Brian, I've done
him absolutely man.
Speaker 3 (45:21):
Uh. For a while there there were some of my
dearest friends I you know, while I was getting my
bachelor's degree in psychology, uh from the you know, State
University at the time, it had maybe eight thousand students,
you know, the kind of state university in my in
(45:43):
my hometown.
Speaker 2 (45:46):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (45:48):
I was getting a bachelor's degree in these classrooms where
when Carl Jung was brought up, people would snicker, you know.
So I was very much I was reading. I was
studying Western philosophy and the occult in esoterica, and reading
Houston Smith and Mercelle Eliotta in my free time. And
(46:09):
one of the other things that I did is I
described this period in my life as my as getting
my self study bachelor's in McKenna studies, and that is
Terence McKenna. So Terence McKinnon is a huge influence on me.
Not because I think he's you know, some some guru
or had everything right, but I think he's definitely one
(46:31):
of the greatest orators of maybe of recorded history. I mean,
Terrence McKenna was an entirely different kind of speaker and
so so so yes, I have great love and affinity
for mushrooms. And at the same time, by mushrooms, of
course we mean Silosi, Bikubnsis and all those friends of
(46:54):
ours are kind of I jokingly refer to them sometimes
as our sort of hyperdimensional extraterrestrial artificial intelligence whatever my head.
Speaker 1 (47:11):
Yeah, my first time doing them, I took way too
much cool. I took five grams.
Speaker 3 (47:19):
Yeah, holy and.
Speaker 1 (47:21):
There was about fourteen hours eight of those. I had
no control of my body. I mean it was it
was pretty intense. Yeah, No, it was fun. It was
a great experience, and I didn't I learned. I learned
I wasn't scared because I was I knew where I
was and I was in the comfort of my home.
When it first hit me. I was terrified because I
(47:41):
didn't know what the hell was happening, and it felt
like I was sinking into the floor. It was hilarious.
And then I was like crawling to my room and
my roommate had to like help me. But I realized,
you know, you can have an amazing experience with these
things if it's controlled and you know what you're doing.
So I did. I started doing the two or three grams. Occasionally.
(48:06):
I'm putting myself in these peaceful surroundings. In the middle
of winter, I'd go out in the snow and just
sit there in the snow and just listen and just
have like these hypnotic realizations of clarity almost So, yeah,
it was.
Speaker 3 (48:21):
It was good.
Speaker 1 (48:22):
There are good things to it.
Speaker 3 (48:24):
I can count on one hand my total number of
journeys with these things, and and never five grands. But
you know the thing is, here's what's really okay. I'm
gonna tell a story. This is really fun. I did
not expect to be going here.
Speaker 1 (48:43):
Shows all about that.
Speaker 3 (48:44):
Yeah, good job, Duke So and thank you Brian So.
My last encounter with the mushroom it was important to me,
ah for this reason, the criteria by which I knew
(49:06):
that my reasons for wanting to do them. I knew
that my timing was perfect because I had one objective
in mind, and that objective was to enjoy myself and
(49:28):
to have fun. Right, So what a lot of people,
A lot of people are using these psychedelics. Here's the thing.
I'm not a fan. I'm not a I'm not some
psychedelic super fan to be someone who I'm not a
you know, I I'm not some psychedelic super fan. I
(49:49):
think that actually psychedelics because we have this kind of
journeying in ayahuasca culture. In fact, he's mckinna referred to
psychiatry and psychotherapy. He referred to psychiatrists as an incipient
shaman class. Now that's always stuck with me. Now again
(50:14):
no judgment, of course, and people who choose to go
down that career path, and I've absolutely none. And at
the same time, I don't think it was necessarily McKenna's
goal that this stuff be integrated with the same level
of kind of both medical so mental health and kind
(50:39):
of medical mindset that it's been integrated with, or the
same kind of commercial mindset that it's been integrated into
culture with. What a lot of people are doing with
psychedelics is they are searching for answers. And what's interesting
is they're searching for answers ironically side of themselves, right
(51:03):
when that is so, what I'm saying is that ayahuasca
is not going to give it to you. Mushrooms are
not going to give it to you, right, It's already
in you and so and so for us to double
down on these modalities, this is something that I've said
(51:25):
in a number of my interviews in the past, where
I've talked about, you know, you've got your kind of
this kind of archetypal burrow or person out there who's
who's searching from one modality, whether it's they see an astrologer,
they see a you know, they go to a sound
(51:46):
bath healing, they do cold plunges or sensory deprivation, they
do ayahuasca, they do ayahuasca again, they go again and again.
And what it is is, it's they are hungry for
something and they're shopping at the kind of buffet of
tools that we have that provided by culture and the
market to supposedly get at that thing, and it doesn't.
(52:12):
As a matter of fact, Duke, I used to be
a professional and astrologer. I had a stint there where
you know, I've studied astrology for over a decade and
I decided at one point in my career to open
up astrological services to the people that to my clients
and the people that I worked with. And so I
was doing my own little fusion of Western astrology and
(52:33):
human design and these kinds of things. And you know,
I came to the same conclusion that I came to
actually in my medical career. So I'm you don't know this,
I don't think, but I'm an acupuncturist by training. I've
been an erbalist and an acupuncturist, been a verbalist for
over a decade, and in you know, in twenty fifteen,
(52:55):
I began my master's degree.
Speaker 1 (52:57):
And yeah, look at that, told you little research.
Speaker 3 (53:04):
Cool man. That's my that's my alumni right there, that's
my alumnus. Look a little bit, that's cool man. That's
really neat. I love it. So you know, I'm an
acupuncturist by training. You know, I do Chinese medicine. And
I have come to the same conclusion again and again
and again on this sort of journey of my message.
(53:27):
What I now see as this ministry of mine, and
it's that to the extent to which I participate in
the conversation with someone as someone who has something that
they don't have, well, I am incorrect, and that that
to be in right relation with the fullness of what's
going on here in a conversation with someone else, is
(53:50):
to hold that space. I called the work that I
do one on one, I call it feet to the fire,
because what I want to do with people is I
want to hold their feet to the fire of their
own innate and inherent divinity and the parts in them
that have this intrinsic connection and knowledge about what is
(54:12):
actually going on here, rather than thinking that there's something
that I can tell you that you don't already know.
Speaker 1 (54:18):
Right, So, you got astrology, You've got acupucture, You've got
these Chinese herbs, You've obviously done a lot of reading.
Where are you from? Man? Tell me about you? I mean,
where are you from?
Speaker 3 (54:35):
Dude?
Speaker 1 (54:35):
How'd you get? How did you get?
Speaker 3 (54:37):
Like?
Speaker 1 (54:38):
I want to know, like what's your childhood like? Because
I imagine you didn't just hit ten years old? Like
you know what? I got this list and I'm this
is my checklist right here. I'm hitting every one of
these things.
Speaker 3 (54:48):
Actually it's funny. I talk about this in the book too,
But at ten years First of all, good on you juke.
Because often, depending on the interview, these are often the
they can be the kind of questions where I'm actually
saying no, no, no, no, it's not about this isn't
about me. But I'm but you ask in a spirit
of curiosity and fun, and that's what I'm here for,
(55:11):
you know, like a like why I did mushrooms? You know? Yeah,
you know, it's not about It's not about arriving at
some destination, because this present moment is where it is
at right. So it's funny you mentioned ten years old.
I I did actually write at the age of ten
(55:39):
a treatise on the Nature of God in a a
in a word document which has been lost to corrupted
hard drives and and all that kind of stuff. But
I grew up during drawing angels and reading the Dalda
Jing in the middle school. In middle school, Yeah, you
go religious family then, Like no, I can still count
(56:02):
on one hand the number of times that I've been
to a formal church service. Okay, so my but my
mother was a woman of deep faith. She was a
woman of deep, deep faith, and she believed that God
is good and that people are good. And there were
angels all over the house, you know, little angel statues,
(56:24):
and and she would talk about this about God and
what God wants for us, and so my faith. One
of the interesting things is when my relationship with religion
(56:45):
has been a very very very liberal one and kind
of one that has I've been kind of on the
outskirts of it, like kind of the outside looking in.
I was never someone who age what age?
Speaker 1 (57:03):
Your age?
Speaker 3 (57:04):
Oh my age, I'm I'm gonna guess you're my age.
How old are you.
Speaker 1 (57:09):
I'm thirty six.
Speaker 3 (57:10):
I'm a little bit younger than that. I'll be uh,
I'll be thirty four in November. Yeah close enough. Yeah, yeah, so,
and I'm a Georgia peach. By the way, you ask
where I'm from, I'm a Southerner kah been.
Speaker 1 (57:24):
All over the place. I do like that you were
like you were interested in the religion, like religion, rather
than being forced into it.
Speaker 3 (57:37):
Yeah, yeah, I have I have no idea what that's
what that's like really, and and it's a blessing because
I feel like my relationship with God is between God
and I and uh, I'm gonna say this, it's a
(57:59):
little odd. I've said this on a couple of interviews,
and it's that Emerson. Emerson said that for a man
to believe that the contents of its of his private
mind is true for all people is genius. And I've
that for a man like so that for a man
(58:19):
to believe the contents of his private mind are applied
to everyone, right, that that that is genius. Well, I've
thought about this and I said, well, you know what,
I'm I'm pretty damn convicted to this message. And what
is what has kind of arisen in me at this
point in my life and my career, whatever the hell
(58:41):
is going on here. Yeah, that I I think that
what I know to be true is true. And I
think that what's fascinating about that is that it's not
something I can tell you. Yeah, because as you know it.
Speaker 1 (59:03):
Yeah, I mean that when you when we talk about
like prayer and stuff like that, and people praying and
you know, I've seen people, you know, speaking in tongues
and things like that. To me, it almost feels like
it's a self self awareness more than it is like
(59:26):
praying to something else. It's more like praying within yourself
more answer, what do you mean? I don't think that
you're you're not praying to an entity out there like
you think that you might be, but in reality, you're
you're looking within to to find the answers. Because I
(59:46):
don't think what I've seen, in what I've experienced with
these kind of things, it almost seems like people expect
results from their prayers mm hmm. But in order to
get the results, you have to be the one to
go do it. Like it's not just going to be
(01:00:07):
handed to you by some malevolent entity, like it's it's
you know, if you're looking for cleansing or you know,
that's that's just my view on it.
Speaker 3 (01:00:17):
That's interesting. I'm I didn't jump ship with you there
until you said that it isn't a given because I
think that mhmm, you're right that that to be in
relationship with this experience with the world that we're living, uh,
(01:00:42):
in a way that has that carries this resonance, that
carries this truthfulness about the nature of life, about the
nature of God, about the nature of the mind, about
the nature of consciousness, about the stories that we're living.
To kind of like just feel into what's actually going
on here and come to the conclusion. Yeah, of course
(01:01:03):
I can look out in the world and see suffering
and see pain, but I know that there's something else
going on here, and that actually, if I want to
shine a light and be what it is I actually am,
then I can point my sales in the direction of
(01:01:24):
this force of something that will move me if I
just get out of the way and allow it to.
Now that is available to everyone, That is absolutely available
to everyone. And I think that that movement, the wind
in those sails, actually is free and automatic and effortless,
(01:01:47):
and it is a given. There is this notion about
God helps those who help themselves. There is this notion
of you know, you have to meet the kind of
like there's a social of like you kind of meet,
have to meet the divine halfway at least. And while
I think that that's pointing at action, that's pointing at
(01:02:10):
something that is a very complicated and not complicated thing
in life, doing versus being right, I think that we
were not going to construct something that's true about life
(01:02:32):
from looking only at the doing or only at the action,
and then trying to fit being into that. I think
that what's true is that getting out of the way
and letting go of the wheel and stopping this white
knuckling of the wheel, discovering that this is a self
driving car. That is where our inspired action and and
(01:03:01):
you know, that's where inspiration and creativity and imagination and
bliss and ecstasy and all the good things in life
like being a child. Right, The child does not come
at life with all the sense of obligation that we
as adults do.
Speaker 1 (01:03:17):
Right.
Speaker 3 (01:03:18):
And it says not just in the New Testament you
must become like children. It says not only the New
Testament says it's in the dewda jing can you be
supple as a newborn child. So it's the mystical traditions
and the religions of the world are pointing at you
know that. It's a huge theme in Daoism. It's a
huge theme in Daoism that there's something special about consciousness
(01:03:39):
before it's in some sense not corrupted. Some people might
say that, I don't believe it's corrupted. I just believe
that we for some reason begin to take the contents
of our conscious mind for granted and then impose the
structure of our experience on to uh subsequent experience. So
(01:04:03):
we we tend we tend to believe that this is solid.
We tend to believe that we are somehow situated in
this linear flow of time. And when you were a child,
you didn't give a shit about any of that. You
did not give a ship about any of the things
that we as adults, uh take so seriously, right, And
(01:04:24):
and I'm really passionate about that. I'm really, I really
I call it. I call it picking up the stick.
And I think that at some point for all of us,
A lot of people talk about this, you know, in
our child work and all that kind of stuff. I
call it dropping the stick and picking up the stick,
that at some point in our development there was some
(01:04:47):
moment perhaps in which we the stick that we had
was the
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