Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: You know, we're all a victim of this divide and conquer consciousness. And I think we can choose.
We can just choose not to give it so much power.
[00:00:57] Speaker B: Welcome to Supernormalize, the podcast, where we challenge the conventional break boundaries and normalize the seemingly supernatural. Join me, CJ, as we explore less uncharted realms of existence and unravel the mysteries of life. Experience. My treasured listeners, if you have a life story or healing modality or unique knowledge that you'd love to share, reach out to me at supernormalized. That's supernormalized with a Z at Proton me. Let's together embrace acceptance of the supernatural and unusual as what it really is. Completely normal. Today on Supernormalized, I have Julian Palmer. He's a documentary maker and explorer of psychedelic consciousness. His documentary contemplations was released recently on Amazon prime, and one of my friends, Nathan, watched it and was extremely impressed with some of the experiences that people went through because they had quite deep connections to regular and common archetypal motifs.
So today I thought I'd get both of them together for a in depth discussion on contemplations and the representations of those archetypal understandings.
In this talk, which I called contemplating contemplations, I will mention that Julian is traveling at the moment, and there is some parts of the conversation where he freezes up a little bit and, yeah, had to introduce a break and bring him back in, so hopefully that doesn't interrupt the flow too much, but please enjoy.
Welcome to Supernormalized Julian Palmer, documentary maker, and would just say explorer of consciousness amongst other.
[00:02:49] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Why the hell not? Explorer of consciousness.
[00:02:53] Speaker B: There we go.
[00:02:53] Speaker A: That works.
[00:02:55] Speaker B: And also, welcome to Supernormalized Nathan. Now, this is actually going to be a talk. Nathan is one of my friends who I would say is an armchair religious scholar, has noticed lots of motifs and archetypal sort of information that was appearing in people's journeys on the documentary contemplations that Julian has recorded. And we thought we'd get on a chat with Julian to go over those ideas and get some feedback from him, what he thinks about that as well, because Julian has, like, I would say, a lot more experience than us when it comes to the psychedelic realms and also has dealt with a lot of people and their experiences and what happened to them. So this is where we are right now. So welcome to the show, Nathan.
[00:03:46] Speaker C: Thank you very.
[00:03:48] Speaker B: So I'm not sure how we're going to start this, but Nathan, you've got a whole lot of information that you processed with this and turned into questions. Do you want to just start shooting through those questions and see if we can go with that and we'll all talk about that?
[00:04:02] Speaker C: Yeah, sure. I'll firstly say that I'm very new at psychedelics and don't have a lot of experience, so some of this might be fairly obvious to someone who knows a lot, but thought I'd ask anyway. And I'm also not any kind of religious expert or religion expert, but I did notice a lot of interesting things that tied into a lot of different religions across the world and spiritual experiences. So the first one was why snakes? They seem to show up in a lot of people's journeys and psychedelic experiences.
And I was wondering why snakes? Because things like birds and fish are also really common in every culture of the world, but snakes are the ones that show up more often, as far as I can tell, in people's journeys and experiences.
Do you have any ideas about why that might.
[00:04:54] Speaker A: Yeah, well, Jeremy Nabi wrote a whole book about this some years ago.
I can't remember the name of the book. It was like 15 years ago or so. And his idea was that that snake represented the.
I think his hypothesis was there's a few mythological understandings of the snake. You've got the Uroburus, for example. And his idea was it somehow represented, and I might be not accurately.
[00:05:37] Speaker C: Because.
[00:05:37] Speaker A: It was a long time ago when I read it, that it represented an understanding of the DNA.
I'll just look it up now quickly, like Jeremy BoOK Cosmic Serpent actually is the name of the book.
And so he looked at this and he was like, okay, why are all these people seeing snakes in their journey? So his book is called the Cosmic Serpent, DNA and the Origins of Knowledge. And on the COVID there's a picture of a snake, like a DNA strand.
And I found his book kind of not that compelling, to be honest.
But I think the snakes do represent a sort of a primordial force. Like James Murray in contemplations saw the Rainbow Serpent. So in Australian aboriginal mythology, the rainbow Serpent, it begins there, doesn't it? It's like the primordial, a little bit like the DNA.
And I don't know why the snake represents that sort of primordial creative force, but it does.
[00:07:17] Speaker C: Yeah, that was the thing. When it got to that part of the documentary and he mentioned the Rainbow Serpent, it wasn't until then that I actually realized how psychedelic a rainbow colored snake actually is in terms of just the visuals of it. And that really struck me as a thing that is significant in these sorts of experiences because it also goes away to connects to the Ayahuasca serpent visions that people get, that I've heard of. And I was like, there's a really strong connection there. And I just wondered if there were any thoughts on why that was. I wondered if it had something to do with the construction of people's spines, like the human spine. If you take away all the other extraneous bones, it kind of looks like a snake skeleton.
And that sort of skeletal structure of the spine is so common in all mammals and a lot of fish and stuff like that. So I wondered if there was something there that could be pulled in. I don't know.
[00:08:15] Speaker A: Yeah, it is quite common, say, with ayahuasca in particular, for people to have experience these experiences of serpents. And there does seem to be a kind of a stronger motif. More than elephants, for example.
Yeah.
[00:08:37] Speaker C: And that was the interesting thing because it was like there are snakes and birds and fish and insects on every single continent in every single culture, but it's the snakes and the insects that show up more in psychedelic experiences, as far as I can tell from the film.
[00:08:54] Speaker A: Well, I think that insects are the predominant species.
There's many more varieties and species of insects than any other, and there's many more insects in terms of mass and number than any other life form on Earth. So I can't remember who said it, but they said, geez, if you look at Earth from an impartial perspective, you'd be like, okay, whoever set this up really love the insects.
[00:09:31] Speaker B: On the subject of the snakes, though. Snakes, in some mythologies are there for transmutation and transformation. So they take the poison from you and turn it into something else and make you evolve, turn you from lead into gold. So I can see that as a part of that story as well.
[00:09:52] Speaker C: And the Kundalini energy as well, is often represented as a serpent rising up the spine, which is a transformational energy as well.
Yeah, no, I found that fascinating. As the first thing that jumped out at me, it was, the snakes seem to be everywhere.
[00:10:07] Speaker A: Yeah, well, that's the interesting thing about all of how contemplations developed, is that none of it was, in a sense, deliberate. It was all just like sifting through all the interviews and getting all the best staff that was most striking and then somehow mashing it together over a long period of time.
I wasn't like, yeah, let's put another snake in there.
[00:10:36] Speaker C: And I think that comes through. You balance the documentary really well between all the different sort of aspects of working or experiencing psychedelic substances. And so I found it interesting that even though you were trying to balance things evenly across all the different topic areas, these things still came through in really regular commonalities.
[00:10:58] Speaker A: Yeah, well, in a sense, that was a little bit deliberate, say, with the archetypal beings, we wanted to represent that as a theme that was present, the snakes.
Until you mention it, I've been oblivious of the snakes.
[00:11:14] Speaker B: That's because you've seen so many snakes, probably.
[00:11:20] Speaker C: So, speaking of the Archetypal beings, there were a couple of stories in there that were really interesting because there were sort of people who didn't have the cultural background for the experiences that they had. So there was one guy that, speaking of elephants, and then another one who had an experience with an ancient Mesopotamian god, and neither of them seemed to know much about those beings before they met them in a psychedelic experience.
[00:11:48] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:11:48] Speaker C: And then afterwards they were suddenly like, whoa, this is a real thing. Other people know about it.
[00:11:54] Speaker A: Yeah, that's very common. A lot of people do meet Ganesh and all these Indian gods and goddesses. It's very common. I mean, remember a friend said to me once, what's the name of that Indian goddess who got skulls around and she's got multiple arms?
Oh, yeah, that's Carly. Right. So it's like the chicken and the egg question. Which came first? The Indian gods or goddesses or the kind of archetypal. You could see them as like, archetypes. But I think I would say that from my perspective, the Indians in the Vedic times, thousands of years ago, were drinking SOMA, which was clearly a psychoactive drink, and they would see these gods and goddesses in the psychedelic space.
For me, they're not actually Indian gods or goddesses necessarily. I just say they're part of the infrastructure of the psychic terrain of planet Earth.
[00:13:28] Speaker C: Do you think that different substances give you access to different parts of that psychic terrain?
Because maybe the Somme.
[00:13:38] Speaker A: Not necessarily. Because I'd say that generally the Tryptamines are going to open you up to any form of entity contact. It's going to come through the mushrooms or DMT.
It's generally not going to happen through LSD.
It can, but it's generally the tryptomines that are going to open up people to these entity experiences.
[00:14:13] Speaker B: You have to take a lot more acid to get there.
[00:14:15] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. And then it gets really confusing and messy when you.
[00:14:25] Speaker C: I just. Sorry, I just wondered. With Soma, there seems to be a lot of consistency across that part of the world with the spirit beings and then with Ayahuasca, it's a very different set of beings, and it's a different part of the world and a different sub. Well, different substance, even though a lot of the chemicals are the same.
[00:14:46] Speaker A: Yeah. Well, I meet people in the Western framework, and I'd say that meeting these mythological beings on Ayahuasca is not, like, really common, but it's common enough that people do.
As common as meeting snakes or jaguars or whatever. I'd say these mythological beings are a huge part of it. But I'd say the beings that are not easily understood, the sheer diversity of the beings that people meet, I think that's a more common theme.
Sure. People do meet these mantis beings, for example. They're fairly common, but I'd say, yeah. Just the sheer diversity and alienness of the beings is more common than these archetypal beings.
[00:16:01] Speaker C: Very cool. Yeah. I didn't know that it was that common across the different areas and different substances to meet these same sort of beings. So that's really fascinating. And I think it says a lot about the psychic terrain that allows access to. For humans.
[00:16:19] Speaker A: Yeah.
And of course, there's a lot of debate whether, oh, are the beings real? Do they exist?
And it was with contemplations. I wanted to kind of present this question to the Australian scene. And in some sense, the results might have been a bit skewed because a lot of the people who I interviewed, I knew most of them already and were friends with a lot of them, but in general, and there was only actually one guy who said, no, being fabrications of the mind. There was only one person who said that pretty much I tried to represent in the film. There was some people who were kind of sitting on the fence or they didn't know. But most of the people who had some experience were like, yeah, I had to come to terms with that. That was part of the journey. And I had to kind of give up this sense of disbelief because that didn't work, because it's like you're having this consistent experience of meeting and interacting with these beings. You're not like, I remember this friend years ago. He'd have all these amazing interdimensional experiences of these hyper vivid, and he'd just straight up say to them, you're not real. You're a projection of my mind.
And he said they wouldn't skip a bit and they just continue the 6th dimensional cosmic download. They just didn't give a shit about what he was saying.
But he continued to somehow pseudo admirably maintain his skeptical rational, logical mind in the hyperdimensional onslaught.
But, yeah, generally most people kind of surrender that and they're just like, all right, okay, surrender to the onslaught. Give it to me. All right. I just experience this and let my mind go. Don't have to interpret everything all the time.
[00:18:47] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:18:48] Speaker C: CJ, didn't you have a story about a being that you interacted going and talking to someone else, or is that someone else I spoke or someone else you spoke to? Yeah, I had a story with someone who'd interacted with a being multiple times in a psychedelic experience, and then someone else, one of their friends, had a psychedelic experience, and this being came and talked to them and said, I know this person. You need to talk to them. They hadn't spoken to each other about this being, but it had gone to this other person and said, hey, you need to get this person to come and talk to me again because I'm annoyed that they haven't shown up for a while. And so that sort of broke the whole idea that these beings are not just mental manifestations while you're on these chemicals, because the same being without any sort of prior interaction, was talking to two different people about each other, even though they had not made that connection themselves.
And I found that fascinating and kind of scary.
[00:19:53] Speaker B: It does actually talk to the fact that it's more than likely this place is just parallel next to us and full of beings that are always alive and living, and for want of a better word, we call them spirits, and they have their own autonomous existence and they're living, doing everything.
WheN I've had experiences with these beings, they're all part of our nature as well.
Yeah, it wouldn't be surprising if that was happening for somebody that they actually had great contact with a spirit and that spirit was trying to get contact with them again.
[00:20:31] Speaker C: Do you reckon that this is the purpose of psychedelics, is to get humans to be able to talk to or experience these beings? Like purpose, as in, it's a fraught term.
[00:20:49] Speaker A: Yeah.
I think because I've been giving ayahuasca to thousands of people over 20 years, it's not like in every session that people will experience these beings. And even with DMT, you don't often know what you're going to get. And I'd say in some sense they appear a little bit, sometimes a little bit shy.
And for me, in the early days, I'd have one ayahuasca journey. I'd meet hundreds of beings. Now, I might meet one or two or three. I might not meet any.
[00:21:41] Speaker B: It's because you've met everyone at the party already.
[00:21:43] Speaker A: Yeah, it's a bit like that.
I think that once you give up your need to have a mental interpretation or understanding of what's going on, I certainly found, and it's something I used to say it took me to meet the 667th being until my rational mind just went, okay, I just got to give up trying to interpret or understand what this is and just take it up on its own terms and not see it through this lens of the mentality, trying to interpret it through the mind, the human mind, and just experience it. And I think that's useful point to get to, but I don't think it helps you out necessarily in your human life. I think it does give you an understanding that, hey, that there is this wider ecology, wider in a sense that what we're experiencing is like this tiny little bit of reality, and there's everything else out there which this multidimensionality.
And I think there's something about that which can really inspire people, that we're embedded within this infinite ecology, this deep ecology, and that we're not alone. Not in the sense that there's, oh, there's gray aliens. We're not alone. We got these cuddly little gray guys with big eyes.
They're not really that cuddly, obviously, but it's like you've got this trope that, oh, yeah, there's like these smoke DMT and there are these DMT elves who live in the DMT dimension and they're our friends. Right. That's, I think, a gross mischaracterization of how it really is. How it really is, from my understanding, is it's like, yeah, it's just creations, like this infinite continuum of possibility, of beingness. And there's so much variety, and there's so much variety. And the nature of beingness is so diverse, and there's so much possibility within that, that fact alone when we experience it. And the understanding also that there are these high dimensional forms that we can experience this sense that, hey, there's beings who are much more evolved than us because we see the little gray aliens and they got, yeah, but they're technologically more evolved, but they're not that sexy.
We're not like, yeah, we want to be just like them. And they fly around these little silver discs on a little seat. We're not inspired by that. But you can meet beings in these dimensions who are incredibly inspirational. You're seeing this extremely sophisticated, advanced, beautiful, graceful, magical sense of possibility. Of like, wow, that's something that I could become.
Or that there is a possibility that that exists means that we have this teleological headspace that we could become something greater than we are, right? Because the human perspective at the moment is like, yes, we are the penultimate life form on planet Earth, and we're the king monkeys, and we just happen to accidentally exist somehow that we don't understand.
It's all genetic mutation from radiation or whatever just coincidentally, chaotically resulted in us. And we're at the top.
And I think when you understand, no, we're not at the top. And the beings who are of, in a hierarchy above you, some of them do exert.
They kind of say, hey, human, you're back in your place. Yeah, I am a lot more advanced than you, and you should know that. And I'm going to tell you some stuff you don't understand because you're not as smart as I am and you're not morally or ethically evolved compared to me. But I'm going to share you a bit of my wisdom because I'm pretty cool interdimensional being here. So it's a little bit like that.
So when you do have that experience from these higher beings, I think it is a kind of grace.
And I do have this theory that possibly with all these Joe Rogan listeners, of course the stereotype Joe Rogan listener is like this kind of like 28 year old MMA fighter sort of follows the Liver King and has got that kind of mechismo or whatever. I think a lot of these guys smoking DMT, they might not be experiencing what people were experiencing, say, in the mid 90s when at any given time there's probably a handful of people smoking DMT. And now there's like, at any given time, there's probably like 2000 Joe Rogan listeners.
And I think possibly this is just a theory of mine, that there's possibly that the beings are not necessarily as inspired to communicate or connect with everyone. I think as I see it, the gods, you have to be kind of worthy. Not worthy, but to meet the gods is a privilege. And if you've made your blessings and you've made your offerings and you've come to the space with the right humility, right, you've got a chance to meet the gods. But if you just this random person who smokes DMT, you're probably going to get some second rate Harlequin making fun of you rather than this epic experience. That's just my take on it.
You're not necessarily going to have this ultimate transcendence or beautiful experience? Because I think in some sense it comes from where you're at and where you are as well.
[00:29:24] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:29:24] Speaker A: Anyway, do you think my rave.
[00:29:26] Speaker C: No, it's fascinating. Do you think that there's like a biological heritage that's involved in that? Because we generate DMT in our bodies and does that give us all the ability or the impulse to actually meet the gods? Is that something available to everyone because of our biological associations with DMT? Or is it something that's very cultural and ritualistic that's necessary before you get to that point? Or is it both?
[00:29:54] Speaker A: Well, I would say these Indigenous cultures were more spiritually connected in because they lived in a relative float tank. We have all this sensory stimulation, especially coming from these fucking little phones now. And you can see how they kind of snap your attention into this abstract space all the time. But it's like when people first began meeting the sand Bushmen.
The sand Bushmen were very surprised. They didn't believe it that the, the west, the, the Westerners, explorers, white people, they couldn't believe that they couldn't hear the star singing. They were like, what? You can't hear the star singing because for them they had no distractions and for them, so they were just like really tuned in to that potentiality. And my understanding of the sand. And I did want to go visit them, but I think it's quite hard because like a lot of Indigenous cultures, they've been heavily colonized and sort of compromised and lost a lot of their traditions. But my understanding is they don't really have the use. They do have some psychoactives that they use for some of their initiations, but generally they are able to go into a trance without anything. That that's just what they. When they go into a dancing space, they can just go into this trance and have these mystical experiences. And I've had this. It's actually only happened to me once that I've gone in and it was on a good dose of LSD when I've gone into a trance and that's when I've had one of my most vivid entity contact experiences.
And I think DMT will take you.
It's like transcending the trance. So you're post trance when you smoking DMT. But yeah, I think there's something to be said for that trance state and that I think Indigenous people, like the Australian Indigenous people because they weren't distracted by all this technology.
Telepathy was something that was common in their culture or within the cultures. And because there was no.
For their spiritual development or understanding and their Awareness. They were just like Innately plugged in.
There was no enculturation.
They had certain mental forms, but there wasn't any distractions that would lead them, I think, in spiritual terms, in terms of the Spiritual Path, if you like. For the typical WeSterner, the greatest obstacle is like the Mind, right? The Prison of the Mind, and especially the Western Mind, which has all these implicit ideas. It's got this long history of ideas about reality and viewpoints and philosophies, and yOu've got all the Schooling and indoctrination.
I think that you've got to kind of escape that kind of imposition and all that verbal Detritus. It can be a real barrier. And then you've got the ego, which is like the Mask Self, which is the cultural fabricated idea of selfhood, which is related to an interpersonal space, of course, as well. So there's that kind of like that, I don't know, compression. You got compression of the Self, whereas indigenous people that don't have that, they're so interpersonal, they're so tribal, it's like it's already one for all, for one. That's their default mode. And they've been able to develop like all of us, all humans have, all of us, not inheritance, but our history as primates is over hundreds of millions of years, or whatever it is. We've lived in these tribal groups. And so we have that. It's not so much this hyper individualism, ego. So I do think the Indigenous people they do have, they're not so much in their heads, in the space within them that they can actually open up to these spiritual dimensions, which are more innate to them for sure.
[00:35:39] Speaker C: Well, I was going to say, one of the things that I noticed Watching it was people were talking about that sort of style of experience that you described with Indigenous people. And then I sort of connected that to Western saints in Christianity, because a lot of the more mystical ones have all these experiences of visions, and they battle demons and they heal and they hear voices and they speak to God and hear music and levitate, and they're in two places at once. And these are all sort of in that realm of that sort of state of consciousness that you get with what you were describing there from the Indigenous people. So I'm wondering if it's not so much the length of time, it's more, as you said, the distractions. Because if these saints were living in a really ascetic lifestyle with the solitude or the close association with their monastery or something like that. They would generate that sort of field that you described from the indigenous people, and that's how they sort of access these states of consciousness without necessarily having psychedelic substances.
[00:36:48] Speaker A: It's quite interesting because we have people in our society who are diagnosed as schizophrenic. Often and often these people within traditional cultures would be, hey, you're the shaman, right? You've got the natural ability to plug in states of consciousness. And so I think many of us have had these experiences where we're able to have or heard about people have these superhuman abilities, or like the mother who's able to lift the car off their child. There's a few instances of that. Or a friend recently told me about how he was able to keep a man alive who was dying on a bus. And just like you said, like he was like human defibrillator until the ambulance came. Like keeping this guy alive.
And he knew he was a conduit for this divine consciousness at the time. So I think when necessity calls on it, we do have these capabilities within us. We do have these powers. We have these superhuman abilities. But for the most part, if you're going to the office every day, you're not going to require.
You go to the photocopier and you make a coffee, and you're like, okay, so how am I going to use my superpowers today? You've got no reason or purpose to, really.
[00:38:43] Speaker B: So it seems like the cultural overlay that is our society is what people are punching through into another space to be able to experience what would be seen as a normal state of being if you were so distracted all the time.
Now that sounds to me like self initiation. So self initiation seems to come up a lot in the documentary. From what I saw where people were suddenly put into a position of initiation, sometimes they weren't ready for it. Other people actually did prepare for it, and that was cool. But it does seem to be an undercurrent. That is a cultural drive that isn't talked about as a path outside of the occult and magic sort of circles. Why do you think that people seek this?
Why do you think that people seek self initiation? Is it because they need to want to actually design, to punch through that cultural mantle to actually see?
[00:39:40] Speaker A: Yeah, well, I think this speaks to us. The reason why people are brought to self initiate is because culturally, we don't really have the initiation rights within our culture that would know collectively witnessed. There's a really good.
I really highly recommend people watch Tribe with Bruce Parry and there's a very excellent one where he is given an aboga initiation. And for the Babongo people, they will give a boga initiation upon puberty, very high aboga. And the whole village is there, like supporting, witnessing, celebrating.
Imagine having that experience, like being witnessed going through your initiation, and they're seeing you transform and they're supporting you.
Imagine what that's going to. The support that's going to give your psyche and psychology. No wonder so many people are anxious and depressed in our society when that's fairly normal within traditional societies, that you will have this space where you are initiated, challenged, and everyone, you might fail the initiation as well. I heard of one indigenous initiation where they actually bury you and they give you a read to breathe through, and then they take it away and you've got to get out. Right?
I doubt if anyone tells you, but if you freak out, you're toast, right?
The way to do it is very calmly move through the dirt, and then you can emerge out into the air. But if you start panicking, you're going to be buried. Right?
Imagine it's do or die. And I think there's something about that which is so dramatic. And with the doses I'll give people like these, they can kill people. They're rebirth doses. And so there's a real sense of coming out the other end, hey, I'm worthy. I've made it right. And I think that would give you a great deal of confidence and self esteem that you could actually go, okay, I've arrived. I'm someone. I'm something. Whereas in Western society, it's like, okay, drone, go to uni, you get a degree. That's your initiation.
You managed to write all the stuff they wanted you to, okay, now get a job with this and such accountancy firm, and get a mortgage, and you're well on your way. So it's not like anyone is affirming you as a human being.
So I think that that's the reason why people, they are seeking or wanting to have these extreme experiences where something very dramatic is happening and there is an awakening into a new awareness and a kind of like a new self and a new person. Yeah, there's actually a little bit of a movement in Australia. There's the pathways to manhood. I don't know if you guys have heard about this, but they do modern day initiations with young men and their fathers. And it's actually quite a strong movement. And I know people who are quite connected to this. And, yeah, it sounds very powerful because there does need. I think the missing element in the self initiation is that there's no tribe there at the end of it saying, yeah, well done. You did it.
We've been through it, too, and we know how hard it was and big pat on the back and all that sort of stuff. So, yeah, maybe we came to live in a more human society which had human values and believed in such things as giving each other a sense of having value or having esteem or reality. We'd be creating rituals that would give people a sense that they were worthy members of human society, that they had what it took and they were worthy and therefore valued.
[00:45:15] Speaker C: It sounds almost like you're talking about a move from the head center to the heart center. And I've noticed in a lot of psychedelic experiences, people talk about a lot of energy going through their heart feeling rather than the head.
And while I was thinking of that, I thought there's a lot of depictions of people like Jesus or Mary, where they have the sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate heart of Mary, and they're depicted with their HeArts exposed and often on fire. And I was wondering if that's actually like a visual representation of what it feels like to be in one of these states with that move from the head down into the Heart and then the Connectedness that feels, that creates with other beings around you.
[00:46:02] Speaker A: Well, I think, like Bill Hicks described it quite well, that he's, you know, I took magic mushrooms and suddenly I'm in a field and I'm in Love with everything.
I think there's that kind of like. And you're no longer within the field of the mind, who's like, oh, yeah, I hate those emo kids in their skinny jeans, and I hate the corporate drones, and I hate people who like this band or that band, or I definitely hate Donald Trump. And there's so much Hatred and polarization in Our world. And when you come back into the sense of understanding, which it's hard to do, I don't know if the human mind is quite equipped to do it.
I have been in states which is a carryover from psychedelic states where everyone I'm seeing is every. I'm watching, like, Damon Alburn on a TV in a nightclub, and he's singing and he's God, right? And everyone I'm seeing is part of this Overall know. It's like you describe that coming back in your Journey, Chris. And I think when you take psychedelics, you can have this, I suppose.
[00:47:46] Speaker C: In.
[00:47:46] Speaker A: Mystical terms, is experiences of non duality, where there's no longer a observer and observed and is definitely a movement outside of the mind. And I think it's hard for us sometimes to come into that. But I think the benefit of that is coming into that space of that universality. And I think in that space of universality, it becomes harder to become as petty, as polarized, as tribal and hateful. And it's like J. Krishnamurti said, as soon as the other arises, there's know I'misquoting, him a bit. But he said, as soon as you say, I'm a know, I'm a Christian, I'm a Muslim, I'm Armenian, I'm Australian, you're committing a violence by choosing to become identified in this tribal sense. And I think having that universality, that nonduality, I don't necessarily think it's going to cure everyone of their tribal identification. It's very strong in the world. But I think we do see we're all a victim of this divide and conquer consciousness. And I think we can just choose not to give it so much power and to come to a sense of universality and choose team humanity and not become so polarized and tribal and hateful.
And as soon as you're like, no, that person, when you hate, you're pushing away. You're like, no, that person is like the opposite, a nonduality. It's like duality. It's like that person's definitely not God. Here's the devil, right?
All right.
[00:50:25] Speaker B: That's what happens when you talk about non duality. The Arcons go, that's it, that's it.
[00:50:29] Speaker C: Wreck is in.
[00:50:30] Speaker A: Yeah, I had to restart everything.
It worked again. Yeah, he was talking about TDS, Trump Derangement syndrome. And it's like, yeah, that guy is a problem. If it wasn't for him, everything would be so know again.
[00:50:53] Speaker C: Actually, one of the things that really got me was right at the end of the film, and it was James Hart's story of being on the stairway and experiencing what it was like to be God by experiencing all the different people around or in the world and then experiencing the suffering. And his takeaway from it was that we should be doing everything we can to reduce the suffering of the world so that God doesn't have to experience it. And that just hit me like a punch. It was just like just hearing it, not even experiencing. He did. And I thought that was a really beautiful way of looking at the world from a psychedelic.
[00:51:31] Speaker A: You know, I'm friends with James and known him for quite some years and he experience and shared it with people on a bit of it was like a double page a four, and described that experience. And I was really struck by it and I thought, wow, this is actually in some sense as important or significant as scripture. This is actually a download that's as significant as any of the, like a religious download that we should record for people to learn from and understand.
That's how I took.
[00:52:19] Speaker C: I'll just interrupt you there. The thing that really got me about this one and made me pay attention was that there's a story in the Bible about Jacob and the ladder, where he comes to a certain place and lays down to rest as the sunset. And he dreams of a stairway or a ladder reaching all the way from earth to heaven with angels ascending and descending. And in that moment he can talk to God. And then James came out with this story and I was like, whoa, the parallels there are insane. And that's literally in.
[00:52:51] Speaker A: Maybe back in the day there might have been trading routes where people were.
People think that St. John of Patmos, nobody knows who he was, but some people think that he might have been taking Acacia and Syrian Rue. But this is the other thing. You don't have these biblical visionary where you're actually shown all these every time you take it. It's very rare that you'll have these.
I don't think I've ever had an experience where I'm like, you know what? This should be tacked on the end of the Bible, right? I'm like, yeah, this is up there with Patmos.
Sure. There are moments you experience like, this is some quite intense, serious biblical level stuff that's going on that I don't understand, right. But it's not like, yeah, this is a message for humanity. I've never actually had a download like that where I'm like, yeah, this is not just about.
[00:54:11] Speaker C: I.
[00:54:14] Speaker A: Experience was one that really, I think, communicates the heart of an understanding of what nonduality is. Because, okay, if nonduality is true, and please someone explain to me why they think it isn't true or a real thing. It makes sense that God is experiencing everything all at once, all the time.
And that would totally make sense. And the other part of that that you mentioned is him saying that our job is to reduce the suffering I have had. And I know quite a few other people have had, initiation into the suffering of God.
And not that it's something that.
Something that is very shocking because normally you have this idea, like, I'm feeling good, I got food on the table, and people seem to like me today. And season two, episode nine of succession, is waiting for me tonight, or whatever it is. You're like, okay, things are all right. But there's a state that you can go into where you experience the suffering of humanity, and it's a kind of a transcendent consciousness where you become aware beyond your own mind, apparently. Well, you might be. You experience the profound imbalance and suffering of the species as a whole.
And I've had this experience a few times now, and I know maybe a dozen people who've had that, because there's nothing that you can do to remedy that suffering in the moment.
You are just victim to it in a sense, but also, you're not victim to it because it is, in some sense, I don't know, a rational consequence of everything that's occurring.
And my reaction to having that experience is you actually want to do everything you can. You're actually inspired to do everything you can to reduce the suffering on Earth, because the experience itself is so overwhelming.
And that part of you switches and it's no longer about trying to maximize your pleasure, whatever the fuck that is. Whoever came up with that concept is pretty fucking retarded.
To eleven, spinal tap that pleasure.
[00:58:02] Speaker B: I think you'd kick the icons again.
[00:58:07] Speaker A: Icons don't like this.
They're like, 1111. What are you talking about? 1213.
When you're actually committed to reducing the suffering and you're helping humanity to come into alignment and health and reducing the suffering, it's suddenly not eleven or twelve anymore. It's 24, it's 46. It's 1000. Because you're no longer working within the shallow pleasure principle, you're working within this higher reward mechanisms where you're actually being rewarded. There's deeper centers, not just like pleasure centers. Go ting, oh, happy, feel good. It's not like that. It's like glory. It's like, back in the day, if you read what the Greeks wrote, they would fight wars just to have a feeling of glory. What it was like to taste glory. Because glory is like this transcendent. It's beyond pleasure. It's a transcendent feeling.
Not just a victory, but of overcoming the ultimate struggle and winning, defeating death, and actually proving that your side was the better side and deserved to live. So it's like this huge initiation. So these reward systems are kicking in collectively that are much higher. They're like these. Way up there. You're actually having this transcendental experience. And people would be prepared to die just to experience that, because it was so beautiful and amazing.
And I think that it's possible, in our human framework, to have these experiences where you do have these amazing transcendent experiences. Probably the biggest one I've had in my life is I created the first psychoactive conference in South Africa ten years ago in September, 213. So it really brought together all the South African psychedelic community. Not all of them, but they looked around, they're like, what? We're a community? Oh, my God, there's other people that do this, because everyone lives in their fences and their walls and their hyper individualized world, and suddenly they're all like, oh, my God, there's other people who do this, and they're cool.
It was huge. Really. Creating this really catalyzed a whole lot of things.
Friendships for life, new relationships, culture. Really set the culture afire and just the medicine work in South Africa, in the world as well. So my experience on the night after having made this conference, I felt like King Midas. I can't even describe the feeling. Like it was like glory. It was something I can't. You kNow, you have dreams, and the dreams will say, if you do this, this is the feeling you will get, and everything will look like this. And when you do the thing, it's like everything looks the same. It wasn't as good as the dream said it would be, or, you know, that this was an experience whereby I could not have imagined this was better than anything that any dream had ever said. It would be the feeling. And I can't even describe the feeling because it was a transcendent. It was like God saying, here you go, bro.
Here's your 20 million cosmic bananas.
Just, everything's lit up. I got my 20 eigth chakra and my 40 eigth chakra lit up, everything's just like, just, I'm like, Mr. Christmas tree. Like I said, king Midas, it was amazing.
And I think when you do.
And the whole motivation for the thing, doing the whole thing, it was like, I had dreams. The dreams were like, what are you doing this for, bro?
You're doing it for the chicks. You're not going to make money out of this.
No. But I knew it had to be done. That's why I did. It was like, yeah, this is going to be powerful.
[01:03:11] Speaker C: This is going to be big.
[01:03:12] Speaker A: And it was.
And then there were other fruits and benefits that came from that for me personally. But that feeling, that was the biggest occasion for me of that feeling. And I've had variations of that theme.
If I'm living my life and I'm in alignment, and I'm doing good.
I had it just a couple of days ago. I just lie down and I get high.
It's better than any drug because I'm in alignment. And it might be that the previous week might be quite hard, but I'll get this. Rewards come in and I'll just be in this transcendent place where it's like everything, God, whatever, say yes. Good work.
Here's some drugs.
You can get high now.
[01:04:18] Speaker C: Anyway.
[01:04:19] Speaker A: That's my rave about that.
[01:04:21] Speaker C: Well, do you think that there's something to be said about physicalizing aspects of your psychedelic experiences to generate that sort of thing? Because I'm looking. One of the interviewees mentioned experiencing reality, turning two dimensional and then drawing Back like a curtain to reveal patterns that were like Hindu architecture. And that made me start to wonder if sacred architecture across the world is a way of people physicalizing these psychedelic experiences and in a way that allows more people to come together in the one place and experience than them as well.
[01:04:56] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:04:57] Speaker C: If that's something you need to do as part of the.
[01:05:03] Speaker A: Were speaking, when you were speaking, what came to mind? I don't know if you've seen the architecture in Iran and also to a lesser degree Iraq. I visited all, I went to pilgrimages to all of the best places where they had that stuff. And it's awe inspiring when you see it. Something lights up and a lot of it people go, no, those guys would smoky DMT for sure. But that's not what they say. They say no because they can't represent God through symbols. They're using pure mathematics. And geometry, which is what you'll experience in the psychedelic state is like the initial state that you experience is geometry. Because geometry is the visual representation of the mathematics.
It's the visual language of the universe.
So it completely makes sense. So that's why that Persian architecture is so spellbinding. And you'll go to these mosques and a lot of them, there's no other tourists there. Pretty much when you go to these places, I mean from the west, it's all Iranians. But a lot of the time you would have never seen pictures of a lot of this because what they're doing within their architecture is they're representing you unified divine consciousness within their architecture and their art through mathematical representations anyway. And in that space you do have many people seeing it.
Part of it is you're coming to the temple or the mosque and you're enjoined with people seeing this at the same time.
So it is profound.
[01:07:22] Speaker C: I can't help thinking that that would be an amazing way of generating that state of consciousness without a substance is just being immersed in that architecture and those patterns and geometric states. And then I wonder what it would Be like to actually have a psychedelic in one of those spaces.
[01:07:40] Speaker A: Yeah, there's some good ones. There's the. What do they call it? It's in Granada. I think it's the Alhambra. But anyone gets a chance to go visit Granada, the mall is created. It's a beautiful place with lots of beautiful geometry and beautiful Muslim art.
And some people say that they did take.
I do know a guy who is a Sufi who his Sufi teacher initiated him with Syrian Ru and Acacia when he was 30.
And he also drank with some Sufis, the guys with the white beads in Iran. And they're sitting up and they're playing music. And he had, like, Syrian Ru and some sort of acacia.
So all of that Islam, pre Arabian invasion of Persia, the Sufism is the indigenous mystical religion of that land.
[01:08:56] Speaker C: It's amazing.
Do you think maybe that organized religions are then just like a big, long integration process of multiple psychedelic experiences?
Probably not. But do you think that could be made an argument? Because looking at a lot of the histories of the mystical stuff, stories in the Bible, we've got Adam and Eve with a snake giving you something to ingest that changes your view of reality.
If you look at the Book of Enoch, it's not in the Bible, but it's around it. And that sounds like a full on trip report.
So I was just wondering if you could look at an organized religion as a way of somebody had a psychedelic experience or a spiritual experience, wrote it down as part of their integration, and then had to tell other people about it to keep spreading that message.
[01:09:49] Speaker A: Yeah, I think it's interesting. What comes up for me when you say that is, I think, in my understanding, like, back in the day, the early Christians say the first few hundred years of the early Christian faith. Coming up into the early popes in Rome, going on my research, the early popes had the ability to manifest.
They had the spiritual power, and they were able to manifest miracles, and they had magic powers. And there seems to be a kind of a.
The tide has gone out.
It's like, say, I'm in India noW.
There's not as many recognized holy men in India now as there might have been in the 19th century or in earlier times.
There's documents, more, say, in the 19th century, 18th century, where people would. There were these sages who could walk on water, for example, who were regularly documented whereas nowadays I don't know of any sages. I've heard that they exist in caves in the Himalayas, some of these saints. And, you know, I don't know. I think that there has been from the inception of the religion, it had a fire to it and an accuracy. And over time the transmission sort of becomes a bit, I think, you know, say Jesus's transmission and teachings probably set people off and people were very susceptible and he just said, greater miracles than you will do, that I can do. People were like, right on. I could move mountains and they did. They didn't have anyone telling them that they couldn't and they believed the guy who said that they could.
And I think over time, yeah, there's been a certain kind of, I don't know, calcification, stagnation, kind of brittleing, brittleization so that that kind of flow or transmission is not so common in our day and age. Yeah, that's how I would see it.
[01:12:49] Speaker C: Do you think that tracks with the decreasing use of psychedelics or is it a different timeline?
[01:12:56] Speaker A: I don't know. And there are people who think that, for example, people in the time of Jesus that they were taking Syrian Rue and Acacia. And I've met, you know, I know a well known DJ producer who goes to Israel and plays regularly and he tells me that he's seen with his own eyes Russian, Israeli people extract DMT from Acacias there.
I don't have any doubt that there's DMT from Acacias there.
I've hung out with the Bedouins and given them CHaNGA and they're like, I describe what it is and they're know. Yeah, I kind of know what you're talking.
Yeah, no problem. And there was interesting book created by this guy called Rami called Acacia Land. And he describes a tradition whereby the Bedouins are using the Syrian ruin Acacia. And what people say is the Bedouins pretty much picked it up or got it from. We don't know where someone told them, but that the Bedouins perhaps are the tradition keepers of the Gnostics or the people who, that was a tradition that people would take the Syrian ruin acacia. And I think at that time when people, you can imagine a culture of people who were quite well versed in and if you look at the Gnostic traditions and their writings, it's all quite cosmic.
They've tapped in and it would make sense that they had done that. And you can imagine that a whole culture that had existed over hundreds of years where a whole bunch of people were using these plants were initiated into it, and then it sort of dies out. The initiations stop happening. The invaders come, and they clamp down on it, whatever happens, and they're just the Bedouins, maybe take it up. Yeah, the culture would just die off. That magic, that field of that awareness would.
It's like people going into the Amazon and saying, all right, guys, no more ayahuasca. You're not doing that anymore.
I think we'd lose something within human consciousness, even there would be some magical awareness or consciousness that would die in the collective field.
So, yeah, definitely. Over time, we've seen the crushing influence of these mono theistic religions and these different invading forces and their requirement that you put down the indigenous toolkit or anything magical or threatening to the established orders.
And as soon as someone starts performing magic or has any spiritual power, Jesus'story is symbolic of threat. Even though Ben Shapiro thinks that Jesus was, like, a political revolutionary, he obviously hasn't read the New Testament. It's like, dude, there's no political revolution in there at all but him performing miracles and having this power, it symbolizes a political revolution. It symbolizes a greater power than the typical human power, threatening to the established order and the Arcons and that kind of established tyranny, which is working through peopLe, which the Gnostics understood, that was the gnostic understanding of reality. Right.
[01:17:17] Speaker C: For sure.
[01:17:18] Speaker A: So I think, yeah, there's obviously so much to unpack within these kind of understandings.
[01:17:32] Speaker B: For sure.
We're at the end of this podcast for now.
[01:17:42] Speaker A: Okay.
Is there anything we didn't cover or that we didn't talk about?
[01:17:47] Speaker B: Probably lots we haven't covered, but we could do a part two if you wanted to.
[01:17:53] Speaker A: We could do another ten minutes or so, or five minutes.
[01:17:58] Speaker B: Okay.
[01:17:58] Speaker A: We don't need to.
[01:18:00] Speaker C: Yeah, I don't know that I've got a lot left. You answered all these amazing questions.
[01:18:04] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:18:06] Speaker B: And a lot of the stuff you actually talked about was answering a lot of the questions anyway.
[01:18:11] Speaker A: Oh, really?
[01:18:12] Speaker B: Yeah, it's really fascinating.
[01:18:15] Speaker A: So, cosmic, man.
[01:18:18] Speaker C: You were going in order down the page that I was looking at, and you'd bring up the next topic before I'd even ask the question. So I was like, whoa, guy knows how to do it.
[01:18:27] Speaker A: I feel like I was ranting and raving about my pet theories, about pet cosmological theories.
[01:18:34] Speaker C: If you hadn't, I would have asked you the next question that would have brought up what you got to say.
[01:18:40] Speaker B: I think it all actually gelled really well. Okay, yeah. In that case, we'll just call this one an end for this one. But thank you so much. That was totally excellent. And thank you for Nathan. I really appreciate everything you guys have shared here today and everything that's been talked about. That was really amazing to hear all that. And I'll say goodbye to the listeners now. So, everyone, can we all say goodbye to listeners?
[01:19:06] Speaker A: See you later, everyone. And also, you can watch contemplations on Amazon in Australia, United States, UK, and in Canada on Google Slash YouTube. And if you like it, leave a review or rate it. It helps much.
[01:19:30] Speaker B: We need to get it out to the world.
It's worth.
[01:19:33] Speaker A: It's a good watch.
Thanks, Nathan. Thanks, Chris.
[01:19:37] Speaker B: Thank you. All right, see you.
[01:19:40] Speaker A: Bye.
[01:19:45] Speaker B: So the recording speaks for itself, I think, and lots of interesting ideas and in depth discussion there between Nathan and Julian with some peppering from me and. Yeah, beautiful. I love all the understandings that have been delivered through this conversation and I hope you've enjoyed too. If you have enjoyed, please share the show to somebody who would like this sort of thing and get onto your podcast app, hit up the five star rating and write a really nice review. I'd really appreciate that. And other people that need to hear these sort of things would love to hear that, too. I think that if you do that, then the algorithms will show us up into the right faces of people that need to see and connect to the show. So thank you so much for your time for listening as well. And until next episode, it. Bye for now.
