[00:00:00] Speaker A: But this woman, she just looked like a person. Very visually solid, just in this little glass with long black hair, pale white nude, I think, and just had this, like two hour conversation and I asked her to teach me mysteries of, teach me the secrets of, I think, water and the dead.
And.
[00:01:10] 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.
[00:01:38] Speaker A: Completely normal.
[00:01:40] Speaker B: In this episode of supernormalized, I talk to Sydney Gray. Sydney is a meditation teacher who lives on the west coast, and he also runs a Reiki practice with his wife, Morgan. He studied math and philosophy at Brown University and spent a year in 2013 doing a street retreat as a wandering buddhist meditator. During that time, he had, like, initiatory experiences which actually opened his eyes and his mind to all different states of consciousness. And I met Sydney through a chat group on the rune suit premium membership.
And yeah, the stories he told, which is so mind blowing that I invited him on the show and he came. So I'm sure you'll enjoy this episode. I really did, too.
Welcome to supernormalize, Sydney Gray. Sydney, I met you through the runesuit premium membership because you'd actually talked about some experiences that had come about from teaching friends meditation techniques. And I thought, well, look, that sounds like a really cool conversation that needs to happen, because people often find meditation to be quite dry and disconnecting in some ways. And I personally never found that. I found that meditation for myself actually just opens me up to more of like an infant sort of universe. And that's what I found when I read some of your information about that. And I thought, well, look, we've got to have this conversation, so welcome to the show, Sydney.
[00:03:21] Speaker A: Thank you.
I'm excited to talk with you.
[00:03:25] Speaker B: Excellent. Yeah, me too.
Okay, so you're a meditation teacher and how long have you been practicing meditation for yourself?
[00:03:35] Speaker A: About 20 years, I think.
Please.
[00:03:40] Speaker B: I was going to ask you then. So when that started, did you find meditation through other people or it was something that just came to you?
[00:03:52] Speaker A: It was something that just came to me. Although I had the help of books, I think I actually started when I was 15, checked some book out of the library and I was in a strange situation where basically the entire summer I was like, no books, no radio, no friends, just locked in a room meditating for three months straight and immediately loved it, was having interesting experiences, bliss states. And later I would meditate with buddhist groups, which led me to buddhist teachers, but that's how I got started.
[00:04:27] Speaker B: Yeah, nice. So in those earlier times, what prompted you to want to actually even take up the path of meditation? Because when we're younger, usually you want to run around with friends and be a bit crazy and everything, but you were like, well, no, I'm just going to go and meditate.
[00:04:44] Speaker A: That's a good question.
I may have been somewhat unusual as a child. I was apparently very quiet the first couple of years of my life. They actually thought there might be something wrong with me. I didn't really cry when I was a child, but I found that as I learned these meditation techniques and had begun to practice them, that whenever I would spend time alone, very naturally arising positive states would tend to occur. And it was almost joyous to be alone.
I'm from a sort of rural area too, so there wasn't necessarily a lot going on, but could be sitting outside looking at mountains near some cows or horses or something, and there would just be these natural feelings of goodwill for people and beings around me and applying meditation techniques to reach states of concentration, it became very easy to find it almost more enjoyable to be alone, at least at the time when I was getting started with this.
[00:05:52] Speaker B: Yeah, I can relate to that.
I actually found myself in a sort of like a meditative sort of state after having some contact with, I call them forest beings, but looking back on it after listening to the modern fairy podcast, it's probably a bunch of fairies and they taught me how to meditate and I was actually a quiet child as well, so I can really relate to that.
I didn't know this until a lot later in my life, but my mother said to me that the reason why they actually tested my hearing a lot when I was a child, because I wasn't talking, I thought it was deaf.
Yeah, it was weird, but I thought, I don't know why they keep on sending me to this place in a large city and putting me in a room in a box and play these tones to me, and I was like, what's going on?
Had no idea. But it made a bit of sense later on. But I actually got into that sort of peaceful space myself from being with those forest beings and being in nature. So that sense that you had of the goodwill of nature and just being in nature itself, it's sort of like a bodhisattvic state itself anyway. And then you were naturally there already, is that right?
[00:07:03] Speaker A: I think so, yeah. And I found that later as I went to college, that I continued having the same experience where when I would sort of isolate myself somewhere, I had a tendency of wandering, sort of an insomniac or something, just wandering around the campus late at night or the city and finding a beautiful place to sit down and could just sit, meditate, and very quickly access these joyful, benevolent feelings. And having that, especially in a chaotic environment, having that kind of baseline was just so wonderful and important. And it did seem very natural. And I think that is the theme with a lot of meditative practices, especially when you're getting started and you're learning how to concentrate, where there's almost an argument that you're actually just kind of uncovering something that's naturally there and a natural, restful state, and you're removing hindrances and obscurations, rather than having to build something unnatural.
[00:08:12] Speaker B: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
So you've discovered this state through meditation and practice, through books, and you started practicing that as I think, as a teenager, as you mentioned there.
How did that play out in your life? And did you find that people were gravitating towards you for learning meditation, or did you just start doing yourself and then somehow fell into the practice of teaching.
[00:08:39] Speaker A: Perhaps more? The latter. People were definitely intrigued by the interest in meditation and wanted to talk about it a lot, where when I was in college, for example, I think people were very intellectual and often wanted to kind of engage the ideas surrounding contemplative practices.
I went to college at Brown, where they actually have a department of contemplative studies that studies mystical traditions, and it's separate from the religious studies department, but they teach about Buddhism and budhist meditation and research, kind of even like the neuroscience of some of this stuff. So there are a lot of people interested in these topics, and I'm still friends with some of them. Some of them went on to become monks, budhist monks, and do all kinds of things. Some of them are now meditation researchers.
But I think it was more of a private, deep dive into the practice as I became increasingly inspired by doing more retreats and meeting more teachers and discovering that there was some real meatiness to all of it in a deeper reality and an urgency even of, you can try to get enlightened in this lifetime. That is a goal that some people actually have.
I became more serious over time and saw it as less of a.
Less of. I don't know, I don't quite want to say a hobby, but less recreational.
And I spent more and more time applying traditional methods and getting advice from different people to try to achieve or experience some of the things that.
There's a lot of texts, a lot of books in Buddhism that the books say is possible and try to do it.
[00:10:33] Speaker B: Okay, so as you was practicing these meditation sort of methods, you mentioned actually on the rune soup groups that you were noticing a lot of phenomena and contact with spirits and all sorts of.
What would you call it? Like multidimensional sort of states. Can you go into that?
[00:10:57] Speaker A: Yeah, I would love to.
So perhaps to kind of set up a conversation around that.
I practiced a type of meditation that is known to produce visionary states. And even before I attempted to learn this type of meditation, I had been having strange, supernatural experiences for some time.
I initially thought I was going to go be a scientist, and I did some physics research. It was fun. But at some point, when I was maybe 20, I was sitting by a lake and just kind of blurted out to the universe, I believe in magic, and miracles are real. Right? Because I've been kind of filling that building for a while, and I decided to kind of have to rebuild my life and my life path. And instead of doing something conventional, like going to grad school after college, I spent a year inspired, no one should do this. I would not recommend that anybody do this. But there's a buddhist teacher named Fleet Maul who has taken people through what are called, like, street retreats, where you have an experience as kind of a homeless person or a beggar. Very like, old school Buddhist asceticism kind of idea. And I think those types of retreats are controversial for various reasons, but I personally found it very interesting and inspiring. So I spent a year wandering across the United States and meditating, and I had already a number of very peculiar experiences. I felt that I spent some nights in ghost towns, I meditated in sea caves, and I met the most bizarre people. And reality just seemed to become more fluid. Things that I would think about just would manifest all the time, like days or minutes sometimes after thinking about it. And I had a very intense experience at the end of that year that I don't think I'll focus on here. But it was some encounter with an entity that wanted to kind of set me on the right path. And it was about as weird as some encounters can go, I felt like I had this vision of karma and of the different realms you can go to after you die and of hell. And it was trying to impart to me some city or psychic power of how you can transfer your mind to someone else's body. And it teleported me around, and it was very intense and very striking. And then the next year, I realized that the way that I had been living was not really following the middle path of you need a certain amount of stability in your life to have a proper foundation for meditation.
And the next year, I endeavored to create a better environment for full time meditation. And that was the environment in which I started practicing this fire meditation practice that can produce visionary states. And so I did six months of solo retreat the following year. And I had some jobs kind of in between, and was able to have a sort of comfortable, relatively happy lifestyle, enough money to just hang out in my apartment and live and meditate. And the fire casino practice is amazing, I think. And a number of people are talking about, have been talking about it these days. I think there is a 2017 book about it by Shannon Stein and Daniel Ingram. And Michael Taft has had a couple of people talk about it on his podcast.
And when I started doing it, I found it very faith building.
And immediately it worked. Immediately. It's very compelling.
Would it be all right if I kind of walk through what the sort of practice entails and then what I.
[00:15:26] Speaker B: Please do.
[00:15:27] Speaker A: Cool. So the practice is described in some ancient texts, like the Visuda maga and the Vimudi maga, and the casino practices are essentially, most of them that are listed are visual practices. You are concentrating on an object outside of your body, really a visual object. There are colored discs. There are some interesting objects, like a hole in a wall. And there also are objects like water and earth and fire. And this candle flame practice is what I was doing. And the stages that you progress through the practice are covered in ancient sources and also in some modern books. So the same books that describe the practice walk through different stages of insight or wisdom or mindfulness development. And the number of stages is variable in the texts. You go from, like, five in the really old ones to, like, 16 in the pseudamaga.
But I think I can walk through them in maybe four or five stages that are more clear to describe. In terms of the phenomenology of, like, this is what you're actually seeing, and this is what it is like, which I think is part of why it was so compelling to me is because that's much less abstract than when you're reading the old buddhist texts. And it's like these are the twelve limbs of dependent origination and these very complicated aggregates of perceptual experience that are difficult to even define.
But when you're doing these visual practices, they influence things in your visual field. And you start out by meditating on the candle flame.
And the goal is to develop the object of concentration. That's the first goal. So as you gaze at the flame, you kind of notice it's dancing. You notice how your perception of it also shifts. You'll notice that your eye muscles twitch and adjust. And it almost like you're resetting a computer screen or something. So you notice that you change, and you notice how the candle flame changes.
And you hold on to the object as best as you can, like a wolf with a bone or something that it won't let go of. And you develop your focus so intensely. And there's also this natural optical effect from flame.
So you reach the point where you close your eyes and you continue to see an afterimage of the flame.
I think there's some confusion around this, too, because this happens with all of the casino objects and not just fire. So it's not just like you're damaging your retina or something.
And then you concentrate in the same way upon the object behind the closed eyes. And you will begin to see a dot, red or purple. And this is still really all the first phase of the practice. Of these maybe four phases I'll walk through. And the dot.
It can be very hard to keep track of. It's like a floater in your eye a little bit. It'll appear, it will disappear.
And you cultivate your practice to the extent that eventually it just becomes pretty semi permanent. Or you have the ability to kind of recall this object. I think there's a phrase that could be used called, like enemita in some buddhist traditions, where this is like the object of your concentration.
So I found this really exciting because it's very obvious whether or not it's working or whether or not you're doing it right. It's like you could check a box, almost like, do I see the object that I am supposed to see?
And I found that I was using the candle flame much of the time. But I also started using other objects as casino objects to practice meditation kind of whenever I could. So I might be in a room, and there is a lamp that's not turned on. And so I would gaze at the lamp until it takes on kind of an aura or a shining, luminous quality. I think a lot of people do this, actually, where they will. If you like looking at a person trying to see their aura, sometimes you'll create an image, an afterimage of them, and they'll get slightly out of sync, and you might see kind of the white aura around their body. And I think it's actually the same thing as developing this concentration object.
And I would look at these lamps and they would take on this luminous, white, glorious quality. I think some of the texts describe it almost as like a moonlike shimmer. And again, I was very happy. I was like, okay, I've got it. I'm doing the practice correctly. I am seeing the phenomena that are in the book, and I want to keep doing it until I reach the higher stages. And so that first stage is perhaps the most boring and maybe the most technical to describe. But as you reach the second stage, there is a large kind of shift in your experience. And some Buddhists would say that it's a huge energetic shift. You might have Kundalini experiences, intense dreams, and just like erotic energies present in your life or in your dreams, there's high intensity, high energy. Time can become very strange. And what you see with the visual object is you see it. Basically, the dot becomes like a twinkling star, and you start seeing the whole visual world around you. Basically, it can start to look like racing particles shimmering. A shimmering, yeah, exactly. And it can look like shimmering particles racing everywhere. Snowfall pixels. And I think from the buddhist standpoint, your laser pointed focus of concentration at that point, which is really easy to develop when it's interesting what you're looking at. For me, I found, like, I'm looking at a dot that has become a twinkling star. That's kind of amazing. It naturally grabs my attention, so it's easy to concentrate on it instead of. For some people, they might have trouble just focusing on their breath.
This is purely an external object.
And your laser pointed focus is seeing some of the qualities that Buddhism posits are fundamental characteristics of all phenomena. So you're seeing what might be called, like, impermanence, where you're seeing that everything is actually made of something subtler and constantly changing because everything around you, it looks like it is moving all the time. Objects are no longer like, this is a cup, this is a wall.
They appear to be like aggregates of events that are hard to describe, that are very visually interesting and colorful.
[00:22:56] Speaker B: Yeah, I've experienced that myself, and I find I go straight into that sort of space as soon as I just sit still. So I completely understand what you're going with there.
Now I just want to roll back a bit to your experience. When you were walking the land. It sounded like you actually put yourself on a path of self initiation.
[00:23:20] Speaker A: Yeah, I think so. And I definitely received attention, I think, from entities.
I had some sort of complicated experience where I felt like I had been adopted by the thunder gods of the clouds or something. It was very strange. And I had experiences where the weather seemed to just adjust, and I had conversations with it. And in some ways it was very holy and profound, though also sometimes terrible.
And another fun experience I had towards the beginning of that trip was I visited a friend who offered to kind of put me on his couch. And the friend offered. He offered me some DMT. I was like, yeah, sure, I'll try. I'll smoke some DMT. And I had not had an experience like this before, but the experience with smoking DMT, I think, can be, it's very brief experience, but also it begins very quickly. So there's just no gap between you're smoking it and now you're in some extra dimensional space.
Before, I think, even the pipe left my lips, I was in some dark, strange universe, and beings started to appear who were all animal headed and looked quite fierce, and their eyes popping out of the darkness and claws and mouths, and they had these robes. And I said something to them like, you are the scariest things that I have ever seen, but I am not afraid of you, but I would rather meet someone nice like a Buddha.
And as I had that thought, there was this tidal wave of fire that came from the horizon and kind of washed over me and everything. And then this enormous golden Buddha statue kind of rose up from this ocean of flame. And I think I was laughing both out of just sheer happiness. It felt amazing and wonderful, and I could just feel the benevolence radiating off of this being. But also I was surprised. I was like, this is possible. This is happening. What is happening?
And then he shot like a ray from his head into my head and just imparting this kind of joy, this resonant joy, and participating in the joy of all the beings in the universe, which I suppose would be, in a very Buddhist sense, that would be one of the four Brahmaviharas, which are these very positive emotions that you can experience or cultivate. But that was sort of near the beginning of this journey, and it definitely set some of the tone for the wandering.
[00:26:18] Speaker B: Yeah, very cool. How old were you when that happened?
[00:26:22] Speaker A: I was 23.
[00:26:23] Speaker B: 23. Okay.
Yeah, because I went through some wild experiences when I was 23 too, with meditation. And. Yeah, it's on point.
So you said as part of that, it was also faith building.
The experiences you were going through are faith building. What sort of faith were you carrying with this?
[00:26:45] Speaker A: What faith was I carrying in the.
You mean prior to that or building with these experiences?
[00:26:54] Speaker B: Building with the experiences. Because it sounds like you're actually creating your own personal sort of religion and spirituality.
[00:27:02] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. Well, I think if I went back in time and I asked myself what it was building faith in, I would probably say in the buddhist practices. But I think the better answer that's more accurate, what I was thinking and feeling would be that it was building faith both in the existence of world behind the world and especially as I progressed in the practice, because after those first two stages, those built faith that the practice worked. And I'm like, wow, you just do these things in these books that are like 1500 years old and you dissolve reality. Why don't people know this?
It was very faith building in the sense that I felt very confident that the practices worked and that what I was doing worked. But also it was illuminating as I progressed through the practices in other ways. So as I reached what would maybe be kind of described as the third phase of this practice, which the different texts will have different numbers of stages, especially for this part, and they're all terrible. They'll be like fear, suffering, like misery. It's kind of the more difficult part of the practice, and it can be kind of gnarly on the mind. And one of the first things that happened when I had sort of reached this stage is I just saw a skeleton appear and float across my room like a ghostly but vivid, open eyed figure that I could see. It just appeared and floated across my room. And I started having waking and dream experiences of my body being unwound from red threads, as if I had been woven of red thread and I was being kind of pulled apart. And philosophically, this is a part of the experience where you've developed that laser pointed, powerful engine of meditation. And then it actually comes around and penetrates the observer, the witness. So it boomerangs back around and applies to you, who is observing all these experiences. And it can be quite frightening. It has an emotional quality of, unless you're really comfortable with things like, I don't know, horror movies and grotesque imagery and contemplating your own decay and destruction and your own impermanence and death, those are sort of themes that this brings up. And I was seeing vivid beings that felt kind of connected to this energy of death.
And that made it fairly clear that the things that I was seeing were not just.
It definitely felt like I was seeing things that were real. The beings were not just products of my mind, although it's useful to also think of them that way. Especially when you're doing buddhist meditation, that everything is kind of a product of mind or something like that. But that built my faith in a more supernatural world, definitely.
[00:30:34] Speaker B: Yeah. Right.
It sounds as though the observer point, when you're actually focusing back on in it in such a way, is like the last thought of the ego.
The last threads of the ego are right there. And so when this is coming about and you're expanding even more, so you're probably raising your frequency in different ways so things can appear.
You've had a lot of contact with spirits and angels.
Can you tell us more about that?
[00:31:07] Speaker A: Sure. Yeah, I can kind of wrap up this story to connect it to that. So I progressed to the fourth stage. And at that stage, I was like seeing hexagrams appear in the air that were then sucking into them in turning me into a spiral. And everything became very holographic. And I continued to see entities. And eventually there was this final moment of everything just collapse, which was kind of the goal of the practice, was to have an experience of no experience, kind of a timeless cessation where the external objects all disappear, as well as the subject observer. And you're able to have a taste of nirvana is kind of the theory behind these practices. And the goal. And I had that experience, and it was very transformative, the way that my body mind field all relates to everything seemed to change, and it reduced a significant amount of suffering. And I think distortion. And that was the goal of the practice. It was very cool. But I found that after doing months of this visionary candleplaying practice, I continued to see things even when I wasn't practicing, basically every day. And that has continued for, like, ten years.
And for the first two years, I mostly just left it alone. And I tried not to think about it because I wanted to skillfully reintegrate myself into society in some sense. And after these more kind of crazy spiritual experiences and seeking out things on the edge.
And so I spent a couple of years trying to decide, like, okay, how can I stabilize my life, make money, have some degree of happiness, comfort, stability, relationships. And for two years, I mostly ignored the fact that I would look at clouds, I would see them turn into giant heads, or I would look at a computer screen for too long, and it would start to glow, and I would start to see into other worlds or something.
[00:33:17] Speaker B: Don't worry.
[00:33:18] Speaker A: I don't like.
Yeah, for two years, I mostly sat on it, and then I ended up having some shifts in my life and some professional changes. And I had a little bit of money saved, and I decided to leave my job and spend six months kind of studying magic. And I was interested in learning more western magical traditions, especially historical ones, in the grimoires and christian angel and demon conjuration and ancestor work. And part of my motivation was I had spent so long kind of immersed in Buddhism and in these texts from east asian and south asian cultures that I kind of wanted to see what the west had to offer a little bit. And it also provided some context for how to engage these practices. I would later also kind of go back to a more buddhist perspective and approach for working with spirits. And my practices were originally in a Theravada context. And I have since kind of joined a Vajrayana Buddhist lineage and received things to bind and get rid of demons and cool stuff like that. But during this intermediate phase, when I was kind of working on my own, I found that I would do these things in these books. I spent six months just reading as much stuff as I could, and I would try to bless this water. I had vases of water, and I would try to bless them in different kinds of water for offerings to different kinds of beings. So rainwater to offer to solar spirits. It's sort of like an egyptian idea, and then spring water to offer to dead people and underworld spirits and my ancestors. And when I would do the rights to kind of bless the water and engage it, I would look at the water, and I would begin to see it glow.
And it felt like a product of this casino practice and having these visions. And then I kind of put two and two together, and I was like, okay, I think it's all real.
And I'm seeing the things that I'm doing. I'm, like, seeing happen.
And I worked a lot with a grimoire called the Book of Oberon, which has some cool fairy magic in it from the 1580s by some unknown authors, at least two or three. And I conjured some very scary spirits and tried to bind them to the dharma or ask them to do things for me. And I had some very amazing manifestations, I think, in 2018, on February 15, I was working a faustian text, for example, and I conjured a spirit of water and mountains, and she is supposed to be a princess of hell. But her attitude is amiable, and I wanted to see what I could learn from her. And so I did this ritual. It involves a new moon and a full moon and some planning, and I think Venus was in Pisces, so it seemed good to talk to a water spirit. And I just did what it said in the book, sort of in a similar way to the buddhist stuff. And I was confused at first because I had this obsidian mirror, and I didn't see her appear in the mirror, but I had made an offering of, I think it was chartreuse, kind of a green liquor in a glass next to the mirror. And then I see that there is someone in the chartreuse.
And I think I had, like, a two hour conversation with a tiny woman in a glass of chartreuse. And I felt totally crazy in a way. And it was interesting, too, because many of the visionary experiences have had these very energetic qualities where things are shifting and changing and kind of like you were describing, too, when you sit down and everything kind of becomes luminous and shimmering and shifting. A lot of my daily visions are like that. That's also my experience often when I sit down. But this woman, she just looked like a person, very visually solid, just in this little glass with long black hair, pale white nude, I think, and just had this, like, two hour conversation. And I asked her to teach me mysteries of. Teach me the secrets of, I think, water and the dead. And I wanted to kind of learn more about different realms. And when I finished the conjuration and dismissed her, I had also asked for a sigil to talk to her again if I wanted to. And I went to bed. I cleaned everything up, did some banishing, purification stuff, and I went to bed, and I felt this pain in my eyes, and I saw this green sigil just flash. And I was conditionally confused. And the pain in my eyes was so bad, and it stung so intensely that I wondered if something was burning or if I had left incense burning. And so I went into the other room where I had done the ritual. This is in New York at this point. And I saw that my windows were actually open, and it was raining outside, which was lovely. I also don't think I mentioned that I timed this ritual during an eclipse and the chinese new year. There's a lot of stuff going.
So the fact that it was raining outside made it seem especially unlikely that something burning from the ritual had hurt my eyes. And I kind of, again, was like, oh, yeah, of course. Something was just trying to. It was what I asked for. It was a sigil to talk to her again. And then I went to bed, and of course, I dreamed about being taken to the bottom of the ocean and talking to ghost children in shipwrecks.
That's an example of where that went.
[00:39:37] Speaker B: Very cool. That's very cool.
Wow. There's a lot in that one. And, yeah, I'm really not sure if there's anything else we can unpack with that.
You've done a lot of magic work then since, and it's become a part of your practice as well, is that right?
[00:39:56] Speaker A: It has, yeah. I do continue to do a lot of magic. There's a large altar that my wife and I share behind me. And, yeah, I found that the return to kind of a buddhist approach has been very effective and very nice. And I would not recommend that people conjure demons, and there are some dead people I don't think you should talk to if you're not ready for it.
But, yeah, it was very.
It was very exciting. It was kind of just entering into a magical world. And I think I conjured scores of spirits. At some point, I shifted largely from demons to angels, and that should probably be unsurprising to a lot of people who usually have more positive experiences with angels.
And I think I still learned a lot from talking to demons. But even then, I was approaching it from a perspective of, like, I'm going to try to ask you to do dharmically aligned things or see if I can bind you for some purpose. That is helpful for that.
But, yeah, my experiences, sometimes my daily experience was quite out there. And you have to learn how to integrate that much energy and that many entities in your life at different points.
If I can describe a particularly intense experience. Once I was leaving work in New York, worked know downtown Manhattan, and I was meeting a friend after work, I think, for sushi. And I left the office building. And this is in the middle of Manhattan. I'm just walking near Grand Central, maybe ten blocks total, over and down. And at some point when I'm fairly close to my destination, everything around me starts to disappear.
It was as if the sidewalk became emptier of people. And then reality just kind of emptied the sky and all the buildings disappeared. And it was this uniform white background with unclear spatial dimensions in every direction. And I found that I stopped walking because.
[00:42:34] Speaker B: Where are you walking?
[00:42:38] Speaker A: And I had a couple of objects on me. I think I had a bloodstone, which can help with. Help with spirits in the grimoire tradition. And I don't think I should have had this in New York. But I think I also had a Cretan magical knife in my bag, like a knife from Crete, black handled knife. And spirits started to appear. And it was as if they were being drawn with an ink brush. And there were these black lines, these curves, and this host of spirits appeared all around me. And I think they were kind of demonic, and I kind of intentionally kept them at bay. But it was very interesting just being surrounded.
You think you're safe walking around in the middle of Manhattan, and then just reality.
Yeah, reality disappears around you. And I don't remember immediately what happened after that, but I know that how it ended was I began to see my friend who I was meeting. He kind of appeared in this paper universe, like 30ft away, walking towards me. And things kind of gradually went back to normal. It was almost like a white mist pulled itself behind the buildings, and everything gradually disappeared. And then he reached me. But at the moment he reached me, everything was back to normal. And he's like, how are you doing? And I'm like, oh, I'm great. Let's get a drink.
I've had a lot of interesting experiences like that one in terms of stuff that has happened to me, and I've had some cool, magical experiences in terms of what I've tried to accomplish, I think, and what has happened.
I've done magic quite often for the last seven years or something like that.
[00:44:38] Speaker B: I can relate to that experience of hitting that white space. I was in a meditation space for really deep one for about two and a half years. That became a continuous meditation space. And during that time, if I ever just stopped, doesn't matter where I was, and just became completely still, everything would start resonating and vibrating, and it would just turn infinite white light in every direction, and I'd feel ecstatic. And it took quite an effort to actually just ground back into reality. And when reality came back and it was. Was like. Like it.
It was being faded in someone who's raised, oh, yeah. And it would appear around me like, oh, okay, I come back again. But, yeah, that was really intense. I got to ask you, though, because how does this job with your understanding of. You've studied math and philosophy of science at Brown University. I mean, you have said back there a few times you thought you were a bit crazy with all this, but, I mean, I understand that, too. It's like if I told anyone else some of the stuff I've been through, it's like they look at me like, oh, you're nuts. But the thing is, I know I'm not, and they're real experiences. So how does that work for you?
Have you actually got to a point now where you're like, I know that spirit is talking to me now. I'm not nuts?
[00:45:49] Speaker A: Oh, absolutely.
[00:45:50] Speaker B: Awesome. So you've accepted it?
[00:45:51] Speaker A: Yeah, I find it a useful framework to kind of engage people. I have a meditation student, for example, who is an AI researcher who went to physics grad school, and he'll often try to describe some of his experiences of weird spatial experiences in physics and mathy terms. I can kind of follow some of it, and I find it a fun tool to talk to some people, but, yeah, at this point, personally, I think physics has a very amusing habit of kind of like, overstating its own power a lot of the time, but it's been doing that for many centuries. It very accurately describes certain specific situations or certain constructions, but I'm not really convinced, weird as it is to say that it's just kind of what's happening around us all the time. Because you can't. I mean, from quantum mechanics even.
Quantum mechanics is a very developed field, and you can expand on it with quantum field theory. But some of the reasons you need to try to expand on it is it doesn't even describe most of what you would want to describe with it. It doesn't allow for the creation of particles, which we know happens all the time. It doesn't allow for.
You can't even use it to construct most matter that's familiar to us. Like, the equations are actually insoluble beyond, like, you get like, hydrogen, and then you can't actually derive chemistry from physics. The kind of reductionist myth is not really mathematically true, but there's this feeling that's like, we can actually use this to explain everything.
And Newton's equations don't even. The three body problem has become more famous through some science fiction. But with Newton's equations, you can't even predict what will happen gravitationally with three objects. If none of them have negligible mass.
It's incomputable, essentially, for most cases. You can derive lots of special cases with symmetries and stuff. But for the most part, if you have three stars that are all significantly massive and nothing is like 1000 times more massive than anything else, physicists can't really tell you very well what they're going to do. So trying to explain everything in the universe through these means is very silly to me. And there are some mathematicians and physicists who will admit this kind of thing, like physics and math, is mostly good for artificial situations that have some properties that are very beautiful, often grounded in symmetries, but you kind of need perfect situations in order to be able to do anything with them. Most of the time in math and physics, I found.
[00:48:35] Speaker B: Very nice.
I was going to ask you then if somebody was actually just starting out on their meditation path, is there any books or any teachings that you'd like to point them at as a beginner to get going?
[00:48:49] Speaker A: That is a fun question.
My book recommendations have changed over time. I think that there's some good content online, kind of on the Theravada side, if you're just learning insight meditation and wanting to try to do some of the stuff that I was doing. And there are some documents you can find very popular among Buddhists in some places. Kenneth Folk has a little document called the Idiot's Guide to Dharma diagnosis, which helps you figure out kind of where you are on the path.
There's another fun document. I think there's two. There's by two different writers. I think if I'm remembering the Slacker's Guide to stream entry, and then the reformed Slacker's Guide to stream entry are quite nice. There is a book that I quite like that came out more recently that's more on the Vajrayana side, just called the magic of Vajrayana by Ken McLeod, which is very succinct and very beautiful. And it describes engaging with the tibetan practices and doing deity yoga and deity generation. And this larger idea that you see in Vadrayana as a Mahayana like tradition rather than Terravada. You're not just supposed to get enlightened kind of for yourself and see the true nature of reality, but you're kind of supposed to become like a benevolent deity who has amassed so much abundance, merit and wealth that you can just give it away freely. And I think that that is kind of Buddhism at its most magical and powerful. And I really like his description of Vadriana in that book.
[00:50:35] Speaker B: If you encountered Buddha on the road, would you kill him?
[00:50:40] Speaker A: Probably not.
I'd probably ask him some questions, though.
[00:50:48] Speaker B: Yeah, for sure.
Well, he would just be another aspect of you.
[00:50:59] Speaker A: Fun, that could go fun places. But what about you? Would you kill the Buddha on the road?
[00:51:05] Speaker B: Wow.
If I'm holding Budha as an idolatrous act, I would.
[00:51:17] Speaker A: Yeah, that seems like that's the right answer, I think because soon as you.
[00:51:22] Speaker B: Start projecting something outside of yourself as being more than yourself, but even the self is the wrong word, it's really hard to put this stuff into words. Because it does go outside of the material realm completely and off into the infinite. But, yeah, you got to reach towards the infinite. And in doing that, like you said, the practice isn't about you being liberated. It's about liberating everything.
[00:51:47] Speaker A: Yeah. That touches on a lovely idea that I think I heard from a Hindu somewhere, which could be stated that on the relationship between the finite and the infinite, which was something like the finite could ever reach the infinite because it would have to multiply. Whether it's added or multiplied, it can't actually get all the way to the infinite realm. And the infinite cannot reach the finite because it would destroy it with its just endless vastness. And so what that reveals is since we're apparently finite beings with access to the infinite, that is supposed to suggest that the infinite is already, like, within. It's not something external that you need to reach out and discover, but that you are already part of the infinite. Otherwise it would be impossible to encounter it.
[00:52:40] Speaker B: Would you say reality is a frequency aberration, which is an expression of the tension between infinite and finite?
[00:52:54] Speaker A: Yeah, probably. That's pretty cool.
[00:52:56] Speaker B: Yeah, it just came to me. I was like, oh, that makes sense in some ways. I'll have to meditate on that one myself.
[00:53:04] Speaker A: Yeah, I like it.
[00:53:05] Speaker B: Yeah. Now, is there any other message that you'd like to pass on to the listeners? And then after that, how can they find you? And do you have any services that you like to provide?
[00:53:22] Speaker A: I don't think I want to offer any messages other than be good, love yourself, love other people, have a good time.
And as for finding me, if people are interested in talking to me about meditation or the meditation path, I tend to like talking to people, and it's a bit of a strange email address, but you could reach me at SGP eight
[email protected].
And if you are interested in some of the other stuff, I do.
I have a comfortable six figure job, but my wife and I also run a Reiki business, which is really fun, doing some Reiki healing and some sorcery for hire two. And that
[email protected] cool. So, yeah, empressreiki.com.
[00:54:18] Speaker B: Excellent. I'll put those into the show notes, and I'll obscure your email so you didn't get spam.
[00:54:25] Speaker A: Thank you.
[00:54:26] Speaker B: All right, so, Sydney, thank you so much for your time. It's been a pleasure talking to you and hearing your understanding and your experiences. And thank you so much for sharing.
[00:54:36] Speaker A: Yeah, of course. It was super fun. Thank you so much for asking me.
[00:54:40] Speaker B: I, yeah, all right, I'll say goodbye to the listeners.
Wow, what an episode. That was really cool talking with Sydney. And, yeah, he's been through a lot of interesting, wild experiences. If he didn't have the framework of Buddhism and meditation around his experiences, it might have actually been a different story. But he actually got it grounded through eastern practices, which helped him and his understanding of the world a lot. So all power to him. And I hope you've really enjoyed this episode. I certainly did. And, yeah, please, if you could share this to one person that actually would find this sort of interesting explanation of his understanding of that infinite multi dimensionality that we all are, I'd really appreciate it. And if you've enjoyed today's show, please, if you're watching on YouTube, I always forget this, like, and subscribe and all that sort of stuff. And if you're on the podcast, please get on your podcast app, hit up the five stars, and please give us a really nice message saying thank you so much for making these shows, because I'd really appreciate that, too.
And until next episode, bye for now.
[00:56:21] Speaker A: Read a bit of that, little bit of that, little bit of that.
