Duncan Trussell Family Hour - 346: Jason Louv

Episode Date: July 27, 2019

Jason Louv, chaos magician/author/podcaster, rejoins the DTFH! Check out ULTRACULTURE.ORG for Jason's awesome works. This episode is brought to you by BLUECHEW (use offer code: DUNCAN at checkout and get your first shipment FREE with just $5 shipping).

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to try it free. Why don't you send me your erotic stories? I want to know what happened after you took that bluechew. Bluechew is the better, cheaper, faster choice, and we thank them for sponsoring our podcast. Here's some hot news. I'm going to be doing a monthly meditation, communal meditation thing at Samarasa Yoga Studio.

That's going to be the first Sunday of every month, and it's just going to be us sitting quietly together. That's it. Not very exciting, more than likely incredibly boring, but if you're interested in sitting with a group of people quietly meditating, then this is right up your alley. It's donations. So if you want to chip in some cash to this wonderful yoga studio

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We also have a glorious shop located at DuncanTrussell.com with lots of beautiful trinkets, bobbles, and glass beads for your enjoyment. Today's guest is a genius. He's a philosopher, an author, a cult scholar, and he's written many great books. I've only had the time to read a few, but the ones I've read I love, including John D. and the Empire of Angels and Generation Hex.

You can find out everything you need to know about Jason Loof by going to ultraculture.org or DuncanTrussell.com to this particular episode where all the links will be there for you. Now, without further ado, everybody, welcome back to the DTFH, the great high magician Jason Loof. It's me, DuncanTrussell. Thank you. Jason, welcome back to the DTFH. Hello, Duncan. How are you?

I'm great. I'm great. I'm doing really good. Anytime I get a chance to pick your brain, I hate the statement. I hate that term. I hate that word. I hate that word. I hate that word. I hate that word. I hate that word.

I get a chance to pick your brain. I hate the statement. I hate that term. Pick your brain. I really do. It's like the grossest term. Have you ever got an email from somebody that's just like, hey, I just want to take you to lunch and just pick your brain about...

Oh, I've gotten those many, many fucking times. About marketing. They always ask me about marketing. Like, I just want to pick your brain about your marketing knowledge. Oh, that'd be awesome. Because you're so brilliant. It's like, thank you. That sounds like a fun lunch.

Hey, I just want to pick your brain about... Yeah, yeah. So I can give you, you know, thousands of dollars. I don't want my brain picked. I'm so flattered. I don't want my brain. It's like, you know, those dental birds that land in the hippopotamus mouth. Oh, yeah.

And the crocodiles. Yeah, those are very friendly. What's the plural of hippopotamus? Hippopotamia. Yeah. Those things. They're picking fish out of the teeth of the hippopotamia. And it's like a sweet symbiosis.

But when someone's going to pick your brain, it is the same sense of like, what are their ideas stuck in the teeth of my brain that your beak is going to yank out? Yeah. So I apologize. That's a little lab. It's not quite symbiosis. It's a parasitism. Yeah, it's a fucking parasitism.

But that being said, I'm going to pick your brain, Jason. Here we are. Because I, all this time, all these great conversations we've had. I must be the worst interviewer that has ever existed because never once have I asked you about the process of teaching magic to your students. And which is like, would you consider that your main gig? It's, yeah. I mean, that I've kind of, you're not, well, we don't actually really do interviews.

You know, we have, we have conversations. That's right. So, but yeah, I mean, yeah, I've kind of organized or created a unique situation for myself where I'm basically a professional academic, at least at this moment where I write books and then I teach, it's just that I teach something that, you know, you can't, they're not going to fund it in the UC system or something like that. Or maybe they would. It would be really lame.

So I've created my own renegade, you know, academic operation here, which is great because it means, you know, I'm not beholden to some, you know, untenable academic structure, jockeying for tenure or something like that. Right. And of course, that's only one part of what I do. But, you know, I'm happy with it. And yeah, so I, what I've been doing this for a while now, four or five years, teaching pretty much full time.

And I'm really excited about it for a lot of reasons. One is that I expected going in that people would be, you know, really flaky that it would be like people like showing up in black metal face paint or just super goth. And it was like, oh boy, like. You mean because they're, they're coming to you to learn magic. Right. And you, you, someone who has written many books on magic have been associated with many magical communities.

You have a sense of like, yeah, I don't want you. You've stereotyped magical aspirants as being like gothy or something, which is I think a lot of people when they hear this shit, they're like, shut the fuck up. You what your magic? You do magic with the K. Can you, can you actually just answer those people? Let me, let me just play like judgmental square, you know, what do they call it? Default reality tunnel person who hears about magic.

Okay. First normies. Normies. I'm going to do an intense eye roll and I'm going to go. Okay. So what do you do? Like spells or something like that? What do you do?

Tinctures? What do you take? Like, I don't know. Do you take like fucking herbs from your garden and mix it together and do, do you say, say shit? Come on. Let's face it. You're selling crystal water to fools.

It doesn't work. And if you're not doing that, then you've deluded yourself because there's no such thing as magic. There's just physics and logic. And a long time ago, we figured out that that magical shit was a primitive, I don't know, archaic fucking way of looking at a world that since then we've completely figured out down to the smallest atomic particle. So really, there's no such thing as magic.

I don't believe that, by the way. I was just trying to embody like the, the world. Totally right. And this is interesting that, so that voice, it lives in all of our heads, but it's actually not real and objective reality. And this is what I learned. So this is what I expected the response to be. And it's not what I've discovered, which was very heartening for me, you know, like when

I, when I started doing this, I was convinced, look, you know, like, okay, Jason, you know, it's time to grow up. You were into this stuff for a long time, like nobody wants it. Nobody's even interested in the counterculture. It's done the great counterculture revolution of the nineties, you know, the great like asset house, Burning Man, Siberia, you know, like the return of the sixties. It didn't happen. It's not going to happen.

It's over. We live in the middle ages again, just deal with it and get a job. And this was basically my attitude. When I began teaching though, I realized that none of that is, this is what I realized. Not only are people incredibly sincere about being interested in this, but also people from all walks of life that you would never, never suspect it's not, there's, the stereotype is not real. And this was me creating a false stereotype.

It was me stereotyping. And my students have been incredibly committed, sincere, genuine, rigorous. And I think that this is what I realized, okay, in the last, what, 200 years, or let's just say in Victorian England, there was this anti or the enlightenment, there was an anti spiritualist bias. And for good reason, because I think that we need, you know, I think that, you know, I, I think that we need rigorous and scientific thinking more than ever, please, you know, and at the same time, people know that they're missing the spiritual aspect of life.

They don't get it from our, our schizophrenic, you know, technotronic culture right now. And they need it. It's the thing they need, you know, other than human connection, which people also don't experience much anymore. You know, they've gotten rid of organizations and social clubs. They need each other and they need a sense of spiritual connection. And since we've lived now in a time when, you know, religion has basically, religion has more or less gone, you know, it's like people, people have the internet, you know,

they're not going to believe stories about Joseph Smith finding gold tablets or whatever or the Bible or things like this, it's just not relevant to people's lives. The moral lessons may be relevant, but in terms of like the literal, you know, a literal truth of religion, it's just, it's not a thing anymore. However, Wait, hold on. It is a thing. It's just diminishing.

It's a dimini, it's not like a globally, it's an option. It's an option as opposed to what it was before, which is the controlling structure of reality. Yeah. That's not the case anymore. It hasn't been for a long time. However, just because people throw out, you know, the ideas of organized religion doesn't mean that they're deep yearning for spiritual connection, which is the deepest yearning

that people have. It's way deeper than I would say even sex and reproduction is the sense for spiritual connection and meaning that's deeper than it's deeper than the need for survival. And we see this by the fact that, you know, there are so many people would rather, you know, you know, or they, they either are okay with dying because they feel spiritually well or the, you know, or they would rather die than give up their beliefs, you know, this happens all the time. And so what I offer with magic is, you know, basically the deal with magic is it's not

a belief, it's not a dogma. It's a set of tools for you to forge your own spiritual connection, your own meaning. I'm not going to tell you what to believe. You know, like I change my beliefs all the time, just to, you know, see what that, you know, what different beliefs are like, but magic is not religion. And it's not science. It's certainly not scientific, although it is empirical and it is experimental. But it's, it's like a toolbox.

So somebody comes to me to learn magic. It's not like I'm fucking up on a guru pedestal, like, oh, you must own and drink holy water and all this. It has nothing to do with that. It's basically, it's like, okay, here's a set of techniques that have been drawn from religions and cultures all over the world, whether it's meditation and yoga or ritual or any of these techniques, whether, you know, from Western magic, from NLP, from Buddhism, from shamanism.

And my approach has always been the chaos magic approach of just take the tools and give people the tools, use the tools and see what happens. So for instance, yoga, if you meditate for an hour a day, weird shit is going to happen to you and you don't need somebody else to tell you, you know, no one else is going to be able to tell you what that's like. You experience it for yourself and then you draw your own conclusions. And so I think that that's a very honest method of teaching and, you know, it's just here's here.

Okay. You want, you want, you want the gear. Here's the gear. Like, you know, plug it in, see what happens, you know, and, and then I teach it in a way that it's, it's safe for people to do that. You know, my feeling with it, with these, these kinds of classes in general is like, if I didn't know you, just being your friend, you enroll in a magic class, which is awesome. But if I didn't know you, I would like, I would have like a real, any class PS, not

just you any class, even a P I want to take piano class, I want to take a piano lesson, that there's an automatic weird barrier between me sending the email to my friend who offered to teach me piano. I don't know what that is. It's like a block, like something about taking it to the level of actually engaging with a teacher is we, it's such a commitment. It's such a, it's so much easier for me to like go on Linda.com. It's so much easier for me to, you know, Google how to play Flight of the Bumblebee and then

give up in two hours and something that it is to like actually make human contact. So what is that? Well, it's shyness, but it turns out to be, I mean, this is, this is what I say to people, you know, it's like, can you learn magic on your own? Yeah, I certainly did. You know, I had tons of mentors and teachers, you know, from all over, you know, many different traditions and all over the world, you know, from Genesis, or I went to Nepal to Genesis.

Yeah. And I went to Nepal to learn shamanism in the Himalayas. I had a Tantric teacher, I have Sufi teachers, all these, you know, lots of teachers for along my entire 20s, I spent learning under many different traditions. But basically what I say to people is, you know, can you learn this? It's like, can you learn this on your own? Yeah. You know, can you learn it from books?

Yeah. Can you learn it by trial and error? Yeah. It's going to take you 20 years. Yeah. I mean, it took me a long time, you know, it's going to take you 20 years. If somebody just, it just shows you how to do it and just says, here, do this, and that's the foundational practice, can you learn it in a week?

Yeah. And I offer this, and I do, you know, I get people from zero to 60 within a week. I have a class called the Seven Day Magic Supercharger where I do that. It's like, okay, and it's a real problem with magic, by the way, because we used to have this phrase in the 90s, the armchair magician, who is just somebody who just sits there and reads, because you can read endless books and the occult publishers, you know, who I all, I'm friends with all of them and I love them, but they encourage that people should just keep reading, you know, it's their product and it is fascinating to read all this stuff.

But people get lost, in a sense, in the same way that when people do a lot of psychedelics, they get lost in the glamour, and it's not the point, you know, it's like, when you really narrow down magical practice, it's not that complicated, and it's not that, I mean, we just did something now, you know, it's like, it's not once you really get it, it's Oh, it was amazing to that was really cool, Jason, just can I talk about it? So Jason has just introduced this non creepy neuro linguistic programming style. I guess you could, what would you call that, like a, a method, a pattern, some kind of

patterning to like dial in a specific state of consciousness. And it was really, it was awesome. And it worked, and it was fast. It didn't. It's like the one, one of the methods of teaching that I have encountered, which I actually like is the kind of slow drip, slow, slow drip teaching of like, here's a practice, meditate. Those within that state of consciousness that begins to emerge. Here's some ideas that you can talk about.

And within that, there seems to be some very, very slow progression, which I like, because sometimes when it's fast, you can, I mean, we've seen it, man, we've seen it. You can blow your fucking fuse. And I don't know if that, I mean, I think anyone who gets engaged in magic, that's a danger. What do you mean by that? Like be more specific about, well, I mean, we've seen it. With psychedelics, with psych, with anybody who takes the step outside of the main vein

reality tunnel. And even if that step is one of, uh, taking up a new, a new hobby, an art form, whatever it is, even if that step is just a mild investigation of the tarot, or even if that step is pretending for a moment that you're in an illusory reality that the way you think things are is completely skewed and warped by your own cognitive intentionally injected into you biases that if you're not ready for that, if you don't, if you're pretending that you're less attached to having your reality spoon fed to you by the news and late night comedy hosts, then you can blow a fuse and you can spiral and spin out.

And in that spiraling and spinning out, you can really cause a lot of problems in your family, your community. And I've seen it so many fucking times, not just with magic, with any religion, yeah, with ayahuasca, with DMT, with an open relationship obsession with any nonstandard path. You can spin the fuck out and then end up kind of damaged, you know, I don't mean to like knock magic in general. These are really valid questions, you know, and of course, these are I've certainly seen blowouts.

And I've spent a what's the worst blowout you ever saw. Can you talk about it? Well, I've lost a lot of friends to hard drugs, yeah, you know, like lost, lost, either dead or might as well be dead, never heard from them again. And I think that's the main one. But I think that I've obviously put a lot of thought into this because I wouldn't be teaching if I had not completely, I don't want to say lockdown, but it completely organize what I'm doing in a way that makes it safe for people, right?

And I don't teach things that would be not safe, specifically. And I put obviously put a lot of thought into this. And that by the way, this is one of the main reasons I teach because magic is now huge, particularly with young women, it's like this gigantic phenomenon as you know, I basically said in my first book, 2005, I said, this is going to happen. It's going to be in the next big youth culture. Wait, can you talk about that? What do you mean with young women?

The witchcraft, witchcraft movement is huge. You go to Brooklyn and like every single woman there thinks she's a witch or is, you know, because a lot of people do sincerely practice. But is there an initiation to be? Is there like an official witch or their schools of witchcraft? Like there are schools. I don't think that people are that organized about it. But, you know, certainly there are things like that.

But I think that. But oh, but my before I get lost, my point was, you know, one of the reasons that I teach is as harm reduction, right? Because in the same way that like dance safe, right? It's like because people are doing this and it's like, OK, like I have, you know, I've seen it. I've seen I've seen things people you wouldn't believe, you know, you know, I've seen some incredible transcendental, absolutely. I've had unearthly experiences, you know, like all this shit is real, right?

Like I've seen things that defy. Any either logic or laws of physics in some cases, but on the other side. And I've also seen. You know, I've certainly seen blowouts and magic, like like many things sometimes seems to attract the best and the worst because it attracts people who are like way out crazy geniuses and then people who just have nowhere else to go and want to drape themselves in some dark and spooky glamour to feel special, which is which is useless.

Same with psychedelics, man. I guess you consider psychedelics and magic the same thing. No, absolutely not. So actually in this dovetails into what I was going to say is like so. So in terms of people overhype the dangers with magic and a big part of that is because Hollywood and we've had this conditioning for, you know, hammer horror movies, Lovecraft, like, oh, like the dark arts, you know, it goes back and a pern of films keeps blasting out these shows that are

like I loved Midsummer, but it's like a depiction of it's that guy, Ari, he's so talented, but the depictions of the witch. I don't know if he did the witch, but he did what's it called hereditary. I hated that movie, which one? Hereditary. I didn't like either one, but hereditary I particularly felt like was just malicious, you know, it both in terms of actually putting out, you know, an actual demon in that movie. And it just felt like hereditary was like, you mean like in the sense

that they actually used it and not a payment on what like to like. Yeah, which is very irresponsible. Was the invocation right on for that demon? Did they do research? No, it's a it's a it's a Hollywood horror movie that has nothing to do with magic, but it but leaves people with this association that then becomes it's like in the same way that when you first start taking psychedelics in the back of your mind, you've got the cop from fifth grade dare class saying like, you're going to go

crazy, you're going to jump off a roof and then you might have a bad trip. Yes, you have all that in your head, even though it's not real. It's the same thing with magic in these shitty movies. And it just drives me crazy. But I also felt like not to get off on a tangent, but that movie. It's like so many of these things are like that movie felt like it's like somebody stabs their arm with a pencil and they're like, oh, that hurt. You should try that.

Like and then you stab your arm with a pencil and you start bleeding. You're like, oh, that really hurt. It's like, yeah, it's fucked up, huh? Like now we've had this experience together. Right. Anyways. So all all this stuff has been blown way out of proportion. And a big part of that is, you know, like cultural fear and cultural conditioning from Catholicism

and other stuff. But let me real quick. Why isn't that big a tree? Why like when I watch the movies where witchcraft in particular, but also paganism gets depicted as a thing where people are going to end up taking your baby or killing you. I always think like these are like real religions. These are real traditions. Why is it OK that these people can be depicted like this?

Like imagine if like the identical film were made, but instead of witchcraft, it was Judaism and the depictions were some kind of like hyper bigoted Nazi era propaganda about Jews, that movie would not only would it like never make it to the theater, obviously, but the creators of it would get like fucking deep platformed and vanished. They would be Nazis. Yet when people are showing witchcraft, I really get like,

I don't get like buttered about it. But to me, it does seem weird that for some reason the left hand path, whatever you want to call it, traditions, it's completely open game. Yeah, magic is certainly not all left hand path. Most of almost all of what I teach is right hand path. But yeah, I think that, you know, I honestly think that it's cultural pushback because so much.

I mean, look at how much traction we've made in the last 20, 30 years in terms of putting out ideas about psychedelics, enlightenment, magic or creating your own reality like that stuff, you know, in the 1990s, that was still hard to come by. And certainly in the 80s, you know, look how much traction has been made. So I think that it's a cultural pushback to kind of shit in the pool, basically. But why though? Why? What's the use that?

I know we're kind of off track here, but I am. This is fascinating to me because of a population of people who, you know, like if you have a population of people who know a few things, for instance, that they can create their own experience without somebody else telling them what to do, that they do not need religious intermediaries that I mean, let's face it, if you learn yoga, you can generate more bliss than any product you can buy, any hard drug, any, whatever, water slide park will ever do for you.

You just don't need any of that shit anymore. You're not going to buy any of it, let alone people who think that they have, that they're empowered and they have conscious agency and they have a say like that doesn't. Nobody wants that, you know? You know what, man? One of the things that I love many things about you, but the fact that you brought up a water slide park as a blissful example

you know what it tells me about you? What? You like water slide parks. I do like water slide parks. Yeah, I do. I haven't been to one since I was a kid either, but they are awesome. I know what you mean. Like if when I'm talking about peak experiences,

I go to water slide parks for sure as an example. OK, keep going. My apologies. So I think that having, yeah, totally right. It's like I think that you're saying these experiences are accessible minus buying a ticket minus like, you know, the the worst most disastrous thing for people like God forbid suddenly it became fashionable to repair your electronics and to stitch your clothes. Suddenly it became a fashion to be able to sew, fix your things, fix your shit.

This is a this one could collapse the economy. If like the majority of people are like, no, I'm just going to like learn how to solder and how to like fix my equipment and how to code and do mine. And so we would it would decimate the economy. Like it would heal and balance the economy, which would decimate big parts of it because the economy is based on basically humanity over extending way out on a limb that it shouldn't be on. Yeah. But so the answers the original question.

Are there dangers with I don't even want to just say magic. Because I actually ironically think that magic is probably the least dangerous spiritual path because it has so much emphasis both on individual discipline and intellectual rigor of analyzing and understanding one's experiences. And discipline and the other spiritual paths very much often lack that they assume that they can get it secondhand from someone else or you just take a drug and have an experience or something like that. Because my question sucks because I'm kind of like someone out of the know

because I really am. I haven't taken a focus class in magic, but I'm basically doing the magical equivalent of some dumb, dumb who's like, I heard that if you take karate, you got to register your hands is deadly weapon. That's what I'm doing, basically. These are important questions because because, unfortunately, they're there are culture has left people with those questions. And that's not a mistake.

I mean, the magic is empowering. It radically will shift your life. It will turn you into the best version of yourself. It will show you your purpose in life. It will allow you to be the person the universe brought you here to be. Right. And it is incredible. And it, you know, if I was to put one word on it, I mean, empowering

on so many different levels and that's that's a little scary. It was always scary to certainly when the church controlled everything and it's it's scary now to our consumerist nihilist, you know, whatever this is, you know, skits, skits, accuracy that we live in now. Skits, accuracy, accuracy, you know, rule by confusion. Fuck. And and, you know, all the information is out there, but everyone's brain is scrambled. That is the best term.

Did you make that up? Just now, holy shit. Skits, accuracy. That's what it is. Yeah, it's rule by the fragmented. It's fragments of fragments trying to rule for other fragments. Wow, cool. And magic that's called Karan's on the fragmented attention.

And it's the exact metaphysical opposite of the magical state, which is singular one point in consciousness, which you will notice is the one thing that everyone lacks now. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, absolutely. People don't want that. Well, it's like an externalization of a of the obsession with people's thoughts.

It's like the the phones externalized our thought obsession. And so now we like look into our phones instead of our thoughts. But it seems like a very similar kind of instinct. Like when I find myself up in my head, you know, whatever running through this thing or that, the programs, it's usually I'm evading the present moment. There's for me, probably not you, but for me, that's like a daydream state. You know, I get like rolled by getting caught in some cognitive vortex. And all of us.

I mean, you pick up your phone and just oh, I'm going to look at my email. And then like 45 minutes later, it's like, whoa, what just happened? That I was on Instagram. I was on Reddit. Like, wait, I had no intention to do that. Yeah, that phenomena sucks. That's that sucks. And like, then also what's happening is within the phone situation, which is, by the way, magic.

We're it's a sorcery of a type. Well, this this is this obsession with the phone is not just an obsession with like looking or like gathering data that it's also any time chaos emerges. The phones come out as some kind of like weird, I don't know, digital, technological pistol that people pull out of their harnesses and hold up in the direction of chaos. Yes, to separate themselves from their own experience. And like with a deluded concept that if I film the thing that's dangerous, it will reorganize into something that I can control.

Now it's the spectacle, like the situations thing. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. But so anyway, yeah, which is why I never do that. But before I lose it, I mean, so that you mentioned you asked about dangers and we're starting to talk about the dangers of modern culture, which are far far outweigh anything you're going to get from any spiritual training. But isn't the modern modern culture magic, though? Isn't it like, aren't we essentially like it?

Like when you're taught when I'm listening to you, I'm thinking to myself, here is a magician who is actually doing a thing that I've read about magicians doing and shamans to who is in a kind of battle or a war with other magicians. In this case, the other magicians are the ones who have created the tapestry that makes up mainstream reality, consumerism, materialism, and have cast a very powerful spell on our culture, hypnotizing them into a specific disempowered state of consciousness within which they could be manipulated, whereas what you're putting out there

sounds to me like just another form of sorcery, which is in direct opposition to any power structure. Whatever it may be that is putting hypnotic devices or ideas into the world that make people feel like shit. Well, I'm not battling anyone. I'm just sitting here being my being my lovely self. Oh, please. And if people are interested, that's fine. But I'll put it this way.

And I think I've said this on your show before, you know, a stage magician is somebody who produces illusions. A real magician is someone who takes illusions away, right? Like she for the destroyer and our culture is is magical. It's pure magic, pure sorcery. I mean, what holds this together anymore? People like people will say things like, oh, it's, you know, like Christianity. It's all Judeo-Christian ethics.

Like, what are you talking about? When's the last time you saw a real Christian, right? You go out, it's like this whole damn thing is run by sorcery. What is sorcery? You know, like sorcery is in the technical definition actually is not magic because magic, capital M magic is about raising oneself vertically towards source, towards the divine and becoming your true self and seeing through the bullshit

and reconnecting with reality, right? Now, sorcery is the production of illusion. And that's what runs our entire culture. Oh, the ads, Instagram influencers. Like everyone is a fucking sorcerer now. Every Instagram influencer like putting out this illusionary version of self. And then what do people do?

It's like, oh, here's a video game. Here's a like, here's something to be distracted with. And our entire I also the other phrase I use, our whole culture, particularly online, is a filth kaleidoscope. We should make those. Yeah, but it's that's Maya, right? Like when has Maya or some sorrow ever been so so directly demonstrated? And now the next thing is that there, you know, the Internet of Thoughts is coming.

Our thoughts are going to be networked to more importantly than that. The potential dangers of magic because you teach magic. And so, yeah, why don't we wrap up that? Because by the way, man, I don't mean to be the fucking let's start negative thing. But literally every, how do you say grimoire? Is that how you say it? Grimoire, yeah. Every grimoire I've ever encountered, every magical book starts with a warning

passage in the front and I love them. I almost want to do a symbol, just a book of the warnings in front of magical books because they're so awesome and so scary. And every single one of them has within it the same essential structure, which is don't do this unless you're serious. Because if you're not, it's going to blow your fuse. That I think is over exaggerated. But there's two, two, okay.

Are there dangers to magic? There are two primary dangers, not just to magic, but really to all spiritual spirituality and life in general. And then, and then a third caveat. So what are the dangers? The first one is drugs, right? I think it's that it's flat out. So here's an example.

Right. People look at there's certain, let's say famous magicians. Crowley is a prime example. Jack Parsons, another one, you know, and they say like, oh, you know, these magicians, like, look, look how they ended up. They ended up with destitute lives and just alienating the people around them and look at Crowley, you know, like he died, you know, in semi-poverty. You know, people exaggerate that too. And he ripped all the people off around him.

And, you know, he was cruel to his followers. And it's like, motherfucker, you know what causes that behavior? Heroin addiction and cocaine addiction, not magic. Right. Magic has nothing to do with that. Now, did, you know, did, you know, you know, Crowley certainly had enough ego to think that he could cure his addictions with magic, which is just silly. But, you know, certainly it can help, but, you know, it's more than that. So we need to be very, you know, one thing that I really take.

Well, I'm sorry. Wouldn't you say it's more hubris? Like it's like the, the shore, the drug addiction was the was the flower growing on the hubris tree. It's like people think they're so powerful that they can like do a thing that historically just destroys lives like anybody who gets into heroin, anyone at this point, who gets into heroin as like basically either one, they're like, I don't care if I destroy my life or two.

They're like, you know what? I could do it a few times. I'm the diff, I'm going to be different. I'm going to be the one who had him, who like, I'm going to be burrows. I'm going to wear suits. I'm going to write great fucking poetry. I'm going to live through an old age. There's a lot of people like that.

And although, you know, in burrows defensive, you actually read his writing. Everything that he's saying is don't do this. You know, like he's, he's making it so clear, like how awful that lifestyle. And he was an addict his entire life. Because once you're an addict, you're an addict. Yeah. You know, you're not going to not be an addict. You might be able to become an addict to different things.

You know, a lot of ex cocaine addicts become fanatical exercise, you know, addicts, things like that. Sure. Once your brain is wired that way, you know, and, and even if you've, even if you're clean, all it takes is one, is anyone who's, who's a recovering alcoholic knows, it's like, Oh, I can have one drink. No, you can't have one drink because one drink leads to the next. And then the whole cycle starts over again.

So, you know, in Crowley's case, in particular, he even talks about a diary of a drug fiend. It's just like passage after passage is, Oh, the great magician can, you know, what is a vice for others? He can master it's like, no dude, like heroin's going to get you. So, but the reason I bring this up is not because of Crowley or dwelling on him, but because when people say, Oh, magic will lead to, or when people say anything, let's be specific, what, what did you observe that was actually bad?

Okay. Specifically tell me that. Okay. So in Crowley's case, well, you know, and people will usually stop there because they don't actually know the details of the history. People will just say, Oh, Crowley, you know, like how he ended, look how he ended. It's like, well, how did he end? And then they won't even know that I've had this interaction with people.

How did he end? Well, he, he spent his final years in a nursing home, a rest home in Hastings. He survived the, which is in England. He survived the, the name of the rest home, by the way, was Netherwood, which I love, but he survived the Blitz and he died in 1947 with students all around him. And, and contrary to belief, he's still, from what I understand, he still had, was taking care of all of the funds for the OTO underneath his bed and did not get into it for drug money at all.

He took very, very good care of it and, and what do you have money under his bed? Yeah. But it was for OTO for the OTO, not for him. And he never went into it for heroin. So, you know, people, but people love to play up the, you know, oh, it's the same, the tabloid mentality, you know. So it's like, okay, well, what did you actually observe? Well, yes, did Crowley do some pretty shitty things?

Yeah, I've documented them in my John D book that came out. But the question is like, well, what, why? Okay, we need to be very, very clinical about this. Like, why did he behave in certain destructive ways? Was it quote unquote magic? Well, if you look at those periods of his life, he hadn't really been doing that much ceremonial magic, but he was doing a fucking tremendous amount of heroin and cocaine and in his own crackhead universe.

And same with Parsons, you know, Parsons obviously came to his life was very short and he died, he blew himself up with fulminative mercury. But if you look at the records, it's not like, oh, the devil came to claim him. It's like, I got you. It's like the dude was probably cooking meth and or at least was on drugs and his hands were sweaty. So he dropped a vial of chemicals that he shouldn't have been handling himself up.

It's like, there's always an obvious explanation. So we can't hang that on magic. Well, you can't say like, well, you know, the reason Hunter S. Thompson shot himself, it was because of writing. Yeah, exactly. He writing, writing drives you crazy. Writing will completely lay your life low. If you write, you'll go nuts.

It's like, yeah. Yeah. And being a having been a writer for my entire life, you'd be amazed. It's like people have this like, oh, like you're a writer. You must live like a crazy existence. Even Burroughs, by the way, Jen told me this, you know, like Burroughs, people had this idea about, you know, that he was traveling around the world, shooting up heroin, like having sex with rent boys, like all that crazy shit that's in

his books. It's like Burroughs life was he sat in his house in Lawrence, Kansas, got up every morning, put on the same gray suit, had the same breakfast, which was, I believe, exactly 11 Ps and a steak cutlet or a pork cutlet. Crazy. And then he wrote all day long. That's what writers do. They write, but, you know, as a writer, people are like, oh, like, you

must be a crazy, like, drug addict and stuff like this. Like, no, it's like writers write. That's what they do. And so, but on the other hand, then people will emulate all this bad behavior of writers, like, oh, they want to be Burroughs is a great example. So they'll start doing heroin and think it's going to make them a great writer. Easier to do heroin than to write. That's for sure.

Very hard. So it's the same with magic. People, you know, they confuse these things. Okay. So there we go. So we have to, we've paired people's bad life decisions with whatever the particular focus of their existence was outside of the drug addiction. And in the case of Crowley, in the case of Parsons, in the case of so many others,

magic was their focus. But to say that magic is the thing that got them hooked on heroin is idiocy. And a focus, both of those guys and most magicians are like, you know, they had a tremendous dozens and dozens and dozens of interests, you know, which is one part of their life. But what is that? I mean, let's like, I know what writing is. What's magic?

Like, how would you define magic? I will give you my ultimate definition. But just to wrap that up, I would say that the two, what are the two, what are the dangers of the magic? One is drugs, if you take out the drugs, particularly hard drugs, almost all of what people observe as dangers of magic, just go away. Okay. They just go away.

It's the drugs, right? So, so I don't like, I don't think people should combine drugs and magic. Okay. You know, I think people should be very like, you know, zen, munk about it. Are you saying what, you don't mean all drugs, particularly hard drugs. You know, in the case of like these real blowouts like Crowley, it's like in that case, that's obviously heroin and cocaine added to behavior. And either he was really into huffing either, which God knows what that does to

you and Parsons also cocaine and amphetamines. So just take that out. And a lot of what you see as wreckage goes away. The second is taking it too seriously and taking it literally. But magic is in many ways, you know, it's a, it's a technique for exploring consciousness. So, you know, and as you know, as a Buddhist, it's like the everything is impermanent and temporary.

So people have these visions or incredible, you know, whether it's on through psychedelics or meditation or magic, they'll have these incredible visions of some transcendent, beautiful thing. Yeah. And then they'll decide that that is real. That is religious truth. And they are special. Yeah, that's the thing they take away.

I must be special. That's it. You know, and then, and then, then that's it, you know, because that's, you know, people need to be detached and realize that the mind is constantly in a state of flux, you know, like you may have had that experience one day, but you're going to have a different one tomorrow and you're definitely going to feel differently in 10 years. Everything is in a state of change.

Gotcha. But people clamp down. It's like a clamped anus that clamps on, I had a vision, therefore I'm special. It's like, it's not going to work out for you too well, buddy. Anyway, so what is magic? Why isn't it going to work out too well? Um, because what is subjectively true for one person, and even subjective truth is a big thing, what is subjectively, here, okay, here's, here's how I'll phrase

this science is the discipline of discovering objective reality, right? Meaning this table is solid. Why is it solid? It's like, and that stuff follows rules and can be agreed upon and experimented by, and, and, and is we all share, but material world. Um, religion is a set of dogmas and say, okay, just follow these rules and you will have a good life or go to heaven or it's received from a priesthood class. Art is the creation of subjective experience that you consume second hand.

Right. So you create a subjective experience and then you give it to somebody and then they have a roughly approximative subjective experience. Okay. It is not objectively real or true in any sense, but may shed some interesting life on what it means to be alive. Magic is a set of tools for producing one's own subjective truth, right? No intermediary.

So with religion, again, religion is subjective, although it pretends to be objective, religion tells you this is what reality is. Um, magic, and I, I purposefully put no overlap between magic and science. And I don't think that they're competitive because magic is about the sub, the subject of world, the, the world of dreams and visions and what you, how you feel on a day to day basis and what you think about yourself and what you want to do with your life and all this stuff. It's like, yeah, you can assemble a picture of that second hand from, you know,

listening to, I don't know, lectures on YouTube or somebody telling you what to believe or, you know, art in a sense, but magic is like, it's like, okay, here's the, like, here's the fishing pole, go fishing for your own subjective meaning, you know, and determine your own truth in your own course through life. No, I'm not going to tell, you know, I, I, I, I refuse to tell anyone what to believe, but I do give them tools to figure that out for themselves, which people don't get, they don't get it in school and they don't get it from our culture certainly because that breaks the control structure.

Do you, do you think that there's a, like, when we earlier, when I was like snarkly talking about people who were invested in default reality or whatever? Do you, is there, in the same way that there's like a stereotype of someone who practices magic, what, if you did have to kind of start off with like the base substrate of the classically conditioned Western mind, that, that psychological state, how would you describe that? Well, it's interesting. I was thinking about this earlier today.

I think the first one is, and this goes back to my own experience of teaching people is it doesn't exist. It's a figment of your imagination. I used to have a name for this person. I called him Dr. Martin, Doc Martin's boots. And he's like the guy that you go into, you go into his office in like a fifties film clip and he's like, the supernatural, huh, that's, that has been disproven.

And he puts his Doc Martens up on the, he puts his boots up on the table while smoking a pipe, you know, it's like, we're rational people and just like, you know, stomps on Richard Dawkins, right. And Doc Martens, there you go. That's a terrifying image. Richard Doc Martin. That's what he does on the weekend. Richard Dawkins, Martens.

So, OK, so before, OK, let me, I just want to talk about like, I'm just saying like that from my standard normie mind, just like the mind of a person who like is limited, the limited mind, that thing that like, for me, that normie thing manifests in the sense of like, I'll never learn to play music. I could never like learn how to like play songs on the piano. I could never become someone who is good at the piano. There's no reason for me to think that. That's an unexplored concept, but damn, if that wasn't lodged in my

brain for the longest time, you know, that's what I think is the quote normie mind is like all those pieces of the, of any individual psyche that's like, you know, maybe you watch like someone doing mountain climbing and you think, oh, I would never do that, but there's a piece of you that wants to do it, but you're like, oh, I would never do that. Why? What is that? That's, that's all right. Let me break this down, because I had some interesting thoughts about this

earlier today, and then I'll give you my, my ultimate definition of magic. Um, so what is what you call it normie mind, right? We could call it, let's just put it this way. It's like the majority of people are herd instinct, meaning safety in numbers. Yeah. And, and they will always be that way. And it makes total sense, right? So the majority of people will believe whatever the majority believes, right?

Just without questioning it, because in their mind, if they deviate from that, it's like leaving the herd and a wolf might get them. Yes. Right. And this has been like literally true for most, and it is to some extent, it's still true, right? For most of human history, it's like safety is in numbers. So there's a tremendous amount of incentive psychologically and physically for

people to be essentially to go along with whatever the dominant idea is. Now, this is very dangerous because it turns out that, you know, dictators, for instance, have understood this. Yeah. And they've understood that, you know, if I just stand up and I'm the scariest, tallest, biggest person, the majority of people will just parrot what I say, because they feel that they'll keep me safe, that I'll keep them safe. Yeah.

Rather, you know. Daddy. Yeah. And, and, you know, so the, you know, here's the thing about America in 2019. The normie mind, what is the normie mind? I mean, like the normie mind is basically the American middle class, right? It's I don't want to rock the boat. I just want a safe job.

I just want my family to be safe. And I just want things to go okay. And, you know, that used to be more Christian. Now it's less Christian, but that used to involve a component of going to church on Sunday, keep them out of hell, which, which frankly, I wish, you know, that would be healthier for people to do than to go to be on the internet. But, but that's kind of the thing. It's just, and, and that has by and large been what's kept the middle class safe

and strong in this country. Now the middle class is currently disintegrating. And here's the deal with America. The, what is the middle class? Like, what is the power of the middle class or the normie class? What is it? Uh, what, what does it rest on? You could say the economic success of America, but that's not actually the case.

Right. So, you know, in our lifetimes, we've seen the American middle class go from like this 80s ideal of like, you know, everyone's rich, you know, like, and we're living in the suburbs. And the, you know, kid, like what you see when you watch ETI, I was going to say ET, but yeah, Poltergeist, exactly. It's like, and, and that was a beautiful time in a way. But so you could say like, well, what was that predicated on?

Well, you know, like the market was up. Things were really good. It's actually not the case. Certainly it hasn't been for a long time because America is so in debt now. Like literally, you know, there was a phrase I heard recently that is, um, um, China lends America spends. Right. So America is now so in debt that were other governments, particularly China,

to just call in Chomsky says this, if other governments were to just call in the IOUs and call in the debt, we would be bankrupt overnight. There'd be nothing left. The only thing that prevents them from doing that is American military superiority. Holy shit. Right. So the only reason they don't do that is because our military is the strongest, which is why we spend so much going into more debt to keep the military strong.

So that means that what is, what is the normie mind based on? It's based on the atomic bomb, right? It's based on nuclear supremacy. Whoa. That's what creates the normie, the quote unquote, normie mind. Now, and this is not a, now that's neither here nor there, but now we're in a situation where America is losing primacy in the world. It's losing to an ascendant China.

Um, it's hard to tell what's going on in Europe. It's hard to tell what's going on with Russia or potentially an emerging Eurasian block. Um, this is a scary situation because now being, and we see this now in the political, everyone's like, Oh, you know, everything is so extreme left and extreme right. Like, why can't people just be centrist? You know, why can't we all just be rational?

Well, it turns out that right now the center is probably the most dangerous position to be in because it's a place where people have all these assumptions. Assumptions like everything will be fine. If I just go along to get along, the payments will have the bank payments will happen, like everything will be fine. As long as I don't rock the boat, everything will be fine. Yeah. But now we're entering into the world where that's no longer true.

And, and, um, you know, you don't need to look very hard to see that. You know, it's, nobody can even expect, you know, the idea that you could get a job right out of college or that you could work at the same company your whole life. That doesn't exist anymore. The baby boomers, many of them were able to buy a house with a high school education and a trade job and they had unions. Yeah, it doesn't exist anymore. Right.

So, um, the things that protect our, our country specifically in our culture widely from chaos, which broadly speaking were the middle, strong middle class, a healthy fifth of state, healthy journalism and some type of spiritual or some type of religious framework that held people into an ethical way of seeing the world and, and a group cohesion. All those things are gone. So the safeguards are all gone. That's a scary, dangerous and precarious position.

And because of that, it's no wonder that, uh, the world is now filthy with wizards because in a, in a, in a chaotic situation like that, and, and most of them are pseudo wizards, you know, in a chaotic situation like that, um, people will look for anything. And, and that's not necessarily bad. When I lived in New York in the 2000s, I met a lot of people from Russia. Really, really smart people on par. I would say that Russians are far more intelligent than Americans by far.

Really? Yeah. I mean, why? Cause cause you know how smart you have to be to survive that level of hardship. You know, there's no, there's no, uh, there's no padding. There's no like, they're like, they're the Fremen or something. They're like, you know, we're the, we're like the Harkonnens or whatever. Yeah.

Yeah. They're the Fremen. They're like living in this like insane world from that they've become super tough, but there's an interesting thing I noticed cause the people, the Russians I met were obviously, you know, in, in a lot of them were in the yoga or meditation world or, um, spiritual, spirituality in general. And one thing that I noticed is in the Soviet Union, obviously much like China, um, religion was, uh, frowned upon if outright banned, right.

And so when the, when the, when the Soviet Union fell, an interesting thing happened, which was the huge explosion of spirituality. So people could, for instance, go back to the Russian Orthodox church, which has now become largely part of the state apparatus in, you know, Russia has now become traditionalist Orthodox Christian instead of communist, which is interesting. Uh, but you know, all spiritual, you know, like the huge interest in, in Buddhism, Tibetan Buddhism in India and yoga and like really serious interest. Like when I was in India, tons of Russians there, tons.

And I think that what, what the deal there is, is when everything is uncertain, people look for stability any way they can get. And what, what magic and true esoteric spirituality do is they give you stability by giving you two things. One is understanding that no matter what happens, you can take it. You have, you are empowered to handle it. Um, I've been living in total chaos for 20 years and I thought no one was interested. Then the world fell into chaos and the next thing you knew, all these people

were at my campfire while wanting some cooked beans. It's like, okay, kind of sit down, let's have a talk. But, um, the other is that by understanding or interacting with, let's say the laws or the structure of reality itself, you build your foundation and your stability on something which is far more transcendent than whatever the temper, temporary political situation is, which is always, uh, perilous. So I think that when, when empires crumble, people go to magic to, for safety, for understanding, for security, for empowerment.

We saw it as the British empire fell. People went into spiritualism and theosophy when Russia fell, people went into the cultism and we're seeing it now in America, in America. Like all young people are interested in this now because they know they're missing this part of themselves. They're missing their soul and they feel totally vulnerable. I mean, I think that for the average millennial, the idea of buying a house would be far more outlandish and ludicrous than the idea that magic might be real.

Wow, what are you talking about? You know, right. So, but do you think it's also, it's not just a reaction to a kind of chaotic world, but to me, not just in now and not just in the past, but if you study the history of a lot of empires, I mean, not the Roman empire, I guess, but like what you do find in the Soviet Union, in early American history, the witch burnings, the prohibition on psychedelics is a concerted effort by the state or by power structures to eliminate any kind of contact with

fundamental goodness and all the various forms it takes. So that thing that magic, I think, introduces people to is the thing behind the chaos. It's not just like, you know, oh, yes, there's chaos. It's like, but look, here's another thing. There's something here that maybe you don't need to throw your imaginary anchor in this ridiculous harbor of stale symbols that has been constructed by people trying to sell you coffee to feel okay, that in fact, there is a way to navigate the entire ocean and the PS, the harbor wasn't real anyway.

There isn't, there never was any kind of stability. There never was any kind of safety. There was just a hypnotic trance that you subscribed to or that you were born into. And that to me is the, to me, it's like, it seems that there's some kind of trance state that there is either not the resources anymore to keep people hypnotized in this specific popular culture trance state. Maybe it's technology giving people access to other forms of information. And yet also we're looking at the relaxing of laws that were keeping people completely

disconnected from transcendent states. Now you can what, you could just like literally order powerful marijuana that will put you into a mystical state if you eat it. It might not be the happiest mystical state if you're not prepared for it, but not just that. I can go online and, you know, connect with you if I want to. And like, you know what I mean? All I'm saying is that it appears a shoddily constructed dam is now breaking apart. And in that water is being released, energy is being released, and those energy spikes

can be plugged into- Yeah, so you better learn to surf because otherwise you're going to drown. Yeah. And I think that, and I'm completely serious about that. And I think that most people throughout the world don't have the luxury of ever having had that illusion of, oh, everything is fine. Americans are largely unique in that outside of some of the first world European countries. It's like, and even there, not so much.

It's like Americans have had this cotton, gauzy delusion that everything is fine. Yeah. Because we don't get droned because there's enough to eat. There's always enough, you know? And so now we're having beginning. Well, I would say we're having a rude awakening, but I don't think that's actually the case.

I think people are more narcotized than ever. We know that the world is dying, and yet we have infinite filth kaleidoscope. We have infinite, any electronic distraction you could possibly want is there. Any pornography, anything ever entertainment, ever recorded in world history. And if you want to make music, you want to listen to music, anything you want. A Hakim Bey said, I think in the 80s, or I think in the 90s, he had this very pointed comment where he said that the electronic world and the internet are a consolation, they're a consolation prize for the death of the environment,

for the natural world. Okay. So here we are in a world where the very, like, I don't know what you call it, the very like, we live in a society. The philosophical, yeah, we lived, but the many of the philosophical foundations of this like ridiculous temple that people have been living in, assuming somehow they're going to be kept safe by the corporations that are in this like weirdly parasitic slash maybe symbiotic relationship with them, are starting to be eroding, falling apart. And many people are feeling just a general kind of malaise, a feeling of kind of profound,

diffused confusion, and just a general sort of like, as you were saying, a sense of being a very tiny, drifting bit of kaleidoscopic filth and a schizocracy. And so, so within that, people are sort of suddenly scrambling to try to find something that isn't a shoddily constructed shit temple made of cups with corporate logos on them, some way that they can connect with something that isn't so easily knocked over by the winds of chaos that have been blowing around the planet since day one. So now what is the definition of magic? Definition of magic. So magic is about taking illusions away, right? So there's two, yes, schizocracy, right? So we live in, you know, like the classic Buddhist phrase maya,

you know, or samsara, you know, or the black iron prison or mal kuth or all these different terms that different religions have for it. We live in an illusion, right? But let's be more specific about that because that's not very helpful, right? What do we live in? We live in the collective, the total collective of all of the minds of everyone on the planet, right? And now that's even more tangible than ever because of electronics, basically create, you know, in the nineties, people are like, oh, in the future, we'll all be buddhas and we'll all be telepathically connected. Well, here you go, right? Like it's happened now with technology, with our phones. We're instantaneously connected to everyone and that will only increase, you know, as they put

these satellites up and bring the entire world online. So the environment that we live in is the mass mind of the entire planet, right? And the individual mind is enough to deal with, right? So it's like, so if you meditate, the more you meditate, the more you begin to realize that this is the illusory nature of all of this, and not just illusory, because I don't even like that. It sounds too mystical, just like the bullshit nature of everything, like people's bullshit, their games, their drama, it's all of it is, but just turn on the news and look at what did, what did, you know, what did Trump say now? You know, it's like, it's all bullshit. But what is it? Maybe bullshit is not helpful. You know, what do human beings do? Human beings

are engaged with making meaning and communicating, creating meaning. Human beings are the time-binding animals. They create stories, right? So spiders weave webs, snails build shells, and human beings come up with bullshit stories to explain reality, right? Well, they're not all bullshit. They're all bullshit, right? Well, I mean, I mean, some of them are entertaining at least. Well, but they're still bullshit, right? Bullshit. They have aesthetic value, but that's it. Like Game of Thrones. Right, right. So, what I'm saying is we can't just, I don't, I have a negative connotation with bullshit. Like, I agree, we're spinning stories, spinning these incredible webs of symbols. Some of them are like, well, amazingly beautiful, though, you know, why are they bull, why is it

bullshit? Well, it's not, it's arbitrary, right? It's just a way of, our entire life, we've believed arbitrary stories because we thought that they had enough explanatory power to keep us safe. When you're a kid, you believe your parents' stories because if you don't, you think you're going to die, right? And your parents, in theory, are there to create a story that keeps you safe, right? But then you grow up and you realize it was just a story, but hopefully you have the maturity at that point to realize why that was necessary, right? I mean, that's not a fundamental thing, though. Like, there's some parents who do this, they, I would assume there's a way of like, relaying some, I don't know, man, like, I know it, I think that a great deal of what we experience

is not other people's bullshit story. It's our bullshit story, which isn't amalgam, I guess, of all of the bullshit stories in the crockpot of our mind blasted out onto this screen of phenomena. And that's it exactly, right? So what is magic? Magic is the assault on the Great Magician. Magic is the assault and the storming of the Tower of Mayan, the Great Magician, the he who produces the illusion. Oden. No, no, Oden's fine. Okay. But what is the great, who is the Great Magician, right? So if you meditate, let's say you go out to the desert and meditate for 10 days, which I recommend anyone do. You realize that the thing that controls you, who is the magician that creates your universe? Is it Rupert Murdoch now retired? Is it Donald Trump? Is it whoever

controls, you know, the electronic apparatus? Like, who is it? Like, particularly beginning magicians, people who are just getting into spirituality, they get into conspiracy theories and looking for, Oh, who has actual control over this? Yeah, what they don't realize is what they're actually looking for. Who who creates this illusion? Could is it all these shadowy figures out there? Or might it just be that voice in your head that says it's you? The voice in your head that says, Oh, I feel good today. I don't feel bad today. All those people probably don't like you. You're not doing well enough. You really should be working harder. Why aren't you asleep? Why are you? Why? Why haven't you woken up yet? All of this stuff, the thing that tells you that

cousin and the thing in your head that constantly narrates the story of who you are and what's going on, that you believe your entire life, the hypnotist in your head, the magician in your head that is narrating this reality to you. This time, the chocolate chip cookie, this time, is going to really make you feel good. You know, like every fucking chocolate chip cookie, you know, I'm going to eat it. It's going to be gone in a millisecond and all the whole experience is like less than a whip it, but you keep fucking doing it. And that chocolate chip cookie, the ones singing the song of the cookies, who is that? The chocolate chip wizard? The wizard of chocolate chips, the person who tells you fucking that. No, the fourth beer is

the one that you need. Let's have one more drink. That'll be good. One more drink for sure. This will be the time that one extra drink really made you feel better. It's the prison warden inside, the captain side. So here's what magic, magic is the quest for reality. Now, reality is fine. Reality is perfect and unchanging and always has been and always will be. We live in a, people always ask me like, oh, show me some magic, bro. Show me some magic. It's like, they want to see a miracle or something like that. It's like, motherfucker, like what do you look at? Look, look at this. Like what is the universe? Like no one understands it. No one can explain it. What is the universe, but a rabbit pulled out of a hat and the greatest

inexplicable miracle that we could ever hope for. And yet, and somehow, despite all odds, it seems to keep going and it seems to all work out in the end. We didn't have nuclear war in the 80s or the 70s. We easily could have. Everything worked out. And you know, we're constantly anxious that it's not going to. Reality is just fine. The problem is that nobody ever contacts reality or sees it because they're either hypnotized by projections of others' minds or ultimately at the end of the day, the thing in their head, the voice in their head that they think is them, the hypnotist inside, the false self, the ego, this is entirely the Buddhist point. The voice that says, oh, you know, oh, I'm so miserable, you know, oh, I'm 45 and my children

are dead, you know, or something, you know, this was the whole point of Buddhism was just snap out of it. It's not you. The thing you think is you is not you. Yeah. Right. It's a perceptual trick created by the brain to explain its own sensory input. Okay. And we're hypnotizing to thinking that it exists. It's just, it's like a perceptual filter created by the brain. So you're saying magic is an assault on that filter? Yes. As is yoga and meditation. They're too separate. They're two different means to do the same thing, which is to get the mind to stop. People. Let me stop you there. My understanding of it, of the practice of meditation is not to make the mind stop. Though David, who I've been working with, has said there is a way to do that,

like that is a path to do that. But it's more of a familiarity with the thing that I formerly called my identity. It's more of a sort of opening up a space within which the whatever you want to call this being, what did you call the magician? What did you call? Mayan. Whatever you want to call it. The ego is too glib. Sure. But you can watch. I like Mayan way better. It's where it's creating a space within which there is a fearless opening up to the many strange rituals this cognitive Mayan is doing within your life, which is, for me, the discursive thought patterns, the habitual identifications with specific types of people, the constant sorcery, throwing out constant webs of illusion and sorcery. Yeah. And just the very act of just watching that,

the seeing the magic show, admitting it's a magic show, and just watching it causes the exact same thing to happen with this type of sorcery or magic that is when you go to watch a magic show, which is just if you just allow yourself out of the, you know, it's so fun to watch a magic show and pretend that the person is doing actual quantum breaking of the laws of physics. And it's one of my favorite YouTube genres is people on YouTube. There's a whole genre of YouTube videos where people are saying street magicians are actually minions of Satan using true magic to do their spells. And it just makes it that much more exciting. But anyway, what I'm saying is all you have to do when you're at the movie, the magic show,

whatever the thing is, is like just touch the ground with your feet and be like, yeah, I don't know how they're doing it, but it's definitely not real magic. And then the illusion seems to be dispelled. Well, that's a very Buddhist. That's one approach. That's a, that's the Buddha, a Buddhist approach, right? And this turns out to be, and it was a, you know, an interesting insight of a Buddha, which is simply that, and I'll just talk from my own experience, it's simply that if you just take the observer position and sit back and watch and allow the thing to be what it is and watch it change while understanding that it is itself inherently impermanent and in a sensual meaning, it has no essential nature to use Buddhist language, then it kind of goes

away on its own. It's kind of like you starve it of attention or starve it of reaction is a better way of putting that. So that's one approach. It's only, it's only one approach. It's the Buddhist approach. There's tons of approaches. That's right. I was trying to create like a, that's as I've been taught, but this thing you're saying is you're calling it an assault on this sort of like, I don't know what you call like a cognitive wisdom tooth or something. This like kind of like it's structure of identity that people have like become or being tortured by. You're saying this is like a methodology to attack this thing, to obliterate it, to annihilate. Yes. I'm being very Borosian. Storm the reality studio, but it's true. I mean,

it's like, you know, there's two ways to- Storm the reality studio? Yeah, that was a Borosian Geisen phrase. So there's multiple methods here. It's like, you know, the meditation is the reduction of the mind to zero, whereas magic is the creation of the, the inverse opposite of the thing to reduce it to zero. Whoa, I'm going to need a, I need to find a calculator in my reality studio to mate. Well, it was very simple, right? It's like, so meditation, look at meditation, right? It's like meditation is one minus one equals zero, which is you take the mind and you reduce its input to nothingness and it's zero. Magic is one plus negative one equals zero. Right. So you create the equal and opposite illusion to blow the whole thing up.

So anyways, we're getting into theory here, but so this is practically, what does this mean? People come to me to learn magic and I show them reality. And this is why I always, you know, there's so many people running around in our world right now who have realized that it's trendy to be into these things and they, it's always been this way and they deck themselves in the right jewelry and say the right things and read the right books and say, you know, talk about astrology or, you know, act like Stevie Nicks or like whatever it is, you know, and, or like, you know, like, you know, you know, like they're in a metal band or whatever, like Crowley. That's true though, but it's always been that way, particularly LA, you know, but it's like

act like Stevie Nicks, you know, witchy, but I know exactly what you're talking about. And it's the same with the spiritual world where people think that if they wear white and beads and all that, then they'll be more spiritual. It's like, no, no, these are, these are just techniques. They're tools, you know, you're getting attached to it and building an identity around the tool. But people have all these weird ideas about magic. They'll think, you know, oh, you do the right primora and the astrology and the, this and that, and then you get power and, you know, and like it's like, and you're a special person and you have insights and now people are turning it into an identity category, which is insane. But, but that's no different than psychedelics.

Well, exactly. It's inevitable in a way. Like suddenly psychedelic or taking psychedelics, at one point was like a form of navigation through the outer realms of our psyche or the subterranean depths or however you want to fucking put it. And then it went from that to becoming a fashion statement. And it's like, it's no longer a thing about, oh, no, I want to like get into my DNA to see if I could like somehow decode the epigenetic race memories in there to like, I'm going to fucking like use this as like a thing. It's a tail feather to make me special. I love to eat mushrooms. I do my ayahuasca rituals. I go down to the, I know a great frog venom dude, I'll connect you. This kind of thing, you know what I mean? It's an inevitability.

So please. It is. And what it really is, is you haven't cured, you know, what, what are these things? They're, they're, they're tools, they're techniques, they're, they're strong medicine for strong problems. Right. And I hate using the phrase medicine because people use that for psychedelics and it's really fucking pretentious. But I'm not talking about psychedelics. I'm talking about what are these techniques? These techniques are for self healing. Let's put it broadly speaking, but at the deepest, most fundamental level. So what is that when people take on the glamour of it? It's, you haven't, you haven't cured your disease. Your disease has decided to wear the clothes of you, the, of the cure. The disease has now masked itself as the cure so that you allow it to perpetuate

and it becomes even worse now. And that's what spiritual bypassing is. That's what people, there's nothing worse than people being in that tunnel of being spiritual materialism and being more and more spiritual for 20 years. Like, no, no, no, it's a tool. It has a point. Use the tool and then discard it. You don't need it after that point. Right. Like it's about fundamental change, but instead people take on the identity of the person who is in process. And we know people like this who are like, you know, they're always having one breakthrough after the next for 10 years and nothing ever changes. It's a cargo cult. It's like the, it's the difference between going to the hospital, you have appendicitis, the doctor takes out your fucking appendix, you recover for however

long it takes to recover and you feel better versus putting on a fake hospital bracelet, a hospital outfit, a bandaid where the cut would have been, and then pretending that you just had an appendectomy. These are two completely different things. One of them you're going to get more fucking sick. And also you're going to get invested in the deception. That's a thing. That's the problem is it's not just that like it's easier to wear spiritual clothes. It's, I'll tell you this, it's fucking easy to buy modular synthesizers. It's easy. If you have money, you just go to perfect circuit and buy them, but learn to play the motherfuckers. Please, that's the hard part, which is why you can get really caught up in like buying musical gear and

getting it all set up. But you realize I'm not making songs at all. So yes, I hear what you're saying. It's like, this is one of the tricks, but let's get to the core. I take one of your classes. What's the first couple of days going to be like? What does that mean? You say you show reality. Like what is that? Well, I teach everything. I mean, you can take classes on everything from ceremonial magic to astral travel. I teach all the wacky stuff too. I love that stuff. You said you show reality. What is that? Here's what I mean by that. So people have this idea. People have all these ideas about magic. There's no governing body. There's no peer review. So unfortunately, we've been in a situation where anybody can say anything about magic and people

believe them because they don't know what it is. And it's been a forgotten cultural thing. Now it's becoming big and everyone can come out of the world work saying this, that and the other about magic and people like, oh, however, the damn thing is a precise science. Like it is a precise thing. If it's magic capital M, meaning the Western esoteric tradition, there is a set series of points that need to be gone through. And so, and people will come up and they'll have these ideas about, oh, astrology, you can get archetypes, mythology, this vision I had a dream. It's like, that's all the mind. That's the sorcery of the mind, right? What my approach to magic is, okay, like, we're not even going to talk about magic. Here's what we're going to do.

You're going to sit down and learn to hold still without moving for an hour. And then you're going to learn to keep your breath steady down to, let's say, one or two minutes per breath for that hour. And then you're going to train your mind to hold single-pointed focus. And until you can do that, don't be talking to me about magic. Then we'll talk. And this is the critical point in that, that everyone from the Kabbalists to the Hindus will talk about, like you talk about, for instance, because this confuses people, you look at the meditative traditions, like Buddhism or Hinduism, and you hear them talking about non-dual states and the silence of the mind and just being enlightened and present in reality. And then you look at that

and you're like, well, how does that jibe with all this other shit? Like, there's all this astrology and all this ritual stuff and people saying, you know, gods and spirits and dreams and channeled writings. It's like, how does that jibe? The answer is really simple. They're just different levels of reality. So you have basic material reality. Then the next layer up, we could broadly call the astral plane, which is the level of imagination and dreams and vibes and, you know, empathetic feelings and telepathy and the cities and all of that. That's something you see passing out the window from the freeway on your destination, right? But unfortunately, people, it's like the story and let me rephrase this and make this even simpler. As the mind begins to quiet

through discipline, you go down strata. You go down the strata of discursive and logical thought, and that takes a long time to break through, a long time, take years, less if you have good techniques and guidance, right? And discipline is the most important. Nothing replaces that. Once you get down, once you file down the discursive mind and you get past normal waking consciousness, then you get into the lower strata. And the lower strata of the mind are what they produce things like dreaming the dream state, which by the way is always operative during the day, not when you're asleep. It's just that you're not perceiving it because you're focused on the discursive. Once the discursive goes away, the dream state emerges into the mind and that's

when people start getting loopy, right? So you've got that. You've got the level of intuition of what appear to be often appear to be telepathic messages from other people. It's like, you know, this meditator's experienced this stuff. But it's just more bullshit. As same with visions, people start to experience visions and things like this, particularly if they have extended sensory deprivation through meditation. They'll experience visions of past lives, they'll experience visions of who they could be, they could experience, they experience deep, seemingly profoundly meaningful releases about traumas from life. It's still the mind doing shit, right? And this is very hard because it's like, as the mind becomes more and more threatened,

it becomes more and more seductive and it's marketing. It becomes more and more like, well, what about this? It keeps sucking you in. And so what happens in the majority of cases of people who think they know about magic is they've gotten lost somewhere along the way and whole cultures, you know, it's like shamanic culture is essentially just never got past that point. There's not necessarily anything wrong with that. It's just that the total goal is to get past that into the silence of the mind at which point, then you begin to get into what are classically called enlightenment stages. And that's an even more dangerous territory because then you start to think that you know something. And there's lots of, you know, the Buddhists talk

about genres and, you know, there's levels of Samadhi and Hinduism and things like this. But, you know, if you look at our culture, you know, in no time in history has it ever been easy to do this. And the majority of human history, this was reserved for priesthood class and initiates, right? The Ellicenian history, you know, it was reserved for an elite. Now that's not the case. Now all the information is out there, you know, and I've worked very hard to facilitate that process in the time that I've been alive, but it's been ongoing for a long time. But now, even though we have access to the information and the techniques, which is fairly unique in world history, as far as I know, we now not only have to deal with the backtrack of our

minds, which is more than enough to deal with, but we are immersed in the sea of everyone's interconnected thoughts. And I would submit at the very least, whether one is interested in enlightenment or not, I would submit at the very least, the ones, and I feel like this is fairly incontrovertible, one success in life is directly tied to how well you can focus. And we live in quicksand right now where people are just, they're completely destroyed between the ears. They can't hold one single train of thought from one moment to the next, you know, let alone do something like maintain single-pointed focus. So the tools, we live in an interesting time where, yes, the world situation is very precarious, but even more than that, we live in a very, very unique time

where all of the information and techniques are there and there's friendly people such as myself who are happy to walk you through them to save you time. That's never been the case ever. And yet, the back drag, the impedance to making spiritual progress has never been more severe. You know, we've never had phones that have push notifications. You know, we've never been expected to be on all the time answering emails every second, waking second of the day. We've never had, you know, infinite electronic virtual reality. You know, our world now is a virtual reality. Forget the actual virtual reality headset. The whole thing's a virtual reality. If you just go out onto the street and you look at all these corporate chain restaurants,

corporate restaurants, restaurants are virtual realities. Our world is a virtualized thing. Yeah, we're living in a hypnotic maze that is selling smaller mazes that are equally hypnotic. It's like maze with a maze with a maze. And not only that, people love getting lost in the maze. I was just watching this video game review for some video game. I don't remember what it was called, but the guy was like saying like, you know, that feeling you get that feeling when you get lost in a video game, you know, that special feeling. I haven't had that in a while. But this game, it did it. And it's like, Oh, fuck, you mean hypnosis, you know, that feeling of being completely hypnotized by technology. I'm building a tolerance. And finally, a game has come along

to keep me in that state of addiction and addicted state. And I love it. This is what the reviewer, he didn't say the addicted part. But yeah, so here we are wandering in a maze that it has within it. It's basically like, imagine a fucking technological maze that was wrapped up in time that within the maze were actually paid entrances to other fucking mazes that had inside of them access to even deeper mazes and deeper mazes. And then this is where we're at. Wandering through this insane, beautiful, hypnotic maze state. And it sucks. Who the fuck wants to have you ever gone in a hedge maze? I have. Have you gotten lost in one? No, it sucks. Like when it actually happens, when you get lost in the fucking maze that looks so cool on the shining or whatever,

you're like, I went out of here. This is bullshit. Why did I even go into the stupid, boring ass green series of shit tunnels? I've got a pee. Where's the bathroom? Why did I do this? This sucks. This seems to have happened to most of us only in this case. We don't know we're in a maze. We think it's civilization. Right. And you're saying, well, there is, if you really wanted to no longer be wandering through this fucking dumb maze or confusing maze or heartbreaking maze or ultimately unsatisfying maze, there might be an exit. But how do we know you're not just running another maze? You don't. I would be intellectually dishonest to claim that I knew anything,

but I will say this, that we have been assured throughout all human history by those who have done the work that meditation is the path towards awakening. And that has been shown to be incontrovertibly true in my life and with a lot of people that said it is questionable. Ken, what we're talking about is it is questionable at any time in history, how many people have ever actually done the work. And by done the work, I mean, like put in the time to actually make some type of attainment. And it's a long, you know, it's faster if you get someone to show you, but you know, it takes time. Nobody wants to do it. I mean, that's the, to me, that's what I love about it. Because they're addicted, right? It's like, this is, what is Buddhism? You know, like,

for instance, it's like, you know, as you know, if you hang around Buddhist circles, you meet a lot of ex addicts, right? There's a lot of recovering addicts in Buddhism. Buddhism and magic is not Buddhism, although it certainly takes techniques from it. Buddhism is largely a process of breaking addiction, right? But it's breaking the ultimate addiction, which is just all sensory experience, right? It's the incarnation. And it is that very like sober, you know, humorless sober attitude, right? I don't think they're humorless. Well, not all of some are, you know, not all of them. But if they aren't, if they do have humor, it's usually gallows humor on the surface of like a vast, you know, gaping void of nothingness. But magic is,

let me just put it this way, right? Magic is dehypnosis. And, but people have these ideas, again, inherited from pop culture and these weird 60s eddies about things. It's like, oh, you know, you just need to overcome your ego. First of all, the egos are very modern terms created by Freud. It's very unspecific as well. Also, and we know, you know, particularly from Buddhism, that taking such an aggressive attitude towards oneself is not very healthy. But it is certainly to dehypnotize yourself from illusion, but not to make yourself less. It's not this Christian idea of, you know, flagellating yourself or like, oh, I'm so worthless, you know, that people got from

Christianity and it's now inherent in our culture, inherent at every level of our culture, because it's still a Christian culture, you know, Judeo-Christian culture, despite the fact that we've shifted all that to kind of like a modernism, consumerism and so on, but still the same impulse. What if it's, what if the dehypnosis is from the, you're dehypnotizing yourself from your own powerlessness, because like you were saying earlier, the story you tell yourself about, oh, I'm just one person, I'm just so small, I can't do anything. I always screw everything up, like that, that's not you. What if the dehypnosis is to dehypnotize yourself from the illusion of powerlessness, you know, and as Stuart Brand said, you know, it's like, I think it was Stuart Brand

said that, you know, we are, we are as gods, we might as well start acting like it. Well, let me stop you there, because I want to, this is where I get stuck, I get, I've hit this place on psychedelics, I've hit the, it's when you don't take psychedelics usually, but you, you have this one last residual sliver of identity that's like clinging to the pre-merging state that can happen through psychedelics that is very temporary, but still can be quite profound if you're super compressed into your identity. It also reminds me of one of my favorite moments in dreams, which is, I have, I have them every once in a while where you're having a shitty dream, and then suddenly you remember, oh, this is a dream, I can wake up,

and it's a really big relief if you're being chased by something, it's a great relief to have that in a dream, it's wonderful, it's freedom, you know, you're like, oh, I'm not going to get devoured by a wolf, I'm not actually in some kind of disastrous absurd situation, it's a dream, and then within that realization, there's power if you decide to stay in the dream, all kinds of all kinds of ridiculous things you can do once you like start lucid dreaming, it's a blast, but then there's the problem, which is that, well, also it's just a dream, you're just dreaming, it's really not much of anything at all. Now, that's okay in a dream because you're going to wake up into this dream, but in this dream, when you've hit that point of realizing like, shit, man,

should I, I'm not saying this is even possible, but should I levitate, should I walk through a wall, should I translocate, should I develop some telepathic ability, should I start inducing specific changes in my world and community and life that are profoundly accelerating and are going to push me into some alternate dream where I'm more powerful, more successful, more whatever, that's going to be exciting for a second, but then I also have to face the truth, this is just a dream too, that means everyone I know, everything I love, all that I've encountered, and every single important thing, all the books I've read, it's just as empty and phantasmal and ultimately,

I don't know, how would you say, opaque as a dream, meaning that the first rush, I think, which is something that comes from magic, is going to be immediately followed by another thing, which is like, yeah, you got to say goodbye to the whole shit kaleidoscope, and even though you think you've earned the shit kaleidoscope, or even though you think the shit kaleidoscope is your connection to your family, everything you've loved, it's just a shit kaleidoscope. Well, you say just, but this is the thing, right? By the way, I don't mean a shit kaleidoscope, I'm using your terms, I think it's a kaleidoscope kaleidoscope, but I don't know what the fragments are in there, they're beautiful though, if it's shit, so what?

The dream is worth preserving, right? And this is a critical point. Now, why am I sitting here talking to you instead of doing what I should have done, which is just blipping out of existence somewhere in the Himalayas in 2010, when I had the damn chance to do so? Yeah, why? Here's the deal. People will get this idea of a spirituality, like it's an escape, or they're escaping from something, or they're waking up into something, and kind of what you're describing is that there's a certain feedback loop that happens, like when you take a camera and point it at the TV, right, that's plugged into, where it creates this feedback spiral, which is, oh, what about this, and then this,

and then I'm waking up, and that's, again, it's discursive thought, it's the mind doing shit before quieting. Eventually, I'll just say that I've come to certain conclusions, because they don't know if they're the same ones that everyone should have. This is where I'm at now, in my thinking about it. Eventually, one is forced by the path in one by life, and by one's life, to simply be what one is, right? And there's no escape from that. It's like you just have to, because it's not just surrender to the mind, and it's certainly not trying to merge back into the universe, you know, as if such a thing could even be possible. It's accepting what you are and not trying to fidget away from it, right, which yoga powerfully demonstrates at the physical

level, just be, just let it hurt, stop trying to make it not hurt, let it hurt, just let it do its thing, just be with it, just deal, and eventually that becomes or should become a kind of warrior mentality, which is, this is not the time, we were talking about this earlier, this is not the time for, you know, like, okay, I gotta lighten, peace out, see you guys, bye, you know, and maybe for some people, right? But for the first time, I think in, as far as I know, in human history, maybe it's been this way in other ways, for the first time ever, I mean, we really seriously face the prospect of losing this planet, right? And there's certain things going on, there's overpopulation, there's environmental degradation, there's the existential threat of

artificial intelligence, particularly, there's the development of new weaponry, like nano weaponry and bio weaponry, that the ongoing existence of humanity and of nature and of the biosphere is greatly in question. You know, it would be good to say, well, things always work out, and I said that earlier, but we don't actually know that for sure. And despite all mythology and intuition to the contrary, or even mathematical thinking about it, for all we know, there's no other conscious life anywhere else in the universe. That seems highly unlikely that that's the case, but we don't know, right? So for all we know, like human life on earth is where it's at, right? It's like, it's what we've got. And yes, there's all these ideas about spirituality and gods and

other planes, but largely, these are manifested by humans and would not exist without humans in theory. So, so is this the time to just check out? No, right? I think that this is the time to, there's a time to, there's a time to attempt to stand above time as it were. Well, it's the parable of the sower, man. Everybody thinks the parable of the sower is about, I've always thought of the parable of the sower as a kind of galactic message to whatever the person or beings or collective or whatever it was that pansper me it out into the universe and sent DNA and why this is again, another bullshit story. But what I'm saying is the parable of the sower, there was, you know, how do they, how does it go? This is through seeds on the ground.

And some of the seeds didn't grow because the ground wasn't, it wasn't fertile. Now, I think if this is like the epigenet or the genetic material on the meteorites that collided with planets that just weren't life sustaining, then some of the seeds, they landed on the ground and maybe they grew for a second, but then they weren't like, they weren't, but they died or they didn't work. To me, I think, oh, that's the message from like the great, if there were some kind of like, I don't know, hyper dimensional civil series of civilizations out there, the message is not all planets work out. It doesn't always work. Like just because you're here, it doesn't mean it's, you stay here, meaning that if you can, if you can become, what is it, wheat and not

shape as a planetary civilization, then that is when the veil lifts and you are welcomed into the great whatever it is. The aliens are like, okay, finally, you're cool. You can, we'll show ourselves. So to me, it's like, it's kind of like, look, if we've grown, we've, we're a seed, we're seeds that we've grown this incredible civilization, which is quite beautiful, but it's a parasitic relationship with the substrate that it's growing on. And that is not sustainable anymore than cancer works, you know, when the moment the DNA starts reproducing in a way that runs counter to the biological imperatives of whatever the particular organism is that the thing is infesting, well, then you're in a temporary situation. If you're trying to survive as cancer, so it ain't going to

work. But if the mutation becomes something that actually is symbiotic and not parasitic, then at that point, you become not just some, that thing that can live, but potentially you become a positive mutation. You know what I'm saying? So in that way, I think the way I would phrase what you're saying is it's the dream is not a dream in the sense that we are all sharing the dream on this beautiful planet. Maybe the planet is having the dream, maybe we're the subconscious of the planet, I don't know, but the reality of it is there's a chance, I think for us as individuals to have a, the experience of not being chafed, so to speak, being wheat, but then also collectively there's a chance, I would imagine, for us to jump into a sustainable, harmonized, technological,

space-faring civilization that has passed whatever the particular initiation is that we were all going through. Yeah. Sorry, that was a long rant. No, it's, it's, so are you saying magic is the is something that can help people not just help themselves, but the planet too? Yeah, absolutely. It's interesting to bring up space. I mean, like Timothy Leary actually said that, right? He said that magic, in a sense, was preparation for weightlessness. It was, it was, it was evolving yourself to the point of being able to be space-faring, right? Which I think is totally true. It sounds fantastic, but as one gets into these states, it makes total sense. Yeah. We, we are, we, we must evolve and evolution is not a given. In fact, humanity seems to be

regressing so quickly despite, you know, it's like, we seem to be regressing emotionally at the same rate that our technology advances, which is quite frightening because then once you reach that crossover point where we're no longer able to maintain the technology, then it's all gone. So if I was to say anything, it would be, well, I would say a lot of things, but I think that the process of waking up, whether it's by magic or meditation or, or any, any other means, is seeing reality, understanding that it hurts and being okay with it hurting more. Yeah. Right. It's like, great. Yes, it hurts. And everything that we do is to distract ourselves

from that fact. You know, and if one were to simply accept that it hurts, you know, it drops off so much nonsense. Sure does, man. That's, I remember when I started doing that, that's a really empowering thing. It's like, if you actually stop trying to like imagine you're not suffering or whatever the thing is you're doing to produce the padding, the fake fucking padding between you and the sensation you've been avoiding maybe for your whole life, then suddenly it's not just that you like, you know, it's a lot of energy to filter out the pain. I mean, that's a huge, that's a lot of rainbow wheels spinning to make that, to succeed at that, but you get a lot of cognitive energy back. But then also you realize, oh my God, I was like, I was essentially like trying to,

I didn't, the thing I was trying, I was avoiding was my, it was power. I was like giving up all this power that comes from accepting and be not just accepting as though you, it's you and the pain. It's like you are the pain. This is the truth of suffering, duke. And it's beautiful in the same way like we find the, the, you know, an elemental anything and a thing that can't be split, you know, it's a very powerful, to me, it's quite powerful and wonderful to stop the game of trying to put lipstick on the fish or whatever you want to call it. It's like, no, this is, this is, this is you are suffering. You're in pain right now. It's okay. You don't have to be the Instagram version of yourself. You could still Instagram all that bullshit if you want, but you're allowed to

like be in it as it is. I see that that might be some kind of beginning phase, right? Yeah, of maturity. I think when I was, let's see, how old was I in 2006? So I would have been 25. I had a vision. I talked about it on the first episode of your podcast. I had a vision of the universal suffering and hopelessness of existence, right? And in that, over the course of a year around that experience, I lost my job. I lost my girlfriend. I lost, I ended up living in Canada. And then I ended up on living in the suburbs on the outskirts of Vancouver, unable to get out of bed without antidepressants and unable to move, unable to feed myself, laying there in the darkness and there was one light in the room. I remember it was totally dark. There was one window that light

was coming in from and that was Kether for me. That was the final stop on the tree of life. That was the Godhead because it was everything, nothing, everything else had gone. There was only that. And then the Canadian government threw me out of the country and I was, I had nothing. I lost all of my physical possessions. And so I had literally nothing. And I ended up in a hotel room in Bellevue, Washington, or Bellingham, Washington with a six pack and washing forest gump on TV because that's all I had left, like a one pair of clothes. And I remember I was in the bathroom and the faucet was going and I was just trying to understand what had happened to me and why all this had, and this was, I've been on the top of the world. I've been the boy, dashing boy wonder

of magic. My first book out at 23, beloved by, and I went from the top of the world to the bottom within a year. And I remember staring in the mirror and feeling my breath and realizing that it was really the only thing I had left and being completely grateful for it. It's like, if that's all I have, that's okay. I'm grateful for every breath because the alternative is obliteration. And thank you for this. And that was the moment that things started turning around. And then everything came back, you know, fairly, fairly quickly. But you got to do, you got to hit that spot first. It seems, it seems some people seem to go through it. I think that

but things change quickly from there where, you know, you change your opinion on these things. It's, it's all too easy. Any teenager can be nihilistic. And most of them are, it's like, oh, everything sucks. It's like, that's easy, right? But, you know, I went from total idealism to total disintegration. And I mean, total, I mean, there's a lot, there's a lot went on in that year. And, but it went from there to realizing that there was a moment in there where I said, if the gods will not help me, I will do it myself. Right? Yeah, it's like, if there are no gods, and they do not answer my prayers, then I will do it myself. Right. And, and, and this is the beginning of something, right? So,

and then I went from that to realizing, if there is no, let us say that as adults, we come to realize that there is no Santa Claus, right? There's no Santa, that all of these are myths, that there's no, there's no there, there, there's no super magical super parent that is going to come make everything okay at the end of the day. It becomes easy to become disillusioned and say, it was all a lie. But then what I realized is, those are good ideals, they are good stories, and it is our, I would say, responsibility, or it is certainly a calling, certainly for me, to make them real. Like as if, you know, if we are the gods, then we must be beloved, we must act like it, we must be benevolent gods, we must work to create benevolence and hope,

and better meaning. And this is maybe not for everyone, but certainly for people who are in a position of leadership. You know, it's like right now, like I'm looking around in the country, and it's amazing, I mean, Blanche, I don't want to talk about politics, but I mean, you look at some of the debates that are, like the Democratic debates, they're not discussing any of the real issues, other than Andrew Yang, whose mic they shut off. People have no idea what's coming, you know, structural unemployment, you know, what, what are people going to, like, people are going to be, let me, let me put it this way. In the next five to 10 years, you're going to be told certain things about yourself. You're going to be told

that your work is not needed. You're going to be told you're not valuable. And you're going to be led to believe that what is real, quote, unquote, is this increasingly abstracted thing. You know, you look at the, the markets, the economy, right now, that used to be based on work. You did work, you got value for it. Then it became derivatives and financial abstraction and trading, and it becomes this more and more abstract thing. Until now, we have blockchain and cryptocurrency, which is like the ultimate abstraction taken away from physical labor. So you look at the market and all of these companies values are going up. So people get, you know, the market, the economy is going up and up and up, but that's not based on salaries are not going up. It's based on these

companies, you know, selling off their stock and buying it back and laying people off and all of, all of these manipulations and sorcery, right, illusion. That's all that is illusion. And you're going to be told that your work is not needed, that you are not valuable because AIs or outsourcing can do what once you were convinced was the reason for your existence. What, what people will forget is that none of that is, all of that is meaningless. That the true value of the value, what creates real value and what is truly valuable is people, right? We have a whole country full of capable, intelligent, educated people who could do anything were they to have the group will, the political will to do so. And people are being convinced. Oh, no, it's like political

polarization, you know, left versus right, everything's falling apart. Oh, you can't do anything because the world's dying. You can't do anything because Trump, there's AIs are going to take the jobs, you know, you can't, you have your powerless. It's sorcery. Again, it's illusion. You know what it reminds me of to interject silly real quick. I remember when the fucking government shutdown happened, people were showing pictures of trash in the national parks. And they were saying like, look what's happened. The trash is stacking up in the national parks. And it seemed like no one thought I can clean the trash up, right? I could get a truck. I could rent a truck for almost nothing and come and clean. And if I got enough people, we could all clean up

the parks. Nobody, everybody was like, fuck, look what happens without the government, the trash piles up. That was amazing to look at that. I think, oh, right, of course, we're so fucking weirdly de-skilled to the point that we can't even pick trash up in a park that isn't our own trash. And so the other side of that is the collective realization like, oh yeah, we can clean up our own trash. We don't need the government to come and clean the trash up. It would be nice if they wanted to chip in, but if they want to fucking argue about goddamn AO fucking C and socialism or whatever it is that they're caught up in. If they want to get mad at super powerful women that are appearing in the politics or whatever it is, freaking them out, go ahead. Such a weird reality

show right now, all of this. Yeah. But it's like, to me, it's sad because it's like a lot of these people that are becoming fodder for the attacks of the right wing people. I think they legitimately want to like help. And then they suddenly are like being like, you know, they can't get away from being packaged by their enemies in specific ways. And the whole thing ends up making, they become reactive. I don't know. I don't know. Well, again, politics against sorcery, delusion. Yeah. But it's that, to me, what's very exciting in my own life, because that's what I have to do is like, if I let my brain get caught up in politics or whatever the thing is, I embarrass myself because I'm almost wrong 100% of the time in my political predictions. But in my own life, when I pull it

down to like realizing like, wait a second, I can fix my own shit. Oh, the pump isn't working, or this thing isn't working, or oh, the shelf, I need to, I don't need a handyman hang a goddamn shelf. I saw a commercial for one of the most, I don't know what the fuck it was, the product, maybe some app. But it's basically a lady sipping a glass of champagne in her house, while all these people come in, they're like making toast for, they're putting a TV in, they're painting the wall for, they're literally doing everything. Because apparently she can't do it. She can't do anything except drink champagne while the app brings in people to help her. So this to me is the reduced disempowered state of many, many people who have forgotten. Guess what?

You can solder, you can hang a shelf, you can sew your pants, you can actually keep your house clean, you can get in shape, you can learn to play piano, you are not limited. You can build a space-faring civilization, you can fix the environmental issue, you can make a country that works, you can talk to your neighbors for God's sake. That's right, you don't, and you don't have to wait for a government action, you don't have to wait for legislation that produces a talk to your neighbor day or whatever, you can go talk to them now. This is the sorcery, the sort, I don't even think it's like the government has intentionally cast the spell, I think it's just easier to believe that if you

sit around and fucking wait, someone's gonna fix the problem. That's that dark conversation we had where you asked me a really important question and he would ask themselves. The last time you called the cops, if you're unfortunate enough to call the cops, how long did it take for them to get to your fucking house? Right? They weren't there in five minutes, they were there in like hours. And yet, you know, as you may have, as I have been, you know, like been pulled over for not wearing a seatbelt while driving at 15 miles an hour on a back road somewhere in LA, you know, it's like, and had to go to traffic court. Because there ain't no money in mopping up your fucking blood from being attacked or whatever it is, it's like that. So the point is, is like,

the illusion is like, you're not safe. First of all, someone wants to do a home invasion on your ass and you're not prepared in some way or another. The cops aren't showing up until long after your arms have been chopped up and your guts have been taped to the wall with that gorilla fucking tape or whatever. I don't know. I mean, it's the point is, is like, no one's coming to help you. To me, this is what you're talking about the Keith or the what did you call it? The Heather, no one's coming to fucking help you. So give that idea up. You're not going to get help except from yourself. In the moment you come to that conclusion, a fire will light under your ass, so to speak. Yeah, it's hard. It's sobering, you know, it's salt, alchemical salt, and it's

painful. But it's only painful for a second. It's like painful in the way if you've been sitting in a chair eating eating chips all day, and you stand up for a second, your knee pops. Well, that can be painful for another reason, which is that if you admit that, then you also have to admit that therefore, nobody else caused your problem except for you. That's right. Now, this is a slippery one too, because people often use this again to spiritually bypass looking at things like structural abuse of power. And, you know, it's like, you know, try saying to somebody, you know, who's like dealing with abusive cops like, oh, you did this to yourself, you know, no, no, no, no. No, not that. Right. But

ultimately, we don't have, we just don't have that many options, right? Like, it's like, you know, I hate to use Christian metaphors, but it's like, you know, it's like, either pick up your cross and bear it or don't. You know, it's like, I think it's either a Jewish or another prayer, maybe it was Nietzsche, I can't remember, said, you know, don't pray for the pain to go away, pray to be stronger to bear it. You know, and it's like, I think that's what the universe is intelligent, right? It's like the universe, whether one is deist or not, you know, I tend to feel the universe seems to be like some kind of like field intelligence, which has loci, which are in individuals and potentially disincarnate beings as well, like gods and spirits, but it's all one

field. And psychedelics seem to suggest that, although it could just be showing you the extent of your own mind touching other things. But you know, I lost my train of thought. Well, no, I know that the universe is intelligent. We're no doubt, whatever you call it, we're a loci like that. No doubt, whatever you call it, we're points of consciousness in this like tapestry of sentience, the sentience manifests through us, we manifest technology, and we're very, very powerful. And it's a very exciting thing. And yes, we are to blame. To me, it's like, that sucks when you realize like, oh, motherfucker, it's like this entire time I've been chasing my own tail, and my tail's been wrecking my life because I haven't understood I even had a tail,

and it's just leaving destruction all over the god damn place. It goes away either. But I love that. Because to me, that's an exciting moment. And I don't mean like in the grand systemic fucking like awful domination structures that exist in the totality of society. Take all those. It's absolutely true. If you depending on your as Terrence McKenna puts it, your photon reflectivity, you have a higher statistical probability of being shot by a police officer. And this is fucking true. And it fucking sucks. It's the worst of the worst. I, in fact, am not equipped to even talk about it. So I won't. But one thing I know for sure, when I'm sitting in the fucking hotel pissed off, because they didn't clean my room. I don't know if you've ever had

that kind of embarrassing anger. Oh, yeah, yeah, where you're sitting in there like, what happened? They didn't clean my room yelling customer service somewhere. But you get literally the dumbest epiphany ever, which is, wait, why don't I clean it? Why don't I just clean it up? I can make the bed. It's not like I made that big a mess. I can make the fucking bed. I can throw out the trash. And I can make this room clean on my own. And I don't have to wait for someone else to come and do it for me. And after the initial embarrassment of realizing you number one had a consumer rage, which Jesus Christ, whenever I get it, it's like, I think I'd rather have one of the Apple store a couple weeks ago and then end of which escalated into a bad Yelp review, which I then

guiltily took down the next day. The worst is the worst. But so what I'm saying is like, to me, it's like, yes, it's embarrassing to realize that the fucking whole time you're sitting there waiting for someone to come clean your room, you get it done in eight minutes. It's also the most exciting thing would you realize your entire life is like that. And the thing you've been waiting for someone to come and do, oh, you wanted to meet the guru or whatever, you wanted to find the this or you wanted to find the fucking that the thing that makes you a special person, you don't have long lasts. Yeah, you don't need any of it. You can do it now. I love that. And like, to me, they all boils down to something that usually quite pragmatic and simple. And my very brief encounters with

magic have been like, have had within them encoded within them that sense of like, look, you can do it, you're going to have to do this. If you want to swim, like, you're going to have to get in the water, you're going to have to get in the water. Magic makes that point very, very clearly. And I think that magic in my experience has been a profoundly maturing path. Because for many reasons, I mean, first of all, it automatically poses the question. It automatically just by, you know, this is why that why I, you know, people said, I'll use something else besides magic. So people take it seriously. It's like, no, I like it's almost like a Zen cone, right? Because just by adopting that word, it puts you in the driver's seat, essentially,

at least theoretically, where you're like, okay, well, well, what does that mean? Does that mean that everything I believe before is not necessarily true? Yes. But it poses the question, it forces one to answer the question. If this were real, and if I were to be able to do anything potentially, what would I do? And what is ethical to do, hopefully, right? And magic, he mentioned earlier, people can get their fingers burnt. Well, people can get their fingers burnt doing dumb shit. And that's true of anything in life. The good thing about magic is that people learn, hopefully, from those experiences. And I think there are, you know, like people, they're sometimes people do need to touch the stove to understand that it's there.

I think that's right. I think that the universe is constantly, you know, not to anthropomorphize it, but the universe seems to be constantly forcing the maturation of souls and the evolution of souls. Magic is the accelerated path. It's like, I want it now. And also, here's the thing. And therefore, it can be very, very strenuous. If you're worried about getting your fingers burnt when you're sitting on fucking stove, you're an idiot, right? It's like, you got to get out of the stove. And I think that a lot of times many of us, you know, have this idea of like, oh, I don't want to do that certain thing or go on down that path because I've heard weird things about it. It might hurt me. It's like, actually, what it's, I think the first is you need to realize

you're in a stove. Like the first thing is you're fucking cooking, baby. You're being boiled right now and you're pretending you're not. You are suffering. You are in the boiling water right now. And at this point, worrying about getting burnt is irrelevant because you got to get out of the pot. That's step one. First, realize there's a pot. You're boiling it. Second, get the fuck out. And then once you do that, you know, if you're surrounded by people who don't even realize they're getting charbroiled or whatever it is by Maya, then yeah, there's an instantaneous power that is right there. Because like if people are, you know, what do they say? A hungry man is an angry man? A burning man. You know, someone who's like being boiled alive is not thinking clearly.

And in that state of cloudiness, they could be exploited in the most horrific ways, which I think we're seeing. It's happening. You underestimate people though, because people pretend to be less conscious than they actually are. That's right. You can't fool people. I think that look, here's the bottom line. It's like, if people are scared by magic, good. You know, it's like, if you, if you, if you, you're, you're scared, oh, something could go terribly wrong. Good. Don't start. You know, it's like, I certainly don't, I don't need to carry people. I don't need to be teaching people who don't want to do it. You know, I'm not an evangelist. I don't want to wake everyone up. I just, I'm just doing my thing. And if people are interested in there, they're

interested. It's a path for the brave. And it's a path with no guarantees. If you want easy answers, it's not the right place, right? Cause this magic, you don't get anything that you don't forge for yourself. You know, nobody can hand you anything. If you want easy answers, go become a Scientologist or something. You know, it's like you're joining the church or just be a normal, you know, you know, just hang out on Reddit and watch Star Wars, new Star Wars movies or whatever else that has taken the place of religion and people's lives. Well, you could do both. Tell people how to find you. We have to wrap it up. I don't mean to end abruptly, but I do actually, holy shit, I got to get ready for this thing that's happening soon.

So it's magic.me, m-a-g-i-c-k.me. I have almost 120 hours of content there. At least certainly don't need to watch it all. I teach everything from ceremonial magic to chaos magic to astral projection to tarot to each thing. I do bi-weekly live sessions where I answer questions one-on-one and I'll spend like 45 minutes with a student, you know, we'll be going through like serious questions and life blockages and things like that. Those are great sessions. So magic.me and you can subscribe and get access to all of that. There's lots more coming. If you are interested, but you just want to check it out and see if it's for you, I have a free introductory course, which I mentioned it on your show before, but I should

plug it again, which is if you text the word wizard, w-i-z-a-r-d, to the phone number 44222. So it's wizard to the phone number 44222. Only if you live in the U.S., you will get a new 16-minute guided meditation. It's actually the one we did earlier today with Duncan and a free introductory course. If you're outside the U.S., then just go to magic.me, m-a-g-i-c-k.me, and there's a link for the free course in the bar at the top of the site. Take his class. This is the real deal. He comes over and my house lights up. It's the best. Thank you for your time, Jason. You're quite welcome. Hare Krishna. The kindness of subscribing to the idea that at any given moment,

you could be reborn into a new phase of your life where health, happiness, equanimity, joy, and high-level elite level orgasms are yours every single day. Until next time, I wish you a wonderful midsummer. Hare Krishna. Goodbye. A good time starts with a great wardrobe. Next stop, JC Penney. Family get-togethers to fancy occasions, wedding season two. We do it all in style. Dresses, suiting, and plenty of color to play with. Get fixed up with brands like Liz Claiborne, Worthington, Stafford, and Jay Farrar. Oh, and thereabouts for kids. Super cute and extra affordable. Check out the latest in-store, and we're never short on options at jcp.com.

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