Duncan Trussell Family Hour - JASON LOUV in MAGICK CLASS

Episode Date: July 18, 2015

Jason Louv, Ultraculture, magick.me, returns to the DTFH to teach Duncan about the secret arts!!   THIS EPISODE BROUGHT TO YOU BY CASPER.COM

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Go to casper.com and enter an offer code, Family Hour, to get $50 off your first order. Hello, my dear sweet dovelings. It is I, Duncan Tressel, and this is the Duncan Tressel Family Hour podcast, and today's episode is dedicated to magic, the secret art, not magic like guy dressed like Elvis yanking rabbits out of a hat, not magic like David Copperfield or Cirque du Soleil, any kind of that Vegas horse shit, not magic like Chris Angel greased hair, climbing into a whale stomach and holding his breath for 17 hours. No, even though all that stuff is entertaining and interesting, this episode is dedicated to magic with a K. A lot of people, when they hear that, they get the heebie jeebies, they consider it to be the ultimate version of woo, woo,

and they turn off to it. And I understand why because it sounds downright ridiculous, especially if you've done even the slightest exploration to the concepts presented by some of the magical systems, for example, the idea that at any given moment, we're surrounded by entities, disembodied motes of consciousness with personalities that can that either want to hurt us or help us or trick us, and that if we know how to, we can harness these the power of these entities, we can summon spirits using incantations to produce effects in our life that bring us closer to whatever our goals happen to be. And that concept is a lot of people just write it off as complete bullshit. And then if you believe in it, then a lot of people say that it's evil. The dabbling

in that kind of stuff can lead to insanity, can ultimately destroy your life. And it's the trick of the devil, which is where the term black magic and white magic came from. And a lot of people, to this very day, truly believe that if you set off down the path of magic, then you will damn your soul to eternal suffering, because it's a forbidden art, which of course only makes it that much more attractive to anyone who hears that, who's like me. And if you explore the idea that you can actually get damned for trying to make your life better than it seems to point in the direction that you need to rebel as much as you can against whatever God would, for whatever ridiculous reason, choose to create a potential energy source that could amplify and enhance your

life and then punish you eternally for accessing that energy source. My POV on this stuff is this. We have an ocean of phenomena surrounding us. And as part of this ocean of phenomena, we have our physical bodies and our egos and our consciousness of ourself. And we have within us, and I think this is true for just about everybody, a sense that if we applied ourselves, we could experience a happier life. And anyone who has actually applied themselves in the direction of achieving some goal knows that it's not the achieving the goal that brings the great exhilarating rush of happiness, but it's the pursuit of the thing itself that seems to create varying states of bliss and happiness and joy. It's not winning the war, but it's the war itself

that seems to really appeal to us. When I say war, I don't mean war in the normal blowing people up war, even though it is true. If you've seen one of my favorite parts of the movie, Apocalypse Now, is when the, I don't remember who played this incredible, this character, but he's the guy who, he's the surfing guy. He's the head of the helicopter brigade, and he's a badass. And if you've ever seen Apocalypse Now, then you'll remember one of this incredible scene. He's the guy who said, I love the smell of napalm in the morning. But there's a fantastic scene in Apocalypse Now where he sort of gets down on one knee, and it almost seems like he's about to start crying. And he says,

this war is going to end soon. This war is going to end one day, something like that. And he's clearly kind of broken hearted about that. Well, if you're anybody who's analyzed the specific circumstances of your life, then you've probably begun to realize that human existence in its own way is a kind of war, not a war against some external enemy, but a war against the forces of entropy that want to hold you to a specific set of patterns that you call your life or your identity. And if those sets of patterns that you have, that are, you're attached to are creating an unhealthy body or an unhealthy mind or unhealthy relationships or a general sense of sadness, a kind of malaise, a bitterness and anger, a feeling of unhappiness, turmoil,

not getting enough sleep, not eating right, a feeling of laziness, a general sense of feeling diffused, blurry, and ultimately completely confused by your life situation, then those are your enemies for the sake of this particular metaphor. And so once you've made that decision that you're in a war or what has been referred to as a jihad, a holy war, not against the West, not against the East, but against the differentiating aspects of your personality, they're causing you to hate yourself or those around you, then you have used magic as far as I'm concerned. And what you've done is you've created a linguistic description of the reality that you're in that hopefully intensifies and amplifies your desire to climb your way out of

whatever the particular quicksand pit that you've gotten yourself stuck into and into the light or into a better light. That's magic to me. Magic is the reframing of your paradigm using flowery language so that you can then have toe holds and finger holds and foot holds that you can climb out of the particular situation you're in. We've been given all these different lenses to look at the universe through. There's so many great lenses. There's the lens of science, cosmology, physics, biology, evolutionary biology, neurology, robotics, you name it. There's so many great chemistry. There's so many great lenses to look at the universe through, but a lot of these lenses aren't going to activate for some people the part of themselves that's

going to make them want to fight. The part of themselves that's going to make them want to fight and push against the anaconda of boredom, the anaconda of laziness, the anaconda of being completely weary of the great struggle that started the moment you realized that you were a thing and you were surrounded by lots of other things and decided that you were going to start fighting for what you thought was limited resources. Any lens, to me, magic is not Harry Potter. It's not levitating forks. It's not walking through walls. It's not flying around in a fucking broomstick or casting love spells or having mind control over other people or astral projection. Though those are theoretically things that you

could achieve based on some of the literature, to me, magic is using your will to overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles in your life. Magic would be the fuel. Magic is the linguistic fuel that gives you that extra push that you need. It's surrounding yourself with the symbols that you need to remind yourself that you are not a nobody. To surround yourself with the symbols that you need to awake, to wake up to the fact that you're not some nobody, that you're not just one little piece of a biomass, that you're not some meaningless, empty, pointless conglomeration of meat and chemicals that's temporarily aware and is therefore but is just ultimately a useless fart in the wind of time. But surrounding yourselves with

symbols that remind you that as far as you know, you are the only being on this planet that's experiencing itself. You don't know if I have a sense of awareness. You don't know if I'm aware of myself. You don't know that I could easily just be a projection of you. I don't think that's not true. The cases were all part of the same consciousness. But magic is whatever you need to do to yank yourself out of whatever is letting you take your life for granted so that you can lay in your own muck and filth and sadness and pretend that that's normal. Magic is the whatever you can do, the force that pushes you up out of the ruins of your life. It's the thing that makes all great men great as far as I'm concerned. It's the symbol system that

they use to give their lives meaning. And it's actively choosing that symbol system and utilizing those symbols in a very specific way to give yourself the momentum or force to move in the direction of whatever your goals happen to be. Ram Dass talks about how we all exist on that there's multiple frequencies happening at once. The frequency of absurdity, the frequency where everything is meaningless, the frequency where we're surrounded by shitty movies, terrible music, and everybody seems to be lost in a consumeristic materialistic haze where they think that buying stuff is going to somehow take away the endless suffering that comes from temporarily incarnating in a dimension where you're being aerosolized by time. That's one frequency, but there's a lot

of other frequencies too. And magic, as far as I'm concerned, is using your will to pick out a certain set of symbols which allows you to tune in to some of these other frequencies that are existing around us at all times. Now, I won't get into the astral plane or the frequency where there's spirits or angels, but I'm talking about the frequency where you wake up in the morning and you look forward to your day. I'm talking about that dimension. I'm just talking about the life where you know if you decide to do something you're going to do it. That dimension, instead of that the other dimension where any idea that comes to your mind, for example, I'm going to start jogging tomorrow. I'm going to start working out. I'm going to quit drinking. I'm going to make a list of

things that I need to do and I'm actually going to do it and then you never do it. That's just a particular frequency that you're existing at. Well, magic would be whatever it is that you need to do symbolically that moved you out of that frequency into the frequency where you become a badass who gets things done. Whatever it is, whatever you have to do. Now, if you want to get from the frequency of lost and in tropic hell to the frequency of being in action, being engaged in the great jihad of your life, being engaged in the great eternal, dharmic battle to actualize yourself in as much as possible, spread love into the world, the way if you want to get into that place, there's lots of ways to do it. You can do it just from pure existential willpower and just

decide, well, I'm just going to do it to see if I can. To me, that's magic. It's still a symbol structure that moves you from point A, subjective point A to subjective point B, but there's lots of other things you can do to move from subjective point A to subjective point B that aren't quite so boring or empty. And for example, prayer. Prayer equals magic. It's the same fucking thing as far as I'm concerned. It's the same thing. When you mutter a prayer, whisper a prayer, chant some prayer, read a prayer from whatever scripture you like, you are intoning an incantation to petition some higher consciousness to help you move from whatever point in the multiverse that you're existing in to another point in the multiverse that you want to be in.

So, oh, God, let me be a more loving person or, oh, God, please help me achieve my promotion or, oh, Lord, heal my brother who is so sick right now. All of these are all of these as far as I'm concerned, or it's magical acts. And if saying a prayer when you wake up in the morning creates some kind of neurological shift in your brain chemistry so that your reaction time is a little better or the way you treat the people around you is shifted in such a way that makes them treat you better, then that could very easily create a chain reaction in your life that leads you to achieving whatever the fuck it is that you want to achieve. Whether or not some divine being in the astral plane heard your petition and sent magic beams down into your life that transformed you

in some way from because of the God's powers or whether just intoning a certain series of words in the right order created a neurological shift that allowed you to function in society in a way that gave you the edge you needed so that you could move to whatever place it is. Subjectively, you wanted to move to. It doesn't matter. All that matters is, did you get results as far as I'm concerned? I don't care where the juice came from. When I plug my phone into the wall, I just want it to charge up. That's it. And magic points us in the direction of certain energy access points that a lot of us might not have been aware of as far as I'm concerned. Is it real? Is there really spirits, angels, demons, beings that we can petition? Are there certain geometric formations that

when placed in the right position on the right day of the year connect with the right planetary systems which connect with the corresponding spiritual systems to create change in our lives? Who the fuck knows? I don't care. All I know is that sometimes when I find myself in a bind, there are certain practices that I can use that come directly from Crowley or from some of the other great teachers of magic out there that will give me a little bit more energy when I need it. And I don't care if it works because of some actual existing physics or if it's just some way to induce the placebo effect into my life. All I know is that more than a few times in my life when I've wanted something to happen, the combination of certain magical systems mixing in with

my own willpower and decision to work hard has created results and that's all I need to know. So there you go. If you feel cynical or suspicious or if you just think magic is a big pile of steaming fucking horseshit, then guess what? You and I are on the same page. On one level, I think it's exactly the same kind of steaming pile of horseshit as any other human invention is in the face of eternity and the fact that we're all going to eventually be transformed into dust by some kind of supernova. We're all sort of damned to absurdity at one level. But on another level, once you get past that place in the moment, in the level of the moment or in the level of what you want to happen this month or two months from now or three months from now, magic is a very

useful creative tool that if you haven't experimented with, then you really shouldn't write it off just yet. And that's what this podcast is all about. And that's why I'm so happy to have Jason here because he's somebody who has been studying this stuff for a very long time and is incredibly apt when it comes to talking about it and teaching it. We're going to dive right into this podcast, but first some quick business. This episode of the Duncan Tressel Family Hour podcast is brought to you by Casper Mattresses. I can say a lot about Casper Mattresses and I'm going to because I have to because it's part of the advertisement. But the only, the ultimate thing I could say is I currently sleep on a Casper mattress. I had a pretty expensive

damn mattress that I ended up buying because for a lot of different reasons. My mom had just died. I was out of my mind. I was doing a lot of crazy things at that point. I actually hired a dominatrix too. I was just doing weird shit, man. I was out of my gourd. And one of the things I did was sort of in this weird grief haze. Also as marijuana haze, I stumbled into a mattress store and got horn swoggled. The mattress salesman identified that he was dealing with somebody who was completely baked and brought me over to this like back expensive area of the mattress store and had me lay down on a vibrate. What essentially is a vibrating bed? And it's like basically like the same kind of bed you give to people who are sick. It lifts up, goes down, does all the

shit vibrates. But it's somehow they've managed to warp it. So it seems like the greatest thing you could ever buy. And I remember being super stoned, laying there feeling the vibration. The mattress salesman knowing I'm super stoned says exactly the right thing to me, which was you're going to don't get addicted to it. My wife got addicted to it. And you know, it's bad. So just telling me I might get addicted to this mattress was enough to make me write him a pretty big fucking check for this mattress, which I then took home and have only been made fun of for having a vibrating bed. And once I realized, look, this is no different than just some cheesy hotel room, you've got a vibrating bed. And by the way, vibrating beds do nothing for

fucking as far as I can tell. So aside from the fact that I got horn swoggled and ended up in this mattress, which was way too expensive and something I didn't need within like a year of having this thing eight months of having it just start sinking in. It just becomes like this lumpy mess of chemicals underneath me. And so I'm essentially it's like laying on like moon craters, just pieces of it just been down. I started getting back aches. It was awful. And so right around that time, I got contacted by Casper. I told them I couldn't advertise unless I tried one of these mattresses out. They sent me a mattress. It comes in a box, open the mattress up, got rid of my old lumpy fucking shit mattress and put the new mattress down

and I'm using it to this day. It isn't lumpy. It hasn't changed. It's a nice, firm, bouncy, healthy mattress. My back stopped hurting. And so I completely and fully endorse this brand of mattress because I sleep on it. I sleep on a Casper. So if you're somebody who wants a really nice mattress and you don't want to get sucked into the hypnotic mattress maze, that anyone who goes into a mattress store is going to get sucked into. And by the way, here's an interesting fact about mattress salesmen, at least the ones I've encountered, they've got a dark side, something about hanging out around all those fucking mattresses all day long. Okay. Put yourself in their position. Really think about this. Think about this.

You are in what could be considered one of the more boring jobs of all time. Like, one of you ever, no offense to you mattress salesmen, if you're getting joy out of your job, then it's great. But I'm just thinking from my own POV. If I'm sitting in an empty warehouse filled with beds that is not very populated, every time I go into a mattress store, I'm the only one there. It's creepy tumbleweeds are blowing down the fucking aisles. So if I had to work in one of those places where I'm sitting around comfortable beds all day long, I'm going to be in the worst mood ever. Cause all I'm going to want to do is lay on one of these beds and go to sleep and try to forget my life for a second. So mattress salesmen are pissed. They want to take a nap.

You're fucking up their nap time. And also they're getting commissions. So they feel like they got to sell these fucking things to you. And also they're getting probably rejected by so many people who come in there and look around and get creeped out and just think, I don't want to buy a fucking mattress from this fucking serial killer. So if you want the experience of going to a fucking mattress store, be my guest. But if you're like me, or a recluse who likes to stay at home and not deal with bullshit like that, especially if I'm going to get manipulated by son of a bitch, some son of a bitch trying to sell me fuckpads, then here's your, I guess you could consider me a son of a bitch selling you a fuckpad right now, but at least we're not trapped

in a warehouse together. You could jump forward by the way, this commercial is annoying you. If you don't want to deal with that crap and you're tired of your old mattress and you want a really nice mattress, then you should get a Casper mattress. All right, here's the stuff I got to say. It's an obsessively engineered mattress at a shockingly fair price. It's just the right sink, just the right bounce to technologies latex foam and memory foam come together for better nights and better days. Risk free trial and return policy. Try sleeping on a Casper for 100 days with free delivery and painless returns. The mattress is made in America. $500 for a twin side mattress, $950 for a king size mattress. Comparing that to the industry average, that's an outstanding

price point. I got to read that. They should revise that. Nobody wants to say price point. If you go to casper.com, put an offer code Family Hour, you get $50 off of your first order. If you're thinking about buying a mattress, it's a great place to do it. In worst case scenario, you hate the fucking thing. You can send it back and then you can go into a mattress maze and allow the dark magic of the mattress salesman to control your mind and you'll end up with some kind of weird fucking mattress that is, I don't know who knows what's going to happen. It's a shot in the dark. The thing could suck you into some alternate dimension where you get fisted for infinity. Who knows? We don't know who these guys are. We don't know where these mattresses are coming from.

These things are probably stuffed with dolphin eyeballs. Who knows? You don't know what's in it. You're not going to open it up. You're not going to open it up. If you think about it, if you're a mattress salesman and you have a skeleton that you want to hide, all you got to do is figure out a way to cut open one of those mattresses and just shove a skeleton deep, deep into the mattress and seal it back up and then sell it to somebody. If you have a mattress that you bought from a mattress store, you could be sleeping on a skeleton friend. You could be sleeping on the vanished, the skeleton of some vanished child, which is probably why you're having those weird dreams. Time to get a new mattress. You don't want to lay there and imagine

that just underneath where you're laying and making sweet, sweet love is a tiny bird bones of some dead babe that a dark mattress salesman decided to stick into the comfy womb of some mattress he was trying to sell. Is that what you want to sleep on top of? Hell no. Go to Casper.com. Use offer code, family hour, and you will receive $50 off a non-haunted mattress. Casper.com. Give them a shot. They support us. Why don't you support them? We're also brought to you by Amazon.com to continue in the direction of reasons not to leave the house. Here's another great reason, Amazon. You don't need to leave the house anymore. There's no reason to go to these stores. I don't know if you've been to a store lately. You might notice when you go there,

it's just, they're mostly empty now because everyone's ordering online. You don't have to go. If you're going out in the world, it should be because you're going to some nice event. You're going out to eat with people you love or you're going to get examined by a doctor. Something serious and something filled with reason, but if you're driving through traffic for hours to go and buy shit that you could buy online and have your delivered to your house the next day, you've just gotten stuck in an old paradigm that doesn't exist anymore. If you go through the Amazon portal located at dunketrustle.com, it's in the comments section of any of these websites, and buy anything from Amazon, they'll give us a small percentage of whatever you buy and it costs

you nothing and it's a great way to support this podcast and it's also a great way to keep yourself from getting trapped out there with all those hypnotized lunatics who aren't aware of the fact that we are nearing the singularity and you don't have to leave anymore. This is your home. Where we live right now, compared to many parts of the world, are palatial estates where now you can have magically delivered to your doorstep anything that you want and that's pretty bad ass. Order those Hue lights, they're pretty cool. Maybe I'm just some cheesy 70s guy because I have a vibrating bed and my lights change color, but I like it. Go to amazon.com, use our portal, won't you? Next week, guys, that is next week. I'm going to be at the Montreal Comedy Festival. I'm doing

two live podcasts. I'm doing two comedy shows. So go to the Montreal website, buy tickets to the show. Come see me perform. Come see one of these live podcasts. I've got some great guests who are going to be on the show. Segura, Kreischer, Ian Edwards. These are going to be great podcasts. I hope you guys will show up. Okay. All right. Fantastic. Today's guest on the Duncan Trussell Family Hour podcast is a returning guest. You've probably listened to the last podcast I had with him. Jason Louvre is a published author. His writings focus on consciousness, the environment, human rights and geopolitics. He writes for vice mother board. He manages the group blog ultra culture. He's written Monsanto versus the world, a fantasy novel, Queen Valentine.

He's the editor of Generation Hex and the site Bible. And he's also, he also teaches magic, which is pretty cool. If you go to magic.me, go there and you'll see that this is a school for magic. You can sign up. If you use Duncan, you'll get 20% off of your class. So if you're interested in studying under Jason Louvre and learning about so many different forms of magic from Raja yoga to chaos magic, this is a place for you to go. You can also get a free ebook if you go there. So check it out. All right, everybody. Thank you for humoring me with that long intro to this podcast. I love you guys so much. And I hope you will welcome with open arms the amazing Jason Louvre, Hare Krishna.

It's the Duncan Trouser. Check, check. Jason, welcome back to the DTFH. Hare Krishna. It's so nice to have you here. Thank you. So many questions for you. I don't often get to be in the presence of a mage, a wizard, a practitioner of the occult, someone who's up to date on this stuff. So I got a ton of questions for you. And I hope you will allow me for an hour or so to be your magical apprentice. When you put it that way, it sounds like I actually know what I'm talking about. All great wizards act like they don't know what they're talking about. Isn't that part of the game? Well, you just you just saw my cell phone is all cracked. I came in, you know, my car is all busted

up. What can I say? So what is that? So that's an interesting place to start, which is that it seems like one of the tricky aspects of learning about metaphysics is that some folks who go down that path disconnect from the basic gears of the machine that we happen to have been incarnated into. Well, it's funny you should ask that because that actually cuts straight to the core of all of the different schools of mysticism in the world. If you study eastern philosophy, particularly Buddhism or Hinduism, you will immediately come into contact with this idea of Maya or Samsara, that the idea simply that the world is illusory and distraction. And it's kind of there to it's kind of there as a distraction to get us to forget our true natures. And of

course, we see that idea in Gnosticism as well. Obviously, it was recycled as the ideas in the matrix, which I try to avoid, because those are such overused metaphors. It's like the matrix, bro. It's like the matrix, but also Philip K. Dick referred to it as the black iron prison, things like that. And I've heard now just just a quick note there. I was just studying the concept of the Illuminati, and there's apparently some level in this strange hierarchy or there's some fourth dimensional out of time group of people controlling the Illuminati who are called the captors or the prison guards or something. I think when you hit that level in the Illuminati, you get a free Costco membership. You get a Costco. So but but right precisely. So in a lot of what

we're looking at is the split between dualistic spiritual paths, which posit that the world is a trap, essentially. And ones that do not posit that because while all spiritual traditions agree that the world is illusory, some at their higher levels, particularly Tantric Hinduism or Tantric Buddhism, and some of the Western traditions, you will always hear this phrase, Nirvana is samsara, or the crown is in the kingdom as the kingdom is in the crown from Kavala, meaning that the world is really only a distraction in as much as it's reflecting to your own mind. When your mind is trained and you see reality for what it is, there's nothing frightening or constraining about it at all. In fact, the world is perfect. It's only our own mental state that

leads us to perceive it as otherwise. Which side of the line do you fall on? Depends on the day depends on how irritated I am with traffic. Now, hold on two seconds. Damn it. I got to like adjust this concept where the world is essentially a reflection of your energetic being, right, is something I've been thinking a lot about. And in particular, that strange thing that happens, when for whatever reason you are tuned in, you have a focused rhythm, how the people just react to you differently. Like everything reacts to you differently compared to when you are in a diffuse, distracted, anxiety-ridden state. Everything reacts to you according to that as well. And it's an

interesting thing to consider that. Is that what magic is? That's basically magic, right? It's shifting your energetic state with the concept being behind it all, you're reflecting yourself into the world. So if you shift your energetic state, then the world is going to reflect back to you, beauty, not just in the way people interact with you, but in the way all material phenomena interacts with you. I think you completely got it and hit the nail on the head. And it's funny because I was actually thinking about this on the way over. The whole idea of magic, people think about magic as they have Hollywood ideas about it, and they think you're going to be throwing fireballs out of your hands and things like that, which would be awesome.

And if anyone can do that, please send me a YouTube of it. But really what magic is is seeing, understanding that the universe is nothing but pure magic. And when you learn to train your mind and get your mind to focus and go silent and be on point, similar to what you were just saying, then yeah, exactly what you're saying happens. And the universe reflects back to you a beatific state, a loving, compassionate state that's symbolized by different gods and goddesses in all chemical shapes and things like that from various traditions. But really that's the core experience. It's getting out of your own way, getting out of your own ego and your own bullshit in your own mind, which is the real controlling archon or controlling prison warden. It's your

own ego. As soon as you get out of that, and that may just be, that's easier said than done, and that may just be for short periods of time, when you get out of that, then you're paying attention to the universe and not yourself, and you see the universe for what it is, which is a magical phenomenon. And yes, it's crazy how much that changes other people's reaction to you, because the universe reflects back what you see in it. And if you project anger and hatred and not to be New Agey, but if you put off negativity, you get it back. And if you put off, if you see, if you choose to observe the universe in a, I don't want to say quantum, because I don't want to be Deepak Chopra, but if you choose to observe the universe in a

quantumly speaking as a magical phenomenon, then that's what it will be for you. Right. Yes, I like that. And I think there's a lot of different, like what you were saying, how there's this, for the state of compassion, for the state of an open heart, there's alchemical symbols, gods to represent it, mantras you can chant for it, sounds that it produces, colors. And that's a really curious mapping that has been done by a lot of different cultures in the world to get to the finer aspects of the energetic self. And so I've been thinking a lot about how, for whatever reason, people don't feel like they get to rename those things or giving them their own name, you know, like we're kind of stuck with all this old language that

people are using, all these old symbols that some of it has a lot of logic behind it. Some of it doesn't. But, or from my experience, I don't understand it's a better way to put it. But I was thinking like another way to sort of chart these states is to start using the language of the multiverse or the idea that, just as a thought experiment, if your perception of the world is changing the way the world conforms around you, then couldn't you say that you're literally living in, you know, eight different or seven different worlds, seven or however many potential worlds you want. So when you get really freaked out and anxiety-ridden, this is something that just happened to me, like I was stoned and I'm walking to go eat and my shoulders are tight and my head start,

my thoughts are just a hornet's nest and every hornet is everything that I need to be worried about in the world and it's just swarming around me. And all of a sudden, I was like, oh, fuck, look at the way you're walking and look at the way you're thinking and look at the way you're feeling and look at the world that you've created around you based on that. You are in a, what if this is a dimension? What if this is an actual alternate dimension that you have inadvertently steered your vehicle into and that by shifting these states of consciousness, you're actually traveling to other parts of the multiverse and so you can literally move from the world of cunts, which is, you know, which that was what I named it, as just some kind of like

just easy, lazy way, cunt world. You just got to put that in Sanskrit or something. Make a symbol for cunt world. Yeah. Right. Cunt world. And then I was thinking, okay, okay, this is cunt world. So let's think about cunt world a little bit here. Let's think about cunt world and what are the adjacent quadrants next to cunt world? Like if I go deeper into the fear, where can I end up? And obviously, like it's hell, right? Like cunt world is the gate to hell. Like if you really freak out enough, you'll have a nervous breakdown, you'll get cancer, you'll get sick, you'll go through a divorce, you'll be abusive, you'll hurt people and all of that will create more chain reactions that will land you in a fucking hospital bed, prison cell, you name it.

And ripple into the lives of other people. That too, but who cares about that? Hold on one second, sorry. I'm really sorry about this. You guys, I've been twitching. So I'm like, my mics are screwed up. So I'm having to adjust the volume. I feel like I'm too loud now. You're coming back from twitch universe? Yeah. So yeah, it's exactly, which is another universe. So yeah. So tell me a little bit about the concept of alternate realities and magic. Could you I want to I want to know if there's any corresponding philosophies to this and any of this magical systems? Well, I think that the core, the core idea there is just to, you know, simply the idea that we always have free will and we always have a choice. And we always have a choice of how we perceive

and how we react. And that sounds simple and new agey, but that is incredibly powerful. It's by it's by cultivating the ability to it's by first cultivating awareness of ourselves that we then cultivate the ability to make choices and to stop with, for instance, destructive patterns that may have been, you know, like, for instance, if you're abusive, you know, you might be, you know, an abusive person, but that may have gone back all the way to your childhood when when you experienced abuse, and that might have gone all the way back to your father's childhood when he was abused, and that might have gone back to his father's and his father's and, you know, mother, father, family, friends, well, who's going back to the dawn of language, you know, the dawn of history.

And, and, you know, magic is how magical is it to think that that pattern, which is, you know, we might be able to see as a demon or something even can be stopped immediately simply by choosing not to perpetuate it. And, but I think that, for instance, cunt world, right? Yes. Yeah, trunk put chugging trunk but talked about this, the Tibetan tantric teacher, in he was looking at the, there's a, you can Google it, there's an image called the, I believe the Mahakala, not Mahakala, what is it called the, it's the wheel of life. Bhavacakra, Bhavacakra, right, which is an image of the six realms of existence. So, and that goes from the heaven realms to the realms of the demigods, the humans, the animals, the hungry

ghosts, and then the hell realms. And he, I, you know, and this is more than just, you know, I think that potentially traditional Tibetan tantric magicians might say those are actually dimensions, but his point is those are states of mind. And if you're in that state of mind to all intents and purposes, the world becomes that dimension. So the, the primary emotion that generates hell realms or cunt world is anger, right? Because anger leads to the feeling of trappedness. And when you feel trapped, then you're to all intents and purposes in hell. Right. So the idea is, and of course, since this is a Buddhist philosophy, the idea is that none of these realms are really, really that different from each other.

They're all just different forms of illusion. But his point is, you know, at any point in a hell realm, you can simply just stop, maintain awareness and just stop perpetuating it. You always have free choice. And you can always choose the dimension, the reality you want to experience. And that does not instantaneous. That is a long term process that includes retraining your conditioned samskaras, or I believe that's before the samskaras, as the Hindus say, or your, your conditioned trains of thinking. But we always have a chance and a choice to choose reality. Because if you think of, if you think of the way that I think about this, if you think of the world around you as a sphere, right, your sphere of sensorium, the world of

everything you perceive with your five senses is a sphere that you're in, like you're in the middle of a hamster ball. And then you think of your awareness, your consciousness and your perception as like a 3d projector. Okay, right. And it's projecting this sphere you see around yourself. So that we always fall into the delusion and the mistake of thinking that the world around us that we're subject to the world around us. When really, there is no difference between subject and object. We're projecting this illusion around us. We are we're each of us the, you know, the, the God of our reality, the primary archon of our existence. And we project that around us based on our thought patterns. But it's not just what you happen to be thinking at any moment. It's your

conditioned trains of thought going back your entire life and in theory, prior lives and things like that. And and of course, bounced off all the people around you. So this is why meditation becomes so important because meditation is the ability to maintain awareness of our consciousness and ultimately to silence it so that we have control of it. And I think it's probably that's, you know, largely that simple. Wow. Now, there's two points that you're talking about here. I want to go to the first one, which is really interesting to me, which is the echo of of abuse, addiction, you name it, whatever, a lot of people, anything that gets anytime anyone points, and it is genetic, you know, a lot of it's genetic, there's a literal

demon traveling through the DNA, apparently, of lines and lines of family lines where there's like alcoholism or where there's insanity, for example, or, you know, all simers or all these things. And I, you know, those, I don't know, I'm sure that there's systems of magic that say all of these lines can be dealt with, but certainly the one that we have control over is the one based on anger. Because I know what you mean, man, like when I've been, I've been floating on this float tank now. And what's been coming to me again and again, and like, again, is goes to Christmas pass level tour guide that I can't see showing me things like, behold, when you were cruel to that girl when you were nine, and just vivid, vivid, vivid, you know, like seeing it, seeing the

look on her face, seeing the disappointment my brother's face, driving away from the situation and feeling my stomach drop. And then, you know, like seeing all these things and realizing that, whoa, there is appears to be, since I was very young, recurring pattern where I'm a shithead to people, and I think it's okay. And that's a real fucked up and intense and kind of, for me, delightful thing to discover. Yeah, isn't that rough? Yeah, that's really rough. That's why I don't smoke dope anymore. Why? Because that process gets so incredibly over, you know, you lose your, you lose your distance from it. It becomes your whole, you know, exactly what you're describing becomes overwhelming. Well, don't, isn't that good? Don't you want to be overwhelmed here? Because

what I started thinking is, oh, this is the confession. I'm in a, I'm in a confession booth right now. It's not a traditional confession booth, but I'm in darkness with a sense of a presence, and my quote sins, since I was very younger being shown to me. And here I am atoning for them with the emotional sorrow. The sorrow is a good way to put it. It comes from re-experiencing your own asshole-ness, you know, and I think that's good. I think maybe you should start smoking dope again. It's a very Catholic reality imprint. Oh, cool. Yeah, okay, okay, great. Okay, great. But yes, but yeah, no, I, yeah, no, I agree with you as well. I'm, I, but it can be because, because that stuff can be dealt with in meditation as well. And sometimes

I don't want to cut off your point. No, no, please don't forget it. But the one thing that I was going to add is sometimes when we get very guilt ridden like that, sometimes the one thing that we've forgotten is that everyone in these scenarios is just as much an infinite consciousness with free choice as us. Yeah. Right. So it's kind of like it becomes, that almost becomes another ego trap where it's like, I'm, you know, it's all my fault. And I'm the one fucking everything up where that becomes a negative ego trap. Right. Okay, great. So this is an interesting point that you're zeroing in on here. And it's the question of atonement and the question of when it, when are you in denial about your own actions? And, and it would be a very easy thing

to do, to do, you know, if you listen to Ram Dass and you hear his prescription for loving the self completely, regardless of whatever it is that you've done, fully embracing the self, whatever it is that you've done, it sounds amazing, really great until you consider someone like say Ted Bundy and let's say post beating a woman to death and maybe raping her. I don't know if he's a rapist. I think he was. At what point do you allow yourself the incredible ecstatic bliss of thinking I'm just a universal consciousness and she's a universal consciousness. And all I did was essentially pop a balloon. That's all I popped a balloon that screamed a lot and cried and has a family, but I popped a balloon

that's returned to the consciousness of the universe. I'm saying this, you know, Bundy needs, we need Bundy to not think that we need Bundy to come to the moment of crisis that emerges when you recognize the fact that your decisions that move in the direction of any kind of violence based on anger, whether it's physical or psychological world and thus you should stop because in the same way that when I hold a candle to my skin and it burns, I am being burned by the sorrow that comes from deciding another human in this dimension. Don't you need the Catholic atonement? Don't you need the lash, Jason? Do you need the lash? Well, to maintain social order, absolutely, right? But as a member of the Illuminati,

you know, all I can say is that we're working on these things. Well, I think that I think that what we're talking about is a clear, when people get into spiritual reality, spiritual reality, these ideas, there's a couple things that happen. One is called spiritual bypassing, which is a, you can Google it, it's a, I believe a therapeutic phrase, which essentially means that once you learn a bit of spirituality, you can use it as a way to bypass your own emotions or your own, or to deal with the, to deal with reality, right? Spiritual bypass, is that a good thing? No, it's not a good thing at all. It's, it's essentially another form of self-deception because, and one of the problems with spirituality

is spirituality will, I don't want spirituality sounds so vague, but you know, these, these, you know, Eastern philosophies and things like this will show you what you are ultimately, but it will not heal your personality or do the work of day-to-day life for you. It doesn't change your fundamental position in the world. It just gives you more awareness of where you are. That's basically it. So another thing that happens is what Crowley called confusing the planes, which is, you know, just because, you know, just because we're all ultimate, you know, infinite awareness experiencing itself, you know, just because we're awareness emerging from the void as an emergent process to take on finite, you know, the human race is this, is this finite expression

of infinity experiencing itself that, you know, loves itself and has sex with itself and kills itself and tortures itself and traffics itself and everything on the spectrum from the best to the worst. And yes, all of these things are simply passing phenomenon in the great void, but to make the mistake that just because everything is infinite, what you do does not matter is missing the point. Because in the world, it's kind of like you can't, you know, just because, you know, calculus doesn't mean that you can, you're going to be any better at basketball, right? That's a really weird metaphor. But the idea being that day to day life is all the rules of day to day life apply to the plane of day to day life. There is no way out or spiritual bypass from them. The point

is to maintain awareness and to not forget what you are so that you have free, you know, so that you maintain more free will and you maintain and, you know, and the so that you don't commit the sin of ignorance, which is ignorance of your true nature, right? But but the and and of course, as one people progress as people see more of, you know, it's a beginner's mistake to think that studying these things makes you yourself more aware. You're simply becoming more aware of the universe. And as you become more aware of how infinite and how much equally how equally divine all beings are, then it just doesn't make sense to behave like an asshole. Oh, cool. Okay, cool. Okay, cool. So it's again, it goes back to this concept of moving into another psychological realm,

moving into another metaphysical realm, which is if you're in the Kant world or any realm below that first chakra land, then hurting other people makes great sense. The first chakra is only survival instinct and bodily health. These are actually the the energetic chakras. Chakra has a couple meanings. One is the it just means wheel. And one is the energetic wheels within the body. And another one is a wheel of existence. So there's no like hell chakra in the body. But wouldn't you say, I mean, if the survival instinct, it's like fight or flight, gather resources, that's for chakra kind of stuff, right? Don't they say that a person who is stuck in their first chakra in a negative sense can end up getting kind of fixated on bean counting and just also just

survival stuff, maybe survival stuff with like more attractive masks placed on it, you know, like for example, when you watch one of those shows about the ultimate cheapskate, I don't know if you've seen any of those before. But like, I love that stuff. Usually like my my favorite all time reality show is Dog the Bounty Hunter. Right, right. I mean, I watch Lifetime Network relentlessly. I enjoy it so much. But the so but what I mean is that my understanding of the first chakra, I don't even pronounce it right. That's why I have you chakra, not chakra chakra. You can pick. Okay, so the first chakra, my understanding of it is that it's some like if you if you see someone who's like always fixated on their money, always fixated on their life conditions, not

lasting, worried about the like in a state of fear, just kind of like fixating on hoarding or whatever. That's like first chakra behavior, right? That's like not good first chakra behavior, but like the negative version of it where you're like in a kind of neurotic state of survival, because you think there's limited access to resources and you feel like you've got to defend scarcity mentality scarcity mentality. Yeah, isn't that right around the first chakra? And then the second one, it starts becoming more about power. First is survival. It's just basic survival function. Second is sex. And third is power. Third is power, right? So two is purely devoted to sex. Sex and reproduction. Okay, that makes sense. Okay, cool. So, so the first so wait to think

about this would be the first is I survive. The second is I and my progeny survive. The third is I protect these things. Whoa, cool. But the third's the heart, right? The fourth is the heart. The fourth is awesome. I'm getting dying to learn about this. So think about it this way. The first is I survive. The second is I reproduce. Third is I protect myself and my progeny. Got it. The fourth is now I love them because I'm not concerned with I've solved the problems of survival and protecting my own. So there you go. That's your standard. That's your standard set for a human being. And that's really all you need. The other the other chakras follow on into other territories. But that's essentially your basic way to create a human being. And and those things have

to find healthy expressions exactly like you're saying, because if they become yeah, if they go into unhealthy expressions, then we get, you know, perversions or maybe perversions is the wrong word, but ineffective uses of these of these chakras. So but if you think about it, that's where most people in the world are at. They just want to they want to build a home for themselves and their family and and have it be safe and everything to be fine. And they don't want to be rattled. And they don't want they don't want to know about anything else they're consumed with that thing. And they're making more humans, right? And that is perfect, right? That is like a perfect human existence. Wow, that's so cool. Yeah, it's the

this is Prabhupada talked about this, you know, Prabhupada, the Hare Krishna's Prabhupada talked about this. He said that all all sentient life in generally all that it's doing is eating, sleeping, mating, and defending itself. That's it eating, sleeping, mating, defending and that human beings pretend that they're not animals, because the way that they eat and the way that they sleep and the way that they fuck and the way that they fight is very advanced. And you know, they eat with very nice forks and knives on beautiful plates and and beautiful homes. And as they're doing this, they pretend that they're civilized because their cutlery is expensive. But really, all they are is a squirrel in its nest chewing on a nut that's

pretending it's special. Right. That's it. Right. And and to reject the the fact that we are animals tends to lead to neuroses, you know, we are animals, we need to embrace the physicality of the body and the man bodily functions and our own animal nature. And to pretend that we're not tends to be a, you know, is the legacy of certainly Judeo Christian, some Judeo Christian thought, and and the legacy of some Western thought and is really the legacy of civilization and is kind of a control mechanism, you know, all of the philosophies that say that we have to stop enjoying our animal nature tend to be not not serve us. They tend to serve whoever's in charge of the local area. Oh, who wants who wants order maintained. That's awesome. Yeah, that's really cool. Yeah, you're

not supposed to enjoy your body, the sins of the flesh. Your the body is a corrupt hive of demons and the idea is to as much as possible, cut off all forms of sense gratification. Ain't just Judeo Christian also as the Hari Krishna's right who say no eating no or no not no eating, they say that would be pretty intense. They say some of them they say no sex, right, no illicit sex, no gambling, no drugs. And I always forget what the fourth regulative principle is. Oh, no eating meat. So those are the four regulative principles. And it is the same. It's like denying the body. It's saying we're not going to allow our identities to be trapped in the fishnet of animal life. And though that is a pleasure, and though that is it can be some of the most joyful experiences of all

time, having a great meal, incredible sex, delicious booze, lost in a I'm talking about celebratory not like addictive I'm talking about those moments when life is going great conscious just conscious beautiful moments. It's incredible. The concept is that as incredible as that is, it's still limiting you to the 80 or 90 year lifespan that you're currently experiencing. And it is inducing the amnesic state of forgetfulness that you are mentioning earlier to your true identity, which is an infinite being that isn't bound by the normal animal instincts. So right now. So the question is, you know, where do you want to land your where do you want to focus? Do you want to be the great enjoyer? Do you want to be

Hugh Hefner or something? Do you want to be like the do you want to be like Game of Thrones level? You know, harems and like silk scarves everywhere and incense burning and opium burning and just sounds like what you're going for. No, I don't want that. But I but I do understand the joy of it. You know, somebody gives you a hellraiser box. You get fucking hooks in your debts. You're so happy about it because the ultimate pervert. But but and I don't think it's bad. But isn't the idea to move those the energy up from the root to the crown chakra to release the Kundalini energy so that you're no longer trapped in the first four of these chakras or the first three, the fourth one seems pretty good. Right. Well, the Well, here's the here's the question, right? Is it top down or

bottom up? Yeah. Meaning are you really trapped in a body trying to experience spiritual consciousness and somehow stuck or are you already spiritual consciousness that's chosen to enjoy a body? Oh, that's a great that's so fucking cool. And for me, and that's a personal you know, philosophical question to ask yourself. But if you are choosing to be here and enjoy this, that tends to be a more productive belief, I think, because then you don't have the idea of the trap, right, which we see so much in, you know, so much of Buddhism or Gnosticism sells us on this idea of the trap, you know, we're stuck here. There's no trap. I don't think, you know, it's it's all choice. It's a loving universe. Yeah, it's cool. Everything's elective. The now,

I love it, man. It's good. You've definitely pinpointed the fact that for whatever reason, I seem to be becoming a Catholic because I'm definitely my POV lately. And maybe it's just because I'm trying to be really disciplined in everything. His has been this sense like last night. Oh, you're becoming a Jesuit. Yeah, I just want to see if I can, you know, I'll be sure I've quit drinking. I've been monitoring my diet. I exercise all the time now. So like last last night, I had a slice of apple pie and some ice cream and I couldn't enjoy it. I'm sitting there eating it like, what are you doing to yourself? You've got to get control of yourself. You've got to see if you can pull this off. And that's a very heavy way to live. That's a very heavy way

to live. But based on my particular goals right now, and just the alchemical experiment that I'm doing, if I allow myself to exist in the conceptualization of the universe being a place to gratify the senses, then I'm not going to reach this goal that I want to reach. And I'm fully aware of the fact that underneath everything is a general level of absurdity, making any human action or goal on one frequency completely absurd, fully aware of that. But even so, just because we appear to be in some kind of hamster ball of reality, ultimately floating in nothingness, I just want to see what kind of tricks I can do. And some of those tricks, I can't do them if I'm gratifying my senses and living the life of a Game of Thrones prince.

Right. So now you're talking like a magician. So I think that personally, I think, just to take this down to very, very practical, I think that anything, any practice that develops your willpower and discipline, no matter what it is, whether that's maintaining a gluten-free diet or working out or choosing to learn computer programming or whatever it is, anything that gives you more willpower and discipline and control is good, especially now when we live in a very diffident sense, pleasure, addicted time in which all of the people we see around us are just kind of floating through existence, watching Game of Thrones and watching Walking Dead until they are the Walking Dead and just expecting, and we see it all day on the internet, expecting

you know, reality to conform to their wishes and entertain them and lashing out and attacking it when it doesn't do exactly what they want. I mean, just look at the comments every time they release a new superhero movie. Right. And Crowley referred to this as the aeon of the child, you know, we live in a time of children where everyone is children around us, and that's a positive thing. That's a good thing because it's a period of individuation, which is an evolutionary step past subjugation previously by kings and gods, right? Yeah. So it's a big deal, but it's also kind of annoying to live in. But anything that will discipline you, self-imposed discipline or focus is good, especially now in such a precarious economic time.

How much is having a detailed knowledge of Game of Thrones trivia going to help us if this starts to look like Greece, for instance? Right. That's definitely a thought that's crossed my mind. And because you can't really lose by being disciplined, like you're not going to lose anything. And it's also one of the unobtainables, which I really like thinking about, you know, the unattainables, the things that money can't buy, it's an unobtainable. So that's another thing that's interesting to me is that here you have a thing that's outside of the control of all economic systems. Money cannot buy discipline, if it could. But discipline can get you money. That's true. That's exactly right. So it's a curiosity, that's all. And well, I think that

to summarize all the stuff we've been talking about into one thing, Crowley nails this by talking about philema, the true will, meaning, you know, the classic dictum do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law, meaning not do whatever you like, but that everyone has a different path or dharma in life, a reason to be here. And but that's not a given. That's not an automatic. You need to discipline yourself to follow your, you know, as Larry said, follow your bliss, it's not just follow your bliss, it's follow your your bliss and pain and suffering and hard work and your dream and your vision and develop the will and develop the discipline to get that unobtainable, which is the vision of yourself that you know that you can be. And therefore, there is no universal right and

wrong for everybody. And I don't say that as a moral relativist, obviously, you know, there are definite bads. There are definitely definite don'ts and definite do's in life. But that we each have different roles to play and different paths to follow. And that what is crucial is, and I find that I find that choosing that attitude instead of the kind of passive mystical attitude of just, I'm going to, you know, everything's bliss, I'm just going to enjoy that. But the idea of almost, yeah, like Jesuit level discipline, but not Jesuit, the lemak, you know, that's the key. And it is advised again and again, you hear it again. And you know what, man, it ain't a fucking popular opinion. One thing I was thinking about is that if you want to sell books, you probably

are going to sell more books if you give out some kind of version of this that involves not much discipline, you know, because it's that concept of discipline sounds so agonizingly boring. Discipline, please shut up. Because whenever when I was a kid, and I heard discipline, you know, it was, it was related to really mundane, submissive decisions that you want kids to make, you know, it doesn't, it's not really discipline. It's just, it's behaving according to the whims of your supervisors, whether they're your parents or your boss or whatever. So that's not what I think discipline is now. I think discipline is a whole other thing. That's exactly what you're saying, which is identifying this actualized state as a potentiality inside of you, letting that

actualized state be whatever it is. And it's obviously incredibly individual for, for, for all people. Everyone, you're all, you're all going to have your own version of what this is. But even right now, I bet people listening, if you just think, what would I look like in my ultimate form? You know, what would that be? This is not even my final form. This is not my final form. What, what if, what if, what if, if, you know, what if right now I'm mid transformation inside the chrysalis of my ego, based on my experience thus far, can I prognosticate what my actualized self would be like? And then something will pop into your head. You'll see it, whatever it is, is ridiculous as it is, or maybe it's not much different than the way right now. But you identify that and then

discipline is the grappling hook that you throw into that place and, and, and climb up so that you become that thing. For what reason? Who knows? That's why I was mentioning the absurdity stuff, because you do kind of think, well, like, why, right? You know, why even bother? Why even do it? Like, who cares? Like, don't even try. Let's not even try because nothing means anything and we're all dying. And so I'm just going to sit here and shove crappy food in my mouth and pretend that I'm a fucking rebel when really all I'm doing is sitting at the bottom of a pit staring up at the sun and pretending that I'm not trapped, you know? That sounds like the last Batman movie. Yeah. Yeah. And he has to jump without a rope. Never forget. Oh, right. Now I know you're talking

about that when he's in the Danes prison. Yes. So to me, it's like, okay, this, yes, this is a, is a worthwhile activity as far as I'm concerned. And to me, it does seem like magic. And it does seem like what I've read from Crowley, you know what, Crowley, I never read from Crowley. I never read anything from Crowley advice. I've never read Crowley saying, oh, and here's when you take naps, or here's when you rest, or here, I don't, I don't see that from Crowley. Crowley is just focus your will as much as you can, more than you think, and you will achieve anything that you want to achieve. And that will better the universe because you're the universe becoming more. Yeah, I think that's very well put. And, and, and, and even to make that the idea of discipline

more practical, if for instance, as an example, as a specific to talk about a specific practice, if people knew how high they could get from a serious yoga and meditation practice at the point where they're doing it for several hours and doing hardcore, serious pranayama and so forth, if people knew how high and happy and blissful they could get from that stuff for free, forever, on demand with no hangover, maybe that would be a motivator. But obviously, it's not just about, it's not just about bliss, it is about what it really is, is transcending the mind and getting the mind to go silent, right, is the key of the key. And that's very, very hard. It's one of the hardest things a human can do, I think. It's so hard. In that fucking tank, you really get a good

glimpse of just how hard that is, because it's an, it's, you know, and I was listening to Jack Cornfield, and he was talking about noting and how whatever the particular state is that you're experiencing as you're meditating, just give it a name and let it go by, you know, note it like it. So the word I would use to describe what you just talked about is impenetrable. It is so incredibly difficult to, I can like silence my thoughts to some point, but there's always this thread of being, this thread of self, this, I don't know, nucleus of identity that I cannot get past. I can't dissolve it. I can't get any further. But if I did, I know that I would have, there could all that would be left would be everything. There would be pure emerging with

the infinite. Do you know who Shiv Bali Yogi is? No. So Shiv Bali Yogi was one of the, you don't hear about him much, but he was one of the, in India, I think is recognized as one of the primary meditators of the 20th century. And he's no longer in a body, but his student Shiv Rudra Bali Yogi is still teaching. He went into Tapas. Tapas is when the Hindu meditators, after they reach a certain point of training, just meditate 24 hours a day. And he was in this for seven years, right, in order to, and apparently, according to when you talk to real hardcore Hindu gurus or teachers, that you'll hear this story. It's like, you know, the training is like 20 years. And he, so he was in in Tapas for seven years, barely eating anything. And when he came out of it,

his fingers were fused into his hands, like this. So if you wrap your the front of your fingers to touch the balls of your palm, and then kind of curl your thumb into it, his hand, his hands were fused like that, because he had them in that position on his thighs while he was meditating. And they basically were like that permanently from then on. And his student has the same who I've met has the same hands, right? And it's like, this is what we're talking about, right? A nearly insurmountable level of discipline. But the point is that it is the point, right? It is the point of, of, you know, evolution, right, is to get to this point. So the point of evolution is to overcome the essentially the discursive mind. I mean, okay, first of all, God knows what

those guys are experiencing at that point. I have no fucking clue, right? That is, I mean, you read those guys accounts, and they're like talking about like going to other dimensions and visiting other planets on the astral realms and shit like that. So fuck knows what's going on in those guys' heads. But to bring it down to the day to day, you know, the mind, the discursive mind, the ego, the part of us that says some things are good and some things are bad and I am and I'm scared, I don't want to die. That's a fairly recent development in human evolution. And it's an evolutionary stage. And it is not the final evolutionary stage. It's an organ we've grown, just like an appendix, or a heart or whatever, you know, that the ego is an organ we've grown

to individuate ourselves and maintain a, you know, to be able to do human life as we currently experience it. But to think that it's the endpoint of the evolution of human consciousness would, you know, I think be a mistake. And so the idea is not to destroy that. We always get this idea particularly since the 60s, since like the acid tests of the 60s. And we get this idea, this kind of Charles Manson-esque idea that we need to destroy the ego, which is false, right? You know, that's not true in as much as you don't want to cut your appendix out. They used to think you should cut your appendix out, but it turns out we need it because it develops certain useful bacteria and things like that. So the idea is, no, no, no, you want to outgrow the ego,

right? Because once you are able to maintain no mind states, you realize that basically everything, nothing you do requires the mind, you know, just observe yourself next time you're driving. When you're driving a car, if you drive a car, you are constantly making split second decisions that determine whether you will live or die and whether the people around you will live or die. Now try going on the freeway, right? Now how many of those automatic movements that you're taking, are you telling yourself, okay, now turn the wheel like half a degree to the left, like nothing, there's no language there, right? So we don't actually need the linguistic mind to function, right? And in fact, when we learn to function without or when we learn to

outgrow the mind and keep it in its place, then that's when we begin to enter into what psychologists call flow states, right? So when you read these autobiographies of guys like Michael Jordan or something like that, and they talk about scoring a goal, or anyone who's at the top of their profession, you will always hear them saying the same thing, which is they're just not thinking about it, or some an actor who's at the top, you know, at the top of his profession, he's not thinking, or she's not thinking when she's performing those roles, right? It just happens. So that's the power of the post-linguistic or intuitional level of the human brain, and I don't know enough neuropsychology to put any neuropsychology terms on

it. So you're saying that, you know, a lot of people scold me because I'll give evolution a motivation, but I know what you're saying, because they are like, evolution isn't a thing, it doesn't want anything, it's just adaptation. But what you're saying is that as a human being on this planet, if you want to be the in-between thing that happened between the protohomid and the human beings, if the human beings are going to, if this amazing transformation from monkey into us into whatever we're to become is continuing, as obviously it must be, then if you want to aid the movement in the direction of that next thing, then your job is to overcome your mind. And if you just want to have a better life, I think, you know, because

how much of, if you go through the day listening to all the bullshit your ego throws at you about, and that could be either, oh, I'm so good, and I'm better than this, you know, I'm better than all this around me, or I'm lesser than, the ego is like a math program that constantly compares itself to things around it in order to maintain its reality. Because as long as it's comparing, as long as it's performing math operations, it's not, it's not equilibrated to zero. Therefore, it still exists. Wow. That is badass. That is so cool. I don't know where that came from. Really, really cool. Yeah. Okay. So it's like a binary kind of, you know, it's just like greater or less than what I'm around. This, that, this, that, this yes, no, yes, no, true, false, greater

than, less than. And even as this thing is running the program, there's this, and this is what I've, you know, gotten from the tank, and also getting, I get it from VR too, weirdly, because virtual reality is the opposite of a float tank, if you think about it. But it's also, I, my big hope for, not, my big hope for VR is that it will, A, VR is the closest people who are, it's, it's a, it's like a simulator of astral travel. Right. It's also a simulator of the psychedelic experience for people who have not had the psychedelic experience. But ultimately, I think that just as astral travel and the psychedelic experience will ultimately show one, if you approach them respectfully, it will ultimately show the futility of it. Right. Like the, the, it's, it's a metaphor

demonstrating the nature of Maya or Samsara as just stuff. Yes. Yes. Yes. We're just in virtual reality. Exactly. Exactly. It's, it's like, it's like Tantra. It's like Tantra compared to the float tank. Float tank is then VR is Tantra. It's like one is overloading your senses, one is removing everything from your senses, both point to the ephemeral nature of the thing that we currently consider to be reality. And, and, and the ego is a manifestation. Is it? Okay. So what I'm trying to get at here is the ottoman, the observer, the witness, right? Watches the ego play out all the games. Yes. Anything that you're aware of, anything that you can see, anything that you can experience is not your true identity. It's just something you're watching. What you really are

is the great watcher of all things. So my question is, is the ego part of Maya? Is the ego in the same way that every other phenomena out here in the external, is the ego also just part of Maya and something that is very close to us, but still not us at all? Yes. I think the, well, okay. When we talk about the ego, the ego is a word that was created, you know, is a relatively new word that comes out of psychology. It comes out of Freud and not, and not the spiritual tradition. So, so it becomes the idea. It becomes tricky it's good in a way to talk about these things in Western language. It's also good to talk about them in Kabbalistic or Eastern language, because then we have a much more precise

set of linguistic tools for talking about consciousness phenomenon in the same way as we have one word for snow and Eskimos have 47 or however many it is. So they have a much more developed toolkit for talking about snow in the same way that if you look at these spiritual traditions like Kabbalah or Vedanta or things like, you know, the Madhyamika of Buddhism and things like this, then you get an incredibly specific toolkit. So in terms of, yes, the ego is the primary generator of our experience of reality, right? So the ego being the bundle of karmic impressions or samskaras, which create the illusion of an individual existence, right? And, and transcending that moving on from that, then yes, we get to the atman or the external,

the observer, right? The, it's kind of like the just the, it's like just the fact that one exists at all. Of course, the, the insight of the Buddha was that even this is Maya, even this does not exist, right? There is no atman. And the Buddha's point, whether one agrees with it or not, is that there actually is no, that the atman is the ultimate illusion. And in fact, there is nothing but the interconnectedness between phenomenon. Meaning arises, meaning arises, and this is kind of like a, it's almost like an advance in physics, I think, that meaning, reality arises only from the interconnections between things. So I would not be this version of myself, unless I was sitting here with you, having this conversation with everyone listening,

right? And neither would you, right? When you, after we're done with this, I'm going to go to Vaughn's, and I'm just going to be the guy who's pissed off buying a bag of chips in an aisle or whatever. And, and you'll play with your dogs, and then you'll be dunking in in relation with the dogs. I'll be Jason in relation with the person in the checkout lane. And the Buddha's point is none of, all of these things are inherently empty of any independent existence, because you can't have, you cannot have a phenomenon without another phenomenon to observe it essentially. Right. Yeah, that's pretty cool. I love that. Yeah, it's good. It melts, it melts you down. Like it's all just a melting, it's all, you know, not this, not this, it's not even that. Oh, you

think you found the observer, you found the great field of awareness, you found the thing that's watching, that is untouchable. Even that is something that is not real. So that you, it's just blind, it's, it's blindfold all the way down. It's just one blindfold, and you pull that off, and then there's another, and you pull that off, and there's another. And as long as you keep pretending that you can pull off the fucking blindfold, is as long as you're going to remain trapped, right? You have to eventually realize that the blindfold, and this is what we started off talking about in the beginning, and I can't remember the exact words. Samsara is nirvana. You have to realize that the blindfold is actually sight, right? That's what it is. You recognize that the blindfold

and all fields of phenomena and all things that exist are perfect, and you surrender to that, right? Is that it? I don't even know what my question was, man. Kind of blew my mind a little bit and sent me on a weird rambly rant, so forgive me. Well, I think that the, oh man, yeah, once we start, now, okay, now we're getting into territory where it's like, okay, this is like, we're at the, where mystics sit around and talk shit about this stuff just all day long, right? Yeah, right. And, is there, is there not? Why is there, when is that, you know, so. It starts eating itself, you know? It's the thing starts, it's trying to dissolve itself backwards, and which is okay, like what we're doing is just the, you know, exactly, we're saying that endless

wrestling with God, it's the, is awesome, amazing, beautiful interaction that we're having with our surroundings and our current predicament. Oh, I remember what I was going to say. I was stressing out because I forgot what I was going to say, and it ties in perfectly to this, so I'm glad I remembered it now. You talked about evolution and people having a problem with evolution, right? And we're at this absurd cultural moment, right? Where people are saying, you know, where we have, you know, the religious right being absurd, right? And believing in these fairy tales. Yes. And then we have the supposed cutting edge of western consciousness, which is hardcore, atheistic, materialistic, you know, so on, and so fedora-wearing, you know.

Yeah, guilty of that one. Richard Dawkins, non, you know, atheistic approach to reality. And we have this, we have this, this silly debate between these two things and this silly debate between this idea of science and this idea of religion, which are not even really science or religion. They're just kind of these bizarre cultural forms that have brought up around sets of people. Right. And one of the things that, what we've just been discussing, this phenomenon of non-existence and dissolving, Crowley calls this NOx, N-O-X, the NOx formula. And I think I'm getting this right. Don't quote me on this. But basically, one of Crowley's points is it is actually better to be, it is better to

approach the field of spirituality and religion as an atheist than as a religious or faithful person, because then you don't have your preconceptions in the way, right? And it's better to do experiments from a position of non-belief, because belief, faith, all these ideas, it's, once one, once, and obviously one can experience this on psychedelics or if you're a hardcore meditator or through whatever way, you get to a point where you realize the shit in your head is just the shit in your head. And whether you, you might have read it from a book, but that's just shit from somebody else's head. That ultimately, as human beings, the mind or the ego-making faculty is not capable of perceiving or putting into language any of this stuff. So when you start talking about mystical

states, you just end up kind of saying nonsense. And it makes sense to people who have experienced the same thing. We're talking about this and it makes perfect sense to both of us. But somebody who comes at this from, they were just watching Fox News is going to be like, what the fuck are these stoner hippies talking about? It just sounds like nonsense. So my point being that the atheistic and almost counter-religious current meaninglessness of our meaningless capitalist society, our meaningless post-capitalist, globalized, computerized, Googleized, Game of Thrones eyes, walking dead eyes, dehumanized culture, this profound meaningless that we're experiencing is actually an alchemical stage. The idea that it's a laying

fallow of the empty, all this God is dead existentialism, all this stuff, is a laying fallow of the old systems of belief. It's a letting go of our prior fairytale understandings of the divine that are archived in this museum form as all the world religions, not to be too offensive. But this is a stage prior to a new, hopefully a new, more mature understanding of divinity and the universe and consciousness and our place in it that comes from a rationally sophisticated position. It comes from, they'd incorporate science instead of, for instance, I mean, yesterday they announced that they've discovered, at the Large Hadron Collider, they've discovered the Penta Quark, which is great. If there's not a DJ Penta Quark yet,

there needs to be one. So the Penta Quark is the lowest form of, not lowest, but I guess the smallest form of matter they've discovered now, it's smaller than the quark, and it has a fucking pentagram in it. Oh no. Yes. They found the devil's mark. And I read this article, and it's like, there's literally language in this article, like, this Penta Quark is cursed somehow. I'm not making this up. We have discovered the Penta Quark. That's amazing. A fucking Penta Quark is a pentagram. Well, you know, I remember like walking down the beach. It's an upright pentagram. Oh, thank God. By the way, a pentagram in any of its forms is beautiful and not able. I was walking down the beach, and I remember finding a star fit or a sand dollar and realizing

that sand dollars have pentagrams on them, and then certain cacti have pentagrams on them. And that's beautiful that they've actually, but I see, I love what you're saying, though, man, which is that I love this idea that the, and it kind of reminds me a little bit of what Alex and Alison Gray taught me, and I'm sorry if I misunderstood what they were saying, but what you're saying is that the in-between phase that you're talking about where you, it's okay. We need it. We don't have to be down on ourselves for it. You don't have to think that it's a sign of this disintegration of society. It's actually just a growing phase that humanity is currently having. And they mentioned to me something similar, which is that we actually

needed the, this period that you're talking about, because to facilitate the technological innovations that are going to happen, especially with psychedelics to like part of the, we couldn't have LSD without science. You know, we needed a period of stringent, non superstitious, super accurate philosophies and thought so that we could bring into existence the components that were necessary to build the next part of this hyperdimensional spacecraft that we all seem to be shingles on, for lack of a better word. And so I love that, man, because it's very merciful. You know, it means we don't have to, if you want to be an atheist right now, if you don't want to believe, if you want to reject all forms of religion, superstition, as superstition and nonsense,

and give up all the mystical stuff and throw it all away. I actually have a friend who, you know, we've been talking and he was going deep into the Bhagavad Gita and a lot of the Eastern philosophies, and he said, it's just, it's, I don't want to do it. It's too much. It's giving me anxiety. It's, it's making me scared. It's, it's rattling my cage a little bit. It feels like a rabbit hole. I can't stop going down. I don't want to do that anymore. And what you're saying is super cool, which is like, don't abandon it. You don't have to. You can approach it from the perspective of an atheist. Don't believe. Give yourself a break from it all if you want to. You don't have to constantly be lost in this incredible, beautiful, the world of the magician or metaphysics or whatever it is. You

do, if you can just as, you can be as much use in the world if you just let yourself deal solely in the realm of matter. Right. Is that what you're saying? Well, the, one of the, one of the phrases I came up with, and I've been teaching these classes about magic, and one of the phrases I came up with in the last one was that belief is the currency you spend to make things real. Oh, cool. Right. Or attention. You can apply that to attention. Attention is the currency you spend to make things real. That's awesome. We look at the world around us. Why does everything want our attention? As soon as you open your laptop or you go outside, you're constantly bombarded with pay attention to the new Batman versus Superman movie or go to Vaughns or go to McDonald's or

whatever it is, or people come at you wanting to get, involve you in their whatever it is, their drama that they're having. Attention is, seems to be the, the hottest commodity. You know, human attention seems to be the hottest commodity on the planet. Now, why is this? I think it's because it's like hotter than oil. Like human attention is the great fuel. Yeah, go ahead. Sorry. Yes, absolutely. Right. And, and we do in a way live in a, you know, I, I really have begun to suspect that we do live in a modern slave society or human sacrifice society without getting too dark, but, but a much more gentle and, and evolved one than the Aztecs, perhaps, or whoever. But I think that. So you're saying that we're basically like to take what you just

said about the slave society. Like the idea is that in the same way we get like, slaughterhouses or, or dairy farms with the milking machine, sucking at the enslaved cows so that people can drink cow juice with their coffee in that same way that we're all like, or a lot of us are just like cattle wandering through some cattle run where our, our attention is being extracted and transformed into energies by our, by our, uh, masters. Well, not, not necessarily by our masters, but by each other, because we're all our own, you know, one of the things that Facebook has proven to me is that we're all each other's captors. Wow. As soon as you get on Facebook, you know, people that you've met 10 years ago once are like up in your shit. Hey, I met you 10

years ago for five minutes. Let me interrupt what you're doing right now. I still wish Facebook had in quotes underneath it, we're all each other's captors. That's so funny. Yeah. It's not like people intend to capture you either. They just, uh, they just get you. Holy shit. Actually, I was just reading, listening to this amazing, amazing, I think it's Sebato, it's Lou Barlow, it's called, it's called Choke Chain and it's a, it's a great song and the essence of it is like the moment you think you're free, someone comes and chokes you with a chain, you know, like a dog on a choke chain, like the moment you have any kind of autonomy or you feel like you're, you're truly being yourself. It's a matter of seconds before some son of a bitch will come and challenge

that and try to yank you down into whatever their paradigm is. Yep. And yes, I'm working on a practical way to solve this problem. What is the solution? I don't know yet, but I think that, um, uh, when you become very good at meditation, one of the things that you realize, um, is that, you know, the idea of the will, there is literally nothing that a single pointed focused human awareness cannot do, I think, right? Um, the, uh, you think of your attention as an electrical current, right? And you're putting it on something to turn it on, right? Uh, to make it real. Um, and then you think of all the things that distract your attention, people coming at you on Facebook, your phone going off. Um, the new DC comics movie is out, right? Whatever it is, right? Or you got to go to the,

you got to go to the store, you got to get your oil changed. Yeah. You know, the 10,000 things. Yes. Right. A Buddhism. Um, uh, if you think of your attention as a frayed wire and those things just like fraying the wire of your consciousness, the idea of meditation is that you build the strength to insulate the wire so that those things don't have power over you. Cool. And I think that my only answer is it's just got to be trained just like going to the gym. And, uh, I don't think there's any way around the hard work of just doing the mental work of meditation to attain single pointed awareness. Um, but, um, yeah, people don't, people don't want you to do that. They don't want you to be free. And I think that, um, one of the things is when you get really good at meditation,

you realize that you have everything you need and that you can get bliss and happiness and love on demand from the universe. You develop your innate connection to the universe. Most people have not developed that their, their, um, um, so that they, they get their energy from other people. Oh, that's good. Okay. That's really good. Yeah. The other, every person around them is a nipple. They try to suck that sweet attention nectar out of. Yes. And they don't realize the fact that they're actually, there is a, a turn as to quote Gandhi, there is an eternal nipple that we can all suckle at. Yes. One moment. So yeah. So universal love nipple. We don't have to access, we don't have to become these like weird attention parasites feeding off of our brothers and sisters,

but we can actually tune into this kind of infinite love frequency. This is like the Tesla talked about this, right? His idea that there is, uh, you know, there's a way that we could have endless access to energy. It's a great dream. This is the great dream. It's just, this is the medical, metaphysical version of fusion that you're talking about here. Well, um, my, uh, everything in the world that anyone has ever come up with has come out of nothing, right? And, um, if you think about the classic image of the stage magician is somebody pulling a rabbit out of a hat, you know, something from nothing, that seems to be the way the universe works when you engage with it fully and hence magic with a K is really not that different. Uh, you know, my, uh,

my, uh, I think that my best under under current understanding of the universe is that it is nothing, right? It is emptiness, uh, and non-existence ultimately, but somehow paradoxically, and this makes no mathematical sense, but or logical sense, but it seems to be loving nothingness. Cool, right? It's like a, like the, the, and, and how could it be anything else really? It's because it's, it's an emptiness. Rom does cause it loving awareness. Okay. If you think about zero, non-existence, uh, what, uh, you know, the only thing that can emerge from non-existence is the connections between things, um, uh, you know, because phenomenon emerge from nothingness and then the connections between those things form and that is love, right? The connection between

two things. So, so how could it be anything else really? Um, it's the adhesive, right? That is so trippy and that's what we really are. Yeah. Yeah. It's really, really, um, and, and this stuff that you're talking about here, this is considered magic. Like people would say that this, this philosophy that you're saying, this is, this is magical, not magical in a sense, like you're out of your fucking mind. There's no talking, uh, unicorns, that kind of magical thinking, but it's magic with a, magic with a K thinking, which is that we are a unified consciousness that is just pure love. Well, I like the, I like the word magic with a K for a couple of reasons. Um, one is it's totally fucking absurd. Yes, it is. It's just like the, the, the

things that come into your mind when you hear that word are just like, uh, you know, there's a guide down by the river in a bookmobile who's going to like, uh, I don't know, like, like, you just think of like, you know, people in basements with robes and rings, being total assholes and yeah, and, uh, listening to coil. And, uh, I've definitely been that person. Um, but, uh, when you hear the word magic, it immediately fills your mind with absurd, foolish things. And I think for that reason it's good because it frightens away people who are not ready to deal with it. Or embarrasses away. Like a lot of people, you know, if you want to show you, you want to see how powerful magic is, mention the word around the wrong people and you will force them to roll

their eyes instantaneously. So the word itself produces a Gergev and shock if applied in the right way. People are just like, shut the fuck up. We don't, like, like, come on, man. Like, are you an adult? Like, no one wants to, this is, I mean, like, this is, no one said that to me, but I have noticed in the wrong company, God forbid I start rambling about magic. Man, it's like, the pressure drops in the room. It would have been better for me to have explosive diarrhea in a chair than in their house than to mention magic. A lot of people don't want to hear it, not because they're afraid of it, because they think you're a fucking idiot that you would ever buy into that nonsense. Right. But then if people actually begin to look into it, then

off to the races, I think that, but the other thing is it suggests, it undermines by its existence, by the word itself undermines the idea of the, we can, the arrogance of the ego into thinking that reality can be understood. Right. To suggest that we don't necessarily, we don't know, we really don't know anything. Okay. If you think about a hundred years ago, people didn't, at the, you know, around the 1900s, people didn't even fully understand that there was a connection between sperm and egg meeting and having a kid. You know, we didn't understand, we didn't know about DNA. We didn't know about, you know, all, you know, we didn't have computers. We didn't have any understanding of the outer planets. What's that? There's a great word for the phenomena where people

used to think that flies grew out of shit. Like they didn't under, what's that called? You know, I don't, I don't know. It's, it's a great spontaneous generation or something. You know what I'm saying? It's like, yeah, people also used to think that fish were a vegetable that just grew in the ocean. I could see that. That wasn't that long ago. You know, we, we, we, people are believe in nonsense. But when I guarantee you that back when people thought that fish were, was a vegetable, some asshole was talking to somebody else. Like there was some guys like, Hey, you guys, you know, I've got a crazy thought. I think that fish are actually living organisms. I think that they're not, I don't think they're plant life at all. I think

we're, these are animals is what I think. Someone's like, Jeremy, shut the fuck up with your crazy ideas. Fish are vegetables. Everyone knows it. If you're going to be a fish, aren't vegetables guy, please just bring it up somebody somewhere else because we're sick of hearing it. Shut up and go back to tilling the field like everyone else. Oh, I guess you spell fish with a K at the end of it too. Huh? You fucking, you hippy, you hippy woo woo fruit. But that is the attitude. And I think people like us get really frustrated with it. When you look at it contextually that through every period in human history, there has always been a version of Richard Dawkins. There's always been a version of the most stubborn, certain hyper secure per guy or girl

who thinks that because they have managed to compile in their mind, the very cutting edge of whatever is the scientific understanding in that particular era and time, they are there for the the level by which all truth can be determined. Right. You know, and that is so fucking frustrating because it's like, look, your confidence and all that you're doing right now, every single time period, there's been someone that level of confidence. And every single time period, those people have been shown to be complete and absolute jackasses. Yes. You know, and so that's why it gets frustrating because you do have to fall back into the state of like, I don't know. Do you know the Lancet, the medical journal, the Lancet? Yes. So I think a month or maybe two

months ago, the editor of the Lancet, which is I believe the most prestigious medical journal in in the world, in Britain, but I think in the world as well, it's like you'd be gold standard for scientific, like this is the like ground level reality. There was an editor, the editor of the Lancet in his editorial wrote that over 50% of all published science is just nonsense. Right. Because it's it's not done properly. It's driven by fun. I don't remember his specific reasons, but essentially, like it's not done properly. It's biased and and if we look at, I think I think that science is the great hope of humanity. The true scientific method of saying let's approach reality and do experiments and discover what's real and what's not. Like that

is one of the best ideas that human race has ever had ever. Yes. Right. But it doesn't get applied properly and it's only applied to certain things. I think that magic certainly Crowley's conception of magic is applying that exact same attitude to the claims of spirituality and religion to see what's real and what's not by doing the actual recommended practices and taking notes and comparing it with other people who have done the same thing. Don't want to waste my time, bro. It's all bullshit. I'm not going to waste my time, man. I'm not going to get look what was you when we sit around and burn incense in front of a good nash or shut the fuck up, man. None of that shit's real. It's just a fantasy that human beings have come up with to deny the fact that they're going to die.

And so in one last desperate attempt to give the illusion that they're okay and not stuck in a cyclone, which is a kind of accidental conglomeration of particles that happen to wake up and are now going to die, they're building fake doll houses made of bad ideas that they spend their time in instead of experiencing real life, which is going to supplantation and getting the discount because your grandfather's there making sure they have baby chairs for you. I love supplantation. You can get great deals there. And you can just like the ice cream section at supplantation, you can get as many like soft serve ice cream cones as you want. And they actually have some pretty decent stuff now. You can get my favorite trick at supplantation is to go with a baggy coat

and to just get a bunch of wrapped yams, like sweet potatoes in your pockets and just walk out like that because then you're set for the week. Wow, you're robbing some supplantations. There's a magic trick. Just listen and the tradition of great magicians, you're robbing supplantation. Now, so this idea of science, I don't think a lot of people understand how scientific magic, at least Crowley's magic is and Crowley actually said science or magic is science for the vulgar. Have you heard that quote before? I don't remember. Yeah, I don't remember. He said it. Well, I mean, who knows if he said it could have been a misquoted thing. But the point is, they're very, very similar. And the if there's a lot of people who for no other reason than

because they think that they should, they won't try praying. They won't try chanting. They won't try visualization rituals. They won't try astral projection. They won't try any of this stuff because they think they know it's not real. Right. Even though they haven't they haven't done it examined the sources, they're getting this idea that it's not real to determine whether or not they actually tried it themselves. And so it's a form of and it's a form of, I think, laziness because how can you go through the world telling people there's no God, there's no life after death, there's no spirit world, there's no astral plane, there's no soul, there's no this, there's no that. If you haven't spent any amount of time in deep contemplation, practicing the various

rituals and rights that have been prescribed by whatever the particular religion is that you want to debunk. Once you've done that, instead of trying to debunk the fucking thing from outside the subjective experience of it, until you've gone into that subjective hamster ball where the walls of the hamster doll are painted with the particular symbols of whatever religion it is, I don't think you can go around saying it's bullshit. I don't think you can go around saying it's nonsense or tripe or whatever it is that you're saying, not you, but whoever it is out there is listening to this, who's been doing that, there probably isn't anyone because I think most people who listen to my podcast probably have some connection with magic, but how can you go around

refuting all this stuff if you haven't tried it? And what a great victory you get if you discover from an actual experiment, not bullshit, but if you actually spend, let's say, I don't know, two weeks every morning praying, simple experiment, approach it from the POV of an atheist, spend two weeks every morning waking up and praying however you want to pray. If something changes in your life, then you've just discovered the most incredible thing that has been people have been yapping about for a long time. If you eliminate all the external variables and things that could have, you know, if you approach that with scientific precision, because the flip side of that is the approach of the true believer, right? The person who's like,

who gets full on it, this is reality. This is like, you know, I'm going to be, you know, who approaches it as a religion, right? And the idea that simply by doing these practices, you somehow become a good or better person, that is equally insidious, right? Because to take these things as de facto true, just because they're written down by somebody else is also in a form of laziness, right? So Crowley says that magic combines the method of science and the aim of religion. And that the idea is you do experiments, you note what happens, you don't take it too seriously, you don't get overwhelmed by it, and then the next day go out and proclaim you're the messiah or the reincarnation of Cleopatra or the Lizard King or whatever. But you take experimental

data, you do yoga practices, you do what might be considered astral travel, you do ceremonial magic procedures, you do a flotation tank, or you do prayer, or you do whatever these things, Sufi dancing, whatever these things are, and you take scientific notes about what happens, and then you review them, and you let the experience sit, and then you've expanded your experience of life. You've had experiences that you didn't have before, and you now have new data for understanding the universe that you did not previously have. But that's not just, you know, that could be anything in life, you know, you could go work on an oil field to see what it's like. That's true. Yeah, that's true. But yeah, I just don't think people understand, because when people

think of magic, I don't think they understand that the people who really practice it are very stringent in their approach to it. Well, not everyone is, you know. But if you were to approach it from, at least from the Crowley School, his everything that he says is very detailed, very precise, very disciplined, and it's a lot of reading, you know, he's not just saying like, do ceremonial magic, he's saying you need to read these 30 books, or you know, it's just a huge object, it's like becoming a doctor or something like that. It's a very real practice. It's about that level of work. Yeah, it's like a PhD level of work, or two. Yeah. So, and of that same, one of the things about Crowley, too, is he assumes a classical education. So what he assumes the

reader going in will know Greek, Latin, math, history, things like this. And it was one of the most, one of the most fruitful things with Crowley for me is not even the magic per se, it's the looking at how much the standard of education has dropped off in the last 100 years. And understanding that just for us to get to the level of an average well educated kid with a classical education, like an 18 year old kid with a classical education would have had in that time period who had access to that is a huge amount of work for an adult now, you know, the standard of education now is so low that even to get to the point of having a knowledge of our own culture, our own history, and how to do scientific experiments, how to understand languages beyond

just English, how to look at things logically, you know, that's a, you know, that's magical right there. And for me, I like I tend not to dwell on these, you know, the supposed supernatural aspects of this, because I'm not sure there actually are any, I think it's just methods of altering consciousness. But I dwell on the practical discipline of it. And the idea of self education, you know, and that's, you know, I've been teaching these classes in Magic Online, and I found that there's a huge hunger for not just, you know, not just spirituality, but learning education, finding out more about the world than just, you know, what's thrown at us by HBO and or Facebook. And there's a huge hunger for because

people know they're missing. People are missing so much now, they don't have access to nature like they used to. They don't have free free spaces, they're not they're not able to go places that are not controlled, right, right, that are not under some form of surveillance. Yeah. So they're not there's nowhere that people can go where they can just be themselves, or that is not mediated or advertised to they don't have access to the classical education. And people are missing out. And we've experienced a process of deforestation, which exists not only in the physical world, but within the within ourselves, right, we're losing all these things, and we're losing access to so much knowledge and so much wisdom and and skills of the past, you know, like, for instance,

I've been one of the things I've been doing is just as an experiment is metal smithing. I started teaching myself how to do metal smithing and then studying with people. And what I started to realize is all there are all of these disciplines that where do you do that? I just well, I've just been finding people who are masters of it who were teaching classes like you go to like places like you're you're talking about anvil. Yeah, hammer banging on like where do you do that in LA like you got to find people because downtown. No, it's like people's houses where they're just teaching it. Well, what do they do about their neighbors and they're like pounding out a broad sword? You know, they've got they

probably have enough property. But just like, but that's really cool. I'm starting to stop you, but it's like, you can't just say you've been dabbling in metal, go over that. That's crazy. So like you're talking about you go to their places in LA, where people have an anvil, right, and a hammer, right, or a whole workshop or things like that. And and and but that's just one thing. And but I what I've been realizing is all of the there are all these skills and trades of the of humanity that we've picked up and learned as critical survival skills that are going to disappear when people die because it's just all computer now, right? Right? Anything that's not on a laptop is seen as lesser than holy shit. And and and and that's really the

cultural attitude. If it ain't been digitized, it don't matter. Right. That's the idea. It's got to be digitized. Anything that's not digitized, you just don't know it exists anymore. Right. There were Obama, I think, like six, seven months ago, wrote an article on medium, where he was trying to talk to the millennials, you know, in their own language. So he wrote a thing on medium, which was well written and well measured. He's, you know, and but he basically, he's talking about how millennials are working now and the challenges facing millennials. And if you read between the lines, if you read between the Obama language, what he's actually saying in there is kids, go work in tech or with something that involves technology because

nothing else is left and you guys are fucked and that's your only option. And I think that that is so that that, you know, we've lost all the manufacturing jobs in this in this country, we've lost we've lost our heritage in a way. And I think that one of the primary benefits that there are so many benefits of magic to me, but one of them is is is finding out about things like that or even to, you know, to talk have the opportunity to talk about these things with people or you are to have form social connections around them. I mean, I don't I think that there is, you know, the most revolutionary act or the most revolutionary act set of acts that we can take right now is self education, you know, and I don't mean just on the internet,

I mean, in a library, I mean, like getting smart because people do not want you to be free and people do not want you to be smart and not smart doesn't mean Wikipedia. Smart means like you actually do the work and the research and the reading. So self education, training oneself and skills and physical world connections, not on Facebook, not social media, but sitting down and having a conversation with somebody and making having a meal with somebody, all right, which is which is a, you know, podcasting allows us to do. Yeah, well, it's the only yeah, exactly. Yeah, creates a space for long form conversations to happen. Okay, well, that's that's it. That's really interesting. That's cool, man. I know you mean that like, learning all

these lost things of which whatever this practice of magic is definitely a hidden art form that you, I mean, it has been digitized. I'm sure there's a billion Kindle books on magic, but most of the stuff is so complex, you know, I mean, like, you know, just today, just talking with you about it, like some stuff is really more clear in my mind. And that's the other thing. And God forgive me, you guys are seemingly about to launch into some advertisement for your online course, which you didn't ask me to do. But you know, the old school of this stuff, the way that it worked is you someone teaches it, it's not something and you've been you are taught, right? You are you, you are an apprentice of Genesis, pure and and and yeah, and I went all over the

world, you know, learning the stuff and in Nepal and studying under a lot of different teachers, yeah, early Genesis. Yeah, so you you got a transmission. You got something of a transmission. And I think that there's like, you need it, like I need somebody like you that I that understands the chakras, so that I can like bounce ideas off, it just helps a lot. And that's something else that's missing. And especially when it comes to this stuff or anything in general, everyone thinks they can teach themselves this or that, like, not to like make it a super mundane, boring, non magical thing. But since I've been like, I have a trainer at the gym now. And before I had a trainer at the gym, I would go to the gym, I'd lift weights within

my comfort zone, I'd lift the same weights every time I went, I'd leave the gym kind of mildly sweaty, having like done really no exercise at all, but convinced that I'm a healthy person, whereas like this guy, you know, now that I'm training, like you really work out, like they've been studying this shit for their entire lives, they understand the anatomy, the human anatomy, they understand the muscular system, they understand everything. When it comes to like physical therapy, they're physical therapists, basically. And so when you work out with them, it's this really precise activity that produces results and really shows you just how much you are limiting yourself by pretending that you knew how to work out when

you didn't. And I think that it's exactly the same when it comes to metaphysics. And it's exactly the same when it comes to meditation, you can trick yourself, you can do it on your own, no offense, I'm not saying there has to be a guru or a teacher, you could do it on your own. Ultimately, everything is self education. Right. You've got to do it yourself and learn yourself. But it helps to have somebody who's like, here's what I've been around people who fucking fingernails have grown into their hands from meditating. And here's what I got from that experience. And there's, to me, it's just a big difference. So I think it's cool that you're doing that class, though, do you feel a little uneasy about becoming some kind of cult leader or some

kind of, you know what I mean? You know, you're saying earlier, you don't want to be Deepak Chopra, but do you feel a little, does it make you a little nervous to be a teacher? Yeah, of course. I mean, how could it not? But I think that the, what I'm doing is, so I have a website now called magic.me, it's m-a-g-i-c-k dot m-e, so magic with a k. And it's, it's, there's probably six year 70 recorded hours of video on there now, and I'm constantly improving them. So there's, there's like 12 to 13 course modules you can take from, there's things on chaos magic, on traditional ceremonial magic, on astral travel, yoga, meditation, even on things like achieving peak physical energy, lucid dreaming, things like

that, and, and that you can take them and learn them as skills from a video, from a, you know, a video instruction, chapter by chapter, that's all practical, you can watch it on any device, you can watch it on a self-paced, and I present it like that instead of as a dogma or a magical group or anything like that. And I was, I really enjoy teaching, so I've, I've really gotten into it, and I've found that it's actually been incredible for my own practice because now teaching it, it's like, okay, it's like now I need to know it, I need to know it, not just how, how I can get it to work for me, but I need to know it, know it, so that I can teach it precisely and accurately. Right. So that's been a quantum leap in my own

growth, but I think that. And you don't think you have to, like, because one thing, like, you know, when I consider the concept of the teacher, like, so here's my question to you, and it's a question that comes from, like, on this podcast, I will, like, do, I'll say, you know, some people, I will say things, and I'm like, I don't think you are some kind of spiritual teacher, and, and I'll look at my life, you know, I'll look at, like, man, I, you know, I, I, I, like, screamed at my fucking poodle a couple of days ago, I, I, you know, got, got in a fight with my girlfriend, or I was a total dick, or, like, you know what I mean, I'll look at my, like, the shit that's going, like, your, your car's dinged up, your nabbing plantains from suit plantation. Here's my question, man, here's my

question. It was just the once. Yeah, once is forever. I'm gonna see that. No, man, I want to address this because it's something that I think about, and I know what my teachers would tell me, which is just your fucking, just try to help the world, dumb, dumb, don't try to, don't think that if you're not a perfect person, you can't help people, you know, that's ridiculous, and that's just your ego trying to keep you from benefiting the world, because so, but how do you rationalize that though? Like, how do you, how do you wrap your mind around the idea of being so good at articulating this stuff? But if your life isn't perfect, if you haven't actualized yourself, can you then teach? There's actually a very precise way that I, that I look at this,

which is in India, there's a difference between a guru and a pondi, right, and a guru is a fully realized, enlightened person who is not only enlightened and realized, but then offers to essentially guide people and carry people along that path, no matter what. Yes. And takes responsibility for people. Yes. And I'm not that, I'm not Ram Dass, I'm not, I don't know, I'm not Neem Karoli Baba, I'm not Yogananda, you know, I'm not a, I'm a guy, you know, I'm a pondi, which is basically, a pondi is basically like a college professor. It's like, I can lay out the intellectual framework for this stuff and communicate it clearly, but in terms of one's own practice, or, you know, I'm not responsible for that. I show the, I'm essentially, essentially what I'm

doing is not really any different than writing books on this stuff. You know, it's just, I'm doing it in a video format and then offering it as lectures, just like a college professor. You're just teaching a craft and a philosophy, a series of philosophies that are super old that you are clearly an expert on more than anyone I've ever met when it comes to this stuff. There is no one that I, it was so funny that we ran into each other, you guys, at a VR expo that we were at, because we both like virtual reality, in a, you know, within like two seconds of us talking, you were like, yeah, I hope I'm allowed to say this. I'm going to write a book on Inokian magic, and then you mentioned John Dee, and I thought to myself, man,

there, I don't know anybody in my life. I know very few people, maybe two, where I could say to them, John Dee, right? The Inokian angels, and I know very little about it, but I know enough about it to like, have a vague understanding of it. But it's so cool to have people like you in the world, because you remind me of, and I hope you take this in the right way, you remind me of a professor, what was the name of that, the university that H.P. Lovecraft wrote about? Arkham, Arkham University. Yeah, that's what you remind me of. You remind me of a teacher in an H.P. Lovecraft novel. That's hilarious. You really do, and I think it's so cool, man, and I think that it's such a specialized understanding that you have,

and so anyway, all I'm saying, you guys, is try it out. It's so cool to like, I mean, you could see from this conversation how good he is. You're right in front of me. You're so good at this. It's totally, it seems like a worthwhile endeavor, and P.S., what the fuck do you have to lose? Like, at the very, you know, how much is a one class? Well, it's, the classes are 55 each. I also do live ones every weekend or so. The ones that are online are recorded. The classes are 55 each for three to five hours of material you get access to, but I also have a subscription plan that's $49 a month, and then you get access to everything. Do people get to talk to you? There is a, there's a Slack forum, if you know what Slack is,

like a chat forum that is a new startup. So there's, there's community growing around it, and I'm, I'm involved in that. The live courses, I interact one-on-one with people. There's also people, you can get personal consultation time if you want. The, for listeners of this show, here comes the shameless plug. Here we go, guys. The, so it's 20% off the first month of the subscription plan, if you use the code Duncan, and then it's, it's literally like something like 30 bucks or 30 and some change for a whole month, and then you get to watch, you can watch everything, you can try everything. Give it a shot. I mean, what do you have to lose? What's the big deal? Just try it out. By the way, I'm not, I'm not being paid in any way. A lot of people are like,

you know, if I can advertise, I'm not doing, I just like Jason, and as you guys know, I'm a big fan of magic, and it's just cool to have these conversations, and I want to help a brother out. Thank you. Well, I wanted to add one thing to that, which is, in terms of the, the guru, teacher thing, I, I really, in my ultimate vision for this, and one of the reasons why I hope people get involved, who are listening to this now is, you know, magic is really, it's basically like the lost science, and it was prior to the enlightenment, all of the, if you go back and you look at the history, all of the smartest people in Western civilization were deeply engaged in this. You know, Giorgiano Bruno, Newton, Isaac Newton, Daniel DeFoe, certainly John D,

people like that. All of the founders of science were very steeped in alchemy and magic, and they had this understanding of all knowledge as a unified thing. So what they were trying to do was not, you know, science now, what they were trying to do is they were not trying to make bio weapons or make genetically modified crops or fill the coffers of some corporation. The original science was they were trying to understand reality. They were trying to understand that, and they saw reality as essentially God, and that magic was a way of understanding what this, this divine thing that we're in, right? And, but it was, of course, as science became more codified with the Royal Society in England, and progressing onward from that, you know,

magic was simply just discarded as an embarrassment. And, but in the same way, but it led alchemy, created science, science came out of alchemy. And of course, as is put by JFC Fuller, one of Crowley students, from astronomy, we got, excuse me, from astrology, we got astronomy. From alchemy, we got chemistry. Right. So from if we were to re study, to re go, re pick up this intellectual project and look at the study of magic itself, what, what will we actually get from that when we scientifically understand that? What art will that become? And I want to approach this as a school because there is, of course, I there's nowhere in the world outside of maybe, I think even the programs in England, although there is renewed academic interest in magic from an

academic standpoint, instead of a practical standpoint, there's nowhere in the world I can go and be a professor of magic is just, I have to do it myself. So what I would hope is to create an academic type setting around this where it's not about just me being a teacher, it's about almost like grad student type set up where people are talking about these things and performing experiments and taking notes and things like that. And it's just an experiment. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work. If nothing comes out of it, then nothing comes out of it. But I want to try and see and just as as an experiment to see what happens. It's its own magical experiment, isn't it? By the way, that name of the name of the school and I just thought of it love the name

of the school in Lovecraft novels, just to avoid getting the comments is it's Miskatonic. That's right. Miskatonic Arkham Arkham Batman. I can't believe I got that wrong. Oh, it's in it's supposed to be in the town of Arkham. That's it. It's Miskatonic University. Yeah, Miskatonic University. That is who you just heard, my friends, a professor from Miskatonic University, Jason Loof. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Let's hear where people can contact you and I'll have these links posted on the site. Okay, so it's magic.me, m-a-g-i-c-k.me. And I should also mention I just have a I have a book out. There's an e-book on Anokian and there's also a new book out called Hyperworld Underworld, which is a collection of my journalism. There's magical

writing in there, but there's also a lot of journalism on, you know, oil pipelines and trade agreements and things like that. And Duncan was very kind to do a quote for the back about it. So and so that's out now, but go to magic.me, m-a-g-i-c-k.me, and also ultraculture.org, u-l-t-u-r-e, c-u-l-t-u-r-e.org is the main blog connected to that from which, which is kind of the parents of magic.me, because we're most of my focuses now. But magic.me, that's the one to go to. And the code for the 20% off the first month is Duncan. Cool, man. Well, thanks so much. And those links are going to be at dunketrustle.com. Hare Krishna, thanks for the enlightening chat. Thank you, Duncan. Thanks for listening, pals. That was Jason Louvre. And big thanks to Casper

Mattress for supporting this episode. Go to casper.com, use offer code Family Hour to get $50 off your first order. And if you like that podcast, give us a nice rating on iTunes. Won't you? Thank you. I love you, Hare Krishna. Ghost Towns, Dirty Angel, out now. You can get Dirty Angel anywhere you get your music. Ghost Towns, Dirty Angel, out now. New album and tour date coming this summer. It's Macy's friends and family. Get an extra 30% off great gifts for her just in time for Mother's Day when you use your coupon or Macy's card. And take 15% off beauty essentials or shop specials she'll love while supplies last. Plus Star Rewards members earn on every purchase except gift card services and fees at Macy's. Sign up today at

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