Duncan Trussell Family Hour - ZACH LEARY

Episode Date: August 16, 2016

Zach leary, It's all Happening podcast, joins the DTFH and we talk about our upcoming attempt to bring virtual reality into a flotation tank.   This episode brought to you by casper.com  go to casper.com/family hour and use offer code family hour to get $50 towards your brand new mattress!

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. This episode of the DTFH is brought to you by Squarespace.com. Go to Squarespace.com and use offer code Duncan to get 10% off your brand new, beautiful website. Do it now. Squarespace, oh, I'll see you in Squarespace.

I've got one wish for Santa Claus on this Christmas Eve. Please destroy ISIS and make them all believe that Jesus is the Savior and the only way to God. Make them understand this by dropping Christmas bombs on the evil people of the world. Let's roll. American children are the best of all. That's why we need more checkpoints at our schools and malls. You can scan our cell phones and take our guns away. Whatever you think it takes to save the USA.

From evil people of the world. Thank you Satan. Duh. We bow down to you, Santa, cause we know who you are. Being of many names that they call the morning star. Lord Dragon Conqueror. Crushed in love you, Santa Claus. What was that?

What was that? What was that? What was that? What was that? Oh, hell no. Here he comes, climbing down your Christmas tree. Body shaped like a pear, covered in glycerin. He's drippin' with love all over your Christmas packages.

And he's ready for you to unwrap his brain and set free the golden phoenix of light, the nests inside of all of us. Welcome now to the EDFH. Your friend and my Santa Claus. Hello dear friends. Tizai, Duncan Trussell and you are listening to the Duncan Trussell family hour, Hare Christmas. If you're like me, then right now you're laying naked on a bare skin rug, rubbing scented mentholiptus cream into your nipples

and staring out over the beautiful forest that surrounds the Christmas palace that you go to every Christmas. You've just counted the mini coins in your gold room and placed a Christmas ham into your gigantic Christmas oven and now the sweet smell of that ham rolls through the house, mixed in with the delicious odor of your lover's musky underarms. As she does aerobics in front of you, in front of the fire, her earrings made of diamonds shaped like Christmas trees and her tongue lipping her slightly chapped Christmas lips as she gazes upon you

as though she is gazing upon a freshly born cosmic god. If you're like me, then you're probably about to do 600 pull-ups and go running through the vast acreage surrounding your Christmas palace and if you're like me more than likely on your run, you will encounter a massive ram that has been wandering on your property for the last several months and if you're like me, you will dive upon this Christmas ram, wrestle it to the ground and just as you are about to choke the life out of it so that you can kill it paleo style and truly experience what it means to be a free hunter-gatherer,

that ram will magically turn into a beautiful forest nymph and try to seduce you but if you're like me, you will not be fooled and you will whisper into her ears the ancient scripture from the dark text that is kept in the basement far below your Christmas mansion and she will yet again transform into a lizard-like being the source of all evil in the known universe and if you're like me, you will not be afraid but you will bite off her tongue and spit it into her face and she will transform yet again into you and if you're like me, you will gaze lovingly into your own eyes

and hold yourself for Christmas gently making love to yourself on the soft, beautiful forest floor that surrounds your Christmas mansion. I hope that you're like me and I hope that you have that plan for this Christmas and boy, what a great episode we have for you today. The amazing Zach Leary is joining us today and we're going to jump right into that but first, some quick business. This episode of the DTFH is brought to you by Squarespace.com Go to Squarespace and use offer code DUNCA to get 10% off your brand new badass website.

Your website does not need to hang on the sacred flesh of the internet like some festering bot fly cyst on the side of a mangy dog hobbling along the banks of the Ganges River You could transform your website into something sacred, beautiful and glorious like a jeweled glowing cow floating above the great people of India and the entire world. All you have to do is go to Squarespace.com and sign up. You don't even need a credit card to try it out. Just go there. Give it a shot. It's only $8 a month. You get a free domain name if you buy Squarespace for a year.

They've got 24 seven support via live chat and email a responsive design that means that it will scale to any size phone out there and if you need to get a website up quick, they've got cover pages so if you're in a big hurry to get your website up, you can get your website up in minutes. There's no reason for you to spend the last few moments you have on this planet prior to the singularity with an embarrassing website that protrudes from the sacred waters of the internet like some kind of festering appendix out of the belly of an old man. Go to Squarespace.com, use offer code Duncan and you'll get 10% off.

Please support Squarespace.com for they are one of our longest and sweetest sponsors. We're also brought to you by Amazon.com. If you go to the comments section of any of these episodes and go through the Amazon portal then anything that you buy from Amazon, they will give us a small percentage of. And why haven't you gone through Amazon in order to copy a Fallout 4 yet? No matter who you are, where you are, what you're doing. This is the ultimate video game of all time and I highly recommend it. I'm playing it right now and I'm deeply, deeply addicted.

We also have a shop located at DuncanTrestle.com with brand new shirts, brand new shirt designs, brand new logo designs and we've got a lot of new posters coming in. So if you want to buy some DTFH merch, go check it out at DuncanTrestle.com. Okay, let's get this Christmas Eve show on the road. Today's guest is a dear friend of mine. I got to spend some time with him in Hawaii. The Ram Dass opened your heart in Paradise Retreat. This is his second time on the DTFH.

The first time was with Gay Dillingham talking about the documentary Dying to Know, which is about Ram Dass and Zach's dad, Timothy Leary. Zach also has a fantastic podcast that you can check out. It's called It's All Happening and that's at It'sAllHappeningShow.com. It'sAllHappeningShow.com. Now everybody, please rip open your hearts, pull out your spiritual Christmas trees and throw them like javelins through the astral plane so that they land in Zach's sweet, scented ears and fill his brain with overwhelming blasts of love.

Welcome to the DTFH, the great Zach Leary. Zach Leary, welcome back to the Dunkin' Trussell Family on our podcast. Hello. Dunkin' super hippie, what's up? You're the super hippie, man. You have to be of all hippies the ultimate hippie. Am I? Well, I mean, if you think about it, there's your...

I mean, this is something that weirdly... Well, I guess because the last podcast we were with Gay Dillingham and talking about the movie and didn't really have a chance to ask you, I think, a question that's probably on a lot of people's minds, which is what is it like to have Tim Leary as your dad? Well, I mean, it is a good question. It's a fair question. There's no question of... God, there's so many times we're going to say that word.

Of course, it's fair. It's a fair thing to ask, but context is everything. You know, it's one of these ideas that I could only play with in my own life as I got older because until about the age of, I'd say, about 23, 24, there was nothing to compare it to. It's just he was just a guy. He was just my dad. He was just a guy. And there was no juxtaposition to look at the lens any differently.

But as I've gotten older, I've begun to embrace the weirdness of it. Not just the weirdness, but really how special and extraordinary it was. How special and extraordinary he was mostly. He really operated in the plane of consciousness that I have yet to see anybody else operate in. Now, when this plane of consciousness, there seems to be a kind of divide between what's known as what I've heard called the psychedelic satsang and the spiritual satsang. And Tim Leary, Timothy Leary, he was the psychedelic satsang. He seemed to be a representative more of this.

Whenever I've seen videos with him and Ram Dass, there seems to be some pretty severe disagreements as far as how the universe works between them. There are. I like to say my little metaphor for it is different rides in the same amusement park. Yeah. Ultimately, it's to in many ways, it's to the same goal, you know, self actualization, your self realization, ununderstanding or obtaining a map of consciousness that can, you know, ultimately help improve your life or whatever it is you're trying to get from the map of consciousness.

They're just different routes to it, you know, going through the head, going through the analytical, you know, the, I guess, you know, the different larval stages as Tim would talk about. Right. And like the Eighth Circuit model is very much sort of like a Tibetan Book of the Day bardo, Tibetan Book of the Dead bardo model. Right. Is just escalating different waves of spiritual enlightenment until you get to what he called the Stuller Circuit, which is really just moksha and liberation.

It's the same thing. Right. Just kind of a different mask. Yeah. And both Ram Dass and Tim Leary, they both seem to be attempting to. To take this very difficult to articulate state of consciousness and figure out a way to communicate it to people, to talk about it, to create a system through which people could achieve these states of consciousness.

It just seems like Alper Ram Dass decided to use the symbols of the East and your dad invented his own symbols and was trying to create a newer system. Well, he did. And I think both of them share this quality in common that with any sort of mystical experience, you know, if you want to come psychedelics, bhakti, whatever it is, all of the experiences are very hard to articulate. I find them to be difficult to articulate. Yes.

So Leary, Alpert, McKenna, Watts, they all this incredible gift of being able to articulate the experience in such a way. You know, first, you know, Leary and Alpert's could articulate this through the language of Western psychology, right? Yes. So that made them both very dangerous and very potent. And it was probably like the key to their success is they could, they were elders of the time, they were the age of the parents, not the kids.

So they could take the psychedelic experience and sort of speak of it through the lens of psychotherapeutic realizations. Yes. And so that made a lot of sense to people. Right. There was so much logic in it. Yeah. It was like, oh, wow.

Okay. And this is directly applicable to, et cetera, to Freud. And they had been, they had, they had the certification, man. They had, they'd been anointed. They did the work. Yes. They've done the work. Yeah.

They weren't wackos out of left field. They had done the work through, through the straight system. Right. They both came up through the square system, you know, through Squaresville. So, you know, essentially just, just what happened. I mean, there's a lot of, you know, ins and outs to the stories, I guess, if you will, but he was, as he was becoming persecuted throughout the 1960s, you know, he became more and more aggressive in his passion for the exploration of the mind.

But that's where it was at. Like people were persecuting the notion of having permission to explore your own mind and your own consciousness as you want. Right. So he was like full throttle. And you can see even in later works or, you know, middle works in the 70s, it was like exo psychology and info psychology and getting to the eight circuit stuff. That all came post 60s.

Whereas Ramdas sort of, you know, experienced a sense of, you know, disillusionment of always having to come down. So it was sort of the same work. But then the language of the heart, the language of compassion, the language of love became just as potent for him. Right. Yeah. But I think the goals, I don't think they ever differed.

And it's really only the. But the persecution differed. The persecution differed. No question. Yeah. Because your, your, your dad went through the archetypical, the same thing that throughout history has happened to people who. It was a heretic.

Yes. He was. He was labeled a heretic. He was imprisoned by the powers that be for spreading these, this new information that it was completely harmless and yet somehow so disruptive to the, well, I guess the way the powers wanted things to run that they did everything they could to ruin his life. And they came pretty close, you know, doing four years of hard time is, is, you know, that's a lot.

That's a good chunk. Is it true that I've read that he like came out of that a little different? Like some people say that it did have an effect on him that getting locked up for that period of time wasn't necessarily, I mean, it's going to have an effect on anybody. But no, he didn't come through unscathed. He didn't come through unscathed. There's no question. It took it.

It took its toll. Yeah. It did. Of course it did. Of course it took its toll. But what's, what's so interesting about this part of the story to me and I have a lot of self awareness around that around this part is that this is not ancient history. This is not made up.

This is not tinfoil hat conspiracy buffs. This is like, you know, he was a real honest to God political prisoner. Yes. In the 1970s. That's right. Yeah. By, you know, persecuted lead, the persecution led by Richard Nixon. You know, this is not a joke.

This really happened. You know, there's no, there's no if ands or buts about it, which makes the, you know, it makes his journey definitely a lot, has a lot more like gravitas, I think, than, than say Ram Dass, you know, because Ram Dass, you know, he became so much lighter and freer and kind of floatier and airier after named girlie Baba. But you know, Tim got harder and grittier and, you know, he was really clinging on. But you can, I can tune into that anger and I could tune into that, what he must have been feeling a little bit, just because to me, they're, I, one of the most frustrating

things about the society that we exist in is the fact that the prisons are filled with people who have done nothing more than wanted to explore different states of consciousness, using chemicals to get there. And somehow that is considered to be one of the worst things that you could do in the world. And sometimes some people have far longer prison sentences for ingesting a psychoactive chemical or being in possession of a psychoactive chemical than people have murdered. It's insane.

Right. It's insane. If you're someone who is at the forefront of this and has identified that here is a substance that has the potency and the power to completely shift the consensus reality in the direction of some higher form of society. No pun intended. That sounds so cheesy, but some kind of like more advanced utopian state of consciousness for the masses.

And you start getting locked up for that. You start getting demonized. I mean, people were like, you're making kids kill themselves. You're driving people insane. You're nefarious. Like he wanted to do it. Like his intention was to my kid jumped off the building because of you. Yes.

Yeah. You're to blame for that. Right. So ultimately, though, I think part of, I think if Tim could be here today and sort of course, correct part of his journey, he was, and I feel sort of weird saying this because I do love him so much and admire his work so much. But he was anti-authoritarian to a fault. You know, if you're going to ride that wave and this, you know, that's your horse and

you're going to bet on that horse all the way through and he never gave me name or never switched horses. That's a pretty, you know, a lot of heavy stuff to keep riding on, you know, and to kind of juxtapose yourself with that in society to take that place. It's just anti-authoritarian, anti-authoritarian. Whereas, I'm sorry, we keep going back to Ron Luss, because you and I are both fresh off of this retreat. But whereas like the merging into the one and kind of seeing the God and everyone standpoint

or point of view is as just as much, if not more, you know, productive credibility to it in the long run. Sure. Right. Yeah, sure. Well, yeah, you're going to run a lot longer on that fuel for sure. Yeah. Now, so here's my question.

When I was a kid growing up and I first encountered LSD, which was one of the greatest things that ever happened to me, I had to hide that from my parents. Okay. What about you? I did at the beginning. You had to hide it. At the very beginning I did. Yeah.

I started getting into the Grateful Dead when I was about 14. Yeah. And despite what everybody thinks, Tim was not, he was not pro-drug for, you know, pre-adolescent, you know, young, prepubescent kids. It was not, that was not okay. So at the very beginning I had to hide it. I probably started tripping a little too young, smoking pot regularly, probably a little too young.

What were the reasons behind him not wanting, because it seems like classically kids are taking psychedelics around 15, 16, 14 is pretty young. Pretty young. You're just not ready yet. Yeah. Your brain just hasn't, hasn't developed. It's just a, it's a, it's a physiological thing. You know, you don't have the brain mass and the experiential intelligence, the experiential

and emotional intelligence to really carry the weight of what these substances can do. And he knew that. And he was lovingly trying to, trying to guide me in that direction, but the wheels finally fell off. And then he just was like, fuck it. Okay, I'll join you. And when it was about 16 is when we, yeah. Took acid together.

Yeah. So that's so funny. Actually, Tim Leary is your dad and you had to be like, no, man, we just, you know, hung out last night, dad, not, no, we didn't, did he ever ask, like, are you taking drugs? He must have known. Yeah, of course. Of course. But no, and then I think my mom would kind of do a, you know, what do they call it in

prison? They come and toss up yourself. My mom would kind of do that, come into my room, toss up myself, tear my shit up. That is crazy. Try to find my drugs. That is so funny. This is like, that's so funny to imagine Tim Leary, tune in, turn on, drop out, having to be faced with one of the byproducts of his work, which is that his son is sneaking

out to take acid. Yeah. Wow. Well, we have time for a story. This is the podcast. Actually, you know, the first time, this is actually a really good story and there's a little bit of a lesson in it. The first time I actually ever smoked pot with him last day of junior high school, my

mom was out of town. I remember she was in the Bahamas visiting some friends, just me and my dad, Ramdas came over. He was staying at our house that night last day of the day after. So it was the night before the last day of ninth grade, which in LA is a separation between junior high and high school, right different schools. And at that point I was smoking pot. So me, Ramdas, my dad were kind of hanging out in the living room.

And Ramdas was like, give him a break. Let's just smoke it with him. Let's just do it. It's going to be okay. Right. So we did. We had this amazing experience. It was this really close, you know, sweet, very kind of paternal and loving, both of

them really caring for me as we kind of exchanged the sacred burn, the sacred medicine. So we did that next day, last day of school, I get up the carpool. He's coming to pick me up and I see in the ashtray on the coffee table, half a joint left. It's in the ashtray. Great. But yeah, both Tim and R.D. are asleep, so I grabbed the joint and I take it to school. And last day of school, so in the corner of the playground, me and my friends smoked

it. Yeah. We got busted. We got busted on the last day. We did. Somebody ratted us out. And then it was the last day of school, there was nothing they were going to do about it. So they had to call him to come pick me up from school and he walks into the Emerson

Junior High in Westwood, California and he walks in and he just gives me this look, just shaking his head like, oh my God. And the assistant principal, I remember this very well, his name was Principal Sher. So Principal Sher, he was like, oh my God, Timothy Larry is coming to pick up his kid and getting busted for pot. This is amazing. Yeah. This is so cool.

It was exactly of the right vintage to really get it. This guy and he was, he pulled him aside and he was like, look, you know, someday this may be legal, but that day isn't now. That's pretty cool. And all that happened was they wouldn't let me graduate, they wouldn't let me walk the stage of graduation. But we had this, you know, is this incredible, I mean, I remember the drive home that day and, and, and, you know, this is the 20 minute drive back home from school, just kind of

the air of like, we gave you a shot, man. And you blew it. Yeah. And you blew it. Yeah. But you know what, man, I guarantee in the back of his head, he thinks it's the funniest thing ever because he would have done the same thing because it's the, he just must be seeing, it's so funny.

This is karma. You know, he's getting to see himself in you being reflected in the exact same way. You're the rebel now. You've done it. Well, you was in some tiny little way, you've done what he did throughout his entire life, which is to go to the corner of the playground and get high and get busted for it. Really cool. So you, um, it seems like as life has progressed for you, you, the path that you have chosen

has, has been something of the psychedelic path, but you definitely have gravitated more in the direction of Ram Dass and Neem Kurali Baba and Bhakti Yoga. Can you talk a little bit about the beginning of that for you when you found yourself being drawn into that path? Well, the first seeds were planted when I was a teenager, I think like every good teenager I would be here now, following the Grateful Dead around the country, and it had a great impact on me, especially the, the, the first half of the transformation. You fall, you, so you fall the dead for how long, how many shows?

About a hundred. So about a hundred shows. Yeah. So the mode a hundred times, I think, somewhere in there. Yeah, you know, so be here now had a great reverence to me. There's, there's no question about it. And I wasn't quite ready to really get into what Neem Kurali Baba was or who he was or that whole thing.

But then, you know, I had this other experience too, which I'll come back around to it. But as I started to age about age 15, 16, 17, any time I saw Ram Das, the light in his eyes, I mean, you've been around it now. Yeah. Couldn't take it. I couldn't take it. I couldn't hang out with him. I just, it was too much.

It just was like, it was just, I had too much. What later I could identify as self loathing or uncomfortability within my own skin to take it. I just couldn't take it. I was like, who is this guy? And what is this act that's going on? You know, you thought it was that and I was like, why he's always like this. You know, he's always beaming, you know, he's always shining so bright.

Then I became, I realized it wasn't an act, but how did he get there? You know, so how did he get there? And then I kind of shut it down for a while throughout my teenage years. But later on in my teenage years, I had a friend in the Palisades who became an Iskand devotee. He went to Pali High and he was getting rid of all of his stuff and he just gave away all of his surfboards and stereo gear and became a Brahmachari in the Iskand tradition. And he introduced me to the Bhagavad Gita and the whole Vaishnav lineage of things.

Where was this here in Los Angeles? This is so this is when I was about 17 years old. So so he introduced you to the Iskand temple in LA. He introduced me to the Iskand temple in LA. He did the one in Culver City, the one in Culver City. And he did, his name was Anton. I forgot what his initiated name became, but he did book distribution, you know, book distributions.

Yeah, he did book distribution of Gryffindor Dead Concerts as well. So I would see him around, you know, two or three times a year and be like, hey, Zach, you know, and he'd give me another copy of the Gita or whatever. And I read the Gita then ate it up and just, oh, my God. This is Bhagavad Gita as it is as it is. And, you know, I immediately was aware of that that translation was a little bit a lot, a lot of him in there. A lot of judgment.

And so it was a little bit like, well, this is fascinating. What do you mean? A lot of him, like a lot of male pronouns, a lot of male pronouns, you know, you do not come to the earth before him. Yeah, sure, sure, sure, sure, yeah, nothing yet. So there's a lot of that and sort of a little bit of the mysticism, you know, stripped away, but that's OK. So I kind of found this whole fusion of the yogic sciences and yogic philosophy

just kind of infused in me between Ramdas, between the Iskand movement. I started going to, you know, Sunday Feast here and going to Kirtan's and thought this was pretty cool. When was the first time you chanted Hari Krishna? Sixteen, yeah, sixteen. And, and I, you know, I did not become a Bhakta at that point, but I got it. I did get it. I remember just succinctly, distinctly going, wow, this works.

Whatever they're doing. Yeah, I remember it's gone to Sunday Feast. So that's the first time you chant it was Kirtan. It was Kirtan. Yeah. And it was just, you know, kind of their very ecstatic version brand of Kirtan, you know, jumping up and down and dancing and the kind of the Lord Chaitanya dance that they do. So you got the high.

I got the high and I got it and I understood that it was drug free. And you're like, what the fuck? I'm like, well, something is happening here. I used to think something's happening. The first time I did it, Laguna Beach, that's where I got introduced to it. My brother had been hanging out there and I was in Laguna Beach. You know, my parents were just horrified because my brother appeared to be turning into a hard Krishna and I was like, this is, this is cool.

So I flew out to see him and I came and picked me up at the airport and gave me a flower from one of the garlands and I took it. And he, man, you know, my brother and I had this very weird relationship growing up, but I'd never seen him like that. He was so sweet and happy and loving. It was really wild, man. I'd never seen him like that. And, um, so I remember, you know, having like just all this skepticism about it

and just, you know, I carried a little bit of the worry of my parents and, uh, but you know, I'm like, you know, suddenly you're at the Hare Krishna Temple, man. It's like, if you've never been to one, it's overwhelming. It's beautiful. It's beautiful. It smells so good and the incense and there's just nothing seems that terrifying about it based on what you've heard, some dangerous cult. Yet the aspects of it that do seem like a dangerous cult are kind of awesome

because it's like, whoa, cool. This is real. This has got some serious pull. Like if you let yourself, you will get drawn into something that will transform you forever and you won't care. And it's beautiful to me. It just seemed even the, the, the, the, every aspect of it just seemed incredibly potent and beautiful.

But then I started, I started, I remember the first time I chanted, uh, was sitting on a roof in Laguna Beach. Like I climbed up on my brother's roof and I'm sitting there chanting and I remember, man, when, when I was done, I thought, Oh, they put something in the food. Cause I'm high as a kite. Well, you know, back then it was, it was, it was a little, it was a little different. You know, the, the Hare Krishna movement was, uh, it was kind of a zero sum all or nothing game back then.

It's like, you know, they wanted you to become Brahmachari and that was the way in. So, uh, it's not so much anymore. It's a, it operates in sort of different constructs now, but so I, I just knew that was not for me, but as, uh, it's about what late 18, just about to turn 19 when my parents got divorced. That was really the, uh, you know, that was kind of the final, you know, straw that broke the proverbial camels back in my dad's life, you know, his, his whole development, uh, work ethic and sort of different peaks and valleys within his

work, it's all based off of tragedy, you know, his first wife, Mary, and killing herself went on his 35th birthday because he was having an affair. His daughter, Susan, killing herself, every wife leaving him, you know, it's just really heavy, heavy, sad, sad stuff. And when my mom left him, well, some people say with Susan, some people say that that, I mean, I, I can't remember which book I was reading, but there seems to be an attempt to connect that suicide to the fact that he was having them take LSD.

Like he, I always thought that when you were saying he didn't want you to take LSD when you were young, somehow, and forgive me, I mean, this could be totally wrong, but I, in one of these books, it was talking about how he wanted it, it no brook or something. He was having them take LSD. Is there any truth to that? There might be some truth to that, but with Susan, um, you know, I knew Susan pretty well, she had, uh, you know, she was really a beautiful, exuberant soul,

but she really had some mental illness, like traditional, classic illness, kind of stuff. Um, so when it happened, when the suicide happened, it was, I mean, you know, she shot her boyfriend and she was in jail. Oh, yeah. So it was, you know, it was just a lot of heavy ossity kind of just around, around this. So then someone, my mom left, it became, um, you know, the, the four years that

we had after that together were God, we had so much fun. It was so rock and roll. It was so sex drugs and rock and roll. It was just, it was a nonstop party. And you know, he was really in kind of a renaissance movement, but there was also this air of sadness to him because that's one reason why he, he, dove into death so easily was because he was sad. He was like, I'm good.

I'm done. You know, I've got it. He did it. I did it, you know, and, and so he really jumped into that. So I immediately had some kind of awareness that like, again, this is a weird thing to say about him, but he didn't really deal with his own shit that well. You know, he could deal with it because he was so brilliant. He was the smartest man in the room.

And he was always was the smartest man in the room. He could resort to that. But for the rest of us, just kind of, you know, fledgling around planet earth and this incarnation who aren't the smartest people in the room. It's not putting myself down. I just, you know, I know what I'm good at, what I'm not good at. There had to be another way. There had to be another way.

So, you know, the yogic sciences and eastern mysticism, to me, you know, once I sort of, well, I went through my own darkness and drug addiction and things like that, but once I kind of plowed through that, that just became, you know, that became a window into the soul and to, especially into a place of healing that just felt much more in alignment to me than going, you know, through the mind and through the constant repetition of the psychedelic experience. Well, I don't, I mean, I, I don't, it doesn't seem to be like, I, they're not mutually exclusive to me.

I know. I mean, I don't, this is like a, I, I, everyone knows I, I love psychedelics and I thank God for them. I do too. Yeah. But that being said, I have, whenever I run into some, that thing you're talking about that like Romdass outputs, whatever that thing is, which is overwhelming and I mean, I.

Real. Real. And, and also the, the, I mean, this sounds so nuts, but there's this, so of these retreats, I'm just for people who don't know that they have this mala ceremony at the end of the retreats where they give you this Mala to chant on, you get to have a, what's called Darshan, I guess you would call it with Romdass. So, and it gives you this, these Mala, this Mala and man, every single time

I've done that, I am just knocked out of the water, man. I get so, it's such a, I can't even explain that feeling. It is the most psychedelic, intense, beautiful thing minus any substances at all, whatever that is. I don't know what it is, what it's just wild. So, um, that, uh, people like Romdass and you see many people like him at these retreats, it's, it's, that's what's cool about them. It's not just Romdass and you realize there's like many, many, many

versions of that floating around. And, but in this, I'm, forgive me if this sounds judgmental because I sure as hell don't mean it too, but I've noticed people who have fully committed to the psychedelic path minus the spiritual aspect of it, there seems to be a kind of like anger or edginess or a kind of like. Exactly. The psychedelic people are the ones who get mad at me who are arguing with me on Facebook about the guru system.

It's not that the, the Bakhti people who are arguing with me about the psychedelic system, right? I mean, God bless the psychedelic community. I'm, I'm part of it and I always will be and I love all those folks. Me too. But, but you know, it's, they're the ones who are getting all hot and bothered and have to seem to have a little bit of dissonance. There's a fundamentalism to it.

There's a fundamentalism to it. There's a fundamentalism. And the fundamentalism centers around a misunderstanding of giving up your individuality, that you are giving up your individuality to control of this old man in the blanket. There's this, this misunderstanding of that, that you have to give something up and it gets into a control game. Easy to misunderstand.

Easy to misunderstand. And of course the guru system is fraught with many perils of terrible examples of it being. It is so hard to understand and it's so incredibly hard to understand. And the problem with, you know, the problem with this, this thing that you and I are engaged in, is that you begin to have very real experiences that are way out there, man. And they're so far out there that even talking about it at all.

And as a, as a podcaster, it's like a real, it creates some cognitive dissonance for me because it's like, man, I'm having some pretty trippy experiences based on this path. And I don't know if I have the guts to talk about all of them because it's so, it sounds so, it really does sound like you've truly, truly lost it. If you start saying like, yeah, I think I might have a very real and powerful connection with an Indian. Who died 40 years ago.

I know. Well, you have a, and I hear you say this a lot on your podcast, you have a lot of, you hang up on the language a lot of thinking that you're you're too hippie. Yeah. God, I'm fucking being hippie again. Fuck, I'm being hippie again. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, you get into that a lot. Maybe I've just, I mean, I do two at times, but I've just made peace with it so, so long ago that whatever. Right. You know, it's just, well, you got to, I mean, that, that is, but so, but to get back to the, this interesting difference between whatever these two paths are, or the, the extreme versions of the, these two paths is that the one

that we're engaged in, if you say guru at all, most people that I mentioned that word guru to at all, they are just like, they turn off immediately. The idea that you could have a guru, a teacher, oh, you're going to bow down to, oh, you're going to get a Y and bow down to Ramdas and a little fucking Mala. Is that what you're going to do? You know what I mean? Like they're like, okay, all right, my dad, I remember my dad, but he's like,

so going to Hawaii to hang out with your gay guru, huh? You know what I mean? Like, like, like that, that, that, um, that kind of for some, here's what I don't understand. Every other mode of life, whether it's tennis, like, let's say that, like, I was really into tennis and I was going to Hawaii to hang out with one of the most famous tennis players on earth, one of the most skilled tennis players on earth to learn how to play tennis.

People just like, yeah, cool, man, you love tennis. Good job. You're going to a tennis seminar. If I was going to hang out with somebody to teach me finances, if I was going to hang out with somebody to teach me how to do jujitsu in Hawaii, you know, a Gracie, whatever, totally normal, totally normal, totally normal. But why is it that when it comes to like this stuff, to spirituality, even though that, that theoretically must that same concept, which is that some people

are gifted when it comes to this human, I have, I have an explanation for that. I think it, uh, and, and increasingly so, it defies the constructs of modern Western civilization. You know, my kind of latest thinking around this is that the rise of atheism is based, it's hand in hand with the rise of big data. So in the scientific world and the digital world and the world of ones and zeros and quantum physics and quantum mechanics and the internet age, everything is quantifiable.

We have a lot of great explanations that are real for everything. That's right. For the age of the universe, for the age of the planet, uh, planet earth, for, uh, fucking Graham Hancock, saying 12,800 years ago, 800, right? Very specific. There was a giant flood, you know, whatever it is, quantum mechanics are being able to say that, you know, matter and light are the same thing made up of the same stuff.

So what, what, what this is doing, and not to mention like the filter level that Google and Facebook is creating, it's creating this air of that, that, that, um, destroys mysticism, right? Getting rid of the space between things. Right. You know, this is great terms. McKenna quote that I've been thinking on a lot lately. There exists this dimension between language, but it's just so damn hard to

talk about. Yeah, right. Yeah. So, you know, because of it, you know, this age and, you know, everybody is a, it's a digerati of some kind these days. You know, your experience, everything, everything through the eyes of big data and how it's being fed to you and your experiential quality of being alive. It's, it's largely through these digital lenses.

Yep. So not only are you going to this, to this old man, uh, you know, guru in Hawaii, but the other guy, he's not even in his body anymore. He's disembodied. Yeah. And yet he has this tangible thing that you guys take away. You can't explain that. Impossible.

It doesn't have any algorithmic explanation to it. So in the modern age, there becomes a dissonance with it, which is why to me, it's, these are the rises of the same heresies and the, and Dawkins of the world. Right. It's because there's no, it doesn't fit into any category. You know, it doesn't. Yeah. Well, I mean, it does have an algorithmic explanation to it.

It's that you're out of your fucking mind and you're getting off on some kind of placebo effect, uh, because you've, are you though? Are you getting off on some kind of placebo effect? I mean, look, man, no, please. I mean, I've been like, look, I've been around all sorts of different spiritual traditions and lineages and been around Amma and Iskang gurus and Bob is in the jungle in India and all the, you know, uh, all, all these different permutations of these, um, spiritual alchemists and the

lineages that they create. This one, the one that we're part of this neem Karoli Baba one, it creates this alchemy that it just has a different result than the others for me, for me. They're not all the same. It's not just, it just doesn't happen to be neem Karoli Baba. It's just the alchemy expressed in this one for me resonates in a frequency that I've never experienced before. Terrence McKenna in the, in his discussion with Ram Dass towards the end, he

said something like, I don't care who you burn candles to, you seem like a kind person. And in that moment, Terrence McKenna didn't realize that what he had done is identified exactly what it is because it's, it's, cause what, what, I think what Terrence McKenna may have been missing is that the reason he was Ram Dass is putting off this vibe that he described as a kind person is that what he was feeling is neem Karoli Baba radiating out of Ram Dass. And the way he put it is you're, he was identifying the actual substance of the

thing, which is, is, is, to me is that, um, cause you know, my, I love breaking this step down. I think it's important to break it down. And I think it's important to try to bring it into the tangible and to bring it into the, uh, and into some algorithm that, that makes sense. And, uh, so it's, it, the way I think about it is, um, so if I get around somebody who's authentically in a great mood, having a great day, I feel better. No question about it.

Usually, unless I'm having a really shitty day and then I'm going to be annoyed. But you know what I mean? Like if I'm around someone who's like, whatever, whatever's happened to them, whatever they're having a cynically good day, man, I feel really good. And, and that makes me feel better. It can, it can give me a little uptick, not a lot, but a little bit of an uptick, right? So theoretically, uh, if we live in a spectrum of consciousness, then that,

then, uh, having a good day, right? You can have that, that could exist on some spectrum, which is like the normal good day, a good day where you realize that, I don't know, uh, shit. You find out that you inherited $15 million. That's a, that's a pretty cool good day. And don't have to put in a materialistic way or a good day where like, who knows, man, you figure out, let's just put it in the realm of like insanity that doesn't even happen.

Let's imagine like one day you figure out, you know how to walk through walls or something like that, like that level, like, whoa, this is cool. Even better. I shouldn't have said the wall walking thing cause it's crazy, but how about that first day after you've made love to a person that you've fallen in love with that day and I think of that day. Oh, that's a good day. Like on the spectrum of good days, that's a really good day.

So then let's take it to, to the, to the good day of, um, your child being born and you, you have, now you're, you have a real family and so all these things like, so there are all these specs now, uh, if this is a transmittable experience, if the idea is when you're around someone who's had a great day, a little bit of it gets into you, then, and if there is a spectrum of happiness, then people like Ramdas and Neem Karoli Baba have figured out a way to go to the five billion times past the day after you've made love to someone that you're in love with and they're experiencing that kind of day, not every day, but they

know how to tune into that. Yeah. So when you get around them, there is going to be the exact same effect times that additional, you know what I'm saying? That's correct. So that's the psychedelic feeling is you're getting this transmission that's happening or maybe another way to put it is you are, um, harmonizing with their frequency and, and, and because that's what humans do.

We know it when women are around each other, they'll begin to menstruate at the same time. Correct. That's a good example. Yeah. So that means that if it, so you tune in, so here's, and I'll sum this up. So here's what I think. Yeah.

That means it's really weird, but that means that the, whatever that energy state and it's fair to say that any state any human being is in is an energetic state. So whatever that energetic state is, is a very specific packet of information that gets transmitted to other people. And if they're able to fully accept it and fully tune into it, or even halfway tuned into it, then that means they can also transfer that energy to the next person down the line.

That's right. So that's right. And it also frees you from these addictions, like all these other examples that you just went through, making love to the beautiful woman, money, materialism, whatever it is, most of those experiences, you're going to come down from them. They have a peak and they have a valley. That's right. They have a zenith to them.

Right. What's going on here is that, you know, through enough spiritual repetition, a practice and a repetition of whatever your, your method is, the peaks and valleys become smaller and smaller and smaller. And the equanimity becomes, it's pervasive. Right. And you can stay in it and you don't have to come down. You don't have to go through so many extremes all the time.

If you're gentle enough with your own spirit to, you know, like Krishna also always says, there's, as far as I'm concerned, there's only one thing we need to renounce and that is our self-hatred and our self-loathing towards, towards our own selves. That's the only thing we have to renounce. And once you sort of get past that game, and I know you and I probably share a lot of that in common, it's, it's, that's a tough game to get through. But once you do, like for me, man, like this last retreat, I've been on a

lot of these now, like over 10 of them. This last retreat was the most potent for me. I'm on my hard hat. I'm a slow learner, whatever it is, you know, I just finally, I banged my head into the wall enough fucking times to be like, Oh, okay. Well, all that other, you know, the self-hatred and how I treat myself. And then how I ultimately can treat others too. I don't have to do that.

Wow. That is, I mean, that's that concept. Yeah. It's, I mean, it's so fun just to imagine. What you would be like if you didn't hate yourself, it's so it's so cool just to like, is a thought experiment. How would you behave in the morning when you woke up? What would you feel like when you went to bed?

What would you feel like? And, and, you know, it seems like the way you would feel is like a kid. Like you feel like a child, like children generally up to a certain age, you don't seem to have the quality of hating themselves. At all. Right. You learn that. That's a learned thing.

And that is the, uh, yeah. So that is the, that, that space is why they call it liberation, right? Because you've been liberated from the tyranny of yourself or of the, of the negative self-image or something like that. Right. I guess that's what liberation means. Or one small version of, I mean, it goes further, doesn't it? I mean, we're talking about very deep water here.

It goes, yeah. I mean, what the supreme manifestation of Moksha means, what a complete, um, merging into the one on every level. Is that, it's not right? Well, yeah. And, and the problem, you know, again, once we start getting into that language, now it's like, I don't, I, like, I don't know what that means at all. So it's like, you know, it's like, at that point, it gets like very confusing

because it's like, it's very hard to talk about, but you, you're someone who has had a very unique life. You've got a very, very unique life. And you've been around, as you mentioned before, a lot of these, I don't know what you call them, yogis, gurus, awakened beings. What is the strangest, most inexplicable thing that you've ever encountered when it comes to this path? A couple of things.

One, um, I think when I first, a couple of Maharajis, new curly Baba experiences that kind of, uh, and these are important to, to share because as we've talked about, uh, new curly Baba died a month before I was born. You know, so, you know, if you really try to get your head around that and the rational mind about how you're developing a relationship with somebody, um, like that, very, very difficult to understand. But, uh, two experiences. One, um, you know, the first time I went back to visit Ram Dass and was

sitting in his living room and it was just me, him, you've been in his living room. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, the big, my statue, the Morty of Maharaj. Yes. The big blue one. Yes. Right.

It's very, it's beautiful. It's a great, it's a great place to sit and hang out. And, uh, this experience of hanging out with Ram Dass, um, you know, when you're sitting with him alone, you feel like you have to talk. You feel like you have to say something because, oh my God, I'm sitting with Ram Dass and even I, I, I still have that feeling. And I've known him at a long time and I'm like, oh my God, I've got to say something that this feels awkward.

We're just sitting in silence. This is, this is awkward. Which he's totally cool with. Well, no, this is what he wants. And he's just, you're the one going through all this. He's just like, I'm just here. What are you doing? And then when I finally first lost that, that need to have to exist in this

place of language, and we were just kind of sitting there having, I guess, a form of Darshan, very, very powerful, very, very, very powerful, very, um, uh, tangible, very palpable, very, um, transmittable in the sense that I could almost like put it and bottle it and take it with me. Cool. Like this was very, very, very cool. Um, and I had another one. It's so funny when you say that because it makes me think how it's almost

like you're trying to drown out the present moment with your words. You're trying to extinguish that your, your work. It's funny. It's like Ramdas is transmitting something. Absolutely. And he sure as hell is not just using language to do it. Every single thing he's doing seems to be some form of this output and that instinct to talk, you're definitely trying to talk over his silence to keep.

To make you comfortable and to fight, to fight back against the thing that he's inviting you into, which for some reason we don't want to get into fully for some reason, like you don't, it's too intimate. It's too intimate. It's too intimate. Yeah. And, and it's, it's already been inside there. You know, this one, um, one of the best things I've ever heard Christian

thoughts say we were in this, uh, actually Rodin Oswami's like a room at his temple in Mumbai. And there were all these, uh, um, Western yogis, um, who'd never been to India before. And they're all asking Rodin Oswami questions about India and everything. And then Krishna gives his advice and he says, whatever you experience in the next two weeks here in India, just know that it's already been true in your own heart and these experiences are just polishing the mirror.

Wow. And that was, you know, contextually, if you really break that down, that's an amazing, amazing, amazing thing to think about. And that's an amazing place to be is that, you know, this, you know, the, the, the polishing, the mirror cleansing, the mirror using the, the dust of the guru's lotus feet to polish the mirror, all of these crazy metaphors. And like the Dungeons and Dragons Hanuman Chalisa translation, you know, that's what it's all about.

It's just about cleansing that mirror to your own divinity. And we've been through this a million times and you and I have at the retreat, you know, every single wisdom tradition all shares as the kingdom of heaven lies within, except, you know, Krishna, all of it. I just heard a cornfield quote. He was quoting some Zen master who says when I see, I'm going to butcher it, but it's like, when I see a tree limb blow in the wind, I am not seeing the tree is not moving.

I am watching my mind move. The tree is still, but my mind is moving. Ah, it's so beautiful. Yeah, it really is. Oh, and you know, it's funny as we were talking, you know, I do this thing just to take it back to Tim for a second, like one of the great sort of games I like to play with the, the memory of him. As I get older, my memories get a little bit foggy, of course, you know, as, as they

do, you know, I do wish he stuck around a little bit longer to have seen my entry into this world and have him sort of soften his own spirit around the thing. So I do all sorts of fun rituals and pooches to him. I have some of his ashes on my pooja table and, you know, mess around with what I think is the alchemy of the afterlife. I mean, why not? Do you feel like you, you connect with him? Absolutely.

Absolutely. And I just want to, you know, try to express that he can be free of some of that self-imposed bondage of his own soul, you know, and experience a little joy and happy notes and freedom and that, you know, none of his mistakes were all that bad. What do you think he said he would say to you now? Or does say to you? Now I think he's, uh, I think he's into it.

I think he's, he's, he's supportive and he's into it. And he's kind of given me that little twinkle in his eye and that little thumbs up kind of, kind of thing. Um, and would be incredibly supportive. I don't think you'd ever sit down and chant Sitaram or Hare Krishna or anything like that, but, uh, I think you'd have a tremendous amount of respect, um, towards my sincerity, you know, towards the practice. I do too.

For sure. I think you'd see it as a, I think you would have to see what happened is that like this incredible fusion between the two, the perfect fusion happened. The, it makes sense, doesn't it? That the, you know, you would somehow incorporate those two paths together in a very grounded, beautiful way. It does make sense. And, you know, like every, I mean, you know, the, the cliche of being any famous

person's offspring, of course, and there is a textbook cliche and it's ridiculous. Yeah. And it's, it's sad and it's almost, you know, uh, lies in the culture of victim hood, but it's very, very difficult once you become an adult because you will, you know, you'll all, people will always be holding you up to some kind of standards of some kind of comparison. And that's just the way it is. I mean, think of, you know, Jacob Dillon or Sean Lennon, those guys who try to

make music, it's a, you're doomed. You know what I mean? So, you know, with that, you know, that came, there came a lot of darkness in my life. I bet. So there's no question that the softening of the spirit and the sense of self forgiveness that is accessible through these, you know, these spiritual practices. God, he would have loved it. Yeah.

He would have loved it. Absolutely. I think so. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, man. It's really cool. It's, it's, it's really, it really is a, I don't know. I, you know, I think that anybody who's taking the psychedelic path, it's got

to be who's listening to this right now, who's just fully committed to that path. I understand how nutty it may sound, especially if you're like getting blasted on LSD and you're, you're, um, you're experiencing like that teaching or you're in the height of experiencing the teaching, which all of us go through where it's like, shit, man, the only problem with this LSD is I have to wait a day in between trips or double the dose. I remember having that as like, I was the one who had big problems in life. It's like, fuck, you can't take it the next day.

You've got to like wait. At least that's how that was my experience. Tolerance builds really quickly for LSD. It's, if I had heard someone being like, listen, I'm telling you, there is a experience that makes that experience just seem like your first step, just a tiny little first step, it would sound in nuts, uh, but you need that first step and it's, I mean, here, let me just get really cheesy cause we're running, we got to go float or anytime, but you're like, and, and I would love

to hear your thoughts on this. God, forgive me, Zach. This is so ridiculous. So in the New Testament, you need a John the Baptist, right? Okay. The John the Baptist was the one who like brings, who like anoints Jesus. John the Baptist is the one who's like baptizing people in the water. And then Jesus comes and like, you know, that's the story.

You need the John the Baptist, John the Baptist, what happened to him? Do you know what happened to him? He got his fucking head cut off. Okay. John the Baptist got his head cut off. He got arrested and got his head cut off. Your dad is the psychedelic equivalent of John the Baptist and, and Ramdas took up the role of Jesus and like, and, and sort of carried the

psychedelic, the, the, the, the psychedelic ground, the roots are psychedelic, but it grew into this flower that has a spiritual component to it. And to me, that's, that's how I see it. It's really cool to see you carrying that forward. Like you are, you are the, you are a great representative of that path, which is really beautiful to see because you're so grounded, you know? And like we talk about this glow that Ramdas has and you've got it, man. When I'm around you, I get lit up.

It's really, yeah. So anyway, I'm glad to know you. You're a cool guy. Well, you know, thank you, Duncan. And I feel the same. You know, I really think Ramdas is, he's the great legacy of the, of the 60s. He really is. He's the guy who sort of, well, a, he's lived the longest, but he's really,

you know, the promise of the 60s, of everything that that idea was born on whatever the ephemeral idea of what you think the 60s was about. Yeah. Ramdas has made good on. But here's the, here's where it gets cheesy, man. You and I, and anyone who's drawn to that path, you got to carry that forward. You know, it can't stop there. That's the thing.

You, it can't stop there. That, you know, and that's, it's so important. Cause like, I don't know for what, and I think a lot, the powers that be, if there are powers that be, they would love for that to have stopped. Right. Of course. You know, they would love for that to just be a cute, wild chapter in the, in the maturing society that we're all part of.

That's right. Also to the second part, and this is probably a fodder for another podcast, but not only can it stop there, but also, you know, when we leave the bubble of you and I or, or these retreats and we're out in the material world and you break the mold of what's called good association and you have to exist in what's called the Maya and doing the dance within that. And that, to me, is really where the practice gets extremely interesting. Cause, hey, we hang on a Nipili Kai and Maui year round.

Hey, life would be perfect. Right. It's awesome. Great. We're, we're fed. Kirtong, beautiful woman, beach. It's amazing. It'd be amazing.

Right. But that can't happen. We got it. We have to exist in the material world. We have to exist in our incarnations and our roles. So that's the, that's the subject of the next podcast. Hell yeah. Zach, thank you so much, man.

Hare Krishna. See you next time. That was Zach Leary, everybody. If you want to find out more about Zach Leary, check out his podcast at it'sallhappeningshow.com and a big thanks to squarespace.com for supporting this episode of the DTFH. If you go to squarespace.com and use offer code Duncan, you'll get 10% off your first order.

Don't forget to use our Amazon portal. Happy holidays, everyone. Merry Christmas. I will see you next week. Hare Krishna. Assembly takes five minutes. No tools needed. To get $25 towards the bed, go to Thuma.co.

That's T-H-U-M-A dot C-O to receive $25 off your purchase of the bed. Shop the bed at Thuma.co.