Speaker 1: You see, something's going to happen?
Speaker 2: What?
Speaker 1: What's going to happen?
Speaker 3: What?
Speaker 2: Welcome to the Occult Rejects this episode. You got a
Speaker 2: couple of us together and we've got a very very
Speaker 2: special guest. Somebody have been trying to get on for
Speaker 2: a while and we finally made it happen. We will
Speaker 2: have p. D. Newman joining us today, but before we
Speaker 2: get to him, let me introduce the other rejects on
Speaker 2: the channel. And we got my man the Headless Giant.
Speaker 2: What is going on sir?
Speaker 1: How you doing?
Speaker 4: I've got my Alchemy Monday show coming up tonight and
Speaker 4: I've got the mail Bag show with Nick coming up
Speaker 4: on Thursday. So definitely subscribe to the YouTube channel and
Speaker 4: get out there and follow me on x and on
Speaker 4: Instagram as well. Thank you very much, check out a
Speaker 4: lot of vidviews.
Speaker 2: Definitely send in that mail and if you want, leave
Speaker 2: an adjus and you will receive some stickers. Thank you
Speaker 2: very much, my man, I appreciate you joining us and
Speaker 2: my man Jin the Ninja. What is going on?
Speaker 1: Sir?
Speaker 2: How will you? What is up?
Speaker 1: Boss? Mister ninety three?
Speaker 3: So if you want to check me out, you can
Speaker 3: follow me on x Twitter at wucom Reborn w uk
Speaker 3: O and g Reborn or on Ig at Threshold Saints
Speaker 3: and also at Threshold Saints for the show account on
Speaker 3: x Twitter, and I had the great pleasure of recently
Speaker 3: interviewing Paul Frederick from the Demonosoftye podcast with my Gray
Speaker 3: Lodge co host, not Matt Murra, but a different Gray
Speaker 3: Lodge co host, as well as Gregory Peters who wrote
Speaker 3: the recent book The New aon Contrast. So two amazing
Speaker 3: interviews coming up and lots of episodes coming out so.
Speaker 1: People can check that out.
Speaker 3: And there's a recent drop I just made on Final
Speaker 3: Fantasy eight, So if you're interested in the kabbala of
Speaker 3: Final Fantasy eight and sort of like the meta ontologies
Speaker 3: and metamagic that it may or may not contain, you
Speaker 3: can check that out episode out.
Speaker 1: Thank you guys, appreciate it.
Speaker 2: Thank you very much, sir. I appreciate you vacing it
Speaker 2: here and perfect timing. Unfortunately, forgot, even though I told
Speaker 2: the Headless Matt was joining us today, totally forgot you
Speaker 2: were coming and I started without you. But you you
Speaker 2: made it, Matt. So maybe you can umute yourself and
Speaker 2: let everybody know what is going on and how you.
Speaker 5: Doing except for everyone, glad to be here, glad to
Speaker 5: meet you Newman, Headless and Marx for the first time.
Speaker 5: So I'm Matt. I mean recently there was an episode
Speaker 5: here on Accoule Projects, so you can check that out.
Speaker 5: I guess it's gonna tell everything you need to know
Speaker 5: about me. And uh yeah, very glad. Let's see how
Speaker 5: it goes today.
Speaker 2: Awesome, thank you very much, appreciate you making it, sir.
Speaker 2: And last but not least, we got the storyteller himself,
Speaker 2: Robbie Marx. How are you, sir?
Speaker 6: Hello, hope everybody's doing great out there. I'm our Marx
Speaker 6: or Robbie Marx. I'm an artist, illustrate. I do a
Speaker 6: lot of research. You can check out all my links
Speaker 6: for my podcasts and all my very social media at
Speaker 6: link tree r M r X and that'll pull up
Speaker 6: everything for you. And it's good to see everybody here,
Speaker 6: some familiars that I love and some new faces. It's
Speaker 6: always great. I'm excited for the show and thanks for
Speaker 6: having me on.
Speaker 1: Nick.
Speaker 2: Of course no just during the day. I had to
Speaker 2: get you on, so I always appreciate you joining us.
Speaker 2: And finally again somebody I was very much looking forward
Speaker 2: to getting on the show. We have PD Newman, and
Speaker 2: if you're not sure who he is, he is an
Speaker 2: esoteric researcher and practicing occultist whose work sits at the
Speaker 2: crossroads of alchemy, meticism, theogy, and shamanism. He's a Freemason,
Speaker 2: a member of the Society of Rosicrucians, and also is
Speaker 2: associated with the Martinist Order, so he's coming from the
Speaker 2: inside of Western initiatory tradition. He's published in several esoteric
Speaker 2: and Masonic journals, including the Scottish Right Journal, Knights, Templar Magazine,
Speaker 2: the Masonic Society Journal, ED Lusim and ed Lusim and others.
Speaker 2: Some of his books are This is Great, al Chemically Stoned,
Speaker 2: The Psychedelic Secret of Female Angels of Vermilion if I'm
Speaker 2: saying that correctly, The Philosopher's Stone from d to DMT,
Speaker 2: and the book we will be discussing today is Theorgy,
Speaker 2: theory and practice the Mysteries of the Ascent to the Divine.
Speaker 2: So yeah, after that introduction, if there's anything that you
Speaker 2: would like to add, or anything you'd like to say,
Speaker 2: or any places that you would like to plug for
Speaker 2: the people to find your stuff. Pd Please let everybody
Speaker 2: know where they can find you.
Speaker 1: Yeah, thanks, thanks for having me.
Speaker 7: You can find my books at all major booksellers. I
Speaker 7: recently published a follow up to Theurgy that is looking
Speaker 7: at Native American shamanism in the Mississippi Valley and their
Speaker 7: funerary rights and how they were incorporating certain ntheagenetic plants
Speaker 7: to induce what we might call out of body experience
Speaker 7: or near death experience. But yeah, I'm on all the
Speaker 7: social media platforms. You can find me under under P. D.
Speaker 1: Newman.
Speaker 7: If you want to keep up with what I'm researching,
Speaker 7: that's the way to do it.
Speaker 2: Awesome. Thank you. Not to get off the topic. It
Speaker 2: is just something that you just said right now. I
Speaker 2: was like, oh, I quote my attention, and I'm guessing
Speaker 2: maybe you know from the other stuff that you've written about,
Speaker 2: maybe you might see what I'm getting at. Do you
Speaker 2: think some of these things that they might have been
Speaker 2: taking back then was to push themselves too close to
Speaker 2: an NDE. It was the extent of like, I'm going
Speaker 2: to poison myself before I actually die so I can
Speaker 2: have absolutely awesome, awesome, and.
Speaker 7: That's that's not just an indigenous thing.
Speaker 1: You know, even in the.
Speaker 7: Urgy, which is really a ritual application of Platonic metaphysics.
Speaker 7: One point at Plato says that the philosophy is basically
Speaker 7: training to die, learning how to die, and he discussed
Speaker 7: this in terms of what was in counter heard by
Speaker 7: the initiates at the Elusinian Mysteries, at the Greater Mystery,
Speaker 7: And there's plenty of evidence to suggest that what was
Speaker 7: actually going on with this this kiki on potion they
Speaker 7: were drinking was that they were consuming some form of
Speaker 7: a of a hallucinogen. A lot of evidence points towards ERGOT,
Speaker 7: which is a precursor to LSD. Normally it's toxic, but
Speaker 7: there are ways to prepare it where it won't induce
Speaker 7: gangreen and and what they call Saint Anthony's fire. So yeah,
Speaker 7: I think learning how to die, approaching death, or as
Speaker 7: Brian Morask who says in The Immortality Key, learning to
Speaker 7: die before you die. And if you can learn this,
Speaker 7: then when you do die, you won't die because you've
Speaker 7: kind of gotten your sea legs and can can navigate
Speaker 7: that that territory.
Speaker 2: Do you think, not to sound like crazy, do you
Speaker 2: think like maybe when you say you see legs with
Speaker 2: that almost kind of give you maybe the options of
Speaker 2: where you're going. Yeah maybe okay, all right, I like that.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and and here, you know, and the material realm,
Speaker 7: we're very much predicated on space, time on you know,
Speaker 7: time really comes into play when we say how long
Speaker 7: will it take me to get from point A to
Speaker 7: point B traveling at a given speed? Right, Well, in
Speaker 7: that realm, that's not necessarily the case. It's not so
Speaker 7: much the quantity of space and time that determines travel,
Speaker 7: it's the quality. So it very much operates and the
Speaker 7: way that magic operates like attracts like. So it's not
Speaker 7: that let's say you think of a place where you
Speaker 7: want to be, that's very quantitative, but if you can
Speaker 7: feel how it feels to be there, the feeling becomes
Speaker 7: the place becomes the embodiment. So travel travel is very
Speaker 7: different experientially, and the way it's discussed in after death
Speaker 7: manuals like the the Bardothodole, which is what we know
Speaker 7: is the Tibetan Book of the Dead, or in the
Speaker 7: Papyrus of Any, which is what we know is the
Speaker 7: Egyptian Book of the Dead. Navigation is very much predicated
Speaker 7: upon the quality, the quality present within the Traveler.
Speaker 2: Really, I love it. I love it. Not to get
Speaker 2: too far ahead of ourselves, unfortunately, and I came right
Speaker 2: off the bat with a question that was kind of like,
Speaker 2: you know, I'm sure I have to with your book,
Speaker 2: but it was just something.
Speaker 1: That's a good question.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, thank you, thank you. I would love to
Speaker 2: nerd out on this, but I do want to stay
Speaker 2: on the topic unfortunately. For one thing, I do want
Speaker 2: to ask for the listeners who may not know who
Speaker 2: you are yet, how did you first get into, like
Speaker 2: I guess, the world of alchemy or medicism and theogy
Speaker 2: if you don't mind.
Speaker 7: Taking drugs, Oh okay, it'd be totally honesty. From about
Speaker 7: age about age eleven is when I first started taking
Speaker 7: LSD and mushrooms. And you know that I live in
Speaker 7: the Deep South, where mushrooms grow and grain fed cowfields,
Speaker 7: so we were learning how to identify them and how
Speaker 7: to consume them before I was even a teenager. And
Speaker 7: back then, you know, it was a novelty. It was
Speaker 7: very much a recreational kind of a practice.
Speaker 1: But pretty soon.
Speaker 7: As the dose has increased and the substance has got
Speaker 7: more complex, such as with n N d MT and mescaline.
Speaker 7: I've very quickly found myself in territory that I couldn't
Speaker 7: navigate philosophically, psychologically, and that's what led me to first
Speaker 7: look into metaphysical models different religions in Mississippi. You know,
Speaker 7: it's not like, you know, I had found parallels to
Speaker 7: things I was experiencing in Eastern texts like the Dalte Shing,
Speaker 7: the Bagabad Gita through Panish heads. But it's not like
Speaker 7: here I can go and talk to a guru, you know.
Speaker 7: And I had encountered a number of similar terms. When
Speaker 7: I was much younger, I was spending the night with
Speaker 7: a friend and there was a book on his shelf.
Speaker 7: He lived with his grandfather, and the book really attracted
Speaker 7: my attention, and when I pulled it down was looking
Speaker 7: at it. He told me, that's that's the Scottish rite,
Speaker 7: thirty second degree. That's what you get when you come
Speaker 7: in thirty second degree. My grandfather's a freemason. And so
Speaker 7: I'm flipping through it, reading passages. I have absolutely no
Speaker 7: idea what I'm reading, but I knew right then that
Speaker 7: I was going to at some point in my life
Speaker 7: to figure out what the hell is going on?
Speaker 1: What is this book about, but a lot.
Speaker 7: Of the same terms that I was encountering in these
Speaker 7: Eastern tacts I found there. And masonry is very visible here.
Speaker 7: You know, the Scottish Rite was created in Charleston. Masonry
Speaker 7: is very much accepted practice in the south. The further
Speaker 7: north you get the more conspiracy kind of minded views
Speaker 7: of free masonry starts creeping in. But here you don't
Speaker 7: see that. It's very respected. And so I petitioned a lodge,
Speaker 7: never expected to get in, but I got elected to
Speaker 7: take the three degrees and it turned out to.
Speaker 1: Be absolutely what I needed at the time.
Speaker 7: And from there I just went on and to you know,
Speaker 7: her Meticism and Kabbala and Taro and alchemy, and you
Speaker 7: know it's still go and theurgy these days, theurgy, Neoplatonism,
Speaker 7: the Hermetica.
Speaker 1: That's really where.
Speaker 7: I spend my time these days. But yeah, that's how
Speaker 7: it came about.
Speaker 2: That is awesome. I love it. One thing I did
Speaker 2: want to ask you if you don't mind h if
Speaker 2: you had to, you know, this is for like the
Speaker 2: newbies and kind of like I guess, I do have
Speaker 2: a lot of conspiracy theorists who that listen to the show.
Speaker 2: So We're gonna ask you this question basically for them,
Speaker 2: if you had to explain theorgy to someone who only
Speaker 2: knows magic from pop culture, what's the simplest, the most
Speaker 2: accurate definition you'd give them, because you know, I'm just
Speaker 2: saying the idea we have of it from Hollywood is
Speaker 2: probably completely wrong.
Speaker 7: So, you know, to borrow a phrase from the Christian scripture,
Speaker 7: I will be done right With magic, it's very much
Speaker 7: predicated upon the accomplishment of one's desires. It's largely ego fulfillment.
Speaker 7: It can be other things, but usually it's because I
Speaker 7: want X, and you know this spell is designed to
Speaker 7: give me that result. With theurgy, those things can still happen,
Speaker 7: but they're a byproduct of the real goal of theurgy,
Speaker 7: which is union.
Speaker 1: With God or with the gods, or with a God.
Speaker 7: But it's basically and when we say union, you know,
Speaker 7: it's easy to think of it's not like a hug.
Speaker 7: You know, it's not like two people hugging. It's losing
Speaker 7: your egoic perspective and for a brief moment, facing your
Speaker 7: consciousness to its root and perceiving the world as God
Speaker 7: perceives the world, or as a God perceives the world.
Speaker 7: So that's how theurgy differs. It means God work or
Speaker 7: the work of the gods, you know.
Speaker 1: So there's also this idea that.
Speaker 7: Man cannot affect theurgic union. That's purely up to the gods.
Speaker 7: It's the grace of the gods whether they reach down
Speaker 7: and lift that veil for you. All we can do
Speaker 7: is work on what and the literature is called epitidities,
Speaker 7: which means our preparedness, how much we've prepared ourselves to
Speaker 7: have that veil lifted. That's really the limit of what
Speaker 7: man is capable of in terms of theurgy.
Speaker 2: Thank you. I couldn't have said it better. I'll have
Speaker 2: to say even that, like my time is being a
Speaker 2: magician or a ceremonial magician. Whatever theurgy worked, it was
Speaker 2: a different experience with that stuff. I was very, very
Speaker 2: big into that once I started having which I call
Speaker 2: magical experiences. Uh. I will say, whenever it came to
Speaker 2: maybe me feeling something, whether it could be maybe just
Speaker 2: myself being feeling good about what I just did or
Speaker 2: whatever it was during theatery like practice is actual, like
Speaker 2: prayer and devotion to God. That is times where I
Speaker 2: may actually felt like I had contact. You know. It
Speaker 2: was very It was very deep stuff for me, you know,
Speaker 2: and I try to do I have mentioned that on
Speaker 2: the show a couple of times, but I do think
Speaker 2: just from my experience, from how I practice, I think
Speaker 2: that stuff is highly important just for me.
Speaker 1: So I agree.
Speaker 7: And in ceremonial magic we see analogs. Particularly, there are
Speaker 7: a few in the Greek magical PAPYRII the Book of
Speaker 7: a Bramain is a great example, you know, and that
Speaker 7: text the damon once damon a daemon is, as it
Speaker 7: says in Plato's Symposium, is any being that acts as
Speaker 7: a mediator between man and the gods. And they carry
Speaker 7: man's aspirations to the gods in the form of prayer, sacrifice,
Speaker 7: ritual activities, and in return, they bring down from the
Speaker 7: gods to man inspirations, and inspiration literally means to take
Speaker 7: the God inside oneself. So it's we're essentially talking about
Speaker 7: possession and post exorcists.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 7: The possessions is terrifying to most people, the idea that
Speaker 7: you can be possessed by a spirit, But in theurgy,
Speaker 7: that's the highest grace to be inhabited by a god.
Speaker 7: And there's a caveat that we should mention. And that's
Speaker 7: that in theurgy, we're never not inhabited by the gods.
Speaker 7: Everything happens because of the gods. What changes is our
Speaker 7: ability to perceive that everything down to from stones to animals.
Speaker 7: And if if you're in if you're in our medic Kabala,
Speaker 7: you're aware of correspondences, right that if we're going to
Speaker 7: work with Tifferis, we're going to work with things, and
Speaker 7: the metal kingdom we're going to go for gold, and
Speaker 7: the mineral kingdoms, sulfur animal kingdom will go for lions, roosters.
Speaker 7: You know, well, all of these examplesn't originating Kabala. It
Speaker 7: comes from the Jews in exile encountering Neoplatonists and late Antiquity,
Speaker 7: and the Neoplatonists they don't call them correspondences.
Speaker 1: And it's important. This is important distinction.
Speaker 7: Because it's easy to psychologize magic and say, well, if
Speaker 7: I surround myself with red things and increments of five,
Speaker 7: psychologically I'm transcing myself into gid Bura, right. But for
Speaker 7: the Neoplatonists, it's not a mnemonic. It is the god.
Speaker 7: They call it Sunthamata and sumbola, which means tokens and symbols,
Speaker 7: and what tokens and symbols are are there? Think of
Speaker 7: them as like bractals of the God sewn throughout the cosmos.
Speaker 7: And the idea is to bring together from every kingdom
Speaker 7: of nature the token of the God. And by doing
Speaker 7: that you make a fit receptacle what's called a Hypodokein
Speaker 7: you prepare it its epitidiities. You're increasing its ability to
Speaker 7: capture something of the ray, like a mirror capturing the
Speaker 7: ray of the sun, and it can inhabit this a
Speaker 7: statue or a talisman. So it's different in that we're
Speaker 7: not psychologizing it, which as much as I love the
Speaker 7: Golden Dawn system, I see a lot of Golden Dawn
Speaker 7: practitioners do It's psychologize the system. That kind of thinking
Speaker 7: makes no sense to the Neoplatonists, that the orgis late antiquity.
Speaker 2: Would you would you say that might have been like
Speaker 2: Platinus's issue with the Gnostics too, because I think when
Speaker 2: I looked into that, it might have been like them,
Speaker 2: kind of a humanizing things that weren't supposed to be humanized.
Speaker 7: Plotinus, when you read his Eneads, you get an ambivalence
Speaker 7: from him. You know, he's got a chapter in there
Speaker 7: called against the Gnostics. But in that chapter, it's not
Speaker 7: the dualism he's attacking. It's the notion that the demiurge
Speaker 7: is evil because the concept of the demiurge comes from
Speaker 7: Plato's to mais where demiurge, which just means builder. We
Speaker 7: might even say it means Mason. But the Builder comes
Speaker 7: along and uses the forms, the platonic forms, the ideas
Speaker 7: that exist in the news or the mind of God,
Speaker 7: the highest God, and he forms them into everything we
Speaker 7: see around us.
Speaker 1: And then he.
Speaker 7: Creates suke or soul to animate them, which is where
Speaker 7: we get our word anima. If you're familiar with Youngi
Speaker 7: and psychology, anima just means soul, but it's the root
Speaker 7: of the word to animate something. Well, the Gnostics they're
Speaker 7: primarily coming from a Jewish background, so they're Jews who
Speaker 7: have been raised on Genesis, on the Torah, and now
Speaker 7: they're encountering Plato and they realize that there is truth
Speaker 7: in both. But how do I rectify it? And when
Speaker 7: you look at Genesis in chapter one, it says that
Speaker 7: Elohem created man, and when you created him, He created
Speaker 7: him a spiritual being, created him a hermaphrodite.
Speaker 1: But then by the time.
Speaker 7: We get to chapter two, Elohem disappears and it says
Speaker 7: that Yahweh that tut you Grammaton created man of the
Speaker 7: dust of the ground and then separated the female out
Speaker 7: of the male. So the Gnostics reading this, they come
Speaker 7: to the conclusion that, oh, Elohem must be this higher
Speaker 7: god principle, while Yahweh Tetragrammaton is this demiurgic principle and
Speaker 7: has trapped the spirit of man into matter, into the
Speaker 7: dust of the ground, and essentially created a prison for him.
Speaker 7: That's what Plutinus is taking issue with, because the demiurge,
Speaker 7: for Platinus is the noos is the mind of God itself.
Speaker 7: So when we think about the hierarchy of being in Neoplatonism,
Speaker 7: there are three things called the hypostaces, which are they're
Speaker 7: comparable to the Holy Trinity. In fact, they inform the
Speaker 7: Holy Trinity. At the top, we have the monad or
Speaker 7: the pegae, which means the source, the one, and it's
Speaker 7: beyond being. That means it does technically, it doesn't exist
Speaker 7: in the way we exist. It's beyond being. Now below
Speaker 7: that is the noos or the mind of God. And
Speaker 7: this is what became the logos or the Son. Right,
Speaker 7: So now we've got the Father and the Son, the logos,
Speaker 7: and then below that is suke or soul, the world soul,
Speaker 7: and this becomes the Holy Spirit and early Christianity. So
Speaker 7: what Lolotinus understands by demiurge is the same thing Christians
Speaker 7: understand by the Sun by Christ.
Speaker 1: So this is the.
Speaker 7: Mind of God, that is the demiurge that through its
Speaker 7: intelligence organized all of the forms into something and we
Speaker 7: could say it informed matter into something useful, meaningful with
Speaker 7: process and growth and choice, you know.
Speaker 1: So that's what he's say.
Speaker 4: Yesterday we had Peter Mark Adams talking about the the
Speaker 4: temples with the helped me out Nick completely blank, the
Speaker 4: in Rome no no, no in Rome, with the underground
Speaker 4: temples where they would go and line blanking on it
Speaker 4: so hard. But they were talking about how in the
Speaker 4: experience with the Yeah, in that experience they would approach
Speaker 4: the demiurge as they were and dwelt by the spirit
Speaker 4: of God. Right, And so that was sort of their
Speaker 4: view into looking at the demi urge from the more
Speaker 4: European perspective as opposed to thinking that it had to
Speaker 4: be an evil force. And I think that's really reflected
Speaker 4: in a lot of the Mystery School teachings is is
Speaker 4: you know, the DeMier is the guy who's making all
Speaker 4: the physical stuff. Yeah, you might not like it all
Speaker 4: the time, but it's essentially good because you would resist it.
Speaker 4: And that's essential to Platonism as a whole. Platonism is
Speaker 4: radically monast so there's a hierarchy of being with the monat.
Speaker 1: At the top.
Speaker 7: There is no devil, there is no evil principle. Everything exists,
Speaker 7: Everything participates in being because it participates in the good.
Speaker 7: Now we can act in a way that causes what's
Speaker 7: known as privation of the good, almost like erecting an
Speaker 7: umbrella over so that the sun won't shine on us.
Speaker 7: But that doesn't automatically create evil. It's simply is not
Speaker 7: participating in the good to the degree that one could.
Speaker 7: And instead of evil, that's looked at as more as
Speaker 7: a tendency toward non being. So there's not good and evil,
Speaker 7: but there is being and non being, and even non
Speaker 7: being if we go back as far as amenities, non
Speaker 7: being can't be because it's not so it's acting in
Speaker 7: an illusory way. That's for something that can never happen. Right,
Speaker 7: So yeah, that's that's exactly what I'm what I'm getting at.
Speaker 7: And but when I say that Platias was a little
Speaker 7: bit ambivalent, he still had gnostic tendencies, because you'll see
Speaker 7: him say and in another place in any Ads, he
Speaker 7: says that that matter is evil, that if if evil exists,
Speaker 7: it's it's in matter. And Plato would completely disagree with that.
Speaker 7: Pythagoras would disagree with that. It's simply the bottom of
Speaker 7: the chain of being where all of those rays, all
Speaker 7: of those chains descending from the one, from the forms,
Speaker 7: meet and mingle and produce all of the phenomenology that
Speaker 7: we encounter. So there was a certain self loathing with
Speaker 7: Blatinus in terms of being in a body. And this
Speaker 7: translated even to his student Porphyry, who organized any ats.
Speaker 7: Porphyry it is said to have been suicidal more than
Speaker 7: one time in his life because he was in a body.
Speaker 7: He felt so ashamed that he was in a body and.
Speaker 2: Away for a while, go on vacation. Can he tone
Speaker 2: go away for a bit and get you glue?
Speaker 7: You'd think, yeah, But when Yambokus. I Amblicus comes along,
Speaker 7: you know. Porphyry writes this this letter to Aniba, which
Speaker 7: is one of Iamblicus's students, and he's trying to say
Speaker 7: theogy is is.
Speaker 1: Pointless, it's not a worthwhile practice.
Speaker 7: And and it's Iamblicus that that answers him in the
Speaker 7: guise of an Egyptian priest. Am I think the name
Speaker 7: he chooses is but he has a very different view.
Speaker 7: So Plotinus sees the soul, part of the human soul,
Speaker 7: is always united with the one, meaning the soul is
Speaker 7: not fully descended into matter. Iamblicus wholeheartedly disagrees with this
Speaker 7: and says, no, we are fully descended. That's why what
Speaker 7: we do matters, and that if we weren't fully descended,
Speaker 7: there would be a gap in the chain of being here,
Speaker 7: that it wouldn't connect all the way, and thus would
Speaker 7: negate the possibility of a scent of return to what's
Speaker 7: called epistrophe, return to the God. So we're in a
Speaker 7: constant motion of perrotos and epistrophe going down and going up.
Speaker 7: So he says, no, we're completely embodied. Moreover, the body
Speaker 7: is not a prison for the soul. It's the means
Speaker 7: by which the soul can even express itself, because outside
Speaker 7: of the realm of the space time continuum, change can't happen.
Speaker 7: There's no process, there's no time. Right, so, how how
Speaker 7: can we.
Speaker 1: Learn make our mark on the world?
Speaker 7: How can we do anything unless we are fully descended
Speaker 7: and unless the body is that the means by which
Speaker 7: that the spirit is able to.
Speaker 1: Make those changes.
Speaker 7: You know, So there's even disagreement within the domain of
Speaker 7: of Neoplatonism and Plutonis. While it's it's clear he was
Speaker 7: probably familiar with theogy because he uses language that originates
Speaker 7: with the Chaldean oracles, and the Caldian oracles is where
Speaker 7: we first encounter the word theorgy. This father son Teine
Speaker 7: both known as the Giuliani. Both of their names were Julian,
Speaker 7: but they're the first ones that talk about the orgy
Speaker 7: and corfyry. He really he gives us the schematic kind
Speaker 7: of the way theurgy works, but then later in life
Speaker 7: rejects it in favor of his master, Platonus's picture of
Speaker 7: uniting with God through purely through philosophical means. But Iamblicus
Speaker 7: rejects this, you know, he says, we can talk all day,
Speaker 7: but at some point the words run out. Dialectic can
Speaker 7: only get us so far, and when the words run out,
Speaker 7: that's where the orgy begins. That's when ritual activity picks
Speaker 7: up and and can only be the final means by
Speaker 7: which we connect with with the gods. And at one
Speaker 7: point he's talking about the sunta mata the tokens and
Speaker 7: how they're magical items, like if we had a piece
Speaker 7: of gold to connect us with Helios. He's saying, it's
Speaker 7: not our intellectual understanding of the fact that gold corresponds
Speaker 7: to Helios. He said, if that was the case, then
Speaker 7: any philosopher would be uniting with God or with the
Speaker 7: gods all the time. He said, no, it's ritualistic actions
Speaker 7: that are not understood by the practitioner. And the token
Speaker 7: affects our scent, of its own power, of its own
Speaker 7: connection to the God, that it's a real connection. And
Speaker 7: once you start viewing the world in that way, everything changes,
Speaker 7: because you're interacting with divinities all the time. You never
Speaker 7: there's not a moment that you can't So very similar
Speaker 7: in a way to the Egyptian religion, where when they
Speaker 7: saw an Ibis, they're not thinking, Oh, he corresponds to
Speaker 7: thought or to uti. That's to uti right there, you know.
Speaker 7: And that's how the theorists are approaching the world. They're
Speaker 7: approaching the gods and fractal, microcosmic forms with everything they touch.
Speaker 4: So would you consider it more of an animism type
Speaker 4: religion as opposed to being more of a polytheistic or
Speaker 4: monotheistic or monasty.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's it's polytheistic. But it's also.
Speaker 7: The problem arises because you you encounter sayings like all
Speaker 7: of the gods are present in Zeus, but zeusically all
Speaker 7: of the gods are present in Herah but heroically right,
Speaker 7: So each of the gods are the one God, but
Speaker 7: this is how they manifest. And this given scenario and
Speaker 7: also our epithidiities, our preparation alters the way we perceive
Speaker 7: the God because one person might see it one way
Speaker 7: in another another way. And this is addressed in Iamblicus
Speaker 7: and Proclus and the solution. They're saying that it's not
Speaker 7: that the God has changed, gods are changeless, it's that
Speaker 7: people are prepared differently to interact with the one Divinity,
Speaker 7: with the one God. So all of the gods are
Speaker 7: I don't want to say descended from, but they're part
Speaker 7: of what's called syra, which means chains. They're part of
Speaker 7: the chains of these forms that exists like kind of
Speaker 7: like archetypes that exist in the mind of the One God.
Speaker 7: So they're all one thing, just like in Kabbalah, all
Speaker 7: of the Sepheral they're united in Keather right, it's only
Speaker 7: after the supernal triad that they be they begin.
Speaker 1: To be separate.
Speaker 7: So in the News, all of the gods are one God.
Speaker 7: These are ideas in his mind, but based on what
Speaker 7: idea is being expressed through what activity that determines how
Speaker 7: we perceive the God.
Speaker 2: If that makes sense, par was there something you wanted
Speaker 2: to ask?
Speaker 5: Oh?
Speaker 6: I was going to bring up the fact that when
Speaker 6: you get into the Calvian oracles they talk about it's
Speaker 6: the whisperings of Apollo, but he always takes advice from Zeus.
Speaker 6: So again you have this chain, this idea of linking
Speaker 6: back the source. And it's interesting in regard to talking
Speaker 6: about theurgy and be like taking on the energetic view
Speaker 6: of reality from the standpoint of the God. When you
Speaker 6: get into like vood we were talking about the other
Speaker 6: night where the gods actually come down as a writer
Speaker 6: and participate and dance with the humans, and they talk
Speaker 6: directly to God. And then you get into like you're
Speaker 6: talking about heresies against the gnostics and these ideas of
Speaker 6: the separation between those that that are seeking theurgy and
Speaker 6: those that are externalizing it and and shying away from
Speaker 6: and so you have this this diametric cleave essentially that
Speaker 6: has been a battle. It's seemingly as far as you
Speaker 6: can go back.
Speaker 7: Yeah, it exists today. Anytimes somebody talks about mind over matter,
Speaker 7: you know, or or or favors intellectual learning over pumping iron.
Speaker 7: You know, these are false divisions, and that you're you
Speaker 7: and just as much worship mars aries through reading sun
Speaker 7: Zoo or going and lifting some iron and a gym.
Speaker 7: You know, those practices are equally effective in terms of
Speaker 7: worshiping the gods.
Speaker 1: It's a false division.
Speaker 7: Yeah, you're you're absolutely right, and calls it taking on
Speaker 7: the mantle of the gods, right, you know, And I
Speaker 7: think that's what you're describing. And we have something very
Speaker 7: similar in Palo I'm a hollow practitioner. And then Palo Cambisa,
Speaker 7: which has its origins in Congo just like voodoo. You know,
Speaker 7: possession is a very real aspect of it, and even
Speaker 7: communication with the gods through simple divination practices. I'm sure
Speaker 7: you've you've encountered the use of cows and Santaia and lukumi.
Speaker 7: We use chamlongos, which are these coins cut out of
Speaker 7: coconut husts that are con cave on one side and
Speaker 7: convex on the other. And so just like with the cowories,
Speaker 7: you know, you ask your question, throw them and the
Speaker 7: con cave side up. Those are mouths speaking. That's those
Speaker 7: are yes. So you could you know, there's a range
Speaker 7: of yes and no's and maybes, and rephrase your question.
Speaker 7: Yes with conditions, no with conditions, those kinds of things.
Speaker 1: But even that, while.
Speaker 7: Seeing as trivial by Judeo Christian traditions, by Islam, we
Speaker 7: take that very seriously. And no matter what the answer is,
Speaker 7: that's what you do.
Speaker 1: You know what I mean?
Speaker 7: Don't you don't say, oh, well, that's good advice, but
Speaker 7: I think I'm going to do something else. Part of
Speaker 7: how you imbue that practice with real power is by
Speaker 7: always doing what it says, and in that there is
Speaker 7: a show of faith, and through that show of faith,
Speaker 7: there is the increase of the ancestors, the mumpungos, the gods,
Speaker 7: the damons to want to actually give you useful information
Speaker 7: because they know that you're going to follow through with it.
Speaker 1: And when you do, you know, you become a.
Speaker 7: Force of the universe. You're no longer trying to carve
Speaker 7: a hole out of a mountain. You are a tidle
Speaker 7: wave because you have the movement of creation behind you, right,
Speaker 7: And that's kind.
Speaker 6: Of let me bring one point up real quick. I've
Speaker 6: speculated over the years that the Knights Temple are logo
Speaker 6: in regard to the two riders and one horse is
Speaker 6: exactly describing this process.
Speaker 7: That's interesting. Yeah, I've never heard.
Speaker 6: That take, but like that headless Yeah, well, I was
Speaker 6: gonna say.
Speaker 4: This brings in the concept of the muse. How inspiration
Speaker 4: can strike one person and unless you follow through with
Speaker 4: the with the instructions and the inspiration that's been given
Speaker 4: to you, that mus can leave you and you won't
Speaker 4: get it back in the same form, the.
Speaker 7: Same inspiration slippery little clouds. You know, if it comes
Speaker 7: to you and you don't act on it, you better
Speaker 7: believe somebody else is going to have the same I
Speaker 7: shortly after and if they act that ship.
Speaker 2: Yo. You know it's crazy. You know how many times
Speaker 2: I should you not? Even with other co hosts on
Speaker 2: the show, we talk about topics that we would cover
Speaker 2: and then we would never get to do it, and
Speaker 2: somebody else a few weeks later would be like fuck, man, like,
Speaker 2: what's the odds of that?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 2: You got it a lot, a lot to where it's
Speaker 2: like freaky, Yeah.
Speaker 6: Well, who I was gonna say. When you look at
Speaker 6: the Cotton Gin, there were numerous people that came up
Speaker 6: with the patent at the same time. Same thing with
Speaker 6: the Wright brothers. There was another couple of brothers on
Speaker 6: the other side of the earth. You know that there
Speaker 6: were formulations. It's this, these things are in the air.
Speaker 6: I think it's the intrinsic, fractal line nature of the
Speaker 6: growth of what we are as a whole, as humanity
Speaker 6: that's kind of persisting and pushing towards some unseen divine end.
Speaker 7: Yeah, Darwin too, you know, Darwin with the theory of
Speaker 7: evolution at the same time is a completely unconnected researcher
Speaker 7: came up with it. And and and if we look
Speaker 7: at like Empedocles, who was a pre Socratic philosopher, but
Speaker 7: also a magician and a gooies uh, what we might
Speaker 7: today call a necromancer.
Speaker 1: But he talks about ideas.
Speaker 7: As conscious beings and they they come to you, and
Speaker 7: if you entertain what they are and give it voice,
Speaker 7: they will stay with you and come to you more often.
Speaker 7: But if you don't, he says, they will fly off
Speaker 7: and find someone that is more in line with with
Speaker 7: what they represent, and that person will receive the idea,
Speaker 7: and even into Christianity, there's there's this idea in Saint
Speaker 7: Augustine where he's he mentions. He says, if you were
Speaker 7: to see an angel, he says, angels don't have bodies,
Speaker 7: they're not material logics, so you wouldn't see them.
Speaker 1: With your eyes.
Speaker 7: You would instead encounter them in the realm of ideas.
Speaker 7: They would come to you as an epiphany, a revelation,
Speaker 7: you know. So it's this idea that ideas are conscious
Speaker 7: and have motives of their.
Speaker 1: Own, and if you.
Speaker 7: Are too lazy in the moment to act on it,
Speaker 7: they don't wait. They have no patience, very macy.
Speaker 4: Epiphany is a funny word because in Greek, you know,
Speaker 4: it means the appearance of a god. Right, that's the
Speaker 4: theophoy is the epiphany, and to us it's like, well,
Speaker 4: I just had an idea, and so we've sort of
Speaker 4: lost the concept of how sacred these thoughts can be.
Speaker 1: And how corrected they to the rest of the universe.
Speaker 1: And how does it feel when you have an epiphany?
Speaker 7: It comes with a sense of enthusiasm, right right, and
Speaker 7: enthusiasmos it means the God is inside me, you know,
Speaker 7: So inspiration, enthusiasm, epiphany, all of these ideas. We talk
Speaker 7: about it artistically, but really what we're dealing with is
Speaker 7: the reality of divine forces putting their fingers on us
Speaker 7: and you know, hoping probably that we we'll do something
Speaker 7: with it. But I have a feeling that there's no hope.
Speaker 7: There's no chance involved. They know if you will, they
Speaker 7: know if you won't. And there's probably more to do
Speaker 7: with with teaching a lesson, you know, like you just said,
Speaker 7: you don't do the podcast on that somebody else does
Speaker 7: that teaches you the lesson to don't hesitate act now
Speaker 7: live in the moment. There is no future, there is
Speaker 7: no past. There's this eternal, spinning gray minute, and that's
Speaker 7: the one opportunity.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and I guess it also comes back to what
Speaker 5: you were talking about. The I don't know the name
Speaker 5: you used, but the in Portuguese would be bouzius, which
Speaker 5: is like the concave stuff that they.
Speaker 1: Use to get the information from.
Speaker 5: Where it's like, whatever information you're getting there, it's most
Speaker 5: likely what should follow already, like you're in period, supposed
Speaker 5: to be already something important, So go and follow it,
Speaker 5: don't discuss it. It's like intuition. You get the intuition,
Speaker 5: follow it. Otherwise they're not, and you're gonna see, Oh
Speaker 5: fuck I should why not?
Speaker 1: You know? That's exactly it. Yeah.
Speaker 2: I remember one time I saw an interview with David
Speaker 2: Lynch and he was going on about the whole point
Speaker 2: of forgetting an idea, of losing an idea, and like
Speaker 2: how devastating that can be to an artist. He was saying,
Speaker 2: you may want to actually kill yourself because you don't
Speaker 2: want to lose it. Was something crazy like that, are
Speaker 2: you gonna want yeah?
Speaker 1: Yeahs stealing for the.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 5: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Yeah. He has said some great stuff. Did any of
Speaker 2: you have other questions and stuff? I don't want to
Speaker 2: be the only one.
Speaker 6: Well, I was going to say, as an artist myself,
Speaker 6: I have a notebook, I have post it notes. I'm
Speaker 6: constantly writing things down to remind myself for inspiration to
Speaker 6: move forward, for that enthusiasm. But it's interesting when you
Speaker 6: get into these ways of touching on these divn these
Speaker 6: divine energies. You have, uh, like we were talking about
Speaker 6: bringing the God into yourself. You have the inspiration that
Speaker 6: comes to you. You have divination practices, you have dreams
Speaker 6: and and these things, you know, following the origins back
Speaker 6: you know, through ancient Kaldia, into the Canonites, going back
Speaker 6: to Nimrod, going to the fourth son of Noah and
Speaker 6: learning these divinations. And they even say that, uh, the
Speaker 6: use of ecstatic practices was most likely brought into India
Speaker 6: by the Scithians, you know, so it's in it's this
Speaker 6: this this transient kind of ecstatic philosophical belief system them
Speaker 6: that has kind of branched out and connects so many
Speaker 6: of these systems, but to many is looked at even
Speaker 6: though it's one of the oldest practices, it's looked at
Speaker 6: as you know, potentially evil because of the unknown, because
Speaker 6: of the fact that people don't understand the concepts and
Speaker 6: haven't realized that they are as well participating in.
Speaker 1: These things right, right, all the time, yes, all the time.
Speaker 7: We're we're always participating in the gods in the muses,
Speaker 7: but it does the idea of evil has become so
Speaker 7: prevalent with the introduction of Judaeo Christianity into the thought model.
Speaker 7: And it's ironic because both of these religions insist they're monistic.
Speaker 1: There's one God.
Speaker 7: But if we're going to posit a devil, we've created
Speaker 7: a dualistic framework. If he's equally powerful but opposite, we're
Speaker 7: in Zoroastrian territory. We've Leftmanism. And that's what I like
Speaker 7: so much about Orthodoxy, about the really early Christianity like origin,
Speaker 7: you know, he he, he.
Speaker 1: Talks about.
Speaker 7: Apple catastasis meant appo meaning not kta meaning going down,
Speaker 7: and stasis meaning stay there. So he's he's he's refuting
Speaker 7: the idea of an eternal hell, saying that that makes
Speaker 7: no sense if if Christ's sacrifice was truly absolute, there
Speaker 7: can be no remainder, not even a devil, you know.
Speaker 7: But it's it's harried so far up into modern times.
Speaker 7: You know, we look at grimoires with like goetic texts
Speaker 7: and the princes of Hell and commanding demons. When you
Speaker 7: look at the etymologies of the names of these these demons,
Speaker 7: h at least half the time they're the names of
Speaker 7: Hagan gods. You know, they've just been recast as demons.
Speaker 7: So when you encounter Astaroth, you know, we're encountering Astarte,
Speaker 7: we're encountering Inana.
Speaker 1: You know who is.
Speaker 7: And and on the material plane, the planet Venus, you know,
Speaker 7: she's the one that has the power to enter the
Speaker 7: underworld and get back out again, which was unheard of.
Speaker 1: That's really.
Speaker 7: Like with Hades and Greece. You know, you you if
Speaker 7: you're dead, you go there and you don't get out
Speaker 7: except maybe one time a year, and it's temporary. Or
Speaker 7: if you're in there, you don't get out permanently, which
Speaker 7: is why the Eleucinian mysteries were such a big deal,
Speaker 7: because it opens the door for that possibility. That's why Christianity,
Speaker 7: originally as it was originally conceived, was so important. People
Speaker 7: don't think about the fact that when Christ was crucified,
Speaker 7: he was crucified in a platonic cosmos. Hades is a
Speaker 7: Greek idea and in the Creed. If you read the
Speaker 7: Creed and Orthodoxy it says that immediately after he was crucified,
Speaker 7: he descended into Hades to release the saints, right, and
Speaker 7: he's going to give them mansions in his father's house.
Speaker 7: Well his father's house. What he's talking about what every
Speaker 7: Greek and Roman person at the time recognized from that language.
Speaker 7: He's talking about Olympus, where the gods live, but men
Speaker 7: have never been allowed to go, you know. So it's
Speaker 7: interesting because he's both confirming the Greek cosmo conception and
Speaker 7: overturning it at the same time by changing the rules.
Speaker 7: But it still wasn't new, because this is what we
Speaker 7: have been seeing with the mystery traditions, with the orphic tradition.
Speaker 7: When Orpheus, even though he doesn't succeed in getting Urides
Speaker 7: all the way out of Hades, the possibility exists, you know,
Speaker 7: so fascinating way that this stuff flip flops and we
Speaker 7: inherit this idea of demons, when really it's a corruption
Speaker 7: of the word damon and a damon. There are orders
Speaker 7: of damons, but at the top of the order of
Speaker 7: damons are angulos, which is where we get our word angels,
Speaker 7: which means messenger, just like hermis, just like we said
Speaker 7: earlier about what damons mean. They're messengers that exist between
Speaker 7: man and the gods.
Speaker 4: But it gets so much worse when you translate daimonis
Speaker 4: into the Roman, which then becomes genius.
Speaker 2: So now.
Speaker 4: By condemning the demons, you're condemning your own genius. In
Speaker 4: some ways. That's the spirit that expresses through your body.
Speaker 1: And we think about that wrong.
Speaker 7: You know, in modern times we think of it a
Speaker 7: genius as somebody that has a natural proclivity for a
Speaker 7: certain thing, whether it be mathematics, science, music. But that's
Speaker 7: not a genius. A genius you acquire your genius through
Speaker 7: devotional practices, through doing the very thing that your character
Speaker 7: incarnated to do, and that Socrates called it his damonion,
Speaker 7: which is just another way of saying his damon. But yeah,
Speaker 7: your genius is something that you acquire, and once you do,
Speaker 7: you are linked up with the gods. Because the genius,
Speaker 7: the daemon is never not in line with the god
Speaker 7: above him. Right, So you become a tidle wave. Your
Speaker 7: output gets just skyrockets. Your ability to to burn through books,
Speaker 7: especially if they're books in which you're vitally interested, there's
Speaker 7: no limit, you know, And I'm sure, a lot of
Speaker 7: you have experienced that. I know when I first got
Speaker 7: on this path, had my first you know, to put
Speaker 7: it in woo wu terms like spiritual awakening, I couldn't
Speaker 7: get enough. I'd spend eight hours a day in the bookstores.
Speaker 7: I didn't have any money, so I couldn't buy the books,
Speaker 7: but i'd sure as fuck sit in there and read them,
Speaker 7: you know. And there was no limit to how much
Speaker 7: I could fit up here, and I never never had
Speaker 7: that capacity prior.
Speaker 2: Does anybody have any more questions before as something a
Speaker 2: little bit different?
Speaker 1: Sure? Sorry, Nick, I'll jump in. I know I've been
Speaker 1: a little quiet. Pete.
Speaker 3: Would you say that those higher noedic experiences, I know
Speaker 3: you said you use a psychoactive substances at the very beginning,
Speaker 3: But like when you were engaging in those noedic processes
Speaker 3: of reading, engaging with the text or the fire of perception,
Speaker 3: it's very gebbatic and hessetic at the same time, because
Speaker 3: you're bringing sort of an asynthesis into different So would
Speaker 3: you say that you were following a particular hermeneutic through
Speaker 3: those texts or a particular even an ideological or cosmological one,
Speaker 3: Like what are the particulars that helped you sort of engage.
Speaker 1: With that not at the time, because I didn't know anything.
Speaker 7: Yeah, at the time, I was just gathering information. It
Speaker 7: would be a number of years before uhh, I really
Speaker 7: started getting my hands on maps like the Azhaym, the
Speaker 7: Kabbala try of life. And you know, once I had
Speaker 7: these maps and had acquired this new language, I could
Speaker 7: interpret the information that I had read and retained.
Speaker 1: But at the time I was I was a tabolou
Speaker 1: rasa and I was I had. I had no.
Speaker 7: Idea what was going on, and that part of that
Speaker 7: I liked. You know, there was a certain sacred kind
Speaker 7: of vulnerability being suspended in the mystery, and I think
Speaker 7: that was integral to the beginning of the journey.
Speaker 1: But no I had I had no uh.
Speaker 7: Framework by which to interpret even my own experience at
Speaker 7: that point. So it was simply pick it up, read it,
Speaker 7: put it down, and then as I read further texts,
Speaker 7: I'd compare contrast, you know, find analogs. If they didn't agree,
Speaker 7: the next step is rectify that. Find a text that
Speaker 7: meets them in the middle, explains why it doesn't fit.
Speaker 7: But one of the first books that I read and
Speaker 7: I haven't read it, and it's been you know, twenty years,
Speaker 7: so I don't know how it holds up today. But
Speaker 7: it was a book by dal Malachi called Gnosis of
Speaker 7: the Cosmic Christ, which is a Sophia and gnostic approach
Speaker 7: to kabbala and that was very helpful because I was
Speaker 7: experiencing a degree of cognitive dissonance with reading Pabbalistic texts
Speaker 7: and gnostic texts, because remember I was largely going from
Speaker 7: things I had encountered in that Scottish Grite book, and
Speaker 7: there's a lot of talk of Kabbalah a gnosticism in there,
Speaker 7: with no effort made to distinguish the two. And so
Speaker 7: once I started diving into those texts, it was clear
Speaker 7: they're not There's some some crossover, but they're not talking
Speaker 7: about the same thing. And you know, dow Malachi back
Speaker 7: then at least, like I said, I don't know how
Speaker 7: that holds up today. I don't know how I would
Speaker 7: feel about that book today, but it did. It did
Speaker 7: smooth smooth some things over for me and pointed me
Speaker 7: in other directions. And there was even a time when
Speaker 7: I wrote him. I must have been eighteen or nineteen,
Speaker 7: but I said, I said, I can relate to a
Speaker 7: lot of things you're describing in here, because he's talking
Speaker 7: about visionary experiences through ritual, which I hadn't experienced yet.
Speaker 7: I didn't experience anything like that until I started practic
Speaker 7: to sing yoga and then got into magic. But I
Speaker 7: was saying, you know, a lot of what you're saying,
Speaker 7: I've encountered, but it was on substances like psilocybin and LSD.
Speaker 7: And I said, where do you stand on this? Because
Speaker 7: nowhere in the book does he discuss that. And he
Speaker 7: was gracious enough to open up with a stranger about
Speaker 7: that and say, well, you know, these practices don't work
Speaker 7: for everyone. The ones that they don't work for, he
Speaker 7: said that we all everyone that comes to me.
Speaker 1: We start with these practices.
Speaker 7: If they continue to do them properly and still aren't
Speaker 7: getting results, he said, I call those hard cases and
Speaker 7: with them, I take them to the Native American Church
Speaker 7: and they get a dose of peyote and usually they
Speaker 7: come back and it gives them, you know, a frame
Speaker 7: of reference. They say, oh my god, I get it.
Speaker 7: Then they go back and say, okay, let's start over
Speaker 7: and see if we can do these practices and see
Speaker 7: if you recognize any of the phenomena that you saw
Speaker 7: on the payote, you know, And I thought that was
Speaker 7: a pretty smart way to go about it.
Speaker 1: Open the door.
Speaker 5: Would you say, would you say, even after that you
Speaker 5: got to know and practice like magic and all this stuff,
Speaker 5: if you ever did something again, like any substances archdelics, yeah, exactly,
Speaker 5: if you felt you felt the difference like from doing
Speaker 5: it after, then you I kind of have a bit
Speaker 5: more control maybe over that kind of the.
Speaker 7: First thing I noticed after going back to psychedelics because
Speaker 7: I took a break from them for a long time
Speaker 7: to try and get a frame of reference for that
Speaker 7: territory from from somebody who knew more than I did.
Speaker 7: But when I returned to them, the first thing I
Speaker 7: noticed was that it wasn't free anymore. I couldn't just
Speaker 7: go in there and laugh and and trip out and
Speaker 7: have a good time.
Speaker 1: Every time. It was like, Okay, this is work, Get
Speaker 1: to work.
Speaker 7: So that's one way that I still use them often,
Speaker 7: especially on solstices, equinoxes, full moons, new moons.
Speaker 1: You know, I try my best.
Speaker 7: To ritualize it, but it's always it's always work, and
Speaker 7: it's all, there are also more consequences. You know, early
Speaker 7: on there weren't really consequences, but you really see in
Speaker 7: real time the consequences not just of actions, but of intentions, thoughts,
Speaker 7: tendencies to react to the world in a certain way,
Speaker 7: like the buddhistk Sankara, your tendency to respond in a
Speaker 7: certain way, and you see that in real time, and
Speaker 7: you know, ignorance is blitz. I was probably seeing that
Speaker 7: in real time at eleven and twelve, but I wouldn't
Speaker 7: have recognized it. But being in a place where I
Speaker 7: recognize it, yeah, it's it's absolutely changed the way I
Speaker 7: do it.
Speaker 1: To quote Jim Eshelman, who I'm sure some of you
Speaker 1: with a.
Speaker 7: Background and the Lima no Jim, but he said one
Speaker 7: time to me, he said, I never bring psychedelics to
Speaker 7: my ritual, but I always bring ritual to my psychedelics.
Speaker 1: And that's that's me for sure.
Speaker 2: Nice.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, sorry, Matt, I have a quick follow up
Speaker 3: for you, PD from your previous comment, but even the
Speaker 3: one you just sort of articulated now is not Would
Speaker 3: you be comfortable if you described your sort of journey
Speaker 3: into these the higher nosis as a bride perhaps traveling
Speaker 3: through that path and into your so seeing the world
Speaker 3: for the first time, like preconceptually not having names for things,
Speaker 3: and then perhaps crossing into that carnal ground of ideas,
Speaker 3: as you said, being able to throw everything up in
Speaker 3: the air and also rectify. So that's a very yosodic
Speaker 3: kind of property, is to be able to sort of
Speaker 3: bring all things into synthesis at tiffer it, but then
Speaker 3: also bring it down back into your sead and say, yeah,
Speaker 3: this is perhaps closer to the truth, or perhaps has
Speaker 3: a contour closer to the truth.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 7: Yeah, Well, for starters, I see any psychedelic drug as
Speaker 7: being related to the supernal triad at least has the
Speaker 7: potential to get you into those spaces. You might not
Speaker 7: stay there. Everything that goes up must come down. But
Speaker 7: for the lower sepharo there, I still associate.
Speaker 1: Them with drugs.
Speaker 7: You know, if I do a stimulant, I understand that
Speaker 7: it's propelling my psyche into oh, you know, if I
Speaker 7: do an aphrodisiac, it's propelling my consciousness into ned Zach.
Speaker 1: I see it that way. Now, the.
Speaker 7: Apologies in my personal journey before I had any language
Speaker 7: for this stuff, and what really made me say I
Speaker 7: need somebody to kind of give me a leg up
Speaker 7: here because I don't know what's going on.
Speaker 1: It was.
Speaker 7: I must have been sixteen because I was driving, so
Speaker 7: I know I had my driver's license. And my younger brother, Michael,
Speaker 7: he's on x as God Sauce, a brilliant guy, way
Speaker 7: smarter than me. But we had gone to a festival
Speaker 7: in Memphis that it's called Memphis in May, which is
Speaker 7: kind of like Memphis's Marty Gras.
Speaker 6: I've been there a bunch of times.
Speaker 1: I love that.
Speaker 7: Yeah, well, if you want, if you've been there back
Speaker 7: in the nineties, you probably remember Hippie Hill where all
Speaker 7: the hippies would be playing bongos around the Elvis statue.
Speaker 1: And yes, we.
Speaker 7: Expressly went there for the purpose of getting LSD because
Speaker 7: every time we'd ever been there, we'd found some, but
Speaker 7: I didn't want to drive with it, you know. So
Speaker 7: we found this guy that we were familiar with, and
Speaker 7: I bought seven hits for each of us, me, my brother,
Speaker 7: and two other friends that were with us, and we
Speaker 7: didn't have anything to put it on. So we've got
Speaker 7: this puddle of seven drops in our hand and we
Speaker 7: all look at each other and we're like, yeah, let's
Speaker 7: just down it and jump in the car and hopefully
Speaker 7: we'll be home before this gets out of hand, because
Speaker 7: Memphis is about an hour drive from Tupoula.
Speaker 5: And.
Speaker 7: It was a traumatic drive. I'll say that now. When
Speaker 7: we finally stop the car and we're all getting out.
Speaker 7: We stopped at the friend's house, who I'm letting We
Speaker 7: were all supposed to hang out, but he was kind
Speaker 7: of wigging out wanted to go home. So we drive
Speaker 7: him home and I tell everybody, get out, stretch your legs.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 7: We still have to drive some more, but let's take
Speaker 7: a breather. And my brother won't get out of the car,
Speaker 7: and he's he won't communicate with me. He's not responsive,
Speaker 7: he's not catatonic, but he's completely disconnected.
Speaker 1: From the world.
Speaker 7: And as this evening goes on, he does some things
Speaker 7: that I can't to this day, I can't explain magical
Speaker 7: type things. And finally he tells me in this joking
Speaker 7: kind of way, He's like, you know, I don't know
Speaker 7: why I'm telling you this. You're You're just a puppet,
Speaker 7: you know. But he says, I'm God. I know, I'm God,
Speaker 7: I am the one, and I was like, buddy, you're
Speaker 7: just tripping. You know, you're you're not handling the lsd well,
Speaker 7: but you're not God. I promise. I know your mother,
Speaker 7: you were born, you know. But he's like, no, I
Speaker 7: am God. I wore this mask my whole life and
Speaker 7: tricked myself into believing I was that mask.
Speaker 1: He said, but but.
Speaker 7: Now I realize I am all of you, and I
Speaker 7: am basically the only thing that's real. I work you
Speaker 7: all like puppets. And he's like, again, I'm only telling
Speaker 7: you this because I just need to say it out loud,
Speaker 7: because you don't matter. You're just a puppet, you know.
Speaker 7: And I had no idea what to do with this.
Speaker 7: I ended up calling my mother and I'm like, Mom,
Speaker 7: I'm sorry I woke you up, but I gave Michael
Speaker 7: seven hits of acid and he thinks he's God, and
Speaker 7: I need you to explain to him that you pushed
Speaker 7: him out of your vagina so that he can understand
Speaker 7: that he can't be God if he was born, I said,
Speaker 7: because in my state, I was like, logically, that would
Speaker 7: mean you were the bigger God if you produced him.
Speaker 6: And you still.
Speaker 1: Oh, yes, and.
Speaker 7: This is back when you know there were no cell phones,
Speaker 7: so we had to borrow a wireless with the long
Speaker 7: antenna phone.
Speaker 1: And she's screaming at me, you did what you know?
Speaker 7: And I'm like, just please talk to Michael so I
Speaker 7: can get him home, because by this point he's gotten
Speaker 7: out of the car but won't get back in. And
Speaker 7: he takes the phone and I can hear my mom screaming,
Speaker 7: and he looks at the phone and just effortlessly snaps
Speaker 7: it into two pieces and throws these pieces away. So
Speaker 7: long story Shortyes, this night, this was a very traumatic night.
Speaker 7: After about seventy two hours, he finally that look left
Speaker 7: his eyes and he seemed to be somewhat back to normal.
Speaker 7: But to be one honest good you can go read
Speaker 7: his X posts. He's he's never fully come down. He's
Speaker 7: still he is God. He is the one we're all
Speaker 7: puppets that's never left him. It forced him into a
Speaker 7: permanent syllipsism. So I always thought at that time that
Speaker 7: that he just kind of lost his ship on LSD.
Speaker 7: It wouldn't be another for another maybe six seven months.
Speaker 7: That I took three hits of LSD with two hits
Speaker 7: of mescaline, and I saw a firsthand what he was,
Speaker 7: what he meant, what he.
Speaker 1: Was talking about.
Speaker 7: I was the universe, the boundaries of myself completely dissolved.
Speaker 7: Time didn't exist, space didn't exist. And I understood while
Speaker 7: he for him it was a negative, we were puppets.
Speaker 7: I didn't see it as that. It was more everyone
Speaker 7: is me that you pick up where the Danny game
Speaker 7: I play leaves off, and that's how we have completion.
Speaker 7: And it came with this idea that there is only
Speaker 7: one God and it doesn't understand itself. I don't understand
Speaker 7: myself was the thought process. So what better way to
Speaker 7: gain self knowledge than to play multiple roles that can interact.
Speaker 1: With itself subjectively? Right?
Speaker 7: To gain self knowledge through this illusion of multiple players.
Speaker 7: And it was both ecstatic and absolutely terrifying. And so
Speaker 7: when I came down from that, that's when I said, uh,
Speaker 7: I'm not doing that again until I can get a
Speaker 7: picture of why that, get get a a a framework for.
Speaker 1: Why this happened.
Speaker 7: Some philosophically, what is going on when this happens, because
Speaker 7: now it's it's happened to two people, myself included. But again,
Speaker 7: you you know, you get into those Eastern texts and
Speaker 7: it's in the slainest language ever. Right that that you're
Speaker 7: basically wear fingers on a hand, and in certain states
Speaker 7: you can chase it up the arm, up the shoulder
Speaker 7: and get right into the head of whatever being you
Speaker 7: were just a digit on. So yeah, that that was
Speaker 7: the journey, that that forced me into a reckoning. Now
Speaker 7: that's not what I call my spiritual awakening.
Speaker 1: That was that was a crisis.
Speaker 7: My spiritual awakening experience came much later after I had
Speaker 7: started working the AA system and was doing yoga every day,
Speaker 7: and i'd been doing you know, incorporating one limited time.
Speaker 7: So I had incorporated yama, niyama, asauna, and now I'm
Speaker 7: working on pranayama and the pranayama.
Speaker 1: The breathing exercises energized me to.
Speaker 7: Such a degree that I couldn't sleep or I couldn't eat.
Speaker 7: So I just set up and did these the asana
Speaker 7: and pranayama for almost three days and something licked like
Speaker 7: a damn broke in my chest. And thankfully it wasn't
Speaker 7: like what happened when I became God.
Speaker 1: It was more.
Speaker 7: This state of total ecstasy, see that I didn't know
Speaker 7: what to do with. My only thought was, how can
Speaker 7: I be of service to people, and my only solution
Speaker 7: was going I was going to all my friends' houses,
Speaker 7: washing their dishes, sweeping their floors, you know, That's all
Speaker 7: I could think to do.
Speaker 1: And my friend Dustin, he was like, Danny, man, you
Speaker 1: don't you don't have to do that. Come here, why
Speaker 1: don't you come smoke this joint with me, you know,
Speaker 1: let's just chill out.
Speaker 7: And I'm like, oh, you know, crying in there with
Speaker 7: joy and sweeping this floor. Everybody was worried to death
Speaker 7: about what is wrong with Danny. That's what my friends
Speaker 7: call me.
Speaker 6: Danny was a.
Speaker 7: Total you know, and and it and it lasted almost
Speaker 7: as long as it took to get there.
Speaker 1: It lasted right about three days.
Speaker 7: And by that time I had I thought this was permanent,
Speaker 7: like this was this was enlightenment, that this would never
Speaker 7: go away.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't.
Speaker 7: Want to say I crashed, but I came down and
Speaker 7: was back at my normal baseline, and I kind of
Speaker 7: mourned that it went away. And it initially led me
Speaker 7: to think that that enlightenment was a sham, that this
Speaker 7: was just a trick of body chemistry. It wouldn't be
Speaker 7: until years later that I realized that enlightenment is not
Speaker 7: that state. It's attaining that state, coming back down and
Speaker 7: allowing what you saw, what you knew in that state
Speaker 7: to inform the way you behave when you're at Walmart
Speaker 7: or when you're in traffic. You know, that's that's in life,
Speaker 7: and that if you are in that state, forever.
Speaker 1: You're I mean, you're useless.
Speaker 7: You're useless to everyone around you.
Speaker 1: You're a buffoon in a way.
Speaker 7: But if you can come back down where you have
Speaker 7: to clock in and out from your job, you know,
Speaker 7: clean up your own mess, wash the dishes. But still,
Speaker 7: even if you don't feel it, allow your behavior to
Speaker 7: be dictated by what you saw and knew in those moments.
Speaker 7: I think that's closer to what we in the West
Speaker 7: call in an enlightened state or whatever.
Speaker 2: Something I did want to ask you. It's a little
Speaker 2: bit different, you know, a little bit off topic, but
Speaker 2: I think it does go to your you know, definitely
Speaker 2: with your book, and I just wanted your opinion. There's
Speaker 2: been probably like over the last two years, there's been
Speaker 2: times I've covered alchemist or ocult ist poets, writers that
Speaker 2: might have been openly into the occult, and even some artists.
Speaker 2: I don't know if it was Jim Morrison specifically, but
Speaker 2: I started noticing there was a lot of them that
Speaker 2: chose at some point to write in hexameter or hexameter,
Speaker 2: however you say it or a pentameter, and you think
Speaker 2: there's something too that besides just a way of writing,
Speaker 2: because I'm sure I think you touch on that in
Speaker 2: your book.
Speaker 1: With dactylic hexameter.
Speaker 7: In the English language, it's really difficult to write in
Speaker 7: daktylic hexameter. The closest thing we have is pentameter, and
Speaker 7: we see people like Ralph Waldo Emerson. You know, they're
Speaker 7: dipping into that. It's the closest analog. But that that's
Speaker 7: the language that the oracles would speaking, you know. So
Speaker 7: if you went to the oracle at Delphi, what they
Speaker 7: gave you back as your oracle was in dactylic caxameter,
Speaker 7: because it was seen as the language of the dactyls.
Speaker 7: These these beings that live underground or in volcanoes, but
Speaker 7: they're they're these divine sometimes craftsmen, but they're crafting for
Speaker 7: you this oracle.
Speaker 1: Uh that that.
Speaker 7: Usually isn't just encoded and full of symbols, but it
Speaker 7: works on multiple levels, right, So it has for the
Speaker 7: ancient Greeks, it has the potential to create a statement
Speaker 7: that can be true on more than one level, and
Speaker 7: that that's somehow inherent in the form, not just the words.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 7: And there's probably something to be said for rhythms and cadence,
Speaker 7: just like with when we hear rhyming and good alliteration.
Speaker 7: It creates a trance like state, and I think dactylic
Speaker 7: hexameter lends itself to that.
Speaker 1: I don't think the.
Speaker 7: Pentameter is as successful, and it certainly doesn't have the
Speaker 7: historical weight behind it that dactylic hexameter does. But yeah, Parmenides,
Speaker 7: homer hesiod, Empedocles, Xenophanes, Heraclitis, all these guys, the earliest
Speaker 7: really brilliant philosophical proto scientific thinkers and magicians.
Speaker 1: Wrote this way, So I spoke this way.
Speaker 7: The Caldane oracles is in dactylic hexameter. Yeah, yeah, I
Speaker 7: definitely think it was the meat of choice.
Speaker 2: I think the first time I came across that was
Speaker 2: when I was looking into Empedocles, and I think because
Speaker 2: of the oracles, I.
Speaker 7: Think sympedicals is so amazing. I don't know if you've
Speaker 7: read Peter Kingsley's book Reality, highly recommend it. It's it's
Speaker 7: a it's a It's in two parts. The first part
Speaker 7: is dealing with Parmenides, the second with Empedocles. But it's
Speaker 7: not just some historians scholarly. Let's talk about what he said.
Speaker 7: Through reading it. He has this uncanny ability to lure
Speaker 7: you into that way of thinking. So by the time
Speaker 7: you've closed the book, you really feel like you have
Speaker 7: a kinship with Empedicals with Parmenides.
Speaker 1: It's it's in the top probably the top three most
Speaker 1: important amazing books I've ever read.
Speaker 4: Nice it's funny to be the resistance, and yet also
Speaker 4: love for Parmenides. So like all these other philosophers are
Speaker 4: reading Parmenides and he says motion is impossible, and then
Speaker 4: they're all just like, ah, you've got to be kidding me.
Speaker 4: But they loved it so much that they kept it
Speaker 4: with them the whole time. And I see that as
Speaker 4: a big influence in the monism of Socrates and all
Speaker 4: the rest of the you know, even Platonic Neoplatonic. And
Speaker 4: he also influenced all of science, right, So this is
Speaker 4: where ontology comes from.
Speaker 6: I was going to say, up to Walter Russell and
Speaker 6: his discussions on how light works, you know, there is
Speaker 6: no motion, you know.
Speaker 7: Yeah, there's a great poet who is the spiritual mentor
Speaker 7: to are Schweller de Lubitch oscar Vladislavs de Lubitch Below's
Speaker 7: but he had a spiritual awakening that occurred on Christmas
Speaker 7: or Easter or any day or something. But the revelation
Speaker 7: was that that space doesn't exist, that this is all
Speaker 7: one full suit that we exist in. And a lot
Speaker 7: of a lot of philosophers like to pit hair Aplitis
Speaker 7: against Parmenides, like they're arguing, you know, because Parmenides he's,
Speaker 7: like you said, he's saying, there is no motion, there
Speaker 7: is no change, there is only being. Non being cannot
Speaker 7: be by definition, if you can think it, it is.
Speaker 7: If it is, you can think it, you know. But Heraclitis,
Speaker 7: he's he comes along and he says, no, you can't
Speaker 7: cross the same river twice because it's not the same river,
Speaker 7: and you're not the same man.
Speaker 1: You know, they're both.
Speaker 7: I don't think it's so much that they're disagreeing as
Speaker 7: they're approaching the same problem from different angles, and we
Speaker 7: might even say one one party Parmenides is speaking from
Speaker 7: a acrocosmic perspective and hair clitis from a microcosmic perspective,
Speaker 7: but both are are true, and that they're both experiential
Speaker 7: depending on where your head is in that moment. Yeah,
Speaker 7: I love those guys, the presocratics. Just there's so much
Speaker 7: there that is misinterpreted. I think that's dismissed as pseudo knowledge, pseudoscience,
Speaker 7: but when you really dive into that stuff.
Speaker 1: You start to see that the world might not be
Speaker 1: what you thought it was.
Speaker 4: Describes his journey as being sort of like a drug trip,
Speaker 4: you know. So he's in this palace of the Queen
Speaker 4: of the Knight and it's guarded by you know themis
Speaker 4: or our DeKay right, and then she and right, so
Speaker 4: she opens the door for him, and then all of
Speaker 4: a sudden he gets the secret of the universe, which
Speaker 4: is formal logic. This is the first time it's expressed,
Speaker 4: and you know the uh, you know, formula profile of
Speaker 4: A equals a and then you see that carry on
Speaker 4: to its natural conclusion, which is all motion can't be real.
Speaker 4: It's none of it's none of it's actually happening, only
Speaker 4: being others.
Speaker 7: You'll see a lot of people say that all philosophy
Speaker 7: is a footnote to Plato. Well, Plato is a footnote
Speaker 7: to Parmenides. That's why in the Parmenides he says, we're
Speaker 7: going to have to kill Father Parmenides because we can't
Speaker 7: move in any direction until we can get this ship
Speaker 7: out of the way.
Speaker 5: It's so true, and then it's funny, and it's funny
Speaker 5: to understand how then, would it would make sense for
Speaker 5: God to divide itself into multiple things. Seems to be
Speaker 5: because there's one thing, like.
Speaker 7: Thing that's right, and that's that's what I saw, you know.
Speaker 7: That's why I lashed onto that so easily, because it's like, oh,
Speaker 7: I I definitely get that.
Speaker 6: Yeah, but I was gonna say, you get these various
Speaker 6: stories within the texts of like hammering the universe into
Speaker 6: existence and the very sparks flying out where you have
Speaker 6: like Indra's net where everything is reflecting off everything else
Speaker 6: and everything is still a part of the whole. These
Speaker 6: stories very through, you know, and you can find similar stories,
Speaker 6: I mean throughout.
Speaker 7: It's the closest analogue to something we get from mac
Speaker 7: like somebody like Max Plank, you know, when we're talking
Speaker 7: about that at the smallest level, the oxygen molecules, the
Speaker 7: everything is made up of these subatomic particles. If we
Speaker 7: could see it from that perspective, it would be a
Speaker 7: three dimensional mesh web structure, you know where, with no
Speaker 7: no set operation division among that quanta.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 7: Yeah, so he there, Like I said, they were thinking
Speaker 7: far ahead of of what he would think would be
Speaker 7: common for an ancient mind.
Speaker 1: Mm hmm. I love that you guys are so educated
Speaker 1: on this.
Speaker 6: I never get to just just riff on riff.
Speaker 2: You're getting getting to You're able to nerd out a
Speaker 2: little bit, right, Yeah? I uh, I did. Does anybody
Speaker 2: have any more questions? I wanted to ask one more
Speaker 2: at least before we wrap it up, but I don't
Speaker 2: want to take away from anybody.
Speaker 5: I have one, I guess, so I don't know how
Speaker 5: what's the different things that you tried, let's say, but
Speaker 5: how did you perceive? For example, I tried I had
Speaker 5: experenses with Iota, with mushrooms, with let's see you with
Speaker 5: some other stuff. And it's it's very intriguing that each
Speaker 5: one of them have a kind of persona, if I
Speaker 5: may call it like that, like they they present themselves
Speaker 5: a little bit differently, even though like you could say, okay,
Speaker 5: the compounds maybe are a little bit different as well,
Speaker 5: but there is a similarity in how they behave. So
Speaker 5: even if it's let's say I had different Iaska ceremonies
Speaker 5: with different people, so they were prepared differently, but in
Speaker 5: theory it was always kind of the same type of
Speaker 5: experience the same like mushrooms. I had mushrooms the same
Speaker 5: Brazil or in another place, and so in theory they
Speaker 5: are different, but the experience is super similar. So I
Speaker 5: was wondering if from your perspective you could see that
Speaker 5: as well, and how would you if you ever tried
Speaker 5: to interpret that, like would you connect each of for example,
Speaker 5: the mushrooms. Even the Americans, the I guess Central Americans,
Speaker 5: South South Americans they call it like cult, tuna, accult
Speaker 5: or something.
Speaker 1: Like that, like they have a name.
Speaker 5: Exactly so, or like for Iwaska they call it like
Speaker 5: mother I or whatever. So they kind of already personify it.
Speaker 5: So even if I'm not into that, let'd say I
Speaker 5: wasn't raised in that way. When I perceive it, I
Speaker 5: see the same thing. So it's this idea of there's
Speaker 5: some kind of agrable maybe you want to call it.
Speaker 5: So it's curious, how do you perceive it?
Speaker 1: Well, yeah, well, I mean I'm.
Speaker 7: Very much I have a magical worldview, and I think
Speaker 7: the world is peopled by spirits. I think even the
Speaker 7: simplest things, like a can of soda, you know, it
Speaker 7: participates in mind to the degree that it is capable.
Speaker 7: Because we're not in a material, material universe. We're in
Speaker 7: a mental universe like Uxley, and I think even William
Speaker 7: James before in mind at large is what we're in.
Speaker 7: What we interpret as material, but this is a mental
Speaker 7: struct sure, and so everything participates in mind to.
Speaker 1: The degree that it is capable.
Speaker 7: And these entheogenic substances they've been participating in mind much
Speaker 7: longer than we have. There is a spiritual intelligence to them.
Speaker 7: There's a being there. And like you said, if you
Speaker 7: doubt that, take ayahuasca, because I promise you'll encounter a
Speaker 7: female type figure. You take mescaliner praote, you will encounter
Speaker 7: a male like figure. You take Salvia divinorum, it will
Speaker 7: be a female type figure every time. And of course
Speaker 7: I struggled with this, especially with with LSD, you know,
Speaker 7: because the high doses veellacy, the visuals are very cartoon like,
Speaker 7: and I thought, why am I seeing? You know that
Speaker 7: mundane that I watched cartoons when I was a kid,
Speaker 7: so now I'm seeing seeing cartoons. But no, I think
Speaker 7: it has more to do with cartoons exist because just
Speaker 7: like Parmenides said.
Speaker 1: It, if it is, it is.
Speaker 7: And it's always been a part of this and it
Speaker 7: manifests for us in a material realm as something somebody
Speaker 7: drew and moved the pictures real fast. But that that
Speaker 7: doesn't mean that it came from a vacuum, came from nowhere,
Speaker 7: And so it raises the question, well, obviously there are
Speaker 7: no cartoons and a square of bladder paper, you know,
Speaker 7: where is this coming from? And I only use that
Speaker 7: as an example to say that, yes, just like with
Speaker 7: a sacred location, a haunted house as people would like
Speaker 7: to call it, but there are spiritus Loki are geniuses
Speaker 7: that exist in certain locations, and there are geniuses that
Speaker 7: exist in certain substances, and when we begin to approach
Speaker 7: them that way, that's where we really enter magical territory.
Speaker 7: With these substances, you can trip on them, you know,
Speaker 7: all you want to, but the moment you meet it
Speaker 7: as an entity, things change, the communication takes place. It's
Speaker 7: like with dreaming, right, you know, when you wake up
Speaker 7: in a spiritual awakening, it's almost like waking up and
Speaker 7: becoming lucid in a dream, because you realize in a
Speaker 7: dream it doesn't matter who you're dreaming about, what the
Speaker 7: room is, they're all you. From a psychological perspective, I'm
Speaker 7: playing the role of each person here, I'm playing the
Speaker 7: role of the room I'm in, and that's what that's
Speaker 7: waking up while you're awake as the effect of. But
Speaker 7: if you're familiar with work, especially James Hillman, you know,
Speaker 7: he says, the worst thing you can do is look
Speaker 7: at a dream entity and say what do you represent?
Speaker 7: I mean, if if you met a new person and
Speaker 7: instead of them asking you your name, they said what
Speaker 7: does he? What do you represent? They don't even ask you,
Speaker 7: They ask themselves because you're non existent, what does he represent?
Speaker 1: What is this? You know?
Speaker 7: It's offensive and it's offensive to dream characters as much
Speaker 7: as it's offensive to the spirits to occupy these plants.
Speaker 1: You know, so when when.
Speaker 7: They appear differently it's because they are differently. They have
Speaker 7: their own personalities and the moment you approached them that
Speaker 7: way instead of a means to an end, that they
Speaker 7: are the end in themselves. I'm I'm here because I
Speaker 7: want to commune with you. You know more than I do
Speaker 7: about some things. And guess what, I got a nervous
Speaker 7: system and opposable thumbs. You can use those if you want.
Speaker 7: If I can get a little bit of access to
Speaker 7: some of the ancient mind you have, that's my approach.
Speaker 7: So yeah, I definitely think as new age as I
Speaker 7: might come off. Man, there are spirits in those things.
Speaker 7: There is intelligence in nature, and its far surpasses anything
Speaker 7: mankind has deduced over the however, many millennia we've been
Speaker 7: running around on this planet.
Speaker 3: There is a theory that the origination or the origin
Speaker 3: of like magical practices, especially dharma or tonto specifically Tontra
Speaker 3: dharma originated in the Yakture cults. So it sounds great
Speaker 3: equivalent of a genius loki basically like a nature fairy
Speaker 3: or a nature spirit of like a particular place tree plant.
Speaker 3: But they're often seen as very ferocious, and so what
Speaker 3: we would say as a Buddhist is that they even
Speaker 3: as they appear, it's just existence appearance. So if you
Speaker 3: push through that in your own consciousness, then you can
Speaker 3: see what the core of what they really are, which
Speaker 3: is also sort of a reflection of your own mind
Speaker 3: often or consciousness, not necessarily. I'm not saying it's one
Speaker 3: hundred percent that there are one hundred yees.
Speaker 7: Not psychological mind, but the mind, the primarial.
Speaker 3: Like like rigpa is what we would call it, or
Speaker 3: like you know, like that diamond thunder is like Zeus like,
Speaker 3: but it's not really it's more yosodic to forrat like
Speaker 3: in a dialectical relationship.
Speaker 7: Yeah, yeah, and you And from that perspective, you know,
Speaker 7: there are two valid approaches to this. There's an amusing
Speaker 7: the terms in the sense that anthropologists and historians of
Speaker 7: religion use them. There's the magical approach. There's the mystical approach.
Speaker 7: The magical approach is a ladder, and each rung has
Speaker 7: different types of beings on them. They each are objective,
Speaker 7: have different things they can.
Speaker 1: Tell you, do with you, do for you.
Speaker 7: The mystical approach is everything between me and the top
Speaker 7: of that ladder is an illusion. Push passet if you
Speaker 7: see the Buddha on the road, kill him, you know
Speaker 7: that kind of thinking.
Speaker 1: The goal for me is just to get to the
Speaker 1: top the clear light. The void of nothingness.
Speaker 3: Well, we would say aving say we would say emptiness,
Speaker 3: it would be luminousness and masselessness.
Speaker 1: It's non void.
Speaker 3: Void would be at fifth consciousness, and we would actually
Speaker 3: want to go a little higher. We would want to
Speaker 3: go together, if you want to use a cabalistic sort
Speaker 3: of example.
Speaker 1: But it's not my void.
Speaker 7: But it's no thingness, as you know, unless you're saying
Speaker 7: that it's not apathetic, that it isn't devoid of it's
Speaker 7: not such that anything you say about it would be
Speaker 7: wrong because it would be limiting it to that. That's
Speaker 7: what I'm That's what I'm trying to explain. But I'm
Speaker 7: not a Buddhist, so I know, I totally get it.
Speaker 1: I just the.
Speaker 7: Language would is probably going to ruffle your feathers if
Speaker 7: you are a.
Speaker 1: Buddhist, doesn't you know?
Speaker 3: It just is I just enjoy the engagement of like
Speaker 3: the difference of like perspective or view, right, it's very interesting.
Speaker 7: But I think that I do think they're both valid.
Speaker 7: If you know the mystical approach. I don't care what
Speaker 7: angel stands between.
Speaker 1: Me and the top of the ladder.
Speaker 7: The magical approaches, Well, today I need to access that
Speaker 7: part of the ladder because I'd like to accomplish X.
Speaker 7: And I think that's the difference. But again, with these substances,
Speaker 7: I don't think it's always safe to use them as
Speaker 7: a means to an end. They're the end in themselves.
Speaker 7: So you wouldn't say I need to access X. Wrong,
Speaker 7: so I'm going to utilize X substance. Uh, that's where
Speaker 7: I think you could get into trouble because you're you're
Speaker 7: objectifying a subject.
Speaker 1: That's what I say. What I was.
Speaker 6: Meaning now speaking of ejectifying a subject this antidotally. I
Speaker 6: have a friend, this is years ago, that he used
Speaker 6: to sell salvia liven normum on tour and he was
Speaker 6: a heavy user of it. And when he started selling
Speaker 6: it heavily, he had an entity come to him whenever
Speaker 6: he would use salvia, and it was a male entity
Speaker 6: that was he said it kind of looked like a
Speaker 6: Mayan warrior that had a light bar, and every time
Speaker 6: he would use the substance when he was selling it,
Speaker 6: when he went into that state he had the light
Speaker 6: bar at his neck and the warrior was just staring
Speaker 6: into his eyes and he said he had to quit
Speaker 6: selling it.
Speaker 7: So I had to say, that's almost identical, but with
Speaker 7: mushrooms and sell the mushrooms as a kid, and had
Speaker 7: it wasn't I don't know what it was because it
Speaker 7: was so large, but a giant foot would come down
Speaker 7: and threatened to squash me. And it was as real
Speaker 7: as real, absolutely terrifying. But yeah, I never sold another
Speaker 7: mushroom after that.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Wow, So I had a question about Martinism. Now I'm
Speaker 4: seeing that there's a Martinistic influence in Voodoo and and Mormonism.
Speaker 4: Is there what got you into Martinism? And I know
Speaker 4: that it has something to do with the solemonic magic
Speaker 4: and how they use some of those keys as well.
Speaker 1: So I was just wondering if you could expand on that.
Speaker 7: Well, my interest in Martinism came with my interest in theurgy.
Speaker 7: Martinism emerged out of the first high degree system of
Speaker 7: masonry called the Elucohen, which was founded by a my
Speaker 7: named Martinez de Pascali, and it's a theurgic system that
Speaker 7: also works. It's kind of a Brammelin like in that
Speaker 7: it also works with lower spirits. But the point being
Speaker 7: if you're aligned with your damon, your holy guardian angel,
Speaker 7: and they align with you, then you're kind of extending
Speaker 7: stalvation grace into the lower realms of the world.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 7: That's what first interested me about it, and and also
Speaker 7: their their open use of hallucin engines, which a lot
Speaker 7: of Martin won't admit today, but they were using a
Speaker 7: number of different psychedelics in the initiation rituals of the
Speaker 7: Eluco And now after the Elucohen officially closed, Louis Claude
Speaker 7: de Saint Martin had a circle of friends around him
Speaker 7: that he would continue teaching what he called the way
Speaker 7: of the Heart. So it's no longer ritualistic, no longer theurgic.
Speaker 7: It's more like he's doing a Potinus kind of thing.
Speaker 7: And two or three of his students or students or
Speaker 7: students eventually came together and created the Bartonist order, which
Speaker 7: is a three degree system similar to masonry, but with
Speaker 7: more Rosicrucian elements present. And once you become a Martinist,
Speaker 7: a third degree Martinist elucoen opens to you, so you
Speaker 7: can join a luko and get access to some of
Speaker 7: these theregic protocols that aren't written about openly, aren't discussed.
Speaker 7: Of course, it's not late Antique theorgy, but you're seeing
Speaker 7: how it developed post grimoire tradition, and that that's what
Speaker 7: interested me mainly, was was trying to understand how they're
Speaker 7: fitting things like the Key of Solomon, you know, different
Speaker 7: grimoires into that model. Because you look in the Lemegaton,
Speaker 7: look in the lesser key, you know, you'll see it
Speaker 7: separated into goetic magic and then theurgy. The goetic is
Speaker 7: dealing with demons. Theorgy is dealing with angels. A late
Speaker 7: antique theorgist would say, no, that's not theorgy. That's dealing
Speaker 7: with angels. That's that's working with demons, has nothing to
Speaker 7: do with uniting with a god, you know.
Speaker 1: So I was mainly interested in.
Speaker 7: It evolved through through the years, especially after the emergence
Speaker 7: of the European grew more tradition.
Speaker 2: Thank you, really, thank you? Does anybody else have any
Speaker 2: more questions? Before I ask him something else? I guess
Speaker 2: kind of like to wrap it up, I did want
Speaker 2: to say, like I didn't want to ask I guess
Speaker 2: like the average person on the street, I guess came
Speaker 2: up to you and said, like, you know, why does
Speaker 2: all this stuff that we were just talking about, the oracles,
Speaker 2: Neil Clayton is you know, Homer and all that stuff?
Speaker 2: Why in the orgy? Why does any of that matter
Speaker 2: today in twenty twenty five, Like, what's the point? What
Speaker 2: would you tell somebody like, yes.
Speaker 7: Two things, I would say, It doesn't matter. You're perfect
Speaker 7: just as you are, whether you want to or not.
Speaker 7: You're still at one with God, at one with the Gods.
Speaker 7: Every thing is as it should be. But at the
Speaker 7: same time, we tend to get in our way. I
Speaker 7: think things should be one way.
Speaker 1: We see the world as we wish it were, not
Speaker 1: as it is.
Speaker 7: And I think that from that perspective, the Orgy can offer.
Speaker 1: A lot of solace, a lot.
Speaker 7: Solace in terms of how we feel when we butt
Speaker 7: up against the world, because it does imbue it with
Speaker 7: a meaning, with a sanctity that is very hard to
Speaker 7: find even in the world religions.
Speaker 1: It's just.
Speaker 7: It's just hard today to go outside and really feel
Speaker 7: the miracle of being.
Speaker 1: Uh of everything.
Speaker 7: And I think that's the biggest thing I've taken away
Speaker 7: from theogy is participating in the miracle.
Speaker 1: Foraging.
Speaker 7: You know, when you're foraging and I'm going out, I'm
Speaker 7: finding heliotrope, I'm participating in helios and and it just
Speaker 7: changes the entire dynamic of me.
Speaker 1: Against the world. So that that's probably the.
Speaker 7: As kind of puzzling as it probably sounds to some listeners.
Speaker 7: That's that's my my explanation.
Speaker 1: I like that very well said.
Speaker 2: I think, I mean not to speak for Jen, but
Speaker 2: I think like me and him have even discussed it
Speaker 2: for myself. You know, I mentioned before with theogy when
Speaker 2: I have practiced that before in my past, that is
Speaker 2: some of the times when I've actually really felt some
Speaker 2: sort of like emotional effect, some sort of deep feeling.
Speaker 2: I think Jenna's even said that you've been into like
Speaker 2: theatical stuff. Uh.
Speaker 1: Yeah, blocks it can be very theoretic.
Speaker 3: Yes, contra is definitely thurgical, and I would say we
Speaker 3: do apply our will at specific points, but we would
Speaker 3: be mindful of the karmic implication of doing so with
Speaker 3: certain practices for sure. But yeah, I agree with you Nick,
Speaker 3: it's it's it can be very we would say it's
Speaker 3: un blocking the energy centers or the channels, so sometimes
Speaker 3: I get heart center. Often you will find like people
Speaker 3: will cry after Sodna. It's very common. So yeah, absolutely
Speaker 3: there's many and there's a you can feel anger, sometimes
Speaker 3: you can feel lost, sometimes you can feel you know different.
Speaker 3: It depends on what practice and what text you're doing.
Speaker 3: But yeah, you definitely can unblown buzz or those cliches
Speaker 3: or those skandas, those aggregates of mind that would prevent
Speaker 3: you from sort of reaching primordial consciousness for sure.
Speaker 1: So much.
Speaker 7: There's there's a great book that might interest you by
Speaker 7: a friend of mine named Gregory Shaw. He wrote a
Speaker 7: book called His first book was Theogy and the Soul, which.
Speaker 1: Was a really a deep dive into Iamblicus.
Speaker 7: But his most recent book is Hellenistic Tantra, and he's
Speaker 7: comparing Iamblicus's program to.
Speaker 1: Abin A Gupta to.
Speaker 7: The early Kaula Tantra, particularly Kashmir Tantra Southeast Asia. But
Speaker 7: lots of parallels, especially in the perception of the body
Speaker 7: as as almost like body as soul and vice versa.
Speaker 7: But that might be something jen that that you would
Speaker 7: find fascinating.
Speaker 3: Thank you, ped I'll definitely I've seen it on ig
Speaker 3: people like I Baker and other people have like interviewed him.
Speaker 3: I just haven't listened to them or bought the book,
Speaker 3: but I will definitely do that.
Speaker 1: Thank you a little bit of a pretty good too.
Speaker 2: Yeah, actually I got I coming on and I think
Speaker 2: of a week.
Speaker 1: Or so nice.
Speaker 2: Yeah, uh p D, thank you so much. Before I
Speaker 2: let you plug everything and let everybody know whether where
Speaker 2: they can find you stuff. Let me just have the
Speaker 2: other people remind everybody where they can find them, jin
Speaker 2: real quick, let everybody know where they can find all
Speaker 2: your amazing stuff.
Speaker 1: Well, so thank you so much.
Speaker 2: PD.
Speaker 3: I know it's a little discursive, but I know you're
Speaker 3: you're so smart and you can you can take it.
Speaker 3: And I really enjoyed it. And thank you so much
Speaker 3: for teaching me about uh, you know, the more platonic
Speaker 3: and neo platonic system, which I'm not that familiar with
Speaker 3: to be honest, so it was definitely a learning episode
Speaker 3: for me. And thank you of course to all the
Speaker 3: O their co hosts, especially to uh Nick and Matt Murra,
Speaker 3: who is my co host on The Gray Lodge, which
Speaker 3: is our co host like Roundtable, we talked about speculative gnosissism,
Speaker 3: every Friday night and check us out on YouTube and
Speaker 3: at the True Gray Lodge dot com, t r v
Speaker 3: E True Gray Lodge dot com and on Threshold Saints
Speaker 3: if you want to follow me. And I'm interviewing the
Speaker 3: alt lit author Andrew Thompson and his new book Crowbar,
Speaker 3: so that'll be dropping really soon. It's supposedly the book
Speaker 3: of twenty twenty five, so it's really lucky to be
Speaker 3: able to interview him. So thank you guys so much, appreciate.
Speaker 2: It, of course, No, thank you for making me man
Speaker 2: and Headless Giant what is going on with?
Speaker 1: Thank you.
Speaker 4: You can find me on x and on Instagram at
Speaker 4: the Headless Giant, and you can follow my YouTube channel
Speaker 4: at the Headless Giant. If you have any sort of
Speaker 4: mystical experiences, any kind of a drug experience having to
Speaker 4: do with these entities or UFOs or anything, you can
Speaker 4: send it to. Yeah, you can go with the Headless
Speaker 4: Giant podcast at gmail dot com and we will read
Speaker 4: those on Thursdays and Nick will give you some stickers,
Speaker 4: so definitely check that out us.
Speaker 1: Out as well.
Speaker 2: Awesome, Thank you very much sir and Matt my man
Speaker 2: what's going on?
Speaker 5: But thank you again thanks so much for calling me here, Nick,
Speaker 5: and nice to meet you all. Was a very nice episode.
Speaker 5: Thanks PD for sharing all the stuff. It's cool to
Speaker 5: see other people practice and get to the same places.
Speaker 6: And you know, even if.
Speaker 5: As obviously we're not going to share every time one
Speaker 5: hundred percent of the same thing, it's cool to understand
Speaker 5: how others thinking so and it was very fascinating stuff.
Speaker 1: So again, thanks all for that.
Speaker 5: And yeah, you guys can find me as it's here
Speaker 5: at Medmore nineteen everywhere to their YouTube, Instagram and TikTok anyplace.
Speaker 5: There's also my website that's Kabbala dot com k.
Speaker 1: A A B A l a h dot com.
Speaker 5: And yeah, there's an episode here in occult prejacts from
Speaker 5: this like very recent you guys can check it out
Speaker 5: as well.
Speaker 1: It was very nice.
Speaker 2: Yes, it is still up on the lives go check
Speaker 2: that out. And my man Robbie Marks, thank you so
Speaker 2: much for making it today.
Speaker 6: Really yeah, I'm glad I could make it. Thanks for
Speaker 6: having me on and it's great to see everybody. Great
Speaker 6: to meet the nuclear PD. Excellent conversation. This is the
Speaker 6: type of information that I dwell within and kind of
Speaker 6: have kind of absorbed, you know, since like you were saying,
Speaker 6: since I was in my early teens, and it's just
Speaker 6: it's a great conversation. So thank you so much for that.
Speaker 6: And if anybody wants to check out my stuff, you
Speaker 6: can go and check my link tree which is link
Speaker 6: tree r M r X and that'll pull up my artwork,
Speaker 6: my metamind cast, podcast, all my miscellany social media any
Speaker 6: way you want to connect with me is there. And
Speaker 6: thanks again Nick, of.
Speaker 2: Course, thank you for making it. And finally, PD, I
Speaker 2: really want to say thank you for coming on. I
Speaker 2: know it took a while, but it was well well
Speaker 2: worth the wait. I think the other rejects on the
Speaker 2: show can even say probably within the last six months,
Speaker 2: I've gotten very interested in neoplatonism and some of the
Speaker 2: oldest stuff, so this show was really really familiar. Like
Speaker 2: I truly love the show. So thank you very much
Speaker 2: for coming on, man, and please let everybody know where
Speaker 2: they can find you stuff.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I've had a blast. I mean, like I said,
Speaker 7: it's it's very rare that I get to to just
Speaker 7: kind of riff on this stuff. Usually I'm having to
Speaker 7: reinvent the wheel and and and you guys are already rolling.
Speaker 1: So this is this has been a treat for me.
Speaker 7: As far as you know, we're finding Facebook, Instagram X.
Speaker 7: I usually just post what I'm researching and you can
Speaker 7: find me on.
Speaker 1: Under p. D.
Speaker 7: Newman on all those platforms. Again, my books all major booksellers,
Speaker 7: and I'm working on three or four books right now,
Speaker 7: kind of juggling them. But before those come out, my
Speaker 7: colleague Ala Hawkins, he's an award winning filmmaker out of Columbus, Mississippi.
Speaker 7: We're finishing up a documentary right now on on my
Speaker 7: second book, Angels and Vermilion, kind of tracing the trajectory
Speaker 7: of Acacia in the use of DMT from Egypt to
Speaker 7: Prague to London and finally into freemasonry.
Speaker 1: And hopefully that'll be done next spring.
Speaker 7: But yeah, follow me on any of my social media
Speaker 7: accounts and I'll keep you updated on our progress with that.
Speaker 7: And again, thanks guys, it's been a real pleasure.
Speaker 2: Oh, thank you again. And I do think as far
Speaker 2: as I know, we got hooked up through inner Traditions,
Speaker 2: So I guess if anybody's looking for his books, they
Speaker 2: should be on that site. So you know, he should
Speaker 2: be on the can check that out. Thank you again
Speaker 2: for coming on, and everybody in the chat, that's what's up.
Speaker 2: Even the people who don't agree with this stuff. I
Speaker 2: appreciate your opinion and jumping in on the chat. And
Speaker 2: the people that had stuff to add, that's what's up. Again.
Speaker 2: I appreciate it, and that's why we go live and
Speaker 2: until the next one, everybody be well later