[00:00:01] Luke: How many times have you been present as someone has left their body?

[00:00:07] Zach: Mm. Wow. That's probably more times than I can count or kept track of over the years. During the four years that I was a hospice director, I was admitting about 80 patients a week to die. So 80 times 52 times four, I guess. So I wasn't present at the bedside for every one of those, obviously, but I was present in their lives in those last few weeks of their life for a lot of people.

[00:00:34] So that was just the last four years of that. And previous to that, you're at the bedside in ICU day in and day out for a decade in academic medicine. So certainly hundreds, really up in the thousands somewhere, I'm sure, but they start to blur together a little bit because you just start to realize that they're all the same.

[00:00:58] Every time you start to cross the veil of the appearance of a human body, you get to witness something that's just so spectacularly outside of our day-to-day experience that it inevitably blurs. Something that strikes me as being similar is every time we see something in the cosmos, through a telescope or under a microscope, we're looking through a lens that's bridging our 3D world to something much more magnificent.

[00:01:34] And I feel like being at a deathbed is something similar to that, where it's almost impossible to bring back from what you just saw to your physical reality, because it's such a different world and such a different vibration than this world that we've built. This 3-dimensional dream we're in is ready to conceive. And this is why we can have the James Webb telescope show us that we're one of 2.5 trillion galaxies, and you can't bring that back.

[00:02:02] You can't actually. You're going to go and still get a Starbucks coffee because your matrix can't handle the fact that there's 2.5 trillion galaxies, each with a few billion suns. And the same way you look into a microscope and down electron microscopy, and you start to realize that every single cell is this ecosystem in and of itself, an entire cosmos within a single cell, and you can't bring that back to our physical reality, it's limited by our five senses either.

[00:02:30] And that's a lot of what the deathbed feels like to me, is it's like this entrance into another space that is so hard to create from or reintegrate into our dream state because our dream is so limited.

[00:02:43] Luke: I've only been present at the death of one mammal, and it was one of the most powerful experiences of my life, and it's ineffable, just the energetics of that moment. And it wasn't even a human. It left such an impression on me that I think ultimately the net benefit of that was the realization that death is a fallacy. I realized that as I watched this being die, that nothing had died. That something had just changed. And in the moment of that change, there was something happening to my nervous system that was unexplainable.

[00:03:31] Zach: Let's go into that actually.

[00:03:32] Luke: And beautiful and powerful. So that's why I asked that question.

[00:03:35] Zach: It's so critical. I think if we bring ourselves super present with that, it can open something. So if you really drop into that space, do you remember where and what you were feeling in your body?

[00:03:47] Luke: I had just shot a pig, a wild boar, for the first time in my life. And what was interesting about it was that it was such a short transition that there wasn't thankfully a lot of suffering involved, but I immediately started crying, but I wasn't crying out of grieving or sadness or guilt or anything like that.

[00:04:17] I was crying in a way that you would cry from just being in the presence of someone you love almost. It was a loving emotional crying more so than a sadness. It was just like when you're overwhelmed by emotion kind of crying. So I think it was a systemic emotional feeling and also just hair standing up all over my body and very ephemeral almost-- I would say psychedelic would be a close word, but it wasn't like I started seeing fractals and things like that.

[00:04:53] Everything slowed down and became very still and there was a depth of presence that was very tangible. It was just like, everything just got real quiet and real weird, but in a beautiful way. But it was a very unique essence, which is why it stood out so much to me and why I'm so curious about people that have been present as you have so many times in the transition of that life force.

[00:05:29] Zach: I mean, all the words you just used are so important for humanity to listen to and to feel. That word, tangible, I think is really beautiful. Suddenly everything became tangible. In some ways what you're describing is things are going into a state of reality that it wasn't in just a moment ago.

[00:05:47] And so the concept of tangibility is it suddenly becomes palpable. It's touchable. There's something there that shifts. And I believe that's super important for us to meditate on as humanity, is why are we living in an intangible world? What happened to create a daily lived experience that's not tangible and that it takes something like a death, which is ultimately like you described, a transformation of energetic reality to remind us that we're living in this abstract reality that is not tangible.

[00:06:25] And it's such a gift, I believe, to feel past that veil of this intangible abstract belief system that we call life. And a human right now is so fundamentally trained by an early age somewhere around age 3, 4 years old as you start to have a neurologic system that perceives difference when we're born.

[00:06:51] We don't see that way. A child will look at you out of the womb above your head. And so it's not looking at your physical body. It's looking at your energetic body. It's seeing the entire physical reality without the construct of the human visual cortex is the dominant experience.

[00:07:10] It's experiencing your ultraviolet, your infrared. It's experiencing your entire aura because the brain development hasn't gotten to the point where it can actually see. It takes weeks and months of training the brain into understanding the visual cortex for it to start to dumb itself down.

[00:07:29] Learning is a process of trimming neurologic connections. So in the womb we have the maximum number of neurologic connections in the human brain that we'll ever have. And the moment we are beginning to see patterns, and that can begin in the womb with your mother's heartbeat, her respiratory rate, you're starting to learn. You're starting to have physical inputs. You're having experience or learning of what it now feels like to have a physical body that can perceive reality in a finite fashion.

[00:08:00] And so it's interesting to imagine that your mother's heartbeat may have been your first sense of a finite reality up until that time you only had an infinite sense of a reality and suddenly you take on a physical body that has five senses that can hear and feel the vibration of your mother's heartbeat and that starts to give you this finite thing.

[00:08:22] And so you start trimming neurologic potential connections so that you can start to see the pattern that's emerging. So learning is a pairing down of neurologic possibility until you learn one thing. As we enter this world and the five senses are further stimulated outside of the womb, we're in this constant state of paring down all the other possibilities of how the universe is, and we start to depend on the frailty of the five senses that we've been given to define our reality.

[00:08:52] And so we're paring down our true sense of connectivity and reality through neurologic programming or learning that's now dedicated to the five senses. By age 1, 2, you're starting to see the world differently, but you still haven't made the break. There's a phenomenon when you wave at a little kid, they will turn their hand around and wave at themselves in the same way you're waving at them.

[00:09:16] So they'll wave at you like this. And then suddenly around age two, they'll realize they need to turn the hand around to wave at you. They realize that you are outside of them. So it takes a couple of years of being limited to this visual cortex for us to realize we're separate from things and that somebody else is having a different experience than us or has a different perspective and therefore we need to turn our hand around to wave at them over there.

[00:09:40] So they understand the perspective. That takes two years of decreasing the likelihood that you're actually all interconnected that you're all the same thing. And so you're learning separateness as a child.

[00:09:52] Luke: It's so wild. It's wild. You're in the womb in a state of oneness or non-duality. You emerge. You remain that for the first two or three years. And then you start to buy into the reality that is a projection of your senses. And then for some of us that leads us very astray into living, just on pure survival and instincts.

[00:10:20] And if you're so inclined, then you start to feel as you age that, wow, there's something missing here. I'm feeling this sense of separation. And then some of us maybe go down a spiritual path where we start to re-emerge into the attractor field of that same oneness from which we came. And that seems like the whole life battle is then to get out of the limitations of your sense perception, to get back to the reality that we're discussing that's present when someone leaves their body. It is funny.

[00:10:53] Zach: That's it. It's the book ends on life. And so you will get back to that perception of all connectedness. So as you separate two, three years old, you start to feel vulnerable. And your parents and your society around you teach you how to connect to a shield, a protective shield.

[00:11:16] So as you become perceived separateness, you need something to give yourself enough courage to exist separate, and that shield that's handed to us or trained into us is often referred to as the ego. That egoic shield is literally the necessary vibration for a mind or a consciousness that believes itself to be separate from everything else.

[00:11:40] And so the ego is this brilliant coping mechanism to separateness or the perception of separateness. And that ego then becomes one of the problems in that it's now the force field for that split mind. And so it reinforces the experience of separateness, and its defense mechanisms are to protect the separateness.

[00:12:04] And so if you challenge it with a religious worldview or spirituality that says there is nothing separate, we have a really difficult time doing that. And so that's when we take spirituality into religion, I think. Religion is the protection of our separateness. Spirituality is the dissolution of separateness.

[00:12:27] But the human ego won't let the dissolution happen, and so we create religious constructs that reinforce the separateness. Oh, you know what, you got kicked out of nature, you got kicked out from God, and now you have to get back to God. You're evil. You're sinful. You need to have some external force.

[00:12:45] And so that separateness is reinforced by our religious mythology or storytelling because it matches what we feel. Whereas the spirituality requires you to dissolve that egoic structure of separateness, which is very tough to do. It's like looking through the microscope or the telescope, where you can peer in there for a moment, say, oh, isn't that beautiful?

[00:13:09] But then you go hang out with your family for five minutes, and you're in this egoic split, and you're just saying there's no such thing as spirituality or enlightenment, because you're a human with a construct of an ego. And you're going to be triggered instantly as soon as you go back with your siblings or whatever.

[00:13:23] Luke: Or you turn on the news. You look at what's going on about you and the world and it's like, wow, can there really be any purpose to this? Can there be a God if this is the way things appear on the surface?

[00:13:31] Zach: God's not certainly not good if this is what we're manifesting. We go into those logical arguments, which as soon as you go into your mind, you're living back in that split reality that's protected and doubled down by the ego. And so the good news is the ego takes an enormous amount of energy to maintain it.

[00:13:51] Because you have to put all of this denial of the reality around you into the mix. And so you have to deny the fact that you actually know deep down that you are connected to the universe, that you are connected to source, that you are connected to nature itself, that the tree is not different than you.

[00:14:08] You know that at your cellular level, because it's breathing through you, it's speaking through you. Nature is expressing itself through you, or else you wouldn't be a biological organism. And so you know this at a deep level, but you have to put in these levels of denial and these rational mind structures to keep you separate.

[00:14:29] So all of that takes an enormous amount of biologic energy to maintain these artificial constructs. And what happens during the dying process is there's no longer enough energy. And so the death process begins when we're pretty young. Around age two, we start losing mitochondrial density in the body.

[00:14:47] When we're born, we have about 250, 300 mitochondria per human cell. If it's a neuron, it's very energy demanding and they're very long cells. A single neuron can be a meter long. So these are single cells, but they're enormous macro structures, and so you have to have 2,000, 3,000 mitochondria per neuron.

[00:15:10] By age two, we're losing our mitochondrial density by about 1 to 3% a year. And so you're losing the workforce inside of your body that produces the energy of life. In a very, very nutshell definition of what is life, this is my own distillation of this, so take this with a grain of salt.

[00:15:29] But life is essentially the condensation of light energy. The brightest thing that happens in physics is a sun. Nuclear fission and fusion that happens in a star is the most potent collection of energy that physics can do. Biology has been able to consolidate or concentrate that light energy through microbial processing. And so the first bacteria began to be able to capture sunlight and store it in carbon dioxide form.

[00:16:03] So CO2 was captured out of the atmosphere and put into double carbon bonds that stored light energy. We call these carbohydrates or fats. And so these long carbon chains that are constructed from CO2 are storing light energy. And so the first lichens and the first single-cellular organisms started to be able to store light.

[00:16:24] And then they would use these energy sources or these light sources as an energy source and in fermentation in a single bacteria, you can actually release about 1,000 times more light per cubic centimeter than the sun produces. So just to get one single living cell of a bacterium, you're already at a logarithm's improvement of light condensation.

[00:16:50] So you're taking all that sunlight, you're putting into a tiny, tiny little space. So you're concentrating the sun by about 1,000-fold to get to a single living cell. So life is 1,000-fold concentration of physics. To get to multicellular organism like an earthworm or a nematode or a human, you have to 10x that concentration again to get the amount of energy necessary to manage multicellular networks.

[00:17:17] And so this is very much like a city. You set up your teepee in the wilderness. It takes a certain amount of energy to do that, and maybe you start to build a tribe. So now you've got a group of people around you that are creating a social construct and it takes more energy there.

[00:17:33] So now you're growing crops and you're starting to do hunter gathering stuff and you're pulling in all this stuff because now you're supporting more complex systems where you have to communicate with one another and there has to be some sort of socialization. And you need some resources to farm, so maybe you got some animals that have come into the mix, and you're raising pigs, or you're doing things.

[00:17:52] And then you get to a city, and the amount of energy now needed to light the buildings and do the things. So every time we create more complex social structures, or cellular structures, it demands more energy for communication, more repair, more regeneration, all this stuff. And so I think that's important because I think there's a lot of misperception or maybe we just never even asked the question more scary is like, what is life?

[00:18:15] And so life is, in its nutshell, a condensation of light energy at a very bright level. And so to have a bacterium, you're 1,000 times brighter than the sun. To have a human, you're 10, 000 times brighter. So when you have that simple information at your fingertips now, then it starts to get really obvious  how we start to behave within the life construct that we've been given.

[00:18:41] The physics of being you is something that's been there since the origin of universe or probably time itself or whatever we want to think of it, maybe the multiverse. This is an energetic structure that is able to manifest many different versions of life from it depending on the environment in which that energy field shows up.

[00:19:05] That energy field shows up in vacuum space, it can manifest an asteroid or a star. It is sacred geometry, so it's going to organize energy around it. And depending on which space you put that energy field, it's going to work with the materials that are in its pressure condition.

[00:19:25] If you end up being an energy field that we might call a soul, and that's what we use-- we use that as a spiritual identity ultimately, but I think it's a pretty good word in the sense that it's describing an identity that is outside of the biology.

[00:19:40] So the soul is this energy field that's going to manifest life or physics in a particle state instead of just the waveform of vacuum space. It's going to particulate something. So soul we could describe as an energy field capable of taking potential energy within waveform and turning into a particle expression.

[00:20:02] If that energy field happens to be gifted the opportunity to enter the womb of a mother, the space time is going to organize around it in that pressure condition and build a human. Not because the soul has to be human. It's because the soul has entered a space where the pressure condition is going to describe human.

[00:20:23] So this gravitational experience of being a soul in the womb of a mother is going to start to self-organize material around it. Because of this state of that mother's womb, it's going to help give this template for biology to line up too.

[00:20:37] And so you're ultimately a physics phenomenon that can go through space time. It can have a body, not have a body, and it doesn't lose its identity because it's basically sacred geometry held in vacuum space. That sacred geometry has a very clear identity to it. And so what makes you different than the pig is the vibrational energy that organized the material around it.

[00:21:00] You and the pig are actually not genetically different at all. Pigs are understood to be the mammal that's most similar to humans genetically, and we used to think it was like 99% or 99.5% identical to humans. But a study that came out recently, maybe five years back, the university team was able to demonstrate that it's actually 100% identical to human. It's just reorganized.

[00:21:24] And so they were able to cut our very complex genomics into just 178 puzzle pieces and reorganize the puzzle and then spells pig from start to finish. And so a pig is a reorganized genetics around a different expression of the energy field because that soul entered the womb of a mother pig rather than a mother female.

[00:21:46] But the soul is still the same identity. Pig, human, doesn't matter. The soul is simply holding the original template. And so we are organizing physical matter to materialize or create particle states out of energy field frequencies. That's a very esoteric conversation to say, what is life? Life is a concentration of--

[00:22:07] Luke: It's pretty good the first 20 minutes.

[00:22:09] Zach: So life is a concentration of energy. How does it organize itself? It organizes itself to souls. Souls are these energy fields that can enter physical spaces or stay in the cosmos. So it's come into this physical space and it's going to organize energy. And so the consciousness that you're experiencing as a human is not human consciousness.

[00:22:27] It's actually impossible that anything's coming from the human consciousness. The vibrational connection to the knowledge field of the entire cosmos basically holds an information field, and that soul is an intricate part of the knowledge field. It's connected fully to it. There's nothing that can separate that energy field from that of a star or that of the universe or whatever we call source.

[00:22:53] And so we have this interconnected physics that's about to express itself in a finite way as a pig or a human or an earthworm. And I think it's just a really great opportunity for us to humble ourselves in the face of this anthropomorphic belief that we're humans and therefore we're intelligent, therefore we have consciousness to be like, no, actually, we are consciousness.

[00:23:20] We are the connected universe, and we suddenly expressed a finite being that we would call human or pig, and that finite being is now having an experience of the infinite through the finite experience of particle rather than wave. The beautiful thing about death is you're moving back into the waveform.

[00:23:42] You can't destroy the energy. That's first law of thermodynamics. You can neither create or destroy energy. You can only change its form. So that pig was moving back into a waveform from its particle expression as a pig identity and you got to suddenly step into that field.

[00:23:57] And so what did you actually feel when you said that suddenly time slowed down or exited time and everything became tangible? You were experiencing an energy field of a soul that suddenly was expressing its reconnected self. And you feel this at the deathbed of humans all of the time, which is this thing that was a frail, dying biology in its release of its five senses and the egoic structure that it believed. That's such a high energy demand biologically to maintain all of those fake beliefs, artificial realities.

[00:24:36] And as the biology failed, sometimes it's weeks and months of this person being in a near coma state and yet they're emanating, they're vibrating in the connected field. They haven't let go of that body quite yet, but they had to let go of the egoic structures that were blocking it because they don't have enough energy to maintain those beliefs anymore.

[00:24:55] They're maybe nonverbal now and they're just laying there and they're breathing, but their biology has surrendered itself to the physics again. The biology is now experiencing the entire knowledge field without the split of the ego or the frailty of the world built by the five senses. And so that being laying there in the last few breaths, the last few weeks, and for a lot of people this can be come as they can last for years.

[00:25:20] And so it's always mysterious when you see a body that's sustaining itself with no food, no beverage, no apparent pleasure. Why is that being still there? Because they're experiencing that tangible reality outside of their biologic expression. And there's some reason for that. They're anchoring some energy field or knowledge field in that hospital bed or at that home bed.

[00:25:44] And so in hospice, it started to be this sense of I'm always in the holy of holies here, because every single soul that's letting go of those ego constructs is now vibrating in its original design. And in that original design is rebirth. And for the vast majority, they just let go of that body as they start to organize material around them again.

[00:26:07] And they go on their next assignment, whatever that might look like. So this energy field travels and can go inhabit some other part of the cosmos or another womb or whatever it ends up doing and organizing matter somewhere else. But in a surprising number of cases, that human wakes up and starts to tell you about what they've been experiencing in this non-local, non-particle state.

[00:26:30] And they'll tell you about where they traveled, what ancestors they've visited, what futures they've seen, all of this. It was years of listening to this in ICUs and everything else before I got to my hospice work, where it started to really strike me as very strange that they never lost their identity.

[00:26:46] Here they are traveling the cosmos. They know they're outside the body. That's their body. And then they remember coming back into this physical body and suddenly back in the ICU again. What's giving them such a clear sense of identity as they expand and travel and become other things or experience the cosmos from other perspectives?

[00:27:03] And so I've become very confident that this identity that is what we could call a soul is so durable that it's not relying on its relationship to a human mind to know itself. It is a vibration that's very unique in the cosmos to itself, and it always knows that it's expressing its version of the divine, its fractal of the whole. And each fractal is unique, and I find that quite fascinating, that the souls aren't getting confused to their identity, even when they're not in the particle state.

[00:27:36] Luke: Right. It's not like when you leave the body, you're just emerging back into the field of consciousness as a whole as a non you. There's still a you wherever we go as a single focal point of consciousness itself, we're referring to as a soul. But wherever we go, when we leave the body, we're still there. And then when we come back, we're still us in a new version, like a new vehicle of sorts. It's so interesting. That's so mind blowing.

[00:28:16] I have wondered, as we do, about that. Do we just disperse back into consciousness and we're just a nothing and then when it's time to reemerge, then we reorganize as a soul and then come back through a portal?

[00:28:30] But based on what you've just described here, it sounds like even though we might go back into the fabric of consciousness, we're still a thread in that fabric, a very unique thread, the geometry.

[00:28:43] Zach: The geometry is not lost, yeah. The geometry, I don't think, can be destroyed or changed. It becomes non-local. And so the phenomena of going from particle to wave is a beautiful potential. The two-slit experiment has gotten a lot of traffic recently in the media and Instagram and everything else.

[00:29:07] But if you haven't heard of the two-slit experiment, it's worth just going to see some examples of this because it's so important we wrap our head around this. And if we're going to answer the question of who are we and where are we going as a human species, we have to understand the relevance of this experiment.

[00:29:23] Basically what they do is they take a stream of photons and shoot it at a plate, a steel or metal plate that just has two little slits in it. And if you're shooting a beam of particle at a plate and they can only pass through those two slits, you would expect to see on the film, on the back side of that, basically stripes that would recreate that pathway.

[00:29:49] So any of the photons that were lined up with that slit and went through, you'd be able to see the shadow of that slip basically. But if you put that into a situation where nobody's watching this experiment, you're shooting the protons, everybody leaves the room, nobody's witnessing the film, bizarrely it creates this rainbow-like dispersion of particle state behind the shield.

[00:30:17] And so it's not two slits. It's actually these phenomenal fans that branch out. And so what's happened is the particles have taken every possible pathway and expressed itself in every possible position from the source to that film irregardless of where those slits were in the plate.

[00:30:37] And so when unwitnessed, the particles that we're shooting, which are in the particle state, these photons are shifting somehow in the unwitnessed state back into wave and are expressing all of the possible directions and possibilities simultaneously. As soon as you put a human in that room to watch the experiment, it's a perfect two slits expressed.

[00:31:01] Luke: No way.

[00:31:02] Zach: You just have to watch the experiment, and all of the particles stay particle. They can't go into the waveform because they're being witnessed. And so to be witnessed is to take something from all of its possibilities into one possibility. The trickier thing is you can take all of the humans out of that room and put an electrical sensor there. No human, no biology, just an electrical sensor, and the damn two slits are still there.

[00:31:26] And so witnessing is a phenomenon of an energetic exchange, not a human thing. You don't need a consciousness there. It's literally just something that allows something to be registered as real. And so if the sensor, if the electronic sensor can say something just passed by, it's going to keep it in the particle state. It's not going to let it go into wave.

[00:31:48] Luke: It's like the does the tree falling in the forest make a sound if no one's listening thing.

[00:31:54] Zach: That's exactly right. There is no reality.

[00:31:56] Luke: Oh my God.

[00:31:57] Zach: There's no physical reality that happens if unwitnessed. In the forest, of course, every leaf is sensing is each other and so everything is witness since then. No human there to hear it. It certainly makes a lot of noise because nature's hearing itself

[00:32:13] Luke: Right.

[00:32:13] Zach: And we now know the sensory systems of plants are just ridiculous, better than ours probably because we've dumbed ourselves down so thoroughly through experiential learning of five senses that are so limited. Your houseplants here are amazing. So we've got these succulents sitting here. Do you water these or your wife?

[00:32:32] Luke: I do. Yeah. I'm the plant keeper of the home.

[00:32:35] Zach: All right, so you're the plant keeper. So it turns out that the plants sense your vibration as you come here and approach with water, and they sense your nurture. And so they know. That plant behind you, that thing knows it's going to die within two to three weeks if not for your vibration coming here and delivering water to it.

[00:32:53] And so there's this deep energetic understanding of your nurture to the plant. We can put an EKG system, an electroencephalogram basically on the plant, those little leads, and check it, then we can send you out of the house. And that plant will have a certain vibration with you gone.

[00:33:11] If we then call you and say, come on back to the house, that house plant, when it senses your energy field entering a two-kilometer sphere around it, suddenly perks up. That house plant, because it understands you're its nurturer, will sense your return and have a stronger sense of life force because you're near.

[00:33:32] So if that plant can feel you two kilometers away, can you imagine what a forest is feeling when it's connected through a mycelial network and everything else? That plant is in a pot, isolated, and it can still feel you. And so these plants are sensory experiences that are so tuned and so good at witnessing nature.

[00:33:51] And I think that's what you experience in a rainforest, is a level of witnessing that you can't experience in Los Angeles with 25 million other people around you, because they're so unawares. They are not witnessing. And so because of our split mind, we have become a poor witness to nature. And because we're so abstract in our sense of reality, we are not witnessing it.

[00:34:15] And for that, we start to experience and then project and create from an abstract artificial reality. And so this is why we build houses like we do, like this hotel I just slept in last night. It does not breathe. There's no windows that open. It's full of off-gassing chemicals. The mattress is giving off carcinogens. The soaps in the shower stall got all kinds of scents and endocrine disruptors and crap that'll go through my skin. We create toxic environments.

[00:34:48] Luke: And the shapes too. Something that drives me nuts about modern architecture is right angles everywhere. And then you walk 10 feet out your front door and there's not a right angle anywhere in nature to be found.

[00:35:00] Zach: Yeah.

[00:35:01] Luke: It's crazy.

[00:35:01] Zach: It's crazy. And it's because we are manifesting from a split mind that is not able to witness. And so when we are acting out of fear, guilt, and shame of rejection and abandonment from nature, for that we build outside of nature. We construct outside of nature. And if you look up the Oxford definition of nature, it gets right at this.

[00:35:23] Nature is everything on the planet. It's minerals, plants, animals, as opposed to humans or anything humans have created. That's how we define nature. We are not only outside of nature. We are in opposition to nature. As opposed to humans or anything humans have created.

[00:35:40] Luke: That's the real definition currently?

[00:35:43] Zach: Yeah. Oxford English Dictionary.

[00:35:44] Luke: Well, there's the problem.

[00:35:46] Zach: That's the problem. So that's our root wound.

[00:35:48] Luke: Oh my God.

[00:35:48] Zach: Our root wound is we believe we were separate from nature. And when we didn't think we could be seen by nature, we became non-local in some ways. And so we were failing to be, and we fail to be a witness to nature, and so nature actually dies around us.

[00:36:03] When you put a keystone species back into a natural ecosystem, if you take beavers, for example, and repopulate a river that had gone extinct in its beaver population some decades ago, life immediately returns to the river. New species show up. Species that thought would be endangered or extinct come back.

[00:36:22] That one beaver species is considered a keystone species because it brings life back around it. It creates biodiversity around it. Lions do this in the bush of Africa. An elephant can do this. Repopulated Yellowstone National Park with wolves, and suddenly the river started running again. And so it doesn't seem like a wolf has anything to do with the water cycle until you put the wolf back there and the river starts running again.

[00:36:46] And then you start to dissect the whole thing and you realize, oh my gosh, when the wolf touches the earth, it brings in this microbiome because it's doing predation to the herbivores and the other herd animals around it. And that's generating a different relationship with a herd animal and keeps the herd animals moving in a different way.

[00:37:03] So they're actually touching more earth. And with that, they're regenerating the planet and then the water table starts going because there's a higher level of resonance frequencies of life on the surface of the earth. And so the water is attracted to that so it comes out. The fossil aquifers are now flowing across the surface of the river for the presence of a wolf.

[00:37:23] Humans are acting the opposite. When we touch any space on earth, we degrade biodiversity, and the life force within that ecosystem degrades. So we've done this planet wide. 97% of all arable, farmable soils on the planet are now depleted or severely depleted. And nearly every river in the world is going into a desiccation. It's drying up because there's not enough life force on the planet to keep the electromagnetic field tendency towards bringing that water to the surface.

[00:37:50] So all the water is sinking into the deeper cores of the earth due to an energetic collapse of humans presence. So we need to actually return to our keystone state. And to do that, we're going to have to start to witness reality, to create a particle reality again. So we get to witness nature so that it moves out of waveform into its particle state. It becomes more real. When I look at these plants and appreciate them, they become more physically real.

[00:38:18] They start to actually have a more coherent resonance frequency because I'm saying, wow, that is a beautiful, beautiful plant. How does nature do those little dots on that? That's really wild that nature would create a striped and spotted succulent. Why? What's going on there? It's beautiful.

[00:38:37] That's the other one. It's got that variegation in there. It's so beautiful. And so just stopping for a second in the conversation and touching the fleshy feel of the surface of the succulent, we're creating a more real experience over here in this pod. Everything's becoming more crystalline. Everything's vibrating at a higher frequency.

[00:38:54] Everything's creating more energetic pulse in reality. And so the water literally underneath the surface of the planet can feel that and is being drawn towards this energetic experience of you walking through a forest and saying, my gosh, these trees. These ferns. And so start to feel that in your skin.

[00:39:12] And if we start to interact with our food system this way, we're going to start to eat light energy at a higher frequency. What you experienced in killing that pig, you will never look at meat again, the same way, I assume.

[00:39:24] Luke: Yeah. That was purpose of doing the whole thing, which is very much against my nature, generally speaking.

[00:39:31] Zach: Yeah. So you're in that vegan vegetarian worldview and then you go do this. And so what is your thoughts around when you now see a piece of meat? What are you able to tap into that tangible experience?

[00:39:43] Luke: Yeah. I think after that experience, I became much more discerning about where the meat I eat comes from. I wouldn't say I'm militant about it, but if at all possible, I'm going to the farmer's market, I know the farmer. I've shaken their hand. I've asked them questions about how they treat their animals, what they eat, what water they're drinking, how they're dying, this kind of thing.

[00:40:06] But I was a vegetarian for many years, many years ago, and it was not good for my body. My health really suffered in a number of ways. And so I went into that really out of compassion and some misguided ideas. This was late '90s, early 2000s, when there were a lot of different ideas.

[00:40:26] It was either you're supporting factory farming and the cruelty and really satanic nature of that whole operation, or you become a vegetarian, regenerative agriculture and grass-fed meats and grazing and the stuff that you talk about and many others now. That was relatively unknown.

[00:40:44] So for me, it was like, wow, I tried to do the right thing, and now I'm suffering as a martyr in my own quest for compassionate and doing no harm, realizing I'm doing myself harm. And then it was a matter of finding ways to reconcile that. And so that hunting trip was part of that.

[00:41:01] It's like, if I don't have the courage to face death at my own hand, then I felt like a sense of hypocrisy that I'm willing to let someone else do it. And one of the things that I took away from that was, I don't think hunting is just-- if we were back in the village of 60 people 10,000 years ago, I don't think I would have been the hunter.

[00:41:26] I would have been, I don't know, the village shaman or guitar player or whatever. You know what I mean? It's just like, I don't think this is my role because it's not something I particularly enjoy processing the animal, the whole thing. It wasn't innate to me in that way. But it did give me a sense of understanding based on what I shared earlier that, oh, wow. You actually can't kill anything, even if you tried, because the thing you're trying to kill is unkillable.

[00:41:55] And that could sound like a blanket rationalization for harming animals or something, but it's just really the way it is. And also, I think one thing for me that was hugely beneficial was understanding that my life and my body and my relationship to death is also the same, that I can't die.

[00:42:15] And so so many of the things that I spend my energy on in my life, trying to secure this body and keep it safe and keep it alive as long as possible. It's like, wow, you really see the futility in that too. So there's much less attachment to experiencing life in this form called Luke Storey. And just a looseness about the whole thing, much less attachment to everything as a result of that, just seeing like, oh, wow, I've lived my whole life based on my senses and the belief that this is all you got.

[00:42:48] Because however many years in this body and it's over, there's a lot of clinging that's born out of that, a lot of attachment that's born out of that. And so as I said, that was one of the most potent experiences on so many levels. I mean spiritual and physical and also just the understanding that in nature, everything is eating everything all the time.

[00:43:10] It's like there are microbes feasting on my body right now, and you could call them murderers because they're eating up my body. And when you throw me in the ground or my body in the ground, I'm going to be food for something, and that's going to become food for something that becomes food for something and so on ad infinitum.

[00:43:28] And so it brought me out of this feeling of guilt, is understanding in the natural order of things that all energy is just consuming other energy to sustain itself. And it doesn't matter if you're a vegan because the broccoli that you're eating, so my microbes and gophers and snakes and rats and birds had to be displaced and killed in order to grow your monocrop kale or broccoli or whatever you're eating.

[00:43:54] It's like, there's no way to sustain life unless maybe a breatharian or someone who has mastered sun gazing. I think there are people that have energetically risen to a place where they don't need to consume other organisms to sustain their own master organism. But where we are now, most of us still need to participate in that cycle of life. And so that was the reconciliation that I arrived at.

[00:44:20] Zach: Beautiful. I think we can see so many important corollaries to that in nature. The concept of predation is something that's relatively new to me, but the concept of predator and prey is a description of ascension, is what I'm now understanding. And so there's been a long understanding in First Nations tribes in North America and other places around the world that animals were preying on one another not to kill, but actually to have some spiritual ascension process occur.

[00:44:57] And there was stories, and then this just recently apparently got captured on film as well with a night camera technology. But there were stories of witnessing wolves visiting a herd of grazing animals and some sort of interaction between the alpha females of the wolves interacting with the alpha females of the herd animals in some exchange of information or ceremony, and then they would go off, and then a few hours later would come into the hunt and animals would be taken down and consumed by the wolves.

[00:45:40] And this has now been captured of this state of reverence where the female alphas will go into some reverence state before the herd animals and there's an exchange and a nod in the thing. So there's an exchange of information that happens and then there's an exchange of life.

[00:45:55] So that had been talked about. And then digging a little bit further back, Viktor Schauberger made some observations around eagles and fish that I've talked about in podcasts. He started to witness that fish were jumping out of the water in these high mountain lakes into the towns of eagles.

[00:46:14] He thought it was the eagle that was hunting and would go in circles around these lakes until a fish started to follow its shadow. And then it would pull that fish into a vortex and then grab it out of the middle of the lake. So that eagle would cycle down in a vortex towards the center.

[00:46:29] And then he witnessed a fish one day, he caught a sight of a fish circulating a pond, couldn't find an eagle and that high mountain lake started to become this template for this fish and then eventually a hawk came and saw that thing, started following that. And then the fish took it into a tighter and tighter circle and jumped out of the water into its talons.

[00:46:54] And that's when he realized that he had been seeing the whole equation wrong. He thought that the eagle was hunting the fish, but the fish was really bringing in the eagle for its own ascension. And so you start to put these pieces together and you start to realize that nature is always ascending.

[00:47:10] That's what it's done. And we have a universe that's maybe 15 billion years old. There was a sudden expansion of space, time, and energy, and it started to self-organize into solar systems and stars and suns and planets and life on planets and all that. That all emerged over a 15-billion-year period because of different pressure conditions that came from an expanding universe.

[00:47:34] And so souls being these sacred geometries sitting there in space time as the universe expands is able to participate in that witnessing ultimately. And so there was a two-slit experiment going without any witness at some period of time perhaps, and there was nothing there.

[00:47:53] But as soon as it was witnessed, things started to become particle. And so I love looking deeper and deeper into the origins of everything. And where I've gotten so far in my meditations is probably in the very beginning process of being something close to these conscious things that we call indigenous wisdom keepers.

[00:48:14] But in my very elementary way, I've experienced going back in time, back in time, back in time to realize that God or source has to be the only still spot in the universe. And when I say universe, I'm really talking about the cosmos and multiverse. So then picture before this little expansion. We know that our universe has limits to it and it's measurable and it's actually functioning as a black hole.

[00:48:38] So we can only see the limitations of our own universe because of the nature of gravity. And so we have a sense that this is our universe, but there's a lot of people now understanding there's a multiverse and there's lots of different orbs here traveling the cosmos that we would call universes.

[00:48:54] And between those universes is unorganized waveform, basically. And so universe itself is a centripete moment where you've taken something that's in a classic chaotic state and created a centripete or order out of it. To create order out of the chaos, it simply has to be witnessed.

[00:49:14] Again, the two-slit experiment shows this, but we've also seen it in other physics experiments and everything else that it's in the witnessing that it becomes particle state and then it's in the witnessing that it becomes in these higher and higher orders of magnitude of complexity the longer it's witnessed.

[00:49:31] And then the more eyes that are witnessing it in the sense of the more sensors that are witnessing nature, the more complex it gets. So again, when I stop and remember these succulents for a moment, I'm participating in the increased amount of sacred geometry or expression within these plants. That's bringing more order to it, which brings more gravitational energetic draw for more resources, more energy and more life force into the plants, because I'm now one of the things participating in the witness of the succulent.

[00:49:58] And so it only took this one little still spot within the multiverse to create the multiverse of the cosmos. You could picture as completely infinite state of chaotic energy form with infinite possibilities because it's unwitnessed. And it's in constant motion. I don't know if it began with that still spot or the still spot happened, but at some point a still spot happened.

[00:50:22] And the moment there was a single spot that was still, it became that electrical sensor, basically, that the two-slit experiment would do. So then suddenly you had something that could sense the relationship of all the other movement, because it was now still. And everything else became ordered and it's witnessing of it.

[00:50:40] Oh, that particle is going that direction. That particle is going that direction. And then just witnessing that something emerges. And so one stills point in the universe, just as wouldn't be necessary is becoming this sensor that can now see everything. And so if there is something that we call God in the outside of the multiverse, I would say it's the only still spot in in this cosmos.

[00:51:06] And in the witnessing, then it starts to see the patterns of sacred geometry that emerge. And that sacred geometry is embedded in our most ancient expressions as humans. The flower of life, you handed it to me. So you served me water and the flower of life here. And so this complex structure here with all these triangles and tetrahedrons, that is actually a three-dimensional thing here in my hand as a glass.

[00:51:33] But it's basically an artistic two-dimensional expression of the flower of life that's been printed on the surface of this glass here. And that two-dimensional structure, once blown out into a 3D, is actually a 64-double tetrahedron. And that 64-double tetrahedron, which is basically the Star of David in three dimensions, and so the Star of David or the Muslim Star, these are all depictions of the double tetrahedron.

[00:52:02] And this is exactly the shape and size of the balls that sit under the paws of the lions at the Palace of Knowledge in China that was built some thousands of years back. So this structure has been understood since the very beginnings of human expression and technology and connections with science or our observation of the universe, this pattern keeps coming out.

[00:52:28] And this pattern, this 64 double tetrahedron is now understood to be the shape of a black hole. And a black hole is that thing that takes waveform and turns it into particle. And so I love imagining that single spot of stillness in the cosmos that became still and suddenly could see the flower of life everywhere.

[00:52:48] It saw all of these projections of the double tetrahedron. And as soon as it witnessed that, then there was suddenly a black hole. It suddenly pulled from the possibility of a black hole in its witnessing because it was a still spot. It could see all of those relationships or sense all of those relationships, and suddenly there was a black hole.

[00:53:05] And so suddenly that's a universe. The universe consolidates a massive gravitational field, and then it can attract more and more energy to it. And so now all the chaotic structures of the cosmos, it's starting to click, click, click, click, click, and it gets to a critical density and then explodes because it reached critical density and now you have a universe that's expanding.

[00:53:24] And so that black hole witnessed by the single spot of stillness now became a universe that creates immediately within it, many, many black holes because of the way in which pressure conditions are starting to form as it expands. And so that one spot that was an expanding universe now is manifesting lots of gravitational fields that are going to become the black holes that will then start to manifest particle around it in the form of galaxies.

[00:53:51] So the two and a half trillion galaxies that we've now witnessed with the James Webb telescope are all organized around single black holes that are pressure conditions out of being witnessed by the system of the universe itself. So now the universe is witnessing itself. So it's in this constant state of one thing being still, and then it creates from it.

[00:54:11] And in the center of that stillness, which is happening in the center of the double tetrahedron, it's another witnessing point. And so the witnessing points are expanding and expanding and expanding. And pretty soon the universe is having such a blissful time of seeing all of its own beauty because every time it can observe or sense the particle state it can see all the sacred geometry in there.

[00:54:33] And as soon as that's sensed, the relationships of sacred geometry, another black hole forms. That's a pretty trippy description of what God and the origin of the universe and the multiverse there. But the reason I think it's exciting, back to the pig story here, is that we have now witnessed, this is Nassim Haramein's work around the proton that makes up the atom.

[00:54:55] I'm going to say in the center of every atom that is everything on the periodic chart. So the very fabric and the building blocks for what we would call nature are these protons. And the protons in the center of an atom have now been demonstrated to be a 64 double tetrahedron. And so those are each black holes.

[00:55:12] And so now imagine you're at trillions of times smaller than a human cell. You're down at the nucleus of a single atom, and so you're a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny thing and it's a black hole and the center of that is stillness. And so you've got this magnificent phenomenon where there's black holes, a couple of black holes in the center. Most of your body is hydrogen. In the center of every hydrogen is one proton.

[00:55:37] So there's a black hole organizing every element of hydrogen in the universe, which is the most ubiquitous by many logarithms. And so hydrogen is all these little black holes sitting around there. My body has self-organized now into trillions and trillions and trillions and trillions of these little black holes that self-organize and pressure conditions from being witnessed.

[00:55:58] And in my mother's womb, I organize a human body. The trippy thing is all the black holes are connected by wormholes. And so we now understand that black holes can communicate directly into one knowledge field. And so as we start to think about what is God, well, it probably began at one still point in the universe. And then what does it become? It becomes a consciousness that's all these interconnected places of witnessing, all the still points in the center of every black hole.

[00:56:27] Luke: Would that be quantum entanglement?

[00:56:29] Zach: It's quantum entanglement at the black hole level for sure. And so the wormholes are connecting the physical reality or field of all the black holes into a single organism, if you will. And so the multiverse is a single organism witnessed by one small speck in the universe that was still enough to witness it all. And so it's all unfolding in these increasing complexities. And so what is vegetarianism versus meat? This is how I describe nutrition these days. It's my long route. What is food?

[00:57:02] Luke: It's not to make a very good bumper sticker.

[00:57:04] Zach: Yeah, this is a long one. It takes up the whole back of your electric car. So the increasing complexity of the universe is this constant witnessing of nature. And so nature or the cosmos itself witnessing itself necessarily leads to these compounding levels of complexity where there's flower of life everywhere. And every time you witness it, there's another universe. There's another universe.

[00:57:31] And so if you become still next to an animal that's dying, you're becoming witness to the birth of new energy fields. And so you're literally in your witnessing of it and your feeling of it. You're birthing inside of yourself more energetic expressions.

[00:57:45] So now if you eat that pig, in your witnessing and understanding that it is a beautiful field of energy that cannot be destroyed, it can only take new form. And in your witnessing of that, you take that into your body, you are going to start to reinforce your energy field with pig. And pig is now experiencing the universe through you.  Because its energy field is still there.

[00:58:10] And so that one piece of meat on your thing is actually the whole pig. It's a fractal of the entire consciousness of the pig. It's a fractal of the original physics that organized the pig. And so that consciousness is now being witnessed by your body and is now witnessing the universe through your body.

[00:58:28] And so I think this is ultimately what predation is, is animals that are in reverence to the beauty they can see around each other are able to build higher and higher levels of complexity through the witnessing of one another, because they're not divided from each other by an ego.

[00:58:43] Luke: Right.

[00:58:44] Zach: The only reason we are degrading all of the soils that we farm, degrading all of the biodiversity of the planet through our food system, is because we believe ourselves to be separate from it. And in the moment that you kill that animal, you lost the separateness, and you felt this tangible reality of everything's connected.

[00:59:01] I am the pig, the pig is me, and we are all ascending through more and more complex expressions and witnessings of nature. And when you go into relationship with your food that way, you suddenly realize the judgmental structures that we have in a human mind protein's good for you, or fat's bad for you, or sugar's good for you, we have all these weird belief systems that are so reductionist and absolutely have nothing to do with nature.

[00:59:29] And so for this, we can't be nourished. Food at best is palliating our slow death from age two. But I believe there's an opportunity for us to shift into a reality of being a keystone species, where everything we touch actually enriches, increases its biodiversity, increases vitality, increases its life force, because we lose that egoic structure so that we can see the beauty around us again.

[00:59:58] This would fundamentally change our relationship to our planet. Right now we function as a cancer, but it's only because of an abstract reality or belief system we've created. When we step into the tangible reality is that there is no death. There's only ascending energy fields. And with enough concentration or condensation of light, life occurs.

[01:00:17] And life is also trying to ascend through these different levels of complexity, which takes more and more witnessing of one another. We have 8 billion souls here, 8 billion souls are of animated humans. And so the human organism is a very, very bright thing right now in the cosmos, and I think it's witnessed by many.

[01:00:37] Things around the cosmos can feel us. They can see us because we're so bright. And so we've brought so much condensation of light energy onto this little planet through all of these multicellular forms of life. And all of that is starting to resonate in one known organism because we've learned how to communicate as an organism of 8 billion people through cell phones and technology.

[01:01:00] All of those things have bizarrely given us the ability to start to act as one. And right now what that's expressing, because we all share this artificial reality of separateness, is an incredibly destructive force. We've become more destructive. Every time we connect, we're becoming more extractive, more destructive.

[01:01:19] Every time you make a cell phone call, even a text-- I've been told one text message creates enough heat energy to be equivalent to boiling one cup of water. Just a text message. And now you think of the trillions of text messages that are shooting around the planet right now, every couple of seconds, and you start to get a sense of, man, we've put a lot of energy into this connectivity, and that energy, because of the way in which it's being used, is pulling more and more finite resources out of the planet, because we don't understand the nature of infinite energy, free energy of the rest.

[01:01:51] And so we are currently in our disconnected shared reality that we're separate from nature. We are sucking life out of this planet so fast because we are a connected organism that is now in the same resonance of fear, guilt, and shame. And so the pandemic, I think, was the greatest experiment in fear, guilt, and shame that we've done as a planet.

[01:02:10] In a single narrative, we were able to create the largest fear paradigm that 8 billion people have experienced together. And because of the nature of connectivity of cell phones and everything else, we were able to tell every single person on earth that there was now an existential threat outside of their own control that was here to kill them.

[01:02:28] And so we practiced as a planet for the first time, uniform frequency of fear. And then when that reached its peak and started to dissipate, we moved into a story of guilt. Well, if you don't do this thing, you're guilty for killing other people. And if you don't socially distance and mask and vaccinate and do all these things, then you're part of the problem.

[01:02:50] Then all of us resonated in this guilt field. And when that started to dissipate and the energy started to weaken, we tried shame. Well, you're just an idiot if you don't understand this. You're a stupid doctor, and you're going to be cancelled. And so we did the fear, guilt, shame thing to a T as 8 billion people.

[01:03:10] And so it was one of the most important experiments we'll ever do in human history because we just experienced what it feels like to, as a uniform body, project fear, guilt, and shame out into this universe, and it got witnessed by an entire universe. And so we showed the universe what the heart of darkness feels like.

[01:03:27] It feels like separation, and it is the result of separation. And so we just showed the cosmos through a single narrative what it feels like to be human. It is terrifying, and it's full of fear, guilt, and shame. And that current condition is the result of an artificial reality we created due to five senses that gave us the perception that narrowed our neurologic learning down to this belief that we were not connected to everything.

[01:03:54] And in that abandonment disorder, we developed addiction. And so we have become addicted to everything through abandonment disorders. If you drill down on alcoholism or any form of addiction that we've studied in, you ultimately will find yourself in abandonment disorder.

[01:04:10] Luke: I can verify that as a former alcoholic.

[01:04:13] Zach: Yeah, you know exactly how to touch that space. You know exactly that sense of rejection, that--

[01:04:18] Luke: There's an interesting exchange between the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous and Carl Jung  that's famous in recovery circles. And essentially Carl Jung had deduced that alcoholism is ultimately a yearning for God. And one could say, well, I yearning for connection, a yearning to not feel alone, a yearning to not be abandoned.

[01:04:46] And it's like, I can look back in my own experience with addiction and alcoholism and just fundamentally, all I was trying to do was just feel a sense of connection on a superficial level to other people, but on a deeper level, a connection to God and a connection to myself.

[01:05:06] That was just the futility of that whole vicious cycle was all based on what we've been discussing here today of just the lack of awareness that there's no way I can be disconnected from nature. It's like this phantom ghost of a felt sense that is not based in reality. It's just, as we've said, created by the senses and the mind and the ego and all these things that in their effort to protect us lead us to believe that we are separate.

[01:05:37] And it's a heartbreaking experience in the micro as a single person, but as you described, through this trauma-based mind control experiment that we all went through, you can see how it happens in the macro to the entire civilization. It's crazy how susceptible we are to that as individuals and as the collective.

[01:05:59] Zach: That's beautifully said. And at the risk of sounding oppositional or contrary to Jung and the massive amount of body of work that AA has produced, but I would say that the refinement that we couldn't move towards there is that it's not the alcoholism that is the yearning to get back to God.

[01:06:19] It's actually the human condition is a yearning to get back to God and the alcohol or the drug or the carbohydrate diet or refined carbohydrates or the codependent relationships, all of the forms of addiction that we take on as humans are genius coping mechanisms to survive a state of belief of disconnectedness.

[01:06:42] And so the soul is yearning in its great cognitive dissonance for this fracture of reality. And it's yearning to get wholeness back. And in that it's creating so much stress for the organism that it's going to die. It's going to kill itself. Suicide is the only option. And so we're reaching for these things to dull the senses.

[01:07:04] Whether it be the Instagram feed or our food or alcohol, we are dulling our senses to try to survive this cognitive felt dissonance between the believed human condition and the actual natural condition. There's something called human nature. We have a word for it. And so the dissonance between the reality of human nature and our cognitive experience or our felt experience of being human creates so much dissonance that it literally I think is intolerable to the human mind.

[01:07:36] And so we're reaching for a thousand things to distract ourselves, to dull our senses, to dull our sense of that so that we can survive this fractured state. TJ Woodward is beautiful. Is it Woodward? I think TJ Woodward. But TJ wrote an incredible book called Conscious Recovery. I think it was 2010. And now he's built an enormous curriculum and everything else, and I think it offers an alternative to AA in that instead of seeing the alcohol as the disease or the alcoholism as a disease, he flips it around to show it as a genius coping mechanism.

[01:08:11] And when you find out what you're coping for, then you can get past the identity of alcoholism very quickly. It's like, oh, that's not my identity at all. That was just a tool that I used. That is one of the dangerous things about AA. If there is one, it's, taking on the identity of a disease. And I see this all the time in my field. Endocrinology is classic for it. We're the experts in diabetes, for example.

[01:08:35] And all you have to do is walk into a dinner party these days to listen to somebody say, I am diabetic. No, you're actually a light being that's 10,000 times brighter than a star that's organized from space time around a soul that's infinite in space. There's no way that your identity is I am diabetic.

[01:08:53] And yet we can convince a human consciousness because of its state of dissonance that it is a disease. And so we are, as doctors, handing out artificial identities. I am diabetic. I am depressed. I am alcoholic.

[01:09:10] Luke: I agree 100%.

[01:09:11] Zach: We grab these external diseases as our identity because it most matches what we're feeling. It's like, oh, that's why I feel like I am. I'm an alcoholic. That explains why I feel this way. No, you feel this way because you have an artificial belief system that you're separate from the divine, that you're separate from nature. And as long as you think that alcoholism is your problem, it won't get you to the opportunity to jump to that further, to solve that real core healing that has to happen as you are not separate.

[01:09:41] And so that's where disease and disease systems, AA or diabetes management are, the rest-- these are crutches that are palliating a human broken identity. And there's great danger in that. And in some ways, the more altruistic the society tells you are for grabbing onto this, oh, you're a recovered alcoholic. Wow. That's amazing. We know that thing.

[01:10:03] And so we can attribute a bunch of social reward to the identity of I am alcoholic, or we can do a bunch of reward to, I am diabetic. Like, oh, wow. Sorry, you can get compassion or at least you get empathy. And you get these different vibrations coming back at your-- so I think there's this moment in time where we could just stop and become still and witness ourselves for a moment in the same way that you witnessed a dying pig. You are dying. I am dying.

[01:10:38] We are biologies that are rapidly dying. We're accelerating that death rate through our broken relationship to nature. And so let's come still enough until we feel the waveform. And so let's come into this present moment where suddenly you're like, oh wow, I am so much bigger than anything.

[01:10:57] I'm actually not anybody's son. I'm not a father. I'm not an employee. I'm not a boss. Those are all artificial constructs that have been handed to me to try to palliate my fear that I don't know who I am, and that I don't have intrinsic value to the universe. And so I think all the listeners on here right now, and the two of us, we can just drop into this space with awareness of like, we are so much brighter and bigger than all of that.

[01:11:25] So let's just be witness to ourselves for a moment. Can you be the sensor that senses the vibrational potency of you as you move from waveform into particle? And to do this, you need to come out of your head. I've got you way up in your head. Probably said so many things and so you're way up in your thinking brain right now.

[01:11:45] Let's move out of that and let's go right to your most obvious opposite end to your feet. I want you to try to become so still that you can actually feel the pulse of blood flow through the soles of your feet, to the very bottom of your feet.

[01:12:12] Those are your feet. That's an expression of you. Wiggle the toes, move your toes a little bit. Feel that motion. Be still while you're witnessing the movement of the toes. Still your mind, still your heart, your chest, your belly. Still yourself until all you can sense is the movement of those toes.

[01:12:44] You've got dozens of muscles that are cooperating to achieve that small motion there. Those dozens of muscles are being coordinated by a small number of neurons that run from your lower back down to your feet that are being coordinated by a central nervous system up in your brain, and you're perceiving reality through the wiggle of your toes and the muscles moving there.

[01:13:17] And just by witnessing your toes and your feet, you're going to start to bring more life force to them. I've recently noticed that I've got some small little veins that are starting to dilate on the sides of my ankles and all that and it reminds me of my grandfather's feet and ankles that are starting to emerge from me, and that's always distressing.

[01:13:43] But what it means is that I'm not actually witnessing my feet enough and so they're aging in an unhealthy way because I'm not paying enough attention. I'm not witnessing my feet. I'm spending so much time up in my head. At best, I'm paying attention to my lower back when I'm uncomfortable sitting, but I'm not paying attention to my feet.

[01:14:04] And in this little practice of starting to pay attention to my feet, I can actually improve the vascular flow, the lymphatic flow, and those veins can go back to normal.

[01:14:14] Less dilation, less dysfunction, because I'm witnessing the beauty of having feet and being mobile and being-- those feet carry me through millions of miles of travel every year now. So grateful to these feet. And so we can start to realize that age is normal. Transiting through space time as a finite organism is inevitable and it's appropriate.

[01:14:40] What doesn't need to happen is deterioration of function within that life space. We can start to become generative in our biologic expression if we became still enough to witness it. So let's start to witness life better within us. And we'll start to age more similar to the wild animals in our environment.

[01:15:04] The wild animals in our environment will often live to their last breath in a body that is indistinguishable from their youth. They maintain this life force up until their last breath. The eagle doesn't stop flying for the last eight years of its life and sit around in eagle nursing homes. It's in its full state of vitality up until the last breath.

[01:15:36] And so let those feet start to guide us back to a state where we understand that vitality is a sense and a sensory experience of witnessing the beauty of the divine, the universe within our own finite bodies, and in that we might find the ability to live our lives much more vigorously and much more full of life regardless of how many breaths we've been given.

[01:16:00] You are a sensor that can see the beauty of nature, and you take all of the possibilities of wave into a particle expression when it is witnessed. And so witness yourself. Still your chaotic mind that is living in fear, guilt, and shame of being separate and rejected from nature and therefore behaving in such an addicted fashion.

[01:16:20] Let go of that artificial reality. Become still and whole for a moment and witness these small parts of your body so that you start to reassemble, remember what you are as a physical body, a finite expression of the universe as it's witnessed by a single small still spot within that cosmic landscape.

[01:16:41] Your beauty is being witnessed maybe least of all by your own mind, by your own awareness. The plants in this room can feel you from two kilometers away. You are being witnessed by nature. And so if you want to do your deepest healing, I recommend each of you go out and lay down under a tree.

[01:17:06] And first of all, look at the sky up to those tree leaves and the branching chaos there. It's a brilliant way to immediately neurologically reprogram yourself out of sympathetic fight or flight state as you look up through the branches of a tree at the sky. Experience that. Reset. Get into your parasympathetic, your dream creative space. Now you're ready to participate as a creator, not a reactor to the universe.

[01:17:34] And then flip the lens around and let the tree see you. Realize that those millions of leaves up there in that massive tree canopy are each feeling you at a level that you can't even feel yourself because you've forgotten how. Let the tree feel you back, because if you let that tree sense you, you will become more coherent in your particle expression.

[01:18:06] The waves going through the two slits of your reality, will become more particle by being seen by the tree. Now feel yourself being seen by the tree. Now you're starting to feel your original design. This is your core identity. Go out in nature today, tonight, lay under the stars, lay under a tree, be witnessed by the realities around us.

[01:18:43] Every particle is organized around a proton, that is an atom, that is the building blocks for fabric of nature. So whether it be a star in its physics state or the earthworm beneath your feet, in its biologic state. There are billions of black holes within each of those things. Each proton being its own black hole, having a still space within it to witness you.

[01:19:09] You're being witnessed by the life beneath your feet and the cosmos above your head. And your sacred design has been here since the beginning of time, and your body is a biologic expression of that identity. Add a stunning beauty. Feel what it feels like to be in your heart right now. Does it feel more still than it has ever in your life, perhaps? The anxiety dissipated.

[01:20:13] There is another option. Aside from the victim perpetrator coin that we keep tossing, we can move from victim perpetrator reactivity into this other state of being creator. The divine is trying to create through us all of the time, and is capable of doing so. And when we start to participate in that creative force, we will become a keystone species on this planet and life will explode beneath our feet.

[01:20:42] Our farmers are beginning to do this. The rough description of regenerative agriculture, which is really a reductionist term, unfortunately, to much more beautiful sciences that we call biodynamic farming or permaculture, is entropic farming. These are terms that I think are more beautiful because they're really describing the interconnected witnessing of nature.

[01:21:08] And when we start to do these forms of farming, the regenerative force of nature becomes so explosive beneath our feet and these farmers are watching vitality and therefore economic wellness, social wellness returning to their environments that weren't present just a few years before.

[01:21:28] So the vitality that comes out of life as we start to metric global economies against real assets of biodiversity, it will change the way in which we are each rewarding our farmers and our children to participate in biology because we've created a new economic structure based on not the gold standard or abstract realities of cryptocurrency and blockchain technologies.

[01:21:52] We start to bank against the nature itself, which is to say that nature starts to be the asset held within our currency structures. This is the way in which we can start to change the polarity of human behavior. Right now we are extractive and we can become productive. Right now we are consumers and we can become creators. To reverse that polarity of human behavior, we need to reverse the polarity of abandonment and realize complete acceptance.

[01:22:35] And that's the bookend on my career of hospice. As I got to watch thousands of souls animated in finite bodies that express a human awareness, and those humans all in their last few breaths suddenly experience complete acceptance. They realized there was nothing out of place in a life that felt so painful and manifest so much dysfunction on some level.

[01:23:01] It all gave the opportunity to experience unconditional love, forgiveness, joy, pleasure. And the journey was perfect. And so we will change the polarity from abandonment to acceptance and consumer to creator from the malignancy and the cancer on the planet for our isolation to our interconnected productivity.

[01:23:34] And we return to our birthright as a keystone species that is here to bring life forth from a planet because we're so good at witnessing her beauty. Because the same five senses that give us a sense of separation and therefore the opportunity to believe we're separate, those same five senses giving a sense of separation give us enough distance from the rest of nature to see her beauty in a unique fashion.

[01:23:58] This is why we are the only species that stares out at every sunset, dumbfounded by the colors and vibrations of the frequencies of a sunset. We stop our activity to watch. The rest of nature goes about its business. The birds continue to fly to and fro, and they're nesting and they're chirping. They're not staring into the sunset because they don't understand themselves to be separate. They're feeling the whole thing.

[01:24:22] They are the sunset. They are the vibrations. They are the thing. And so it is in this unique separation of our five senses that we also realize our superpower. And we get to see beauty. And in seeing beauty, we experience a frequency that has been expressed in the word love.

[01:24:42] And so in coming into the frequency of witnessing beauty, we start to resonate and transmit a frequency that is called love. And in its greatest form, we realize that it is unconditional. Beauty is everywhere. It is in death. It is in life. It is in death. It is in rebirth. It is in decay, and it is in centropy. It's in entropy. It's in centropy.

[01:25:06] When we lose judgment on the condition of being human, when we lose judgment on the system and reality of being finite, we can see beauty in everything. And in so doing, we will resonate in the frequency of unconditional love and in so doing we will fulfill our purpose and mission as being humans. Very, very grateful to be witnessing beauty with each of you.

[01:25:42] Luke: Well, that was a beautiful and unexpected freestyle, Zach Bush.

[01:25:59] Zach: I'm sorry, that probably took longer than I expected or anticipated there.

[01:26:06] Luke: Well, we're in the realm of no time. It's beautiful. As you're sitting there sharing that, I'm just thinking, I don't know, so many of these conversations that I have, which are inspiring and beautiful and educational and entertaining and all the things. It's like, you almost don't need to have the conversations.

[01:26:28] It's the essence of that moment it's the essence of awareness and presence. It is almost a hyperspace shuttle to where all of those words are trying to take us. You know what I mean?

[01:26:43] Zach: We all know the same thing, which is the irony of it. It takes so much, so many words to discover that. It's like, oh, we all know the same thing. We all feel the same thing.

[01:26:54] Luke: I love it. So I want to let people listening know you'll find the show notes for this conversation at lukestorey.com/zachbush3. Now, you've appeared twice on the show before, and we'll link to these in those show notes. They were numbers 304 and 416 respectively.

[01:27:12] And I don't know if you know this, but I've checked on this periodically. Every few months I go look at my statistics and my downloads and see what episodes are performing how and this kind of thing. I don't do it often because then you're either elated because everything's better than you thought, or disappointed because why am I not doing as good as that guy over there? But what's fascinating to me is that out of over 550 episodes that I've published since 2016, your two appearances are number one and number two in terms of downloads.

[01:27:48] Zach: Wow. That's interesting.

[01:27:50] Luke: Isn't that wild? And I've had some incredible people, Bruce Lipton, Joe Dispenza, Gabby Bernstein, Rick Rubin, Alex Jones. Just a really diverse collection of very well known people in some cases. And in some cases, people much more obscure than you will surprisingly do pretty well in the downloads, but I just thought, what is it about this Dr. Zach Bush, man? People freaking love you, dude. And I think the journey that you just led us through exemplify what that is.

[01:28:29] Zach: An alternative to that is possibly they don't love me as an individual, but that they are seeing the beauty in themselves. And so what draws people to that, to make it one and two, is that they saw something of themselves in those two podcasts. And that's why they keep listening to it. And I don't know if your metrics can show it, but I imagine a lot of those downloads are multiple times.

[01:28:51] People are going back to listen again for reasons they might not even know consciously because they're singing something of themselves. And I think that's where I get excited for my own human experiences. I'm finding that the more that I disappear into stillness, the more everybody can see themselves in anything I do.

[01:29:09] And so this is the magic, I think, of letting go of the separateness as we become the whole. And so I don't think Zach Bush is the number one and two podcasts. I think humanity is the number one and two podcasts. It may have been these moments where people suddenly felt all interconnected, all whole for reasons we couldn't even understand in the words that if we go back and listen to that, and you and me, especially me, when I listen to my own podcast, I'm like, how come anybody's listening to this?

[01:29:37] This guy just rants and rambles for a long time. Doesn't seem to have any direction. I can't even stand listening to myself. I don't understand why anybody listens to it at the word level, but I think there's a frequencies coming through in this information that we share together, and I think you're really good at holding that. And so I want to also recognize that those number one and two podcasts are you. You're half that experience.

[01:30:01] Luke: I never thought about

[01:30:01] Zach: And so people are turning into all 500 year conversations because it's you. And people aren't tuning into the Zach Bush podcast. They're turning into the Luke Storey podcast. To have an experience of you holding space and being witness to a Rick Rubin or whoever it is. It's in your witnessing of the beauty that brings it forward to an experience for the audience.

[01:30:23] And so you're the sensor that's taking all of the waveform possibilities of me into a particle state. And I never show up knowing what we're going to talk about. And this was definitely not what I thought we were going to talk about, but my teams are probably like, Zach, you absolutely said nothing useful for what we intended to say here.

[01:30:42] Luke: Well, we got 22 minutes.

[01:30:44] Zach: Twenty minutes to get refocused. Yeah.

[01:30:45] Luke: We got 22 minutes.

[01:30:46] Zach: That's great. So I think that this is something to ponder as humans though, is that we actually are best at experiencing ourselves in the context of story. Your name is fascinating to me. It's in Luke's Storey here. And so we've got this understanding that we've started to talk about a lot in Farmer's Footprint, which is our non-profit working around regenerative food systems.

[01:31:11]  This great quote is that humans are not made of cells; they are made of stories. I think that's why your podcasts continue to capture so many downloads, is you're so good at bringing us into these moments of fireside experience that we developed all of human experience in this genetically and epigenetically programmed into us, is the ability to see the universe through the lens of story.

[01:31:35] Zach: Without telling each other's stories at the fireside, then everything that happened in the day doesn't actually get recorded and witnessed. If it's not witnessed, it's not real. And so we had to share a story around the fireside. And this is the scary thing, I think, that happens when we have a society that no longer tells each other stories, but consume the same external stories that we find on a Netflix stream or something like that, is if that's the stories we're consuming, those are not real. Those are artificial stories that might be expressing some figment of our own truths, something like that.

[01:32:07] Luke: And that can be said so much of the media as well, not just entertainment.

[01:32:12] Zach: All media is, social media being the worst of it. And so when you start to fill your evenings, not with telling others what you've experienced, but then adopting the space filling thing of other people's stories that aren't relevant to you, you start to live in a completely abstract space and nothing that happened to you today does get logged and learned from.

[01:32:31] And so now you have to go repeat that lesson because you didn't learn it, because you didn't tell the story. And so we need to get back in the habit of making dinner together and gathering around tables together to tell each other stories of our day. I witnessed this thing today. I got to tell you this. I was walking down the street and I saw this cat, and this cat did this thing.

[01:32:51] I don't know what it means, but this happened to me. And then somebody's like, oh my gosh, I had this other cat thing that happened. And it's pretty soon around this table, realizing that feline medicine is here to tell us something. And we wouldn't have learned the lesson. We would have had to repeat the cat experience again, if we didn't tell the story.

[01:33:09] So we are stuck in a very repetitive, boring version of life because we have to keep repeating like Groundhog Day, our day yesterday, because we didn't tell the story and therefore it didn't become real. And therefore we didn't learn from it. And so we're stuck in this repetitive, painful state of like, I just burned another day and it felt exactly like the day before. It's because you're not actually feeling, experiencing, and seeing it for its fullness in reality. So you haven't learned anything from it. So you're going to repeat it.

[01:33:36] Luke: I find the karma of relationships very similar to that too, how we draw in these people into our lives to help us experience the things within that still need to be addressed and be healed until we finally face and address and heal those things. Then those types of people stop appearing all of a sudden. And people that are more supportive of our wellbeing that help us to grow in inspirational ways rather than ways of aversion of pain. It's fascinating.

[01:34:10] Zach: Yeah. I was a physician in an interesting period of time where this cult understanding may be something just in the-- either zoom in and understand narcissism. And so this was a period of time that still persists today, I think, but there was this flash flood of everybody saying, oh, I'm married to a narcissist, or I know a narcissist and this is a narcissist and narcissist.

[01:34:36] And being a physician, you get to sit in an exam room with hundreds of patients a week, and when you start to see dozens of those hundreds start to tell the same story of, well, there's this narcissist and it's ruining my life and blah, blah, blah, despite all the different personalities that sit there, you start to see similar traits in the person that has attracted the narcissist to them.

[01:34:59] And you realize that they are actually creating the phenomenon of narcissism. And so this danger of blaming outside of yourself, all the relationships and all the traits you think you're seeing in relationships that are attacking you or keeping you from your full potential or parasitizing you, you had to create the polarity that would allow that thing to even exist or else it wouldn't.

[01:35:22] So you're exactly right. You are going to keep bringing all the narcissists to you until you change your condition because you are the polarity for the narcissist and the narcissist can't exist without somebody who's completely let go of their own volition and doesn't believe they can create their own reality.

[01:35:37] Well, you're going to have to bring in a narcissist to fill that gap. And so why do our current politicians look like our current politicians? Because we are the polarity to that. We are the one that needs the most egoic and damaged and neurologically damaged presidential campaigns in the history of the country.

[01:35:57] We either need full dementia or we need full narcissistic egoic structures. That's what we are holding right now, because we're too afraid to know or remember, and we have completely outsourced all creativity and life force for some future. And so we give it to somebody like that. And so this is what we have to do is stop blaming our political system and realize it is a perfect reflection in polarity to what we are right now.

[01:36:24] And we're going to keep doing this again and again, unless we get to a point where we call in a different form of leadership that can see us and that we can see them in a new way. And then we create a different politics overnight, overnight. And it won't even take voting. Because literally the people attracted to leadership are going to be different in this next four years if we let go of our fear of guilt and shame for a moment and start to be still enough to witness the beauty around us.

[01:36:48] Then a whole different crop of people are going to be willing to step into this role of media and to be seen. And that just will happen. We don't have to worry about it. We don't have to tear out our hair. Where are the good leaders?  The good leaders are right in front of us, but they're unable to materialize because we are holding the polarity of fear, guilt, and shame so thoroughly that we can only manifest neurodegenerative conditions as our leadership.

[01:37:14] Luke: Well said. Dude, before we run out of time, give me the update on what's happening with ION.

[01:37:23] Zach: Yeah, this journey has been there. So ION is an acronym for the intelligence of nature. And so the intelligence of nature became the brand of our laboratory and all of the products that we've put out from that lab. Our laboratory started witnessing beauty about 15 years ago and it was because we exited the academic structure of needing to name the problem and then figure out the problem.

[01:37:45] So here's your disease. Cancer was my expertise. I was developing chemotherapy. So I had to ask questions about cancer. So I got deeper and deeper into cancer and cancer management and chemotherapy and what I found is I became so isolated and depressed. I became a cancer cell studying and so fixated on cancer.

[01:38:03] And so again, it's a warning of like, what are you fixating on? You're manifesting that again and again. And so my whole life purpose was cancer management. And so I got expert at not only attacking cancer. I think I was manifesting cancer in my own body. And so I was decaying at this really rapid rate and this fascination.

[01:38:21] So I left academia with this new possibility that nutrition was maybe the direction of health. And that took me into starting a laboratory that got to start to ask, what is health? What does beauty look like under a microscope rather than disease? And so for the last 15 years, we've been seeing this emergence of nature underneath microscopes that we couldn't have imagined before because we had never witnessed life under a microscope.

[01:38:44] Because if you go out under the microscope and you're witnessing disease and your whole goal is to find the disease and mechanisms of disease and you're going to make money off the disease, you literally are downloading the heart of darkness here. You are doubling down on the disease itself by that structure of the Medicare system.

[01:39:02] So ION has been our reversing of the polarity of the technology of a microscope to show us the beauty rather than the disease that lies beneath the structures of nature. So ION became this real fascination, watching centropy come out of chaos. And so we can add the common chemicals that end up in your and I's experience every day.

[01:39:20] Glyphosate being the most ubiquitous. Glyphosate's an herbicide that we've talked about on our other podcast. But that chemical creates chaos. It creates a disconnection between all of the cells, and the immediate transformation that happens at the cellular level is a movement towards cancer. And so we're using these chemicals in our environment to break the junctions and connections, and alcohol does the same thing.

[01:39:45] It dices up and cuts the connections between cells. And so as soon as you isolate a cell, it increases its chaos, which is the second law of thermodynamics. Any system left in isolation increases its entropy or chaos. The opposite is true; any system that becomes witnessed and starts to increase its centripetal or its order.

[01:40:05] And so what ION is is actually this extraordinary technology that are made by bacteria and fungi, which are these carbon molecules that allow information to transition across cellular membranes and across liquid states of biology. It could be a soil system beneath our feet, our gut soil system within us, or the intercellular space between every single one of your 70 trillion cells, or the inside the cell system where the mitochondria live, which is your internal organic garden.

[01:40:31] And so these molecules are made by the bacteria and fungi as this wireless communication network that invigorates the witnessing of life, and centropy comes out of that. And so what we've gotten to watch over the last 15 years is you put a little bit of this liquid into a petri dish, and those cells start self-organizing into complex three dimensional organs.

[01:40:50] And so you can actually get behavior out of nature just by witnessing its beauty through reintroducing the communication network of, I see you. And when seen, proteins start to repair, regenerate, reform, re-express themselves from the DNA. And so what we've experienced is the ability to bring nature back into the human experience at the cellular level.

[01:41:11] And so this is the supplement line that we've been bringing to market for the last 15 years, and we've certainly witnessed its beauty at the gut level, which is our largest exposure to the outside world. And so the tight junctions re-express themselves. You get this healthy boundary event, which can, of course, creates the ability of self-identity to occur at the organism level.

[01:41:30] As you break down the tight junction, you start leaky gut, leaky immune system. You've lost self identity at the cellular level. You don't know what's inside, outside. Your own thyroid gland is the problem, autoimmune disease. So we start to lose that self-identity as those tight junctions break apart.

[01:41:47] You turn back on the cellular system and network all turns back on and you immediately get order out of chaos. So this is the universe self-creating life by witnessing one another at the cellular level. So one cell gets to see the other cell. You need this. I've got some of that. I'm going to share that.

[01:42:05] And so the cells suddenly go into the sharing economy. And so we've got a Gut Support one that's been on the market a long time. Skin Support was a new formula a few years ago, and there's a different set of nutrients that are relevant to your skin that that product brings to you. And the skin one's the easiest way to feel and see the difference immediately.

[01:42:23] What does cell-cell communication feel like? You spray it on your skin, within minutes you'll feel better skin turgor, better hydration of the cellular level. You're experiencing a more young version of life because you've increased the life force, just as I can witness this plant and increase the amount of water concentration it can pull in by the skin.

[01:42:42] One skin cell seeing the other skin cell and increases the hydration of it. So you're literally just letting the percolation of life come up through the soil system back to these cells again. And so you can spray it on your skin and see the change over just a couple days, period. Same things happening in your gut. A little harder to see, but you can feel it over time.

[01:42:58] So that feeling, that reinvigorated state of coping mechanisms and damage control and regeneration, all that stuff supported by a healthy system. But what's coming out now is a whole new supplement, understanding we have this whole plus line now that is botanicals that we can suspend within the ION.

[01:43:19] And so this is something where you're going to become your own apothecary in your home. And so we've got a number of different formulas that are hitting the market just in the next few months. But we've actually got dozens that are hitting the market over the next couple years of these nutrient resources that are starting to dose nutrients in the same way nature intended.

[01:43:36] So right now if you go to a supplement store or whatever, you're going to megadose everything. Megadose protein, megadose amino acids, megadose minerals, megadose vitamin D. We have the sledgehammer approach to it because we've lost the connection to nature, and so we're trying to force massive doses of nature into our systems to be able to extract just a little bit of that life force.

[01:43:57] What's lacking is this substance here, which is the carbon substrate that the bacteria and fungi are making in a healthy ecosystem that delivers the nutrients. Mycelium network is exactly what we're recreating basically at the human cellular level. A mycelium network both is the fiber optic communication network and the superhighway of transportation for the nutrients themselves.

[01:44:21] And so if you dump fertilizer in the corner of a single farm, the mycelium network, if left intact, can move those nutrients all over the farm to the places where they're most needed. And you can just pick a single nutrient like silica, and the trees that need silica are going to get silica in just a few hours because the mycelial network having communicated deficiencies around the system will say, ah, here's the silica over here.

[01:44:43] We'll move it over there. That whole system is ready to be invigorated in your own body, but you need the transit mechanisms. And that's what ION ultimately does, is it's the communication network that also has these carbon baskets that will carry the nutrients. And when you have the carbon baskets, you need so little nutrient to do its work because it's so bioavailable.

[01:45:04] So we can demonstrate this in our new plus line, where we're giving nutrients that are actually very difficult to get into the human biology because they're water soluble. Water soluble nutrients like curcumin and cinnamon and turmeric and coriander. These things have been witnessed under a microscope to be able to do amazing things to human cells. Anti inflammatory, anti cancer, all kinds of cool things.

[01:45:26] But when you take that into a complex biologic system like oral ingestion, because as being a human right now, you're missing that organic substrate of a diverse ecosystem within you because of the amount of antibiotics you're exposed to through your herbicides, pesticides, and doctor's offices.

[01:45:42] And so with this death of the soil, we've become deficient in our capacity to absorb nutrients. And so we're now megadosing to try to overcome this failure of communication and failure of transport. Unfortunately, that puts great stress on our kidneys, liver, and other organs when we're megadosing things.

[01:45:59] So much so that the Women's Health Initiative, huge study, 105,000 women, followed for 25 years, demonstrated a 9% increase in mortality for women that took a multivitamin. And so if you're trying to megadose vitamins, you actually increase mortality at about the same rate that smoking kills you.

[01:46:16] That was a startling study. That was back in 2011, '12 that that got published. And so to find out that megadosing has the same toll on life that we were hoping to overcome with that, we need to move back to this concept of nature dosing. And so the new plus line that's coming out with ION is nature-dosed nutrients from whole food sources that are suspended then in your home apothecary.

[01:46:37] So a glass vial will come to you and you'll mix a vial of water with ION and then your botanicals and you'll shake that up and then consume that. And you now have nature dose nutrients that are going to get inside the cells at a very high concentration. If you take the highest grade liposomal curcumin, for example, on the market right now and ingest that, well, we can measure your urine an hour later and show that none of it got there. You just pooped it right out.

[01:47:03] Luke: Wow.

[01:47:04] Zach: Whereas if you suspend that same liposomal curcumin in ION and ingest that, you get 3,000 nanograms per milliliter in your urine of your curcumin just half an hour later. And so this explosive demonstration of delivery by putting nature back in its gifting economy to you, we start to understand how nature intended life to look.

[01:47:26] You are a human organism with 70 trillion cells being fed by 1.4 trillion microorganisms that are feeding you the nutrients in a bioavailable way such that it can get to your mitochondria, which is the soil inside your cells, such that they can turn it back into light energy.

[01:47:43] So when you lose the microbiome, you lose the delivery system all together, and all of the nutrients on your plate become devoid of life in the sense they can't make it to its target. And so we're very excited about this next generation of ION products because we're going to be able to put you back in right relationship with the medicine within your food. As you start to dissolve these botanicals back into the delivery system that it was intended, you're going to start to reinforce your own biology.

[01:48:09] And our hope is that over these next few years, you start to develop a biologic relationship to your food where there's so much nourishment and so much nutrient cycling that your microbiome recovers to the point where you are your own source of ION. I believe that we can get to the point if we clean up our food system, stop consuming glyphosate in every breath we take and every drink of water, and we can clean up that environment, we are very quickly going to put my business out of business.

[01:48:34] We hope that ION doesn't exist in 30 years because everybody has become a nature-dosed machine of connected biology, and that's possible. I guarantee you if we change our food system, my company can go out of business in just a heartbeat. So let's put us out of business as fast as we can by getting us back into right relationship with nature, which will start with that change in polarity of the mind that we are not separate from nature. She's desperately trying to do everything she can to increase the beauty within us, increase the nourishment within us. And so that's been a, in a nutshell, our ION journey over the last 15 years.

[01:49:05] Luke: Awesome, man. I love it. I'm so excited for that development. For those listening that are still with us and inspired, you can go to lukestorey.com/ion, I-O-N, and use the code LUKE15 for 15% off. And we'll put that in the show description at lukestorey.com/zachbush3. I want to tell you a funny story really quick, which is what got me on the ION Gut Support in the beginning.

[01:49:32] When we first met at Josh Trent's house in San Diego in 2020 and recorded a podcast, of course we did, I think a couple in that day and they went really long. So everyone was hungry and we didn't have time to make a reservation. So somebody just decided at a restaurant down the street, which was some Italian place by Josh's house.

[01:49:50] And we all went there, and I was very aware of glyphosate and gluten intolerance and all this stuff at that point. And we open up the menu and it's just all gluten glyphosate food. And I was sitting there. I was like, what's Zach going to eat? He's the glyphosate master.

[01:50:08] He knows all about this. And you're eating breadsticks. You ordered some pasta. And I said to you, I was like, dude, aren't you worried about the glyphosate? And he said, no, I drank ION before the meal. I'm golden. I was like, really, dude? And so ever since that moment, a few years now, four years now, I guess, I use the ION just daily.

[01:50:29] I just keep it in my cabinet and I just take a couple sprays when I walk by in the morning. It's just very easy to habituate myself. And I also give the pet formula to our dog every day, which with a number of other interventions has really helped her, I think with her allergies and hotspots and just weird dog problems, probably from the medication she was given before I adopted her.

[01:50:49] But anyway, point being one of my greatest life hacks is if I'm going to go off the reservation and eat some pizza that's not organic flour or something like that, I will do a dose of the ION Gut Support before and after. And I don't know if it's psychosomatic, but I feel like I do take less of a hit. I notice a less reaction. Is that strategy legitimate at all?

[01:51:16] Zach: Yeah. And we've proved that under the microscope many, many times, and then we prove it clinically as well. But basically, the following is I would say that the witnessing of grace at the molecular level. And so nature is full of grace and this is what it looks like. If you take a gut membrane, we can grow these in Petri dish.

[01:51:38] And so you grow it up to be a coherent membrane. So you got tens of thousands of epithelial cells that have now created a uniform surface that we would call a gut membrane. It's now a single barrier system. You can measure the electrical charge that that barrier is capable of holding across it.

[01:51:55] And so it basically acts as an insulator. The plastic around a copper wire, for example. So insulation around a wire is there to maintain the electrical charge within the wire so it's not leaking. A healthy gut is maintaining your electrical charge within the human body. And so we can measure that electrical charge potential across an intact human gut.

[01:52:15] If you add glyphosate, you lose that conductive protection and you start to leak immediately. And so leaky gut is a phenomenon of certainly stuff getting into the body that shouldn't be there, but it's also leaking energy out of the body. And so you lose the electrical potential of a body when you develop leaky gut, and so your life force is diminishing.

[01:52:35] When we add ION, we see a 30% to 50% increase in the expression of tight junctions across that gut membrane. So you get a much higher electrical charge. So we measure this through something called TER, Transepithelial Electrical Resistance. And so you can measure that in the Petri dish. So you add ION, it gets stronger.

[01:52:52] You add glyphosate, it collapses. But now if you add them at the same time, into the same Petri dish, you got one Petri dish that collapsed under glyphosate, one that got stronger under ION. If you now say, okay, now we're going to do them simultaneously and you give the ION and then the glyphosate at the same time, you actually see more tight junctions than existed when you just gave ION to the healthy membrane.

[01:53:13] Luke: What?

[01:53:14] Zach: And so you actually get stronger for the challenge of glyphosate than you were without the glyphosate. And so that's why I go to the restaurant and I'm like, I'm about to get poisoned. But if I take this grace at the cellular level, what's going to happen is I'm going to get stronger, not weaker for the challenge if I have enough information and resources at the cellular level.

[01:53:36] So a body that has unfettered access to information and those nutrient resources that you would find in the compost of biology, you're going to be able to rise above that to become stronger than you ever were before. And so this is a hermetic principle of biology that challenge or stress or whatnot on the cellular system will make it stronger, not weaker.

[01:53:58] Unfortunately, if you don't have the cell-cell communication, then an injury becomes a chronic problem without repair. So this is where we are as a human biology now, as we have so little workforce, we've lost so much of our biologic ecosystem that we call human biology, gut microbiome being the foundation of it.

[01:54:15] With the collapse of microbiome, we no longer have the workforce to be resilient. And so now stressors, poisons from our food system simply cause chronic disease. And we tipped over in about 1992 to that phenomenon. So before 1992, we were still eating junk. Glyphosate was out there, atrazine, all the herbicides, pesticides, but we were relatively resilient.

[01:54:35] We were starting to see just the obesity thing starting to happen in the late '80s, pretty remarkably type 2 diabetes starting to be whispered about in the early '90s. And then by the late '90s, all hell broke loose. Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, autism, cancers. The whole thing went off the rails.

[01:54:52] And so in those 1990s we lost our relationship to nature, and that was going to be our graceful recovery from the mistakes that we'd been long making. And so this is when we lost our universal coping mechanisms and really broke our relationship to the soil system in the 1990s with chemical agriculture really hitting its full force with GMO crops, so genetically modified corn, soybean, and the rest.

[01:55:14] That's when we were able to put so much chemical into our food chain that it totally broke our relationship to soil, and therefore we manifested the chronic disease epidemics. But we can reverse out of that very quickly. And so we're using fossil soil here in ION.

[01:55:27] This is soil that's about 60 million years old. And we're extracting the carbon matrix that is the communication and the delivery system for nutrients and we're giving that back to humans. And so by giving that back to humans, you're simply reconnecting to the nature that nurtured us into existence in the first place.

[01:55:44] This soil 60 million years ago is important because it predated the last extinction, 55 million years ago. The last extinction was caused by a death of topsoil. And so we're moving back into right relationship with soils that predated these massive soil damage, extinction events, first by maybe an asteroid 55 million years ago, now by chemical and agricultural practices today.

[01:56:06] And so these existential threats to the ecosystem at the soil level have led to great extinction events. And by tying ourselves back to the original information that allowed mammals to occur in the first place, which happened after that last extinction, you're literally tying yourself into the information that imagined us into existence.

[01:56:23] And so I get goosebumps every time somebody reaches for a bottle of ION because a human hasn't experienced that before. If you're just a human, you haven't touched that bottle of ION before, you literally haven't been in touch with 60 million year old soil communication before. And so you're about to experience a human biology that hasn't been so full of grace. And ultimately, this is what we hand out all over the world now, is grace in a bottle. And nature is doing some really spectacular things with that.

[01:56:48] Luke: Beautiful, man. Well, thank you for your continued innovation, research, heart, soul, mind, everything you brought here today, man. It's always great to see you and I can't wait to do it again.

[01:56:58] Zach: It's a pleasure to be with you, Luke, always.