[00:00:01] Luke: I'm a real water fanatic, and I know a few people that are relatively interested in water and knowledgeable about water. But what I know of you, you might have even surpassed me in your level of understanding and fanaticism.

[00:00:15] Paul: I've studied it a lot, and I've done a lot of deep work with my soul to get deep insights on water. Have you ever seen the water charger I built?

[00:00:23] Luke: Yeah.

[00:00:24] Paul: I teach workshops on how to build water chargers, but I built a water charger that you can get about 20 people inside and we use it as a toning and chanting chamber, and it generates a very powerful vortex that structures the water. And when you're inside it, it feels like you're in an energetic tornado.

[00:00:40] It's subtle but it's obvious. Anybody that I know, if they can't feel it, I say, "Take your shoes off. " Grounds them to the stone floor, but it's strong enough to move those water molecules constantly. And it's programming the sun, the moon, the environmental energies, every animal, every insect, anything that touches it is being printed into the water.

[00:01:08] So when you drink the water, you're in real time flow with the energies of the environment so that you're in sympathetic resonance with the environment. Years and years ago, when my soul taught me how to do these things, it was quite a shock because I was just out in the rock garden building sculptures and things.

[00:01:30] And my soul said, "I want to teach you how to build a water charger to charge your water." I said, "Oh, that's cool." And so I just listened as I normally do. I had this massive cone structure that I had to build a door in to get glass water bottles in. The first thing I did was test all the water, and it was just so radically different when I took it out of there.

[00:01:54] And at that time I was buying cases of Avion and glass. So I would test it against the Avion that hadn't been charged, and that was wild. And then I even took tap water, which I would never drink, charge it, and it actually made it so wildly better. If I had to, I could have drank it.

[00:02:12] Luke: Wow

[00:02:13] Paul: But what was really trippy is I went out one night after work, grabbed the water, tasted it, and for some reason I was thirsty or something, so I pulled the cap off and tasted it out there, and it tasted like dirt. And I'm like, what in the world is going on? I'm looking at the bottle to see if it's cracked, shining a flashlight through it.

[00:02:39] I'm like, "That's wild." Then another week or so later, I pulled it out and it tasted like nickel, like metal. And this kept happening. So finally, after about the third time, I'm out there and it's at night and the moon's in the sky. I said to my soul, "How on earth is this water tasting like metals and dirt when it's in thick glass bottles?"

[00:03:06] And my soul turned my head and made me look right at the moon. And my soul said, "It's the energies of the moon." Each cycle of the moon is causing resonance with the moon's energy in the soil and the frequency of the moon's energy is picking up the vibration of the metals in the earth and imprinting it into the water.

[00:03:24] So you're tasting the subtle energy imprint of what's in the earth that's in resonance with the moon at that phase of the moon. So I bought a moon calendar, and I started comparing every time I took it out where the moon was and what the water felt like. And on the full moon, the water would get so strong my friends actually thought it was carbonated.

[00:03:46] Luke: Holy shit.

[00:03:47] Paul: It literally bubbled in your mouth. It had so much energy. And on the new moon, it was so empty. It felt like it was going right through your tongue, like a solvent. And so I realized I could use new moon water to help detox people, and I could use full moon water for people that were depressed or had adrenal fatigue or had an energy crisis where they just maybe were healing and needed energy. And so then I could just choose the moon phase based on what they needed. So that was quite a powerful experience for me to see how the moon is really--

[00:04:30] Luke: It's like homeopathic alchemy.

[00:04:32] Paul: It is alchemy, and it is homeopathic, but it's really energy medicine. And I studied water extensively, and water's absolutely freaking wild. I could go on for hours on water. I don't know how much you want me to say, but I have three comprehensive chapters on water in my Spirit Gym book series.

[00:04:55] Luke: Epic. Have you looked into Veda Austin's work? Are you familiar with her?

[00:05:01] Paul: Mm -hmm.

[00:05:01] Luke: Yeah. I interviewed her a couple of years ago. People often ask me, what was your favorite one? There's been 600 of them or something at this point, but that one really stood out to me because I was already very steeped in just my fascination and love of water. But after that conversation with her, I realized that the way I was viewing water was that it had the capacity to be a conduit for consciousness, right?

[00:05:26] Paul: It is. Yeah.

[00:05:27] Luke: But what I got from her was that it actually is its own consciousness. Because she developed this language where she's able to communicate with the water. It was a deeper level, no pun intended, a deeper well of understanding that she opened up for me. You can't even like grasp it with the mind. It's just so wild.

[00:05:50] Paul: My response to your statement there is that water is a living being. So just like you have your own consciousness and the plant behind you does and everything does, water's consciousness, in my opinion, is as close to God consciousness you can get because water is absolutely unconditional. You can put poison in it, and you can love it.

[00:06:13] You can use it to heal, and you can use it to kill. You can use it under high pressure to cut stones and steel, and you can use it to bake, cook, and make medicines with. Water updates its information. Water's in connection with the zero point field, and it updates itself every one one trillionth of a second.

[00:06:45] And water has a frequency range of receptivity of 65 octaves. Now, most people can't even comprehend what that means, but one piano is about seven octaves. So to understand water, you would have to put eight or nine pianos side by side that progressively went octave by octave.

[00:07:07] And I was so curious when I was studying water, like, okay, 65 octaves. How big of a number would that represent as a frequency? And a friend of mine who is a genius and an amazing guy who's been on my podcast, somebody you should get on your podcast, Father Sean O'Laoire. He's was a Catholic priest for 50 years, and he got kicked out for teaching true spirituality.

[00:07:28] Luke: My kind of guy. I like him already.

[00:07:30] Paul: Yeah. He wrote a book called Setting God Free, and it's mind blowingly good. And he has a degree in mathematics and psychology, and I think physics as well. But I said, "Sean, I need you to calculate this for me." And the number he sent back to me was so big, I don't even know if there's a name for it. I don't even know what to tell you. It's bigger than Google. It's like crazy large. If I had to summarize--

[00:07:59] Luke: In terms of the frequency range of water?

[00:08:01] Paul: The frequency range. If you actually do the math on 65 octaves, you take an octave, you double it, you keep going up 65 times, the closest word I can give you is it has an almost infinite range of receptivity.

[00:08:17] And I've seen tons of research over the years showing it's absolutely receptive to psychic energies, thoughts, feelings, emotions. There's piles of research showing, for example-- Harold Saxton Burr did research, which was mind blowing. I think he did it in the late 40s, early 50s, where he caught mason jars of water.

[00:08:45] First, he got seedlings of the same genus, made two groups of seedlings. He then had his students interact with mason jars, just hold it or put it on the tables where they were studying. And then he went to psych wards and he took mason jars of exactly the same water and just let the psychologically damaged people interact with it.

[00:09:06] Then he watered the seedlings with the water from his students and he watered another batch from the psych ward people. And when you see the pictures of the plants that were watered by the water from the psych ward, they grew away from the sun. They grew down. Their bodies were gnarled and crooked like sick beings.

[00:09:27] And you could totally and utterly see the psychic effect. Now, it's the same water and the plants watered by the water from the students just grew normally. And there's lots of different stuff out there that I've come across that's-- I talk to water all the time. I get in my cold plunge and I pray to it.

[00:09:49] Water talks to you just like that. Water also is an analog of the aether, A-E-T-H- E-R, which is the first step down from spirit. So if you take vibration, so if you use the alchemical model of earth, water, fire, air, plasma, aether, spirit, then you'd go to zero, which would be God or unconditional love.

[00:10:20] So water is in an analog relationship with aether. And this is why almost all creation myths talk about water being the beginning of everything. But then if you take a high-quality crystal, it is another analog of water. I have a Vogel-cut healing crystal that's exotic, very expensive, super-- you know who Marcel Vogel was?

[00:10:44] Luke: No.

[00:10:45] Paul: A genius that developed a lot of technologies for IBM. He was able to take crystal and cut it and chose the right crystal, but he developed what looked like a laptop. Imagine a laptop closed, but it was made of crystal and he could put his hands on it and whatever thoughts were in his mind would appear on it like a television screen.

[00:11:15] Luke: What?

[00:11:15] Paul: Yeah. Now, crystal has water in it. Crystal holds water in it. First of all, that's why stones like to be buried in the earth, because if the stone dries out, it loses its life force. And stones are living things, especially crystals. They grow. The point I'm making is I let friends of mine-- I don't just let anybody handle this thing because it's very expensive.

[00:11:41] And if someone drops it-- and I've had cleaning ladies and people drop very expensive stones. So the paratrooper start talking. If you get too close to that stone, don't touch that stone. But when you come into my house, I will let you hold the stone, and it feels like water frozen in time. It's wild.

[00:12:02] Water is an analog. And aether, just like you have stem cells that can turn into hair, eyes, teeth, ears, brain, anything, the aether is the stem cell for the creative matrix of what David Bohm called the hollow mo-- what I call Spirit Gym. And so the aether is what takes God's dream of itself and becomes crystallized in this matrix that I call Spirit Gym, which is David Bohm's hollow movement.

[00:12:42] And there's a lot of technical details about what happens, but basically if you take God consciousness, God's dream, put it into the aether, it then drops down to plasma and it keeps going down progressively in-- the Kabbalah tree of life shows you the same thing, if you understand what it's showing you.

[00:13:01] It's showing you how consciousness crystallizes into form. And so water begins at the top. At the highest level, and it can resonate at that frequency, and then it is in resonance down to water itself, and then it goes down to the crystals. So you're actually seeing a three-fold step down matrix process, and then crystals will amplify consciousness.

[00:13:26] That's why shamans use them, that's why healers use them. They'll amplify sound frequencies, thought frequencies, emotions, whatever. And so does water, except water is a liquid crystal. A crystal is a solid crystal in three dimensions. And the aether is really a liquid crystal that broadcasts spirit. So that's a very short summary on--

[00:13:50] Luke: So epic. It's also interesting that water can be representative of the elements based on temperature. It's not just one thing.

[00:14:01] Paul: It can be everything. And I don't know if you know this, but probably five or six years ago, I'm just guessing it could be up to 10, but I remember when I first came across this because I was actually doing some research on water at that time. It was either an astrophysicist or astronomer had the question, I wonder what happened if I tuned my telescope to the frequency of water.

[00:14:31] And so he was one of these guys working with a professional observatory. And I can't remember what frequency range his telescope was in because they have microwave telescopes. They have infrared telescopes. But anyhow, he tuned the telescope to the frequency of water, and he found that water was everywhere in the entire universe that he pointed his telescope.

[00:14:55] So we used to think that water was this thing that was limited supply. But he actually shows pictures. I found an article or two, and it showed pictures of the sky, and when he tuned it to the frequency, just like you see water vapor in the sky or clouds in the sky, once he tuned that telescope to the frequency of water, everywhere you looked in the cosmos between the stars, water everywhere. And it glowed on the images like a light blue. And instead of seeing the black sky at night on the telescope, you saw a blue sky at night.

[00:15:29] Luke: Epic.

[00:15:30] Paul: It was really cool. I'm like, "That goes a long ways--"

[00:15:35] Luke: I feel like we could have a four-hour podcast on water. I wasn't even planning on talking about that.

[00:15:41] Paul: Do you know who Isabel friend is?

[00:15:43] Luke: Yeah, yeah, she lives down the street.

[00:15:45] Paul: Right. Yeah. She moved here from San Diego. And she's got some amazing courses on water. I've got a couple of great podcasts with her, and her and I swap information. I wrote a chapter showing my hypothesis of the correlation between the ether and water, and she absolutely loved it. And I go into the Holy Trinity and the Star of David and the geometry and give what my soul taught me. And so then I had my artist do beautiful diagrams, too. I'll send you the chapter if you want. In fact, I'll send you all three chapters I wrote them on

[00:16:20] Luke: I'd love to see that. Yeah. One last thing I want to touch on water that is-- it's just infinitely fascinating to both of us, obviously, but there's so many resources that humans need to live and to thrive. We use oil, and you have all these different forms of energy, and obviously we need water.

[00:16:39] And it's been a fun discovery for me to see that most, if not all of the scarcity around things like water, for example, has been totally manufactured. So when I discovered primary water, it opened up this whole world to me. And what I basically understand from that, and what my intuition tells me, being a long-time spring water hunter and collector, is that the earth actually manufactures water.

[00:17:06] Paul: It doesn't. I'm heavy into all of the theories as you can imagine. I study all this stuff. There is a lot of control over people's minds on a lot of things, but I honestly think that the issue with water is not that people are trying to deceive us or conceive things. I think this just ignorance.

[00:17:30] I've studied a lot of science on water, and the most common thing scientists say to people like Isabel Friend and Veda Austin, "Oh, it's just H2O. It's nothing else." They don't really have enough depth of perception to even look into the mysterious nature of water. So when you're talking about the kinds of things we're talking about here, I honestly think that the scientific materialists aren't deep enough to even know what's really going on.

[00:18:01] Luke: Yeah, yeah. They're not even smart enough to deceive us about it.

[00:18:04] Paul: Yes, that's exactly what I'm trying to say.

[00:18:06] Luke: I think I've had that realization, though, so many times. I was talking about it on a show a couple of days ago, being in Colorado, 10,000 feet up the top of a granite mountain and watching a spring spring forth. Just the most pure, beautiful, living, breathing water, and it's been doing so without interruption of all of recorded history.

[00:18:26] You can go back a couple of few hundred years that humans have been around that area. It's a known spring. And I always just thought there's just no way that the hydrological cycle is completely-- I'm sure it plays a role, but it's not completely responsible for the fact that this water is coming up the way it does.

[00:18:43] Paul: We'll look at an artesian well. I've studied all of Viktor Schauberger's work. There's few people that ever lived that knew more about water than Schauberger. But he made me think of an experience I had. A buddy of mine in Canada, who's one of my best friends, a friend of his is a shaman, a geomancer, and an expert at gems and minerals.

[00:19:04] He owns this huge property about three and a half hours out of Toronto, and on his property is a cave. And for my birthday one year, Rory hired a Mexican shaman and he got-- I don't know if you've ever heard of the shaman named Karaoke.

[00:19:21] Luke: No.

[00:19:21] Paul: Oh my God. You got to get a hold of Karaoke's music. Oh my God. This guy is a crazy good musician and singer, and he makes the most powerful ayahuasca I've ever had, hands down.

[00:19:33] Luke: That says a lot.

[00:19:34] Paul: I've been making my own ayahuasca for a long time and his ayahuasca is like from God. So we went into my buddy Al's cave, and we did special medicines with ayahuasca all night. And the cave was sweating all night long. You're in this cave, and it's just raining like a beautiful-- not raining, raining, but drip, drip, drip. It's just wet inside.

[00:20:14] We were doing a DMT actually with the ayahuasca, which is not for lightweights. This ayahuasca is enough to take you to God. One ounce of it will cure you. Shall we say ex-paratrooper type so I can handle these things? But we're six rounds in and six bags of DMT in, and we're in this cave. But the trippiest thing was the combination of the water and the stones.

[00:20:45] It was completely unlike doing these medicines on the surface of the earth. I could travel the bloody universe, go anywhere my mind could conceive of, and my body was cradled. There was never any anxiety. Oftentimes, if you get far enough out of your body, your body starts to get nervous. Because if the soul lets go of the body, it'll die.

[00:21:11] But the cave just held your body like a mother holding a baby to her breast. And it was the craziest thing. I've never had an experience like that. If I tried to do that much medicine anywhere else, I would have probably died doing it.

[00:21:29] Luke: Mm-hmm

[00:21:29] Paul: But this just let you literally go in your light body and skywalk, man, just travel the stars. And you're looking down at your body, is laying there just very relaxed and breathing, and it was the craziest thing. And his cave was full of shungite.

[00:21:47] Luke: Oh wow.

[00:21:47] Paul: Which is a mineral that protects you against EMF. We put shungite around our beehives. It's amazing. When the bees come home from foraging the flowers, they will actually rub themselves and dance on the shungite to purge the electromagnetic pollution off of themselves. So I'm in this cave with tons and tons and tons of shungite in it. The whole floor is shungite, and it's sweating water.

[00:22:16] When you feel the combination of mother nature's alchemy with water and stone, and you get yourself into a high enough vibrational state, like you do with those medicines, you realize that stone and water does something very powerful to the human body and mind. It anchors you.

[00:22:39] Luke: Yeah.

[00:22:40] Paul: You can see why so many mystics meditate in caves.

[00:22:43] Luke: That's the folklore of the ages, right?

[00:22:46] Paul: Yeah. Yogis meditate in caves for years at a time. And I've seen documentaries where yogis have gone meditating for three years and only stopped to eat one time a week, but they don't lose any weight. They don't look like they're sedentary. And these caves are just cradling them. Cool stuff.

[00:23:09] Luke: So cool.

[00:23:09] Paul: Yeah.

[00:23:11] Luke: How would you define the difference between saying prayers and living a prayer?

[00:23:20] Paul: I think it depends on the mindset of the individual. I think for me, there's a lot of ways I can answer that. But when I say prayers, which is every day, I spend probably close to an hour in prayer, if you look at how creation manifests, you have the vibration of thought, which steps itself down into word, which then steps itself down into reality as deed.

[00:24:01] A lot of people think their prayers, but they don't say them. So for me, it's important to say my prayers because I'm taking the thought and crystallizing it down into a more dense vibration. And then it's important for me to live my prayers, because if I think it and I say it, but I don't do it, then it's a prayer without a body.

[00:24:27] So for me, I feel if you really want to worship God, then you have to become the prayer. You have to literally embody it. You got to breathe it. You got to not just think it, not just say it, but you have to go do it. Most people's prayers are petitions to God to take their pain and their bills away, but they keep doing the same stuff that caused the problem in the first place.

[00:24:56] Or they go to church and think because they ask for forgiveness for their sins that they can keep doing the same stuff over and over again and Jesus will carry the load for them or something like that. But it's just important for me because I have a deep love of God and I know there's nothing here but God or there is no God.

[00:25:26] It's just important for me that I do my very best to eat, sleep, breathe, and be the prayer. And so I really believe, because God is unconditional love, that God always meets you where you're at. But most people, it takes them a while to wake up to what the word really means because there's so much confusion about that.

[00:25:55] But God is a living mirror. We are God embodied. Everything in the created universe is God's body and it's the only way God can come to know itself. So just like we are born and we have a body, Plotinus says the soul's greatest addiction is to matter. And most people don't understand what he's saying, but only God can create a soul. And because God is unconditional love, the soul is born as unconditional love.

[00:26:24] So when you take God and use the word consciousness as a synonym, consciousness cannot know itself unless it has something to know. So when the soul takes on a body, it finally can say, "Look, I am. I've got a hand. I've got a face."

[00:26:46] So when the soul wakes up in a body, as it comes through out of the womb and the child starts to wake up, the soul inside the body is so utterly enamored with the fact because prior to receiving a body, the soul is a non-local reality. It's everywhere and nowhere at the same time. It's in the eternal now.

[00:27:06] You go back to the story of Adam and Eve, they didn't even know they were naked until they ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Well, they ate an apple, so that's the symbol of embodiment and making a choice to embody. So when the soul comes into a body, when souls have not had that many lifetimes, they're so identified with their material self that they actually forget that what's animating the body and what's having the experience of being in the body is God.

[00:27:41] So materialism is really the symptom of souls that have not evolved very far, not realizing that what they are is something far more magical and mysterious than the material form that they're addicted to. And alchemy is really the spiritual practice of becoming awake to the fact that your spirit is embodied and your soul is what's having the experience of being a divine expression, that each of us is a novel expression of the divine.

[00:28:25] So as a soul goes through enough lifetimes and starts to realize that it cannot fulfill itself in a material existence, this is why you see many rich people and famous musicians and singers and movie stars often have everything in the world. They've had all the sex. They've had all the drugs. They've had more money than they can spend, but they are depressed and often commit suicide because they keep looking for something to fill their soul in the material world.

[00:28:56] But ultimately, because the soul is unconditional love, the only thing that can ultimately satiate a soul is unconditional love, which is God. So the alchemist realized this a long, long time ago. And so alchemy really grew from chemistry. And the way that this happened, by the way, is the alchemist all of a sudden notice that if they were, for example, in a bad mood, that would affect their chemical outcomes. They would watch the chemistry change.

[00:29:28] If they were in a good mood, it would change the chemistry. And they were often doing these experiments over and over again. So they begin to see that somehow their chemical formulas were mirroring their psyche back at them. And so that led them to over the span of hundreds and hundreds of years to come to the realization that their psyche is imprinting itself into matter, and that matter is mirroring the psyche back at them, which is exactly what water does.

[00:29:55] Luke: They were the early quantum physicists.

[00:29:58] Paul: They were the early quantum physicists.

[00:30:00] Luke: Yeah. That's wild.

[00:30:00] Paul: In fact, the Greek metaphysician and philosopher Plotinus, who lived about 2370 something years ago, is probably the most quoted philosopher by quantum physicists all over the world. And when you read Plotinus writings, which I've read extensively, he might as well have had a degree in quantum physics because he is saying exactly what they're saying a long, long time ago. And many others too. Ruby, you have all sorts of them.

[00:30:31] But the point that I'm driving at here is that once we start to wake up, and what happens is the soul allows the pain teacher to show up in your life when you're not growing. So we get addictions, and we get divorces, and we get diseases, and we get grounded. So we have to hold still and pay attention and look into what we're doing and look into ourselves.

[00:31:09] If we don't make a conscious effort to look at life more holistically and more spiritually, because we're all God embodied, we must take responsibility for what we create. That's what karma is. And God has to take responsibility for what it creates, because there is no other for God. God is that for which there is no other.

[00:31:32] And because we're all God-embodied, we all have to take responsibility for what we create. And if we're not creating things that embody the truth of God, which is love, then we have to deal with what we create. And as Carl Jung says, if you don't meet your unconscious on the inside, it will meet you on the outside in the events of your life and you will call it fate.

[00:31:56] The fate is you often meet the pain teacher, and the pain teacher comes first as fatigue, then as illnesses, then as diseases. And then if you don't graduate and wake up, then you have to come back again and try. And so really, I think what the alchemists did was they showed us a path without all the religious dogma of how to progressively become conscious of the spirit in us and the soul in us and awaken to the fact that through legitimate spiritual practices and learning to love, we begin to have the abilities that a remote viewer has.

[00:32:42] We realize your body is really like just a cocoon within which the soul matures and grows. But as it starts waking up, it realizes, wow, I'm not trapped in my body at all. When I was 12, I started having very profound out-of-body experiences and later realized I was a remote viewer. And actually won a remote viewing contest in London with 750 people.

[00:33:07] Luke: Really?

[00:33:07] Paul: Yeah, it was taught by the director of the CIA's remote viewing program.

[00:33:10] Luke: No way.

[00:33:11] Paul: Yeah, in the year 2000, I think. And I didn't like their technique because I developed my own system because when I was a child, I had to learn to control all this. And so I thought maybe I was going crazy. So what I would do is I would leave my body and go around-- we had a 142-acre farm and half of it was standing forest. So I'd go look for things. And then in the morning I'd get up and go check to see if they were there. And every single time, exactly what I'd identified by traveling out of my body at night was there.

[00:33:46] And so I realized that there's something a lot more going on than anybody's ever told me. And I couldn't tell anybody about it because they probably think I was completely mentally nuts. But really, what I'm saying is, as you break the hold of belief systems and start really exploring with the honest intent to live and love more fully, then the veils start coming off and you start realizing more things.

[00:34:25] And sometimes Great Spirit puts little helpers in the path, like maybe five grams of mushrooms to just accelerate the experience a little bit. Or the right person at the right time, or somebody who has a cave. My mother joined the Self Realization Fellowship when I was 12 years old, which is Yogananda's teachings, and I learned from very, very evolved and enlightened monks how to meditate and how to deal with my emotions.

[00:34:52] And I went to summer camp with the monks when I was 15, and that took me to another level. And that grounded me so I could handle the stress of my life and being a pioneer and dealing with all the criticism I had to deal with. And so I was able to handle a lot of this stuff, and all these meditation techniques opened me up.

[00:35:16] But ultimately, what I'm really trying to say is that every thought and every word and every deed is a prayer. And because every thought, word, and deed is an act of resonance, you're always resonating with God at exactly the frequency that you're at.

[00:35:39] And because God is all frequencies from zero negative to zero positive, which would be infinite, the world is forming itself around us as a living hologram for what our dominant thoughts, feelings, and emotions are, whether they're unconscious or conscious, and that's why spiritual practice is so important, because the unconscious mind is vast. It's infinite.

[00:36:03] Your personal unconscious is very powerful. And to the degree that your programming is unconscious, then you always think somebody else is doing shit to you. And that's what the pain teacher does. The pain teacher shows up as a divorce, or as a loss of a job, or as a car crash, or as an illness.

[00:36:25] Rumi says the function of a broken heart is to let the love pour out of you. And I think, having been a therapist for countless people for over 40 years now and worked with every terrible situation you can imagine and seen what happens when people are taught how to take advantage of a crisis and turn it into an opportunity for real opening, I know from living experience in my own life and from all the people that I've helped and from all the students that I've helped grow up spiritually, if you go look at the testimonials from people on my spiritgym.com website for people that have worked with me often for years and hear the kinds of things they say, they're all very, very awake to the fact that God is in resonance with us at all times.

[00:37:22] But because God cannot become conscious as just the light or the good, God has to invest itself into the dark as well. This is why in my lesson on myth, I made a statement at the beginning of the lesson. God is the myth maker that plays both sides but chooses neither. Choice is always left to you.

[00:37:40] Luke: Oh, that's good.

[00:37:43] Paul: Right. And that's why we have free will. Each of us is Ram Dass. We are each God workers. We are each God-embodied. Just as there's no two snowflakes' the same, no two grains of sand the same, and no even two identical twins that are the same, when you get right down to it, we are each a unique expression of the divine that holds a piece of the cosmic puzzle, of the divine puzzle.

[00:38:07] And God's got all the patience in the universe because there's nothing else for God to do but find out what its own potentials are. So in the words of Ra, we can either take the service of self-path, or we can take the service to other path, or we can take the path of darkness and evil, or we can take the path that's of good and love.

[00:38:30] Ultimately, what I'm really trying to say, to answer your concept of prayer to your question about prayer, is we're all a living prayer whether you know it or not. And because God is in resonance with every possible frequency, thought, feeling, or deed, you are manifesting your conscious and your unconscious in real time, all the time.

[00:38:54] And the secret is to realize that it doesn't take any more effort to manifest what you want in your life than it does to manifest what you don't want. And that's why shadow work, trauma healing, identifying your complexes, and soul recovery work is so important, because once you start making an effort to look into your unconscious and see your programming, it's no longer unconscious, and then you have the free will to choose how you're going to respond each time a situation that used to give you a knee jerk, hair trigger, ready, fire, aim reaction.

[00:39:34] Now you can slow down, breathe a little bit, and say, "How do I want to be?" Plotinus identified that the soul has three qualities to abide, which is the witness of God, to reflect, which is memory, without which God would have no awareness of its own evolution, and to represent.

[00:39:55] So as we become more aware of how our thoughts and how our habits and how our choices are manifesting in our life through reflection, which is what meditation is, and most healing work is reflection, then we can represent ourselves in each situation, in each day, in each moment, and decide, what is my dream for this?

[00:40:17] And I teach my students, use your heart to feel what you know, because the heart always knows the truth that the head can't find, because the head is knife. It's always cutting everything to pieces. That's how the mind works.

[00:40:33] The alchemist called the mind the logos cutter because the conscious mind cannot deal with holes. How do you think about God? It's too big. So you have to think about math, or about art, or about what you're going to put in your cake, or how you're going to cut this piece of meat without getting your finger cut.

[00:40:54] But the heart really is much more like the right brain hemisphere. So I learned through a very, very powerful student I had once that blew my mind with her energy field-- when I saw her energy field, I was stunned. I was just shocked. I was so shocked. I pulled her aside into my office and said, I got to talk to you. What the hell have you been doing?

[00:41:20] She was this beautiful, little, tiny woman from Singapore who flew all around the world to take a course with me. And she had the most mind bogglingly clear, beautiful energy field in the shape of a gorgeous diamond. And it shined light through the whole room.

[00:41:37] I'm clairvoyant. I could see this. And she was shocked that I could see it. And she said, " Paul, I have a master I've been working with for three years, and he's only got one practice. Would you like me to share it with you?" I said, "Absolutely." So she said, "Can you give me a piece of paper and a pencil?"

[00:41:57] And I had an art book, so I tore a 11 by 14-page out and gave her a pencil. And she wrote it in Chinese and then she translated in English. It's on my wall. I'll show it to you when you come to my place. And it says, "Use your heart to feel what you know." She said, "That's the only practice that my master gives us.

[00:42:16] "And he just keeps reminding us, use this thing, use this thing." And she said, "Whatever you're seeing has happened in three years, because before that I was a lost soul." And then the other question is, what would love do now? If you really want to grow spiritually, your wife's got you pissed off, or your husband's got you pissed off, or your kids are driving you nuts, or someone cuts you off in traffic, or someone rips you off, it's easy to reflexively react, but if we really ask the question, what would love do now? Then we become a living prayer.

[00:42:54] We really embody the prayer. And I'm sad to admit how slowly I've learned to apply what I know mentally, but I've been practicing. And I've managed to make it through hell and back a few times using the things that the monks taught me and the things I'm sharing with you. Sorry for the long answer, but the answer for me is--

[00:43:19] Luke: Oh man, it's beautiful. I love it.

[00:43:21] Paul: For me, I don't think it's worth praying unless you're going to live it, because otherwise it's like the boy that cries wolf. I think he can bore God with all that.

[00:43:33] Luke: Yeah. The same could be said for reading all of history's wisdom in books and never actually applying it into your life.

[00:43:42] Paul: That's how we got to where we're at right now.

[00:43:44] Luke: You end up with a real full head and you're still the same person.

[00:43:47] Paul: Yeah. that's exactly why the world's in the state it's in right now. How many people on the planet know that we've been warring forever, that we've been lying forever? All you got to do is read the Bible. It's a record of how badly people can treat each other.

[00:44:02] And I'm like, "Okay, now that you know what happens when you do that, when are we going to actually try something different?" But this goes back to the fact that I think personally my feeling is, having done a lot of deep healing work with people and devoting my life to really researching these things, not only through intellectual pursuits, but through my inner research, I've come to the conclusion the world is really about a third-grade schoolyard for souls.

[00:44:44] There's myriads of Earths out there or comparable places. One day my soul said to me, if you walked into a third-grade classroom, would you get upset because kids were throwing spit balls at each other and fighting over the hopscotch box? Well, of course, you wouldn't. You're in third grade.

[00:45:07] And that's why the world's like it is. We've got a bunch of third graders that look like adults fighting over the hopscotch box and throwing shit at each other and pulling each other's hair out and blaming everybody else for everything. And that's what the world is. She devotes herself to our childhood.

[00:45:28] Luke: I love that perspective. One of the teachings that has helped me reconcile the nature of this realm and just the extreme polarity of this duality was something David Hawkins used to talk about I'm sure you're familiar with.

[00:45:45] Paul: I'm familiar with. Yeah, I've read his books. Power vs. Force.

[00:45:48] Luke: Yeah. I used to go to his lectures and stuff. It was just one of my favorite messengers ever, but people would ask him questions about, well, I feel like I need to change the world and get involved in activism. We've got to change the world.

[00:46:03] Paul: Mm-hmm.

[00:46:04] Luke: And he would just laugh and say, "Listen, man. God created this world exactly how it is. It doesn't need to be changed. It's perfect in all of its horrors." And the third-grade example you gave, if the purpose of this world is the soul's evolution, you need the contrast. Otherwise there's nowhere to work from to get to. If we were all graduates, then we wouldn't need to be here.

[00:46:31] We would just be in some other-- I'm ad-libbing now, but my interpretation of that that's helped me find some reconciliation with the human experience and how fucking hard it can be for me and everyone in their own way, is that if there wasn't a purpose to the suffering that we can potentially experience here, then we would just be floating off in some etheric realm as a disembodied element of consciousness or wherever we go from here.

[00:46:59] Paul: You'd be a bliss bunny.

[00:47:00] Luke: Right.

[00:47:01] Paul: You'd be Adam and Eve again. That's exactly what the story really means. Interestingly, somebody once was in a lecture with Paramahansa Yogananda, and the guy stood up and interrupted and was very upset with what he was saying. And he said to Yogananda, and I'm paraphrasing because it's been years since I read this. And the monks told me about this too.

[00:47:29] And the man said "How can you say that God is love with all the abuse and the wars and the death?" He just went on a real rant for Yogananda. And Yogananda waited till he had outgassed and he very calmly and politely asked him, he said, "Sir, do you like movies?" and the man said, yes. He says, "Do you like a little shoot them up now and then?" The man said, yes. He said, "How about plot twists?" "Yes." Do you like some steamy sex now and then?" The man said, yes. And Yogananda said, "So does God."

[00:48:08] Luke: Oh, man, that's beautiful.

[00:48:11] Paul: And Jung says something that parallels that, and so do many others, by the way. I've gotten loads of great books by very deep people. But Jung said something that's saying the same thing but a different way. Jung says, "When the Christian Christ created Jesus Christ, he cast a light so bright they had to create Satan to counterbalance him."

[00:48:38] And that's a profound truth. The bigger you make a positive, the more you have to make a negative. Or you create something that's not real. In Spirit Gym, I symbolize God as zero because zero symbolically is the only thing that's no thing and everything at the same time.

[00:49:04] One of the points I make to people, I learned from studying Stephen Hawking, and he said something that really stuck with me because it helped me substantiate what I call my God model-- because Stephen Hawking, Paul Dirac, and several others have actually calculated that if you do the mass of the universe in calculations, such as Paul Dirac did protons versus antiprotons, the equation always comes out to zero.

[00:49:30] Stephen Hawking said, "Somehow, miraculously, the total mass of the universe is zero," when you do gravity or antigravity, but there's lots of ways they do this, which is quite a mystery.

[00:49:44] Now, as a side note, Stephen Hawking said, "See, there is no need for God. Nothing at all equates to nothing. I'm listening to this cause I saw him do this on a television announcement. I'm like, "Oh my God, you've just identified what God is and you don't even realize it. You're so smart, you're blind."

[00:50:05] But what Stephen Hawking said, he said, "Let me give you an example of how the universe works." He said, "Look, if I hand you a shovel and you dig a three-foot hole, what's right beside you? A three-foot pile." He said, "So everything in creation that we call the universe is borrowed from zero and ultimately it all has to go back to zero."

[00:50:25] And this is why everything changes in time. This is why Buddha said the only universal law is impermanence. You put a steel fence post in your backyard, come back in a couple of hundred years, and you'll be lucky if you find any dust there. It'll go away. It'll erode.

[00:50:47] So if you study the Hindu religion, you look at the yugas, the cycles, you got the gold age, bronze age, you got the Kali Yuga, etc., they also show that. And if you understand what the word aum_ means, A-U-M_a, I awaken, springtime. U, I'm dreaming, summertime. M, I'm falling asleep, fall, underscore, winter, end of cycle. And everything in the created universe follows that cycle, right from a subatomic particle to the very breath you breathe to a year, to your life, to childhood, adulthood, elderly, and death.

[00:51:36] And I've got whole sections on that in the Spirit Gym training to show people, you need to understand aum is a master cycle. And in Hinduism, they teach you that universes come into being, they age, and go out of being. And there's a cycle of Brahma, or a cycle of Vishnu. There's different ways of expressing it. But anyhow, sorry if I got a long ways from your prayer question there, but I think really what I'm trying to say is--

[00:52:06] Luke: It's an infinite question with an infinite answer.

[00:52:10] Paul: Yeah, it is. It is.

[00:52:11] Luke: I don't work within the confines of linear time.

[00:52:13] Paul: I don't either.

[00:52:14] Luke: When someone sits down, before we start, you just say, "Do you have to be anywhere?" And if I get a, "No, I'm good," then there's no breaks. We're just going.

[00:52:21] Paul: Yeah, yeah.

[00:52:22] Luke: And this conversation too, has been in the works in one form or another since around 2019, when we first got in touch. So I have a lot of questions packed in, and you have a lot of answers. But on that note, you want to take a break in a minute?

[00:52:37] Paul: Can we get a smoke?

[00:52:38] Luke: We can also just bring it up here and do--

[00:52:40] Paul: Yeah, let's do it.

[00:52:41] Luke: All right. You want to take a break and then we'll jump back in?

[00:52:44] Paul: I'll go make it and bring it up here if you want.

[00:52:46] Luke: Yeah.

[00:52:46] Paul: I'm having too much fun. I just enjoy my smoke, and I'm a bit tired, so it helps keep my brain turned on.

[00:52:51] Luke: Let's do it. Okay, so we took a little bag break. By the way, if people hear this sound, do not be alarmed. We're enjoying ourselves over here.

[00:53:12] Paul: It's the sound of love.

[00:53:13] Luke: It is. So where we were before we took a break is a perfect segue into the topic of forgiveness, which is something I've really been working on. And when you talked about that practice of what would love do. And I think about that all the time and practice that.

[00:53:36] And sometimes the way I play a game with myself, as I imagine an enlightened master that I might've witnessed or spent time with, or just what would one of them do if I could imagine someone who's just completely unattached to this realm and a bit closer to the Godhead?

[00:53:51] And it's been a great guide for me because you always have a choice. If you have enough self-awareness, you could respond. You could react. There's a number of different energies you could use in however you respond to react. And I'm getting pretty good at it, coming from a place of love, and it always feels better to find peace than victory in a conflict. But that brings me to victory.

[00:54:14] Paul: Victory means there's a loser.

[00:54:16] Luke: Yeah, exactly.

[00:54:17] Paul: Just on that note, a long time ago, I realized that competition is great, but it also produces losers, and that can set people back if they're not managed effectively by a skilled coach. And so I developed a concept that we need to switch from winners and losers to winners and learners.

[00:54:40] So like when I was a competitive fighter, the first guy that I wanted to hug is anyone that could beat me, because I know how hard I train and how seriously I took my competitive drive and commitment to the sport. So if someone could beat me, I knew that was who was my next teacher. They were showing me where I had holes in my game or weak spots.

[00:55:05] And the same with triathlon, same with motocross, same with stock car racing, all of these things that I got involved in, I realized my biggest competition is not the other guy. It's myself. I'm always trying to better my last performance, and they're giving me a chance to inspire me to do it.

[00:55:23] So I've always told my students, try to think of winners and learners and get rid of the concept of losers. Because being a loser, a person can actually believe that, and it's a form of trauma. But if we realize that we're learning, then it inspires you to grow.

[00:55:43] Luke: Beautiful, beautiful. Thank you for that. So on the topic of forgiveness, let's see if I can make this as concise as possible. I had a general understanding, somewhat experiential, definitely intellectual, of a model of consciousness that is God expressing itself infinitely. And as you said, in order for it to exist, there has to be something else.

[00:56:13] So it has to create this web of extremity that we call this duality. So toying with this model and understanding it. In 2020, when the darkness we were talking about a moment ago started to really emerge in terms of just these institutions and people working in the shadows, it was a bit alarming to me, even though I was already aware of some of that,

[00:56:39] Paul: Me too.

[00:56:40] Luke: But I went and had my first 5-MeO-DMT experience during that period of time. And in a very experiential way, in a beautiful way, I got to experience as close as I ever have to the totality of consciousness itself.

[00:56:57] And that's where I really got-- it's almost ineffable, but I'm sure you understand the cosmic joke of my limited perspective and how I judge things as good or bad, light, dark, evil, etc. And what I saw in that experience was I saw the beauty in God wanting to express itself and how much perfection was in its expression in the people that I perceived to be evil at the time, which would have been a Bill Gates, a Fauci. You could go on and on.

[00:57:31] And I found this forgiveness and compassion for those beings because I was truly able to see them as just perfect actors in this drama of God's expression. And I found a lot of peace in that and have since. It's been really helpful for me to just reconcile the way the world is, is this third-grade purgatorial realm.

[00:57:53] However, and this is where I want to get to forgiveness, I interviewed a woman a few weeks ago named Anika Lucas, who was a long-time childhood victim of like satanic ritual abuse, just unfathomable darkness. And her expression of forgiveness and her depth of forgiveness was just staggering to me.

[00:58:18] And I experienced, I would say, comparatively more minor forms of similar types of abuse. And throughout my life, of course, these are things in my shadow that I've really had to work on, core wounds and whatnot. And I found it relatively easy to forgive the people behind those things because I've seen that they-- it's like, forgive them for they don't know what they do.

[00:58:47] They fell prey to the temptation of evil through their own naivete, stupidity, blind spots, lack of guidance, whatever it was. So it's like, that's pretty easy for me. I can almost forgive any human being for anything. But when I started to realize that consciousness or God expressing itself as these extremes of unconditional, pure love and just abject darkness and evil, which affected me as a little boy, I find as I work toward that forgiveness, there's a hierarchy of, well, who and what is actually responsible?

[00:59:22] And I've struggled a bit with being able to forgive God for creating this extreme duality of which I was an innocent victim. Leaving any karmic implications aside, because I don't know what happened before this lifetime, but in this lifetime, I didn't have it coming. I didn't put myself in a position to be harmed. I was just harmed. And so I'm really working on, and I'm just being very vulnerable and real here, because you're here and this is what I'd be asking you if there were no microphones on.

[00:59:58] Paul: This is what I do with my patients and clients all day.

[01:00:00] Luke: If you get where I'm going with this, I've hit the ceiling of my capacity for forgiveness because where it's led me is God itself. Forgiving the actors is like low hanging fruit and relatively easy for me to do.

[01:00:14] Paul: Yeah. Well, that's a really common reason that people become atheists, by the way. That's the most common reason. Research on atheists, interestingly, shows that one of the most common themes amongst atheists is that they had very painful, problematic relationships with their father.

[01:00:36] And we have a patriarchal vision of God in the Christian culture, so we have been programmed to perceive God as this man in the sky that's watching every time you masturbate and keeping score and will burn you in hell for this or that. And so it leads people to literally hating God.

[01:01:03] The problem is that is a very, very unenlightened view of God. And I will segue my answer for you by saying, have you ever heard of Shankara? Well, I highly recommend you read the book, The Crest-jewel of Discrimination by Shankara. Shankara was a very enlightened Hindu philosopher sage that at eight years of age began walking on foot around India, challenging any of the famous gurus to a debate, and never lost a debate in his life.

[01:01:37] And he died at age 33, but he was absolutely very enlightened from an early age. And Shankara said something profound, which I'm using to begin the dialogue to answer this issue. Shankara said, "No man can understand scripture until he's enlightened. And when he's enlightened, he does not need scripture."

[01:02:00] So the question I have is, how many Sunday schools pastors and preachers and clergy are enlightened? Well, almost none. So what you're getting is a very convoluted description of scripture that leads to a lot of polarity. And there's an old saying that's very true. The devil's favorite place to hide is in the church.

[01:02:23] So my first point of the answer is that most of our views about God are based on religious ideology, not based on religious experiences. James Carse, who was one of the best podcasts I ever did in my life, Episode 62, who wrote the book Finite and Infinite Games, which is mind blowingly good, and a very deep, loving, wise man, he wrote a book called The Religious Case Against Belief, which I read thoroughly and took mountains of notes.

[01:02:58] But the point of the book is, you cannot have a religious experience if your ideas about God and religion are based on belief, because all beliefs are beliefs and they're closed systems. All belief systems are closed. And whenever you think you believe something, you stop asking questions, and you're not open to the numinous because you think you already know it.

[01:03:27] And a great highlight for this, if you look at the book, Streams of Wisdom by Dustin DiPerna, which shows how consciousness has evolved over thousands of years and look at structure stages of consciousness, which there's many models for, he makes the point, no Christian ever sees the Buddha in an enlightenment experience.

[01:03:46] What he's saying is that you will only see what your programming contains because God is unconditional. Therefore, there's nothing to see and to objectify. You cannot objectify God. It's impossible to do because God is not a thing. So most people, 85% of the world population claims religious affiliation and the rest of them are agnostics and atheists.

[01:04:12] So what that means is 85% of the people, 85 out of every 100 people walking around, has been programmed largely from childhood to have beliefs about God, which they actually not only believe, but will defend often to the death, which is why religious differences is the number one cause of war throughout the history of human existence.

[01:04:30] So in Spirit Gym and what I teach, and I've explored this very deeply through my whole life of spiritual development, is that we have this idea that God is out there and outside of creation, and that God is somehow a deity that's doing things to us.

[01:04:53] But by definition, God is that for which there is no other. If you have any other, there's no God. This is, for example, right in the Christian Bible. Isaiah 45:7 says, I create the light and the dark, good and evil. I, the Lord, do all these things. The Christians hated that passage so much. About 25 years ago, they started rewriting that, so it doesn't say that anymore.

[01:05:17] But that's probably the most true piece of the Bible there is. So what we have to understand is that God as the source of all that is, and God is the only being that can create and sustain itself, is utterly alone. I've experienced the aloneness of God, and it left me crying for hours and hours in the deepest, most saddest state I've probably ever been second only to my brother's suicide.

[01:05:48] And what I realized is that, a, God's not thinking creation into existence, because if you look at the archetypes of number, which are number of fields, which be a long discussion, but mind is a duality. So before duality, you have unity, which is oneness, which is being itself. So if you go behind one, the principle of the one, you get to zero, which is unconditional love, which is non being.

[01:06:22] If you study Taoism, you'll see that the model that the Taoists show you above the Tai Chi symbol is a dotted circle that's empty. That's non being. They call it Wu Chi. Wu means not. Chi means life. So being is life itself, but above it is not life or no thing. Arthur M. Young, who wrote many excellent books, he's the inventor of the Bell Helicopter, and took his money and started a school for studying consciousness, has his own model in the reflexive universe, but he says something very important.

[01:07:03] He says you have to understand that non being is significant because it is aware of being. Non being is significant because it is aware of being. Being is existence itself. Everything that you're talking about happens in the field of existence. I went deep into meditation, asked my soul to connect me to God consciousness and asked, why all the evil in the world?

[01:07:33] With all the intelligence that you have as God and all the ability you have as God, why do we have to go through all this pain? Why do we have to have all this darkness in the world and all these terrible things? And the voice that came to me inside of me said, "You must understand, Paul, evil upholds the good. To the very degree you have good, you must have its counterbalance. And without evil, there would be no one who could recognize what good is."

[01:08:12] If you look at the word evil, it's the word live spelled backwards, E-V-I-L is L-I-V-E backwards. So evil is to live backwards. A moral is a code of conduct that is life affirmative, and evil is any code of conduct or belief or behavior that is antagonistic to life itself. And it is life itself that God dreams into existence and pours itself into so fully. That God can actually create the illusion of other without which there can be no love.

[01:08:45] There has to be a lover and a beloved. So love turns out to be the basis of relationship. So God dreams itself into existence as a myriad of beings, as an infinite number of beings with which it can then love. I asked God, "If you're unconditional love, how is it that we have all these conditions here?" And God said to me, "I create conditions so that I can love myself unconditionally."

[01:09:14] So the point I'm making is there is no God out there that's not here. You mentioned the word Godhead earlier. I didn't interrupt you, but what I wanted to say is you're in the Godhead. If you think of an artesian well, or a hot spring bubbling up, that would be the Godhead, and what's bubbling out of it is what we call existence, or the universe, what I call Spirit Gym.

[01:09:37] That's why I say God is the mythmaker that plays both sides but chooses neither, and choice is always left to you. Now I'm speaking in metaphor, because you can only talk about God in metaphor. God does not want to be loved artificially. God wants to be loved because you love God.

[01:09:58] If I gave you a blow-up doll, would you really fall in love with it? If I gave you a robot that has a wet vagina and says, come fuck me, would you really be excited about that? Would you feel that loved? I doubt it. So evil is the necessary presence of choice to not love. Evil is God's reflection. When you look in your rearview mirror, it says something on the bottom of the mirror. What does it say?

[01:10:37] Luke: Objects in the mirror may be closer than they appear.

[01:10:40] Paul: Right. And then if you look in the mirror, what happens to your right and left?

[01:10:48] Luke: They get reversed.

[01:10:49] Paul: They get reversed. So because we're in a material universe and consciousness is looking at itself in the divine mirror, then what happens is we fall in love with the reflection, and that's what materialism is. It's falling in love with the reflection. That's what narcissism is, falling in love with the reflection.

[01:11:09] But as I tell my patients, remember the person you see in the mirror can't brush your teeth. The person you see in the mirror can't make better choices in relationships. The person you see in the mirror can't make good decisions about how you manage money. So if you fall in love with the person in the mirror and you forget who's looking, you're going to have a lot of problems in your life.

[01:11:35] Luke: That's great. I like that.

[01:11:37] Paul: There's more.

[01:11:39] Luke: I bet there is.

[01:11:40] Paul: Okay. So the thing that people ultimately will come to understand is that God as non being is not something that you can have a relationship with other than the fact that it's just unadulterated consciousness. It's unconditional love. There is no condition there. So there's nothing to know there.

[01:12:03] There's nothing to identify there. It dreams itself into existence. And in order to know itself, it must try all possibilities. And so there's an infinite range of the capacity for love and there's an infinite range of the capacity for evil. But when we see and experience evil, it is our awakening to recognize that it is reminding us that we can either look in the mirror, that we can either choose to not love, or we can choose to look at what's looking in the mirror and realize that it is God looking through us.

[01:12:43] What's looking through your eyes at me is looking through my eyes at you. This is why when people used to ask St. Francis of Assisi, how do I find God? How do I find God? He said, "What you are looking for is what's looking." That's God. God's looking for itself. God's looking for relationships. God's looking for love.

[01:13:06] But God cannot possibly know itself as only being the good guy. God cannot have the choice to love or not love unless there is the choice not to love. God cannot know its potential as a destroyer unless there's evil. And if you don't have destruction, you cannot have creation because all acts of creation require transformation.

[01:13:33] The analogy I give my students is, you don't think twice to eat a chicken or a cow. But imagine being a chicken, knowing it's about to get its head chopped off, its feathers plucked off, gutted, and then you're going to stick it in your mouth, grind it to bits, and drop what's left into a vat of hydrochloric acid. Does that sound loving to you or evil? You're just so used to doing these acts of evil that you only think it's evil when someone's doing this shit to you.

[01:14:02] And this is what the ancient symbol of the ouroboros is telling us. God is all alone. God has nothing to eat but itself. God has nothing to create but itself. If the snake overeats its tail, it ceases to exist. If it doesn't eat, it ceases to live. So the ancient ouroboros is a Gnostic symbol that's telling you a profound truth about God.

[01:14:26] What is the snake? The snake is spirit itself. If you study the history of the worship of God, you will find that the first thing people worshipped because they thought it was God was trees. Because they found that life couldn't exist without trees. Trees gave us food, they gave us shelter, they gave us materials to build with, and they were the home to insects, they were the home to animals, and they thought that that must be God.

[01:14:55] The next thing that they thought was God was the lingam and the yoni, the sex organs, because they saw that whenever these two got together, new life was created. So they thought, well, that must be God. The next thing they thought was God was the snake, because everywhere they looked, they saw fire moved in these snake-like patterns.

[01:15:19] They saw mirages in the desert moved in these snake-like patterns. Whenever they could see energy or see it clairvoyantly, it moved in these snake-like patterns. They looked at from the mountaintops and saw that all rivers and streams moved in these snake-like patterns. So you look at a dune and you see the waves on the dune move like a snake.

[01:15:39] So they thought, well, God must be a snake. So you see, there's a whole long period of snake worship. And you look at temples, like you go to Mexico and they have rattlesnakes and have snakes all over these temples. But people don't realize that that is the movement of spirit. Spirit is a wave.

[01:15:55] In quantum physics, you have the wave dimension, which is the implicate order of David Bohm, which is the unseen order that is creating the physical world, which is the spiritual world. The spirit realm is the creation realm that manifests itself in physical form.

[01:16:12] Every wave has a positive cycle and a negative cycle. Every three-foot hole creates a three-foot pile. So if you call good the positive cycle, then it has to go through its return cycle in equal measure, which is why when we also look honestly at what people do in the name of the good-- see, Bill Gates thinks what he's doing is very good. He's convinced of it, obviously.

[01:16:42] He said right on TED in front of millions of people, "I am going to reduce the world population with vaccines," and people did not even flinch. They didn't ask him a question. Right in front of him, he told them he was going to kill them with vaccines, and they didn't even think twice about it. That's how asleep people are.

[01:17:01] But here's the point. Have you ever been on a street corner where someone's shouting out Bible passages and telling you if you don't take Jesus as your savior, you're going to burn in hell?

[01:17:11] Luke: Yeah.

[01:17:12] Paul: That's called righteousness. That's called fanaticism. There's a lot of people that think that's really good. So when people do evil things and justify it in the name of the good, then you actually see that what is good can be just as evil as what others think is evil. And anyone that disagrees with them, they think is evil. And Christianity has a long history of exterminating anybody that doesn't agree with their philosophy, and so does Islam.

[01:17:40] And Buddhism has a long history of battles inside of Buddhism and with other religions. And Hinduism has a long history of battling with Muslims, and so does Sikhism. All of them do. Because the good is willing to do evil to defend itself against a belief system. So I've just said a few things. What I've said is there is no God out there because that God's not weighable, knowable, or measurable.

[01:18:10] Love is the verb of God. And love is always life affirmative. So to the degree that you're practicing the good, what you're doing is life affirmative. That doesn't exclude other groups by race, creed, or color. Consciousness can be defined as a psychic substance produced not blindly, but in living awareness of opposites.

[01:18:34] So if you look at everything we've just said, we're talking about opposites, and without those opposites, Luke, you would not be aware of anything. And I'll ask you a question. If you look back on your life and say, what have I learned most from birthday parties, happy days, and good sex, or the days the shit hit the fan, or the teachers that were the hardest on me, and the challenging experiences in my life, or even the things that at the time I thought was evil, which would it be?

[01:19:06] Luke: The suffering and all of it has been and continues to be the biggest catalyst.

[01:19:13] Paul: That why I call it the pain--

[01:19:15] Luke: That's what's funny about my question and your beautiful multitude of depth of answers, is my soul knows, my intellect knows that when I was victimized by what I would just label as evil, that those very experiences are specifically the experiences that have led me to my relationship with God, to my capacity to surrender to God, the very clear objective understanding that the more I do that, the more ease I have in my life, the more love I experience, the more love I'm able to share.

[01:20:02] So the irony is not lost on me that some of these painful experiences in my life where I interface directly with what I would call evil, ultimately were the catalyst to lead me as far as I could possibly get in the other direction toward love.

[01:20:17] Paul: Yes.

[01:20:17] Luke: So it's like if those experiences weren't there, would I just been floating in a non-beingness?

[01:20:24] Paul: And you would not evolve, which means God itself would not evolve.

[01:20:28] Luke: Right.

[01:20:29] Paul: Remember, that which is unconditional cannot know itself. To know something is a condition. This is why I say God creates conditions to love itself unconditionally. There's only one medicine for evil, unfortunately. And if you know of a better one, I want you to tell me.

[01:20:48] The only medicine I've ever found, as hard as it is for me to swallow at times, is love. Jesus said, "Love thy enemy as thyself." That's Christianity. I'd like to see it. I keep telling the Christians, show me the practices of Jesus. I would love to find a Christian that can do what Jesus taught us to do.

[01:21:13] If someone hits you, turn the other cheek. I have a very hard time doing that. I'm not evolved enough yet to do that all the time. When all this stuff with the pandemic came down, the paratrooper in me was having a real spiritual struggle because I felt that I could see the evil clear enough that it was my obligation as a man who took an oath to protect this enemy against enemies foreign and domestic as a paratrooper to go out and take care of this problem.

[01:21:47] And I began having conversations with others capable of doing that and finding out why is this not happening. So the whole last four and a half years put me really into a legitimate test of my own spirituality because the warrior inside of me wants to fight fire with fire. But when you chop a head off a snake like that, it just grows another one because that's part of the necessary process for all of us to wake up to what love really is and our responsibility to choose to love or to not love.

[01:22:30] You can't objectify God. You cannot use nouns to describe God. It's impossible to do. All words can only talk about. The word about means around. The only way to penetrate God is with love. And the most profound experiences I've had of God have all been intense experiences of love, every one of them.

[01:23:00] It's very hard for me, at this stage of my development, to watch people die from what's been going on for the last four and a half years and feel love. I have to really sit in meditation. And studying the teachings of Ra in the Law of One helped me a lot to understand the service to self-path and realizing that souls come into the world on the service to self-path specifically to stimulate us to grow, to rototill the garden, so to speak.

[01:23:39] Steiner speaks of Lucifer and Ahriman, and I have a very comprehensive podcast. If you haven't heard it, it'll be quite a mind bender for you. It's called Lucifer-Christ-Ahriman. It was the most listened to of all my podcasts in 2023. And it's a special four-hour edition where I share the teachings of Rudolf Steiner on what Lucifer is, what Lucifer's function is, what Ahriman is, what Ahriman's function is.

[01:24:04] And Steiner teaches that the Christ principle is the balancing force between these two necessary polarities. Lucifer means the light bringer. Lucifer wants us to get out of the world. And all the Eastern religions are Luciferian religions. And this is one of the reasons in Hinduism they talk about maya. It's all maya. It's all illusion. Just get out of it.

[01:24:29] And so you see yogis rowing off into caves and getting out of the world, but Kabir said that's not real spiritual practice. Steiner said the same thing. Kabir said if you want to really have a true spiritual practice, get married, get a job, and practice loving in the world, because that's the only place you can make the world better.

[01:24:50] Lao Tzu said if you want to change the world, change yourself. Ahriman is all about the material form. So the function of Lucifer actually is to let us think and give us the ability to create illusions. Lucifer is the master of illusions. What does the word maya mean? Illusion.

[01:25:11] But remember, if God is unconditional, which can only be symbolized as zero, then everything you see in creation must be a virtual reality, because if your mother is a zero, then you must be a virtual one. So if God is the source, then all things are a virtual reality. But to address this issue, Arthur M. Young makes a very clear statement. He says, "It is incorrect to think of maya as an illusion."

[01:25:39] And many people jump into religious ideas that cause them to check out of the world. Think of Timothy Leary. Tune in, turn on, and drop out. That's very Luciferian right there. Drop out of the world. Arthur M. Young says, "Let me clear this up for you. Maya means the illusion." Spirit Gym is what I call that illusion. It is the only place God can know and experience itself.

[01:26:09] But ultimately, because God is unconditional love, the entire existence is a virtual expression of the divine because it's the only way that it can know itself. And this is why I say God creates conditions so that it can love itself unconditionally. But in my deepest, most profound experiences of meditation, tai chi, or plant medicines, I have gone into non being and didn't know I was alive. Didn't know anything.

[01:26:39] Sometimes I become pure awareness. And it's just like light, the light of God shining in every direction with great luminosity and intensity, and there's not a thought to be had. I don't even know I'm alive. All I know is that the intensity of the love is so potent, it feels like I'm going to explode and vaporize into even yet further emptiness, which can actually be complete and utter death to the ego. And people do die in that state. They do die. I've seen it happen. And I won't go too far into that because that's another conversation

[01:27:19] So ultimately, I'm with you. It is hard to forgive. But what helps me is to understand that it's actually a necessary experience because God cannot possibly know itself as only the good. And because we have to have a mind to navigate reality, because the vastness of reality is literally infinite.

[01:27:45] So if we don't have a mind that can cut out slices of reality that we can relate to, for example, how would it change your relationship with your wife if you tried to love every single woman in the world the same way you love your wife? What would it mean to have a wife at that point? You would be so lost in all these women that it would take the significance of that intimate partnership and disperse it so thoroughly that there would be no meaning to the intimacy and the growth potentials in that relationship.

[01:28:29] So you see, we have to have a condition by which we can grow consciously. And what would it mean to love your wife and have fidelity if there was no possibility for infidelity? It wouldn't mean anything. Why did Jesus say, if someone hits you, turn the other cheek? Because he's saying the best way to confront evil is to forgive and to accept it. And I'm not by any means trying to make anyone think that I can do that. I can't.

[01:29:02] When you really understand what a true spiritual master is, you see what's possible. That's what the Buddha taught us. That's what Lao Tzu talks. Now, whether these people are real or not, because I could give you-- we could have a 20-hour conversation on that because I spent my life investigating this. That's not the important point.

[01:29:21] It doesn't matter how the teachings get here. When you see the truth, use your heart to feel what you know, and you'll know it's true. The point is that there's plenty of examples for us to follow, and there's people that are more evolved than us, all around us at all times. If you really want them, you've got Eckhart Tolle. You've got Thich Nhat Hanh. He passed away, but whether they're on the other side or here, the teachings are here. Buddha, Krishna, Jesus, the list is so long.

[01:29:56] I know lots of people more enlightened than me, and I look up to them. I have pictures of them, I'll show you in my office, of the people who've touched my life so deeply that every morning or most mornings in my prayers, I blow smoke to them and thank them.

[01:30:10] I've got shaman. I've got Jean Gebser. I've got Arthur M. Young. I've got Carl Jung on my wall. I got Steiner on my wall. I've got the Buddha on my wall. These are the people that I hope to grow into one day. They're the ones that inspire me. And it's the people like Bill Gates that show me where I'm at in Spirit Gym in my own growth.

[01:30:38] It doesn't make it easier. And these are very, very hard problems to solve. But my soul told me that as a soul evolves, it chooses incarnations in which there is more and more challenge. And the analogy my soul gave me says, "Paul, you can deadlift 500 pounds, but would you ask some first timer in the gym to try that?" Of course you wouldn't.

[01:31:06] You'd hurt them if they even tried to move a bar that heavy. But you go to the gym, you have to add weight to that bar to grow. And as we evolve as souls, we come into life, and we choose paths that are progressively more challenging so we can grow more into the truth of what we really are.

[01:31:27] I have a real hard time with all the starving people in the world. There's over 2 billion people that don't even have food, water, and the basic essentials for life right now. And I live a beautiful lifestyle. I eat beautiful food. I drive a nice car. I live like you live.

[01:31:48] And every day I have to walk around asking myself, how can I continue to do that knowing that there's all these people starving right now with bugs in their eyes and distended bellies and diarrhea and parasite infections? And it was so disturbing to me because I'm like, I'm doing my best to help all these people here because even people with nice houses and nice cars are just as fucked up as those people, just in a different way.

[01:32:16] And so I said to my soul, "How do I handle this inside of myself? It's so painful. It hurts me every day. And my soul said, "You have to understand something, Paul. Those people, mostly, are the most advanced souls who came to the world to do that." Because there's three things that are very, very hard to do to graduate out of earth school.

[01:32:38] One of them is you've got to get rid of your desire for sex, because it keeps you attracted to the body. Two, you've got to get rid of your desire for food, because as long as you crave food, you'll need a body. Yogananda says that when you die, if you so much as crave a strawberry milkshake, you'll reincarnate to get one.

[01:32:57] So first you got to get rid of your desire for sex, then you got to get rid of your desire for food. And the final is you got to get rid of your desire to be in a body, which is why the alchemist said, and Steiner said, in order for you to be conscious in the afterlife, you must engage spiritual practices.

[01:33:13] Because for each of your senses, in your physical body, in each of your organs in your physical body, through spiritual practice, you develop a spiritual copy of that organ, a light version of it. You develop clairvoyance. You develop clairaudience. You develop clairsentience. You develop all the functions of the liver so that when you die, you are now conscious in a light body.

[01:33:38] But you have to build your light body through the conscious application of spiritual practices because just as a toddler, you've got to learn to control your physical body, you've got to learn to control your light body. Steiner says the first thing that happens when you die is you find yourself bouncing around the universe at the speed of thought.

[01:33:56] And that keeps going on until you realize it's you that's doing it. He also says, when you die, you'll find yourself surrounded by people just like you, and you'll stay with them until you're absolutely sure of what you'll never do again. So, in order for us to be conscious, we're here in earth school, we have to learn to love, and we have to learn to manage the forces of evil, and we have to be honest about how much evil we create.

[01:34:28] And a lot of us have justified our evil and habituated our evil to the point that we're numb to it. If you really look at what evil is, and you look honestly and say, where have I done things that are evil? I could write a 1600-page book just on what I can remember. But then again, it comes to another conundrum is how do you justify what is or isn't evil? Because now you're in a state of relativity.

[01:34:55] That's the problem with the mind. It can relativize everything. So it becomes a very, very tricky thing. But ultimately, to help myself, I basically summarize evil as, that which is not life affirmative. So my long answer and my short answer is it's very hard. And my dream, if there's anything I can share with you, Luke, is that whenever you see evil to the degree that makes you upset at God, have absolute empathy and compassion because it's God that's trapped in it.

[01:35:43] And most people that do evil are the products of families that were very painful experiences. And just like there's no such thing as a wounded parent, there's no such thing as a parent that's not wounded. Any parent that hurts their child is a wounded parent. So just like we have a lot of problems with violence in families, and I suffered a lot of it, if you look at the work of Bessel van der Kolk, you'll see the percentages of children that are violently and sexually abused.

[01:36:20] It's very high. It's 50-plus percent. So when you realize that it's the parents that were abused that are unconsciously abusing their children sexually abusing them, physically abusing, most of us would say that's evil. If people saw how my stepfather treated me-- there was hospital visits. There was things that happened in my family that are so intense. I cannot tell them to people for fear that it might wound them.

[01:36:48] My brother committed suicide to get away from the pain because he didn't know any other way to heal it. What led to my brother killing himself led me to realizing what I want to make sure I never do to anybody. So the question is, how much of a sacrifice did my brother make as an offering to the rest of our family, so that we would know how dark love can get?

[01:37:46] This is why in my teachings, I have a love model that begins with sex and violence, love. We're all born by an act of sex. And being a child and coming into a body is often violent. We don't know what hot is until we get burnt. We don't know what sharp is till we get cut. We don't know dogs bite, and when we pull on their whiskers, we find out.

[01:38:06] We come into households where we're supposed to be wanted and loved by our parents, but many of us find out that we're not wanted and loved. So we all have to grow through this unconscious type of love called sex and violence, love. And we mature into realizing we have to be clear by what conditions we can most effectively give and receive love and feel safe doing it.

[01:38:33] So we evolve into conditional love. That's a progressive stage of conscious evolution. Then we get to the point in our life where we look back and look around, and we're mature enough and old enough and have enough life experience that we can see that the people that are doing terrible things to people and justifying it, are doing the same kinds of things that we did when we were unconscious. And we can have empathy and compassion for them.

[01:39:05] So the next stage is empathetic and compassionate love. We can see people that are stealing things and lying. They're all doing things that we once did until we grew up spiritually and realized the ramifications of those things, and so ultimately conditional love grows to empathy and compassion.

[01:39:25] And empathy means to feel, and compassion means to understand. So it takes tremendous courage to really feel how willing God is to identify the truth of itself, to experience itself. And when we love empathetically and compassionately, with enough honesty, we begin to have experiences of unconditional love. We begin to have mystical experiences. We begin to have union experiences.

[01:39:55] And I've been blessed to have many of them, sometimes just spontaneously. The first one was when my first child was coming out the birth canal. As his head came out of his mother's vagina, I just turned 18 years old. I was blown into a complete union with the universe. It shocked the hell out of me. I became one with everything. It probably lasted about five or six minutes, I would imagine.

[01:40:21] And I was watching my child be born, yet at the same time I was completely and utterly stunned. I was shocked. I didn't know how to contextualize that experience. But God starts to let you see more and more of the truth of it as we polish the mirror of the heart.

[01:40:46] The Sufis are all about polishing the mirror of the heart. On a podcast I just did recently, somebody asked me, "Paul, what is your spiritual philosophy?" And I said, "I will quote something profound from Sufism, which is, as you know, the mystical branch of Islam." The first principle of Sufism is there is no God but God. I worship every one and everything. That's my spiritual philosophy. There is no God but God. There's nothing here but God. If God is real, then this is God.

[01:41:25] I tell my students, "If God's cookie dough, then everything you see around you is some variation of cookie dough." You understand the analogy?

[01:41:33] Luke: Yeah.

[01:41:34] Paul: God is intelligent energy. The word information means to put energy into formation. When you realize even the second law of thermodynamics, I believe it says, energy produced cannot be destroyed, only transformed. Because we are intelligent energy manifest as information, which is God learning about itself, we cannot die. We can only be transformed, and as consciousness evolves, the soul evolves.

[01:42:06] We choose better. We need less polarized lessons as we get to the point where we really truly realize what we are. But then we get to the point where we can graduate. Different models say different things. Steiner says when you graduate out of the earth plane, you can become an angel.

[01:42:31] And the function of an angel is to guide other beings into their divinity. And in Steiner's model, there's nine hierarchies of angels going all the way up to the top, which is the closest to God, Elohim, etc.

[01:42:46] But he says, "Ultimately, all humanity is going to become the 10th hierarchy of angels." And there will be other beings below us that we will then guide up into their angelic expression. And what is an angel? It's the flow of God consciousness, anthropomorphized as something that looks like a human being so that we can relate to it.

[01:43:11] But really, an angel is spirit embodied in a way that the psyche can relate to it. So Luke, what you're touching on is probably the fundamental reason for religion. It's the fundamental reason for spirituality. And it's the fundamental lesson that God teaches itself in order to understand, love, care for, and evolve itself.

[01:43:43] And I don't know of a more challenging, more profound way to grow consciousness and grow spiritually than to grow spiritually than learn how to forgive. Because if you have all the money in the world and all the power in the world and all the anything in the world, but you haven't learned to forgive yet, everything that you have will ultimately destroy you, won't it? Isn't that a paradox?

[01:44:11] Luke: Yeah, yeah.

[01:44:12] Paul: You can have everything in the universe, but without forgiveness, it will destroy you.

[01:44:17] Luke: Yeah. So true.

[01:44:19] Paul: That's the only way I can reconcile it. So that's my answer to your challenging question.

[01:44:25] Luke: Beautiful, man. All right. I got another one for you. Ready?

[01:44:29] Paul: Yeah.

[01:44:30] Luke: So this one may or may not be as deep as that one. It actually ties into death in a way. A couple of days ago, we sent our cat on cosmic vacation. He was an older cat and his quality of life had diminished to the point where he couldn't walk and so on.

[01:44:48] So I had a really beautiful ceremony with my wife, Alyson, in the backyard, and it's been an ongoing ceremony and relationship with him, his spirit, and with the coming and going of energy as you described. And my wife wrote that book, Animal Power, that we gave you a copy of.

[01:45:11] And so it's been interesting in my relationship with her and her shamanic gifts and just the way she moves in the world. Her relationship with animals and with trees and the earth and all of the elements is just different than mine. And so the way she gets messages to write a book about these archetypes of the animals and their spirits, it's not that I don't believe in it, I just don't have the same experience of it.

[01:45:39] So it breeds curiosity. But in moving with our cat in the way that we did and just being with his essence as it transition forms and so on has just reinvigorated my curiosity around the animal kingdom and what it has to teach us. So my question is, what's your relationship with animal spirits and archetypes, and how's that informed your life?

[01:46:06] Paul: I've had a long relationship with them. Until I really began to study, understand power animals through shamanism, I didn't realize that my first power animal came to me when I was approximately eight years of age. And I will describe what happened to you. I've always had a natural affinity for bees.

[01:46:32] I've just always had this deep love of bees. Why? I don't know. Just as a kid, and it used to really upset me when people would hit bees and swing at bees. And I would always tell them, don't do that because you're going to piss them off and they're going to hurt you. They're not going to hurt you if you just relax.

[01:46:49] Bees will not hurt you if you just let them taste you and then they realize you're not that tasty, not hanging around too much. Now, if people are afraid of bees, I would warn you not to wear perfumes and things that smell like flowers because that's why they come to you. They think you're a flower.

[01:47:09] Well, we had this property we lived on in Idaho. We had a big pig farm, 10-acre pig farm, and behind the house was an old cabin that had fallen apart. The roof had caved in and me and my brother and my sister, my two sisters, would go treasure hunting in there, just looking around for stuff, digging through stuff and just seeing what we could find.

[01:47:37] And one day we would just go come out of there and we could hear this really strong buzzing in the sound like bees. And we looked up and the sky literally was turning black. There was a massive, massive swarm of bees. It literally was like a cloud of bees and the sound of them was intense. And my brother and my two sisters got scared and they started running.

[01:48:03] And something inside of me felt I would be safe. And they said, "Paul, come on. You're going to get stung." I said, "No, I'm not." They said, "Don't stay there. You're going to get hurt." I'm like, "No, I'm not". So they ran about 30 or 40 or 50 feet away, and I just stood there. And these bees came down, the whole swarm, and landed on everything, including me.

[01:48:25] And I was covered from head to toe in bees. And the only thing that scared me is they kept trying to climb up my nostrils and in my ears. So I was going and shaking my head a little bit, but they were probably on me for, I would imagine, four, five minutes. And it just felt like I was getting tickled everywhere.

[01:48:45] I was about eight, and I knew from that day on that I had some kind of a special relationship with bees. Well, then when I learned later in my life how to identify my power animals, I found that the bee family. You can have a power animal or you can have the whole family. So root chakra, power animal, the root chakra is the first seven years of your life, is the bee family.

[01:49:13] And just to give you an example of how much wisdom you can get from them, when I was going through a midlife crisis at 50, I was really tapped out. I was jerky. I was just dried out and burned out. And I was sitting in the sauna one day, and I just thought, I wonder what my bee power animal family would tell me to do right now.

[01:49:42] So I directed my consciousness down to my root chakra and called up my bee family, and I said, "Dear Bee Family, I need your help." And all of a sudden, in my third eye, two bees appeared to me and they just sat there and looked at me and I just told them what was going on. And I said, "Can you help me?"

[01:50:06] And they did this little dance. They turned and looked at me and streams of blue light, almost violet light, came right out of their eyes, right into my eyes. And inside of my mind, I heard the words, "Paul, no bee can make honey alone." Oh my goodness. So what you're telling me is I need to delegate more and stop trying to do so much myself.

[01:50:36] Essentially, the bees were saying, you cannot save the world, and you're trying to save the world. You're not here to save the world. You're here to help wake people up so that they don't need so much saving. But ultimately, what the bees told me, no bee can make honey alone.

[01:50:57] You have to grow in your relationships and do things with people and get people to learn to work together. And that's how the whole world will heal, is when people start working together. So there's one of many examples I can give you of what a power animal will do for you. Now, did I answer your question?

[01:51:17] Luke: Beginning to, yeah. That's a great example.

[01:51:19] Paul: Do you want to know what they are?

[01:51:22] Luke: Yeah. Okay, we might have an affinity toward a certain member of the animal kingdom, like in your case, the bees. The way I understand this realm through Alyson is that all of these different kind of representatives of God as these animals have their own inherent archetypes or energies that might appear to different people at different times, which I don't disbelieve.

[01:52:00] It's a little bit of a grasp because it's one of those things you can't understand with the mind. That's out of the realm of mind. It's beyond the realm of mind. And so I'm just wondering, I guess, do you think that if you take a shark, or you take, in your case, the bee, or a bear, or any of these other beautiful creatures, that they have any singularity in terms of what they represent as a whole, not just to an individual?

[01:52:29] Paul: What I'll do is I'll share with you what I share with my students in my Power Animal and Spirit Guide workshop, which is my next workshop I'm teaching, which will probably have already been conducted by the time your podcast comes out. But I have a 90-minute video I did on YouTube to help people understand this, so it goes through exactly, but I'll give you a synthesis of what I've learned through my own spiritual investigations and asking my soul for answers on this.

[01:52:57] So first of all, one thing you have to identify is the fact that your DNA is not just a bunch of on, off switches. It's a cosmic antenna that is soaked in water. And there's tons of research out there on this. If you look in quantum biology, for example, you can look in books like DNA: Pirates of the Sacred Spiral. You can look at the work of Fritz-Albert Popp and photon emission. There's a pile of stuff out there.

[01:53:37] But when I investigated this spiritually using my own clairvoyance to look into myself and to talk to my soul about it, my soul said, "What you must understand is that what scientists call junk DNA is not junk DNA." It is the DNA record of the evolution of species on this planet. And each of us has the entire record within every strand of DNA.

[01:54:06] Luke: Ah.

[01:54:07] Paul: And the human body is actually the evolutionary tip of the sword. And the human body contains information from every single living creature, from the single-celled amoeba all the way to hawks, elephants, and beavers, because each animal is a form of living intelligence that is inherent to nature and the human body itself is an expression of exists within and cannot exist without nature.

[01:54:36] So instead of thinking of an animal as this nice little creature, this nice little bee, you have to think of it as a function of nature, a form of an expression of nature, and a means by which nature hold a certain aspect of itself together and then you realize that you are in constant communication with all aspects of nature and that your DNA is in a 24/7, real-time relationship with every living creature in the environment.

[01:55:14] Isn't it a miracle you have 19% of the genes that a banana has? 23% of the genes of a fruit fly. If you go through, there's not much out there you don't have in you. You're 97% chimpanzee for God's sakes.

[01:55:32] So what you think of as yourself as a human being sitting in this beautiful house in this beautiful chair is actually what happens when you take all the intelligence of all the animal species throughout the history of the 4.9 billion years of earth evolution and keep recombining it, recombining it as a form of evolution, but then realize all that software is what's inside of you that allows your heart to beat, your lungs to breathe, your eyes to see, your ears to work, your fingers to work, to make tools, to make love.

[01:56:05] Every single bit of that, you can find the aspects of that. So if you take a book, call it a story, you can break down into chapters, but you can break the chapters down into paragraphs, and you can break the paragraphs down into sentences, and you can break the sentences down into words, and you can break the words down into letters of the alphabet.

[01:56:29] If you take nature and say you've got single-celled organisms here, you've got jellyfish here, you've got such and such a larva here, you've got earthworms here, you've got ticks here, you've got X, Y, and Z, when you go down to the base of nature, you've got letters.

[01:56:57] When you get to more complex organizations, you've got words. Once you, for example, evolve out of the ocean, you start getting sentences, so more complex beings. So when you look at something like a turtle that's amphibious, now you're going to an even more complex creature because it can live in two different environments.

[01:57:24] So now you're going to paragraphs. If you just start going through the kingdom of nature, you see as the evolution of the brain gets bigger, the complexity gets-- a bear is more complex than a beaver, but a beaver is more complex than a salmon. Then you go to chimpanzees, and they get more complex than hyenas.

[01:57:53] So what I'm showing you is we're now building the book of life on earth. So inside of you is the book of life. And when you're having a relationship crisis that breaks your heart, there's a power animal because your psyche actually needs these types of energies in order to recognize itself.

[01:58:18] So I've done a lot of power animal retrieval with my patients for many, many years, and I'll tell you, for example, the most common power animal that comes up when I deal with people that have heart conditions, serious heart health problems, or broken hearts, is the elephant or the dove. Those animals come up very frequently with people that have never met or even known each other. They don't even know I've done all these things.

[01:58:45] One of the most common things that comes up when people have digestive troubles is an alligator, or a crocodile, or the worm, or a snake. So now go look in an anatomy book at a small intestine and then go look at an earthworm. And there you see that sentence in your story.

[01:59:11] What is an elephant? It's a creature that has a real long memory. They say they never forget anything. That's why you never want to hurt an elephant because it'll never forget. So what is it that hurts most people's heart emotionally? Because they can't forgive the people that hurt them.

[01:59:31] So the elephant comes to teach you how to heal your memories and recontextualize them in forgiveness, so that you can evolve. Another common animal that shows up for the heart is the hummingbird. So when you realize that our psychic sense of ourself is also made of these different types of relating, these different ways of relating, like the bee said to me, bees don't make honey alone, isn't that the basis of relationship?

[02:00:09] So the insects are saying to me, "You can't do anything meaningful in the world without relationships." It took a bee to tell me that. I'm Paul Chek and I'm supposed to be a smart guy. So you can look at these things as unique forms of physical intelligence because every animal in nature has a unique intelligence and native cultures always studied them.

[02:00:36] They worship them. That's why when white men came along and started dropping buffalo everywhere and just leaving them to rot, it just about broke their hearts. White men have fractured the hearts of so many native cultures because they lived in a kinship relationship and they learned how to live in nature by studying all these creatures and relating to them and sharing life with them and asking for permission to be fed by them.

[02:01:11] Shaman would connect to the buffalo spirit, or to the deer spirit, or the elk, or whatever, and ask for permission so they could feed themselves and get granted. And there's many books I have in my library on shamanism, and Joseph Campbell wrote several of the best ones out there, showing even the hunting maps where the shaman would be told by the spirit of that animal where to go, and Indians would go there when they're off and ready to starve to death, and the animal will be standing there waiting for them. And all they would do is draw their bow and kill it.

[02:01:44] The animal would literally give it up, and the animal spirits would say, "This is what you need to do for us." So they would get specific ritual practices, be told what to do or not to do with the carcass, how to use the carcass. There was almost nothing of an animal that any native culture wasted.

[02:02:03] If you look at what we're doing, we need power animal retrieval bad, because we're really, really lost. We're doing to the animal kingdom what white man has done to native cultures, and we're destroying the fabric of nature that holds us together.

[02:02:21] So you could say that your capacity for love from a power animal perspective is nature's capacity to hold itself together to create life, which expresses itself uniquely amongst a dolphin, uniquely amongst panda bears, uniquely amongst chimpanzees, hyenas, wolves, bears, cockroaches. The insect kingdom is also in the power animal dimension. They are all part of the fabric of life.

[02:02:53] So having done more power animal retrievals and spirit guide retrievals for people than I can count, I can tell you that I have seen over and over and over again that when a person has a health crisis or an emotional crisis, when I look into their field clairvoyantly and ask their soul to let me see what their power animals are, and the reason I use power animals is because a lot of people have a really hard time with things like angels and spirit guides or any religious ideology, especially if it goes against their beliefs.

[02:03:29] But hardly anybody has a problem with identifying the fact that there's an animal spirit in them because we have an innate kinship that goes back for as long as we've ever been human beings with animals. So people that are afraid to step into the dimensions of spirituality that we would call religion or spirituality and worshiping gurus or whatever, they often find incredible solace in knowing that there's a wolf power animal with them, or there's an eagle, etc.

[02:04:01] And so these animals teach us different ways to love, different ways to relate, different ways to heal. And just to give you an example, in my own work with myself to help learn and grow, I've over the years-- and your power animals can change because when you have different needs, then the different power animals come to you and you will actually call them from your unconscious or the spirit of that animal will actually know more about who you are than you do and it will help come heal you to help you fulfill your mission in life because we're all part of the divine puzzle.

[02:04:43] We're all part of God's process of healing, growing, and evolving itself. So there's a lot more going on in our unconscious than most people realize because most people don't even know how to explore their unconscious, which is what I teach in Spirit Gym, is many things like this, so you can really come to know who you are.

[02:05:01] So at the root chakra I have the bee family. At the second chakra I have the sea turtle. At the third chakra I've got a great big powerful hawk. The fourth chakra I have the owl. I have the butterfly family, and I have an elephant. At the fifth chakra I have a black panther. At the sixth chakra I have a male and a female grizzly bear and a raven.

[02:05:27] At the seventh chakra I have a big beautiful spider who sits in their weaving webs and she guides me as to how to put all my education together. She shows me what pieces need to be pulled together and where. For my four functions of consciousness, my spirit of intuition is the rattlesnake. My spirit of thinking is the eagle.

[02:05:48] My spirit of sensation is the dolphin. And my spirit of sensation is the deer and feeling is the dolphin. So those are the power animals I work with constantly. And so when I have a challenge, like I got this massive amount of information that I need to put it into a course that people can understand, like Spirit Gym, I talk to Mama Spider.

[02:06:09] When I need to think more clearly and get a big picture view, I go to my eagle. I can merge with her, and she'll take me up. And then she'll help me see the big picture. So I might all of a sudden have a vision of why people are doing certain things. Or I might be consulting for a professional rugby team and all of a sudden I'll be above the rugby pitch, watching them play a game and see that they keep doing certain patterns over and over again and it's causing groin injuries or whatever.

[02:06:45] So the eagle can give me this big view. If I'm in a challenging situation where we're financially strapped and I need to figure out a way to come up with money fast so I don't have to start laying people off or whatever, the hawk will appear to me and show me how to be more efficient at getting things done.

[02:07:07] And the hunt is the hunt. I have to go hunt for a way to generate money because love is a boomerang. If you want more money you've got to give something to the world. So the hawk will show me this is what you've got to do and this is how you do it efficiently and effectively. The bees will show me how to delegate and how to work with people to get things done. The owl shows me when I'm working with people that have a lot of trauma in their life.

[02:07:43] The owl shows me what needs to be seen in their past. So I will look into them and the owl will show me-- for example, I'll have visions of them being emotionally abused, mentally abused, physically abused, or sexually abused as a child. I'll literally see it in their field. I will see it happening in real time. And there's many people out there that can attest to that.

[02:08:08] So do you see that each of these animals is actually like a facet of a diamond through which the light of unconditional love is moving? And without those facets to capture the light, we can't make consciousness out of anything. So the animals are ways of relating to life from a perspective that only that animal can really give you.

[02:08:33] And each of your glands, organs, and tissues, and even your chakras are all tuned to different frequencies and have different functions, all of which, particularly from the first, second, and third chakra, are inherent to nature. The fourth chakra weaves what I call the angelic chakras, which is the higher dimensions that the soul comes down and penetrates into as it crystallizes into a body and the lower dimensions of the dimensions of nature.

[02:09:03] So if you think of it from an alchemical perspective, the root is the dimension of the earth element. The second chakra's dimension of the water element. Third chakra's dimension of the fire element, which is the solar plexus, sun plexus. Because what a lot of people don't realize is our third chakra is externalized in nature. It's not in our body.

[02:09:24] We don't have a means of photosynthesis. So the plants capture light, and they turn it into food for us. So our solar plexus, the third chakra is the plexus that takes photons that have been captured and put into food through photosynthesis and feeds it to us.

[02:09:49] And food is not just calories, it's energy, information, and frequency. So the third chakra brings in the broccoli, the cabbage, the beef, the lamb, the brussels sprouts, the cauliflower, the peas, and it decodes that information, and it uses the energy, the information, which is carried in the water of that plant and in the vibration of the plant and the DNA of the plant, and it distributes the energy and the information.

[02:10:24] So certain foods, for example, can tell your liver how to do certain functions or can enhance certain functions. It can upregulate or downregulate certain functions. If you get too much of a food, it can overstimulate certain functions and repress others.

[02:10:43] So the third chakra then is externalized. This is why we have to be conscious of what we're eating because our body's always telling us by symptoms and cravings what we're needing. But most people are so unconscious about what their body's telling. We've gotten so detached from nature that we think everything is a, just to use a metaphor, a, what do you call it? It's a craving for whatever we're addicted to.

[02:11:23] Luke: Twinkies.

[02:11:24] Paul: Twinkies, mac and cheese, garbage. Because we've lost touch with reality, so we don't know how to read and listen to the energies inside of us. I got news for you. The plant spirits are exactly the same as the power animals. Because you can have plant spirits just like you can have-- I got all sorts of plant spirits that communicate to me all the time. Ask the shaman how they learned to make ayahuasca and all these medicines. They'll tell you the plant spirits taught them.

[02:11:55] Well, there's no difference between a plant spirit and an animal spirit in its actual functional relationship to a human being. And the biggest thing is people have an idea, a bunch of beliefs in their head that stop them from communicating with, receiving the communications, and hearing what's talking to them 24/7 because your genes are broadcasting these messages to and fro all the time.

[02:12:21] But the problem is when you start believing, you stop listening. When you start believing, you stop asking questions. When you start believing, you're blind to the mystery. And if you want to know how this happens to people, if you go see a shaman that really knows what they're doing, with a real problem, they're going to ask you a few questions. You want to hear them?

[02:12:46] Luke: Yeah.

[02:12:49] Paul: When did you stop singing? Shaman's going to write that down, or memorize it. When did you stop dancing? Shaman's going to write that down. When did you lose your sense for the magic, mystery, and awe of life? Shaman's going to memorize it and write that down. When did you stop enjoying good stories? Shaman's going to write that down.

[02:13:20] There's usually going to be a convergence to the answers to each of those questions, such as when my parents took me to Christian church, when I got raped, or when I got traumatized by my dad, or when I went to school and they told me to stop acting like a child and hold still instead of dancing, sharing my feelings.

[02:13:47] That's exactly how I know where to go to look into people and which power animals to see is hiding right in those wounds so I can get the information I need and introduce them to the power animal that will open them up to the spiritual dimensions of who and what they really are and take them out of the material realm of a low level of consciousness into a much higher level of consciousness which can trigger spiritual evolution which has done its job because that person will come to you one day, or to me and say, "Thank God, I had that heart problem or I would never have woken up and learned how to love." Or, "Thank God I had that cancer in my colon or I never would have really healed from my divorce," etc.

[02:14:43] And so power animals and spirit guides are the most amazing church for those that can't handle church because they're wise.

[02:14:55] Luke: Wow, dude. That was so much deeper than I had anticipated your answer to be, like all of your answers today.

[02:15:06] Paul: I've been working with power animals a long, long time.

[02:15:08] Luke: Clearly, that would be the case.

[02:15:09] Paul: And they are, excuse the expression, but fucking amazing. And it is such a great thing to have a spiritual relationship with an animal, or an insect, or a plant, or a tree because you get real love. You don't get any of this scriptural torture, biblical this, God will burn you in hell, this religion against that religion. Every one of them works together.

[02:15:37] And I'll tell you another very interesting thing about power animals. When I work with people that are having health problems, almost always it tracks down to relationship problems, either trauma from childhood or spousal problems, or real challenges with someone that's controlling you at work or whatever. It can also be a lot of people with serious health problems have disintegration.

[02:16:05] So their adrenal glands can be burnt out. They can have cardiac arrhythmia. They can be syndrome X about to become a diabetic because they're not eating very well. I get people with 60 things wrong at once, all of which are problems. And so what I'll do is I'll go inside of them.

[02:16:27] Sometimes I don't tell them that I'm doing this because it's more than their minds can handle. But what I'll do is I'll look into each of the areas of their body where they're sick, which is not working, everything I just mentioned, and I'll ask the power animal to come forward. And then what I'll ask them to do is all come forward together.

[02:16:46] And then I watch how they behave in relationship to each other. And you'll see sometimes maybe they'll have a rabbit, a fox, an alligator, an eagle, and a dolphin, but the fox will not get near any of the other animals, and the rabbit is shaking and scared. Sometimes there's a mouse and they'll be shaking and scared.

[02:17:13] So then I'll go to the rabbit and say, "Why are you so scared?" And it'll say, "That fox keeps trying to eat me. He's trying to kill me all the time. I can't live here with him." So I can actually talk to the power animals and find out their relationships and then ask them, "well, how does that manifest in your life? Who is the fox?" My dad." "Who are you?" "My mother."

[02:17:44] And mom and dad are fighting like cats and dogs and the person's broken inside and has been since their mother and dad went through a divorce 10 years ago, and they never recovered. So the animals will actually tell me where to look in their life and their trauma history. Then I'll say to them, "What do we need to do to help you heal? How can I get you, Mr. Fox, to get along with Mrs. Rabbit over here?" And they will tell me.

[02:18:12] And I'll ask them to please practice. And I'll actually work with the power animals, just like I'm working with a patient. But I'm doing it through my third eye while I'm mobilizing their neck. They don't know what I'm doing. And I watch things change. And if I can introduce them to the power animals because they're ready for it, I'll do it.

[02:18:33] And I teach this to my students in my workshops, and they are often shit shocked, not only at what they find for not only what their power animals are, but how these relationships are, but what the animals tell them about what needs to be done, which is what they need to do in their relationships, because the power animals are the psychic projections showing you what their psyche, their mind is doing to the kingdom of nature within themselves. So think of yourself as a microcosm of the entire macrocosm.

[02:19:07] Luke: You're blowing my fucking mind, bro.

[02:19:09] Paul: So if you're using Roundup in your backyard, and you're walking around it and bare feet doing Tai Chi, because you think you're evolving spiritually, and all of a sudden you've got metabolic syndrome, but you have no idea, I might have an alligator, which is a common power animal for the digestive system come and say, "I'm being poisoned to death. There's chemicals that are coming into their body through their feet." Or they'll say, "They're eating foods that are poisoning me."

[02:19:37] And then animals will actually tell me what they don't even know. That, my friend, is shamanism.

[02:19:46] Luke: Wild.

[02:19:48] Paul: That's what a shaman does. That's one of the many things a shaman does. My wife, Angie Chek, who I got some mind bendingly good podcasts with on my podcast, just any of the ones with Angie Chek, she's an expert at this stuff. She does this all day long.

[02:20:03] Luke: I can't wait to meet her, and I'm hoping that I can bring Alyson to your house so that they can meet too.

[02:20:09] Paul: I would love Alyson to come to our house and meet Angie and just see the art Angie and I have painted.

[02:20:17] Luke: Cool. Can you handle one more question?

[02:20:20] Paul: I handle a thousand questions. The question is, can you handle me answering them all?

[02:20:24] Luke: I'm loving this, dude. This is just beautiful.

[02:20:28] Paul: I have to leave at three o'clock tomorrow.

[02:20:30] Luke: Don't tell me that because as long as we got data cards--

[02:20:34] Paul: Just keep giving me a bag of smoke and--

[02:20:35] Luke: This is a perfect segue. It's interesting because I was recording a podcast yesterday with a brilliant astrologist, which is a topic I've never covered. And before we started, she said, "Well, how long are these?" And I said, "Ideally at least 90 minutes, but they can go three or four hours sometimes." She said, "I don't know if I can go that long. How will you know when to stop?" And I said, "I know when the energy's done. That's when it stops. But sometimes the energy's still going for me and not the gas." That's why I like to check in.

[02:21:08] Paul: Man, I'm with you.

[02:21:10] Luke: But where you went with that beautiful and elaborate exploration of the animal world is a perfect segue into what I wanted to ask you about.

[02:21:21] Paul: By the way, I have all this pretty much in a video on my YouTube channel. So anyone that wants to see that in a video where they can go step by step just go to youtube.com/paul, C-H-E-K, live. youtube.com/paulcheklive. Once you're there, just search Paul Chek power animals and spirit guides.

[02:21:41] Luke: Awesome. And it's a good time to mention now, by the way, there's going to be a lot of links in the show notes here, lukestory.com/paulchek, C-H-E-K. And we'll also put a link to your course there, which I dove into for the first time today and was like--

[02:21:57] Paul: Spirit Gym.

[02:21:57] Luke: Yeah, Spirit Gym, which is myspiritgym.com. And we've got a code LUKE15 for 15% off, and we'll put all of that in the main show notes.

[02:22:07] Paul: That's a mentorship program, by the way.

[02:22:08] Luke: Oh, okay.

[02:22:09] Paul: I put a whole what I call Spirit Gym University, about 130 hours of training on everything you need to know to truly live a holistic spiritual life. And then I meet with the students each week. I give them a one-hour approximately presentation on something that's important for them to know.

[02:22:26] I connect to all their souls and ask, "What do you need me to give you now?" It may or may not be in the lessons. And then I open up questions on the lesson and then I open the floor and I coach you just like you were my private client. And I'm often on there for three and a half to four hours each session.

[02:22:43] So I personally mentor everybody through those lessons and support them in their personal life challenges exactly like I do everybody from Kobe Bryant to Chuck Norris to Laird Hamilton to Gabby Reese to a long, long list of people that have worked with me over the years.

[02:23:00] Luke: Well, I logged in today and was like, "Okay, this is a commitment." There's a lot of content in there. You are a prolific man. It's very inspiring. I churn out a podcast every week and I feel like, wow, this is a lot of work, man. How am I going to keep doing this? So you're an inspiration.

[02:23:16] But going from the last topic, you had mentioned the intelligence of plants, and we've referenced plant medicines, and it's something I've talked a lot about on the show. And that could probably be a 10-hour podcast in and of itself or longer.

[02:23:35] But I know this is entering the culture now, I think, in a great way in this third wave of psychedelics. Well, there's probably many waves before that, but in recent times. We don't even know how many waves there have been. And I see this as largely positive.

[02:23:53] It's been a massively healing and positive impact on my life as someone who used to use drugs in a very destructive way that almost killed me. Took a good 20, 22 years break from any mind-altering substances and then very carefully and intentionally have ventured into my relationship with them.

[02:24:14] However, I see, because it can be exciting and because so much progress can be made in those experiences that there is sometimes a lack of reverence or prudence around the practices. I feel fortunate that I've had a pretty good governor and I've been mindful and so I've been safe and I've only benefited.

[02:24:41] But I know these experiences can not be for everyone and not be for everyone at all times. And many people, I think because of the lack of context of the history from the cultures that have developed these practices, there's a lot of missing links there. So maybe you could give us a few of the do's and don'ts and ways to approach that work mindfully and safely with the reverence and respect that they deserve.

[02:25:13] Paul: I will, and I will let you know that on that topic, I have a five-hour special podcast that I did with a very skilled shaman named Hamilton Souther because I've had to rehabilitate a long string of people that got very badly injured doing plant medicine ceremonies in ways that are dangerous, often in the jungle, with so called shaman.

[02:25:37] I've also had a long string of people that have picked up psychic entities in group plant medicine ceremonies and had their lives turned inside out, some of which you know personally. And in that podcast, it's called plant medicine essentials, I believe, if I remember right. I think it was last year, it's one of the most listened to podcasts.

[02:26:05] It's five hours of everything you need to know and how to go about it and what to do and what not to do. And it's Hamilton and I. I've conducted over 1,000 healing ceremonies with plant medicines in my career. And I've developed a very carefully constructed three-day ceremonial practice. And that's the way I do it.

[02:26:28] Most of my clients have to be in therapy with me typically about two years before I think they're ready, because if they don't learn how to manage their mind effectively, the first thing I want to say is all plant medicines amplify whatever's in your psyche, the good and the bad.

[02:26:50] It's a big mistake to think that the plant medicines do bad things to you or that there's evil entities in them. That's absolutely ridiculous. Unless you're using some synthetic chemical that's been cooked up by some junior chemist that doesn't know what they're doing. But if you're using mushrooms, San Pedro, 5-MeO-DMT, things that are natural, then you're actually gaining the intelligence of the plant spirit, is coming into you.

[02:27:24] It's up regulating your DNA to tune you into the morphogenic field or the field of consciousness that soul of that plant lives on. And those plants can open up the dimensions. So you're actually getting able to see where they live consciously. But the first thing that I would say is that they're amplifiers.

[02:27:54] So one gram of mushrooms is like turning the volume on the stereo up to number one and 10 grams is full blast, as a metaphor. So the rule that I would suggest is always start little because most people don't realize what's trapped in their unconscious. And not only do you have stuff from your own developmental history you can't remember because trauma can actually block memory, you also have ancestral memories that are very real. And I've had a lot of people that I've had to work with ancestral trauma.

[02:28:26] So you're amplifying everything coming through your family tree that's unresolved and your own stuff. So the only exception is if you're someone that's highly skilled and knows what they're doing, so if someone comes to me and I give them five grams is because I've already connected with their soul, looked into their history, and I know that that will be a therapeutic dose and I will take responsibility for managing the person through it.

[02:28:53] But if you're on your own, that's a completely different thing. And if you're with people that don't know what they're doing, that's a very dangerous thing. So the next thing is set and setting. You have to have the right mindset. So if you go into the use of these medicines with fear, and you're scared to death, then you're already coming in with fear that will be amplified by the medicine, and whatever you're projecting mentally, you will experience, because your mind actually paints on the screen of the psyche of whatever it is the plant medicines are going to amplify.

[02:29:29] If you've got unresolved trauma, it will amplify that and bring it out of your unconscious because all plant medicines break down the default mode network, which is the centers of the brain that create the ego structure. So think of the unconscious as an artesian well that has massive power.

[02:29:48] Bruce Lipton says the unconscious has one million times the processing power of the conscious mind. Our ego is only about 3 to 5% of our consciousness. So once you open that valve to the unconscious, the more of a dose you take, so one hit of LSD opens it to a slight turn. Five hits of LSD is halfway wide open. And now you've got 500 gallons of water a minute coming through as a metaphor.

[02:30:23] So you want to make sure that your mindset is such that you're doing this as a sacred practice and that you have a clear written intention written in positive affirmation. Not I want to see the angels, or I want to get rich, or I want to know why my husband always pisses me off. I have a test called the Grand Canyon test. Say your affirmation as though you were standing at the edge of Grand Canyon. If you stand at the edge of the Grand Canyon, Luke, and say, "I want to lose 30 pounds in six weeks," what does it say back to you?

[02:31:09] Luke: Echoes.

[02:31:10] Paul: I want to lose 30 pounds in six weeks. What's the verb? Wanting. So what you get is to keep wanting and you think God's not listening to you, but you're getting exactly what you want because the answer from unconditional love is always yes. Anything else is a condition. This is why in general it's said, be careful what you pray for. You might get it.

[02:31:33] So your affirmation, if stated in an echo chamber should give you exactly what you want. I have lost 30 pounds, and I look and feel great. The plant medicines will deliver that affirmation in your psyche and amplify it, which is like turning the broadcast station up so it reaches out to all the beings that are connected to you that can support you in that process. Be they plant animal or any of the higher beings, angels or otherwise.

[02:32:07] Remember, God's fully integrated. We're connected to what our dominant thoughts are and what our unconscious beliefs are. That's what we resonate with. You take a tuning fork at 256 hertz, which is C, you stand next to a piano and strike it with nobody at the piano, it plays C, doesn't it? And so will any stringed instrument.

[02:32:28] So whatever's in our mind, that's the tuning fork we're striking, and the drug just amplifies and we go into resonance with it. So you want to make sure that your intention is clearly stated as a positive affirmation so that when you get it, it's exactly what you want. So always pretend that you're going to do a fire walk when you're going to do a plant medicine ceremony, and don't think about getting burned. Visualize yourself on the other side having learned exactly what you came to learn, having experienced the love you wanted to experience, whatever your intention is.

[02:33:07] So that's about the set, is the mindset. The setting must also be congruent. You should not do a plant medicine ceremony ever without clearing the space. Now, a shaman is someone like me has many different techniques for clearing a space and making it sacred, but the simplest, most effective thing you can do is get some sage, a bundle of white sage, which you can get on Amazon real easy, and then get a saging fan, which is usually made of feathers, or you can use one of those Chinese fold out fans or anything you can make out of a fan, like a magazine.

[02:33:51] And then you hold the intention and you visualize the space being clear of all negative energies. And you say to your soul, your own soul, "Dear soul, please clear this space, and thank you, Mother Sage, for clearing the space of all negative entities and all negative energies so that I may have a sacred space to do my ceremony."

[02:34:14] And I might say what my intention is. So that I can X, Y, and Z. And then you walk the perimeter of the space in each room that's connected to it. If you're in a house, do the whole house. If you're going to do it in your living room, make sure you definitely do that. But I recommend doing the whole house because the negative energies can penetrate the walls.

[02:34:41] If you really want to be safe, a shamanic technique is to take salt. So if we were going to do it down there, you've got that nice square carpet down there, we'll make the sacred space anytime you're on the carpet, you're in the sacred space. So we don't want to leave that space while we're in ceremony as we have to go to the toilet or something.

[02:35:04] And so we will sprinkle a trail of salt that's one connected line. You know how the Buddhists do sand paintings? So you can make a line between a quarter of an inch and a half an inch thick of salt. You just buy a big bag of salt. And salt has the effect of repelling negative energies and entities.

[02:35:24] So it's actually creating an energy grid around you and you hold the intention that you were safe and that this is a protected and sacred space. So first you clear it with sage. Then you can use a salt barrier. There's many other things. You can also erect a barrier in your mind. You can stand in the sacred space and visualize a dome of healing, white, green, gold, violet, or purple light, and surround the space and say, thank you great spirit for keeping this sacred space protected while we're in ceremony.

[02:36:00] And then when you're done, you can just take the barrier down by just saying thank you. Give a prayer for thanks and then you can ask the barrier to be taken down. So you don't want to be around chaotic noises. You don't want to play music that's disturbing or disruptive. I would say, play the music you'd like to hear if you were dying. Most people wouldn't want to listen to nasty rap music and acid rock while they were dying.

[02:36:32] Play the kind of music that you would either want to be born to or die to. And that will usually create the right energetic container. Unless you have friends that are good musicians that know how to play music that has an integrating and harmonizing effect on the body.

[02:36:50] But things like Hilary Stagg, who's one of the most amazing, harpist ever lived, Duder. I have a whole massive collection. I'm just trying to think of some of the names of people that I use. I've got probably 1,000 great CDs. WA, Diva Premal and her husband Miten. Those are just examples of the kind of music I use in ceremony. It needs to be something that keeps the heart opening and is nourishing to the soul.

[02:37:34] And that can really create a very stabilizing environment. So clearing the space and having the right music. And then make sure there's no clutter around. You want the energy to flow through the room. Another thing I highly, highly recommend is buying the BioGeometry HomeKit. It's only $250.

[02:37:58] It's very powerful, and it produces BG3 which is the negative green in the energetic frequency, which is heart-centered energy. And Ibrahim Karim, the founder of Biogeometry, traveled the world and measured the subtle energies coming off of all the famous healing sites and famous sources of healing waters and found the all emitted BG3. So did the Egyptian pyramids.

[02:38:22] So he developed the home kit which is a cube which has got laser-etched biogeometry signatures that structure the flow of energy for all your glands and organs and your house and normalize the energy. And home kit takes any energies that are too high and lowers them and any energies that are too low and brings them up. So it creates a stable centering energy, and it's got connections for the water mains and the electrical mains.

[02:38:51] Luke: Yeah, I have it on this house here.

[02:38:53] Paul: Beautiful. Well, you know how amazing it feels. I'll give you a tip though. What have you got your cube sitting on?

[02:39:02] Luke: I need to get a new charging tray for it because I lost it. So right now it's in my office on a white windowsill.

[02:39:10] Paul: Okay. I'm going to show you how to double the power of it. If you get a glass Pyrex dish at least four inches square and fill it with drinking water each day after you clear the cube, set it in the water and the water will double or triple the strength of it. And it's mind blowing how much difference it makes. Plants grow faster.

[02:39:39] And when I do ceremonies, I make sure that that cube is right in the ceremonial space. And everybody feels that. Even the most dead wood people will say, "What is going on in here?" And I learned that from Robert Gilbert who's Abraham Karim's first instructor and a genius who's been on my podcast a couple of times. He's a genius. It was just on Aubrey's podcast, actually. If you don't know who Robert Gilbert is, he's a powerful [Inaudible].

[02:40:07] Luke: No, I don't. I had Ibrahim on the show, and it was mind blowing. One of the things he shared with me that has just left me shooketh ever since is we were talking about reincarnation and past lives and such. So we were exploring just the concept of time. And I'm pretty clear in my own inner experience that time is a construct based on our senses and the fact that we're in a body and that there's just this eternal now. And we just happen to find a point on it because that's what we're seeing and feeling.

[02:40:42] And so I feel this sense of eternity and that there's an eternal. aspect of myself. But I've also had experiences wherein I felt like I had purview to successions of past lives. And so we were talking about this idea of past lives. And the first time was actually my first 5-MeO-DMT. Whole other conversation.

[02:41:09] But anyway, what he said to me, he said, "Luke, there are no past lives. There are just other lives." Because there's still the construct you're using of time that there was a you in the 1800s that was a minor or a native American or whatever that your eternal self is actually simultaneously experiencing what we would perceive to be all of these past lives all at the same time. Something to that effect. And I've been chewing on that ever since. The mind can't even like comprehend something that immense. Does that resonate with you?

[02:41:41] Paul: Well, I'm going to say two things. First of all, I don't agree that that's an absolute fact.

[02:41:48] Luke: Okay.

[02:41:49] Paul: A, I could sit here and tell you hours of things I've experienced and done because of past life knowledge and experience, and even have had visceral-- I've done multiple past life regressions. In fact, if you want to hear one of the most painful and intense things I've ever experienced in my life, listen to my podcast with Rosanne Grace, who is a professional past life regressionist, and hear what happened when she took me through a regression.

[02:42:18] Luke: She did it on the podcast?

[02:42:19] Paul: She did it the day before the podcast.

[02:42:22] Luke: Oh, okay.

[02:42:23] Paul: Because I wanted to make sure I knew she was for real before I put her on the podcast. I've had multiple past life regressionists work with me and I also do past life regression work as part of my therapy, and I've studied it. And I've been exploring these stuff my whole life.

[02:42:44] So trust me, I know Abraham Karim's a genius. He's somebody I love with my whole heart. He was a consultant on my Spirit Gym book series. I've had him on my podcast three times. My wife is at the highest level of his training. We're putting his training in my institute, and my wife's going to be the instructor that does it.

[02:43:01] But I want you to know that we also must understand that God is an infinity. So when you realize that God is infinite energy, infinite intelligence, infinite power, infinite information, and infinite processing speed, you have infinite possibilities that can be equally true simultaneously.

[02:43:28] So Ibrahim Karim's perspective on that is based on his own unique set of experiences and beliefs. And when you think that God is unconditional love, then whatever you believe becomes true and that's why you have to be very conscious about what you believe. And if you study these types of things, if you go study these concepts through the Egyptian culture, such as the Egyptian Book of the Dead, you'll get one concept.

[02:43:56] If you study the Tibetan Book of the Dead, you'll get another concept. If you study Steiner, you'll get another concept. So how can I say that he Abraham Karim's belief is more real than Rudolf Steiner's is more real than Paramahansa Yogananda's who does tell you about past lives, etc., etc.

[02:44:15] And I've studied too many of these people that are just as developed as Abraham Karim, and I've had my own experiences. So I'm not saying that I think he's wrong. I'm saying that we must realize that God is a lot more powerful than two-value logic.

[02:44:34] Luke: Totally. Yeah.

[02:44:37] Paul: I forgot how we got to past lives, but--

[02:44:40] Luke: Well, you brought up biogeometry, and it just reminded me of that pondering. And to be fair to him too, he wasn't like, this is definitively the way it is.

[02:44:49] Paul: No, I know.

[02:44:49] Luke: And you know the guy.

[02:44:51] Paul: He's a very good friend of mine. I've had long conversations with him.

[02:44:53] Luke: It was just something I never contemplated. Because I think in a linear sequential time bound way, I feel very certain that I've been here countless times.

[02:45:05] Paul: You probably have.

[02:45:06] Luke: And his idea that, yeah, that's true, but all of those times are happening simultaneously was really interesting to me.

[02:45:12] Paul: Well, the reality of it is if you enter into God consciousness, then you've never lived and you've never died. And I've been there too. And when you come out of it, it's very baffling. This is why when you do deep shamanic ceremonies, you have to have time to integrate because it can be so shocking and so astonishing what you experience that you actually come back and you cannot tell which is real anymore.

[02:45:39] And that's one of the things that happens to people when they do too many ceremonies and do too deep for what they're ready to handle. It fractures their psyche because they get stuck in the eternal now, and they have a hard time interfacing with the linear flow of time. And they're so confused because those experiences feel a lot more real than these.

[02:46:00] I'm a guy that's done way more than 25 grams of mushrooms. Ask Kyle Kingsbury. He came for my 60th birthday party, and he's done 25 grams of mushrooms, I think two times. And I said, "How was the depth of what we did together?" He said, "Paul, that was so much deeper than 25 grams. I can't even measure it."

[02:46:23] He said, "Probably 100 grams." And this was a 21-hour ceremony. And it was not for the lighthearted. But there's an example of the deeper you go, the more your sense of who you are and what you are gets obliterated and the more you confront realities that can be absolutely, utterly shocking with regard to how you re-interface with this environment.

[02:46:54] I've had profound experiences in ceremony of me living in another dimension, on another planet, with a wife and three children. And I'm there right now having a completely different life. And so when you get into the vertical dimension, you can experience any of your past lives and you can go into one of them and find out that it seems like it's happening right now.

[02:47:22] But you got to remember, the Akashic record holds the memory of every single thing that's ever happened, not only in the world, but in God's entire existence. So until you have enough skill to navigate these dimensions, you can get into situations where your conscious mind cannot possibly unravel this Rubik's Cube, but these are experiences that you're having, and it can actually fracture a person's psyche. They can literally go nuts.

[02:47:52] Luke: Yes. I've seen it happen.

[02:47:54] Paul: They can be alive on five or six levels of reality at the same time, and they can't tell what's real. Try driving a car when you're in a state like that. And I've worked with these people, and again, at least two of them that you know I've had to help come back to the world for these types of experiences.

[02:48:15] But just to finish your other question, we talked about mindset, we talked about doing a positive affirmation. We always want to go into a ceremony with positive intention, the intention to heal, the intention to live more fully, to love more fully. We should never use those with negative intention ever, or we should not use them to run from our problems.

[02:48:41] You should not use these medicines to avoid responsibilities. If you're trying to get away from, for example, that you're not caring for your wife and children, so you're trying to drown yourself, like you would use heroin or alcohol to numb yourself, that is going to be the opposite you want to do because it'll do the opposite.

[02:49:03] It'll take you so deep into the reality of what you're doing that you may not be able to handle the ass kicking you get. And people name that a bad journey or a bad trip, but that's actually God being dead honest with you. So don't go into these ceremonies unless you're ready to face the mirror of yourself because there's no way you can lie to God.

[02:49:29] And these plant medicines take you right to the divine mirror. And so go in with reverence and be ready-- I tell people, "Don't do a real ceremony, a real shamanic ceremony, unless you're ready to face yourself and die." If you're not ready to face yourself and die, then you better go see a psychologist and stop fooling around with plant medicines.

[02:49:52] Because if you go into a ceremony like this and you face the truth, but then you come out and go into denial, you have to carry the karma of that. And if you do that enough times, it can give you a disease. It can make you a sick person. You'll actually create your own disease by further repressing and denying and lying to yourself. And that is a bad use of plant medicines.

[02:50:15] Luke: Amen. What about the relationship with the specific plant spirit and the reverence and respect and communion with it as--

[02:50:27] Paul: I always do a prayer. And the prayer is different for different situations, different people, but I always connect to the spirit. I always open my heart to the spirit. I give the spirit thanks. I go through a whole structure of prayer, which it's a lot to do right here, but I give the spirit thanks.

[02:50:49] I give the spirit why we're doing it. I let it know what I need its help with, and I thank it for joining me in body, mind, and spirit so I don't kill the spirit by consuming it. I say, "Thank you for joining me in body, mind, and spirit so that together we can make the world a better place for all living beings now and in the future."

[02:51:09] So I always let the plant medicine spirits know that they're not dying, that they're coming into me to become human and help me live a better life and do the best I can for everybody and for all living beings. And then I also thank all the medicine carriers or anybody that made it possible for me to have that medicine, the growers, the carriers, and even middlemen, because without their support, it wouldn't be there. It's very important.

[02:51:39] I blow tobacco smoke into the medicine as I'm doing the prayer so that I'm channeling my consciousness into it, and that excites the medicine and the DNA in the medicine and the vibration of the spirit so it brings me into resonance with it. You can use your own breath. You don't have to use tobacco. Even your mind will do it because there's water molecules all through these medicines.

[02:52:00] So you're going into resonance with the water molecules because they resonate to psychic energy. To me the tobacco, it's a statement that I'm doing something sacred, and it's a symbol of sacredness.

[02:52:14] So you give thanks to the medicines and you let them know what you need help with. This is more than I can do in a podcast, but this is part of my work as a shaman, is you have to know what medicines to use for certain things. There are certain medicines that work a lot better for certain things.

[02:52:40] For example, there's a time when LSD is a better medicine than mushrooms. And there's a time when mescaline is a better medicine than LSD or mushrooms. And there's a time when 5-MeO-DMT is the ideal medicine. There's a time when NMDMT is a better medicine. There's a time when ayahuasca is a better medicine.

[02:53:05] There's a time when Syrian rue all by itself is a better medicine. So if you don't know what medicine to use, you should find someone that does and say, I'm dealing with grief or I'm dealing with-- and you need to be discerning about who you ask these questions because some guy with a pocket full of drugs that thinks he's a shaman can get you in a lot of trouble. And there's a real problem with that today.

[02:53:28] Luke: I've noticed.

[02:53:29] Paul: That's why I did the Plant Medicine Essentials with Hamilton Souther, because both of us have been inundated with all these problems. One of my students went to somebody that I wished that he hadn't have gone to with his girlfriend and got so badly damaged that he had to shut his business down.

[02:53:57] He had to move into his parents’ house, and he was in the hospital for probably a couple of months while they were running hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of test on him, almost financially bankrupt his parents, and ultimately came to me and I had to do quite a lot of work with him for free because he didn't have any money to help give him the practices he needed to do to heal himself or he wasn't going to heal.

[02:54:24] This guy went from being very successful as a check professional, owning his own business and doing really well to being basically a very broken person whose mind was completely scrambled that his parents had to handle almost like a kid with a vaccine injury or autism or something where they're disabled. So I've seen things like that. I've known six people to die on DMT.

[02:54:56] Luke: Wow. Holy shit.

[02:54:56] Paul: And as a side note, one of the worst things you can do is to use any kind of plant medicine and get in the water. Because if you got enough of it in you, you'll forget that you cannot breathe water. And people will start breathing underwater. A friend of mine's girlfriend drowned herself doing DMT in a hot tub. And I've known people to drown in swimming pools, doing LSD and other drugs in swimming pools because they forget that they're not an angel.

[02:55:27] Luke: Right.

[02:55:28] Paul: They start breathing underwater and they drown. I've had six people I know personally die doing various versions of plant medicines.

[02:55:36] Luke: Holy shit. I'm so glad we brought this up.

[02:55:38] Paul: All doing stuff that they would have never done if I was around. I simply would have taken the car keys away as a metaphor.

[02:55:45] Luke: Yeah. Wow, wow. Thank you for that. That reminds me the first really deep experience I had with Wachuma, and I don't think I was quite so deep that I would have forgotten that I couldn't breathe underwater, but I remember the water being such a beautiful experience. And it was a deep experience, but I couldn't have driven a car, but I could speak, and I knew that I was in a body. You know what I mean?

[02:56:10] But man, I remember I got in that water and it was a hot ass day and it was like-- you know these things you can't even describe. Words don't do them justice. But it was the experience like I had never seen, touched, felt water in my entire life. I came from another planet where there was no such thing as water, landed here, got in that pool, and was like, what the fuck? It was beautiful

[02:56:37] Paul: Absolutely. Now, another tip that I want to share, because it's really important and it's one that people make this mistake all the time, especially young men, just like they dick swing with how much they can drink and how much they can lift in the gym and who can do more of this or more of that, you don't want to dick swing with psychedelics, not unless you're young, dumb, full of cum, and ready to die.

[02:57:01] So my rule is, never take more medicine than you can remain conscious with. Conscious means you know your name, your address, your phone number, you can answer questions, you can count your fingers and toes. Because if you take more than you can remain conscious with, you will not remember anything that happened.

[02:57:27] It'll be like you had a wild, crazy dream, but you wake up and you can't remember the dream. So there's no way you can grow from this experience. And if you take enough of a dose, it'll knock your consciousness out, just like drinking enough alcohol knocks your consciousness out. The difference is alcohol will make you go unconscious, but too much plant medicines will take you into such high dimensions, and you can go into dimensions with negative entities.

[02:57:55] I've run into ETs. I've run into all sorts of stuff out there. And you can have experiences where some of these beings are dark. I've had some profound and scary experiences where, thank God, I had my soul guiding me. I'll give you an example. One time I was doing a ceremony, and years ago when I was developing my-- I used to map out consciousness because I would have people coming to me.

[02:58:28] So I needed to map out the dimensions of the psyche. So I would take each different medicine, and over time, each ceremony, I would take it up a notch, up a notch. So I got to where I was at 900 microgram hits of clinical-grade liquid LSD. And I was right on the edge of complete psychosis, and I'll always hire a sitter to watch over me.

[02:58:56] And I have notebooks and I'm drawing pictures and I'm having my soul guide me, but all of a sudden, I felt a presence all over the room, and there was these gargoyles all over the room. And they were flying at me trying to penetrate me to get inside of me.

[02:59:12] And these are negative entities. And it was the most intense journey I've ever had in my life. I had to fight these gargoyles off for like almost five hours. I was exhausted. Fortunately I have a long background in Tai Chi and martial arts. I know how to strengthen my energy field. But my soul told me that you need to know these realms are out there.

[02:59:38] So my soul took me into this dimension to show me where people get stuck and why people get possessions and why people go crazy after doing ceremonies like this. You realize the psych wards are loaded with people that did this to themselves on these very healing drugs. The same thing that can heal you can really fuck you up.

[02:59:57] And so I've had many patients that have come to me that have had these experiences and have now gotten possessed and can't get out of it, and I've had to work with them. So I spent years mapping these dimensions out and going and seeing what's out there.

[03:00:13] And Yogananda said, the reason we do not want you using psychedelic drugs is because you can go into dimensions in the astral realm which are very dark, and you will have to deal with what you come into contact with there. So just like we have the light, we've also got the dark.

[03:00:36] And what I'm telling you is think of yourself like a tuning fork. You remember that conversation with 256 Hertz C strike it next to a piano. What most people are unaware of is what's going on inside of them, where their pain is, where their judgments are.

[03:00:50] So the more of a dose you take, the more you activate all your own judgments in your unconscious and all your dark stuff. So you end up having to go look at yourself, and it takes you to the dimension that you're in resonance

[03:01:04] Luke: Ah, right, right.

[03:01:06] Paul: People will blame it on the drug, but you're actually going into resonance. So if you've got people that are, say, practicing dark arts or you get people that are-- I am always concerned when I see people tattooing skull and crossbones on their skin, because right away I want to know your trauma history. Because when people see the world through those eyes, I know those are people that you have to handle very carefully in a ceremony because almost always they're full of trauma.

[03:01:39] And so now their attachment to death and to skulls-- and I use art therapy to see what's in people's unconscious before I do ceremonies with them so I can see, because the ego cannot protect itself against art. And I'm skilled at reading art symbolically. So I already know who I got to be careful with.

[03:01:57] There's people that I've had come to me that were scheduled to do maybe a five-gram ceremony and I've had to take them down to three quarters of gram or even half a gram. And then they had a hard time on that. And I'm like, "Okay, I just imagine what this would happen if this guy was at home thinking he's going to be a shaman or him and his buddies are doing five grams of mushrooms." These guys could literally kill each other.

[03:02:24] I've seen people do the craziest shit you can imagine. And I've seen group ceremonies where things got ugly. And I don't go to group ceremonies anymore. After about 8 or 10 of those I'm like, "There's no freaking way I would ever do plant medicines in these groups unless they were run by a--"

[03:02:42] And I've been there with a highly skilled shaman laying in a ceremony when people are just screaming and yelling and acting out all their darkness and having air fights with their father. And I was like, "Here I am trying to hang out with angels and I got freaking hell on wheels next to me over here."

[03:03:03] So these things need to be done sacredly, and you should not do plant medicine ceremonies with someone you don't feel really safe with. Would you trust this person with the keys to your house and caring for your animals and watching your children while you were away on an emergency trip somewhere?

[03:03:25] If you don't have that level of trust with them, you should not be doing plant medicine ceremonies with them. Now, a lot of people say, "Oh, that's a bunch of bullshit. I've done this and this and this." Yeah, you got lucky because you don't have the skill to look inside of people and know what's in there.

[03:03:38] You think you know someone? You don't know what their trauma history is. A lot of them don't even know. Because the more traumatized we are, the more we repress it. And that's why I have to do regression therapies to find out what's going on with people. So if you want to play it safe, then be with people that you trust your life with. These things are very powerful. This is not fucking candy here. This isn't just a little joy ride.

[03:04:06] Luke: I'm so glad we talked about this. I was like, "Man, we've been going for a while," and I just knew you'd have some important insights for me and for other people listening.

[03:04:15] Paul: Well, it is a very important time. Plant medicines can introduce you to real religion. Real religion is having a mystical experience with God or with nature that's beyond anything you can read out of a book. And there's nothing more real than your own experience. Memorizing shit out of books and Bible passages, that's not religion.

[03:04:39] That's why Rumi said, to get to God, you got to become a heretic, which means you got to go against the book. You got to stop memorizing stuff someone else wrote on a piece of paper and think that that's being religious. If that was working, then the world would be in a great shape right now.

[03:04:54] But we've had thousands and thousands of years of religion and we're still constantly trying to kill each other and destroy each other and lie and cheat and steal. So much for that. But you know what? A well-run shamanic ceremony can turn you into a great lover. A bad one can turn you into a psych ward victim.

[03:05:17] Luke: It's a great note to end on.

[03:05:18] Paul: Handle them as though you're handling the most explosive consciousness bomb you've ever held. And like dynamite, can either blast the side of a mountain out so you can build a house or it can get you killed. And you have to keep that consciousness with these things.

[03:05:38] Luke: Epic. Thank you so much for coming to visit me today.

[03:05:40] Paul: I could talk to you for 1,000 hours.

[03:05:44] Luke: It's amazing, dude. Well, it's funny because I usually have a question I ask at the end, which is, name three teachers or teachings that have influenced your life, but you've named 400 already. Our show notes are full. You've given us a lot to contemplate, man.

[03:06:01] I appreciate you. And also just in my gratitude for the lives that you've impacted that have impacted my life. This is the first time we've met in person, but so many of your students, practitioners, friends have interfaced with me and my home and this podcast and your ripple of your influence in the most positive sense is wide. So I appreciate your dedication.

[03:06:27] Paul: I have given my heart and soul to my work and to the world and to people. And look, I've gone deep enough into God to know who I'm hanging out with every day, whether I like them or not. I'm looking at God. I'm breathing God. I'm eating God. I'm sleeping with God. I'm walking on God. I'm pooping God. I even give thanks to my poops. Because what might call our home and our farm the rainbow, I say thank you for feeding the rainbow. Safe swimming. I love you.

[03:07:01] Luke: I love it.

[03:07:05] Paul: I think when you really realize what God is, you can have great empathy and compassion because God is so brave, it's willing to completely and utterly forget itself so that it can truly, genuinely say, I am, when it realizes itself.

[03:07:23] Luke: Beautiful.

[03:07:25] Paul: Aho.