Your Life, Stronger: 4 Basics, Brain Power and Belief – Legacy Upgrade ft. Paul Chek : 954

You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey, formerly Bulletproof Radio, A state of high Performance. I've reached into the thousand legacy episodes of the podcast to bring you this incredible conversation because it's changed so many lives. You're going to get a lot of value from the ideas in this episode, and if you're hearing it for the second time, you're going to get more than you did the first time. And frankly, a lot of people don't hear every episode. This is one of the greats. If you like the show, I'd like your advice. Go to daveasprey.com podcasts and let me know what's working. And I'm sending a quick note of gratitude to you for being a Human Upgrade listener. Thanks for spending your time and your energy here with me, expanding your knowledge, exploring your performance and figuring out what you're actually capable of. I think we're all nicer when we do that. Stay connected with the podcast and with me on Instagram or Facebook, the handle is Heuman Upgrade Podcast. Thank you. Today we're going to go deep into what holistic really is. But this is science based. It's also experiential based. And if you're really deep and you go back and you look at some of the most intense holistic stuff that's written online, you'll find there's a guy associated with it and his name is Paul check. So for 30 years, he's had his own approach to treatment and education and he builds systems that help people get well and do things that are really beyond what they're supposed to be able to do. I am a fan of his work and I've been inspired by his work. And I'm going to tell you a little while, exactly one of the reasons of many. I wanted him on the show. But before that. Paul, welcome to the show.

My pleasure. It's really exciting to be with you, Dave. You've got a wealth of knowledge. I'm always, I always know when I'm listening to your podcast because I need a dictionary. And I think, God, this guy's got some deep, deep knowledge here. He's probably somebody that we need to hear more from.

Well, it's all the smart drugs. Do you take smart drugs?

If LSD and mushrooms are smart drugs, then yes.

It's funny. People get really worked up, especially maybe if you go back and you know this, but listeners may not. If you go back to the 80s, there was a movement and you see, you see guys like Steve, folks Who's a good friend who's been on the show a couple times and one of my mentors who was writing about them, he had Dirk Pearson and Sandy Shaw from the early life extension movement. And they're talking about all these smart drugs and it was pooh, poohed widely in the press. And then the renaissance of them started happening about 10 years ago. And I like to believe that I'm one of the people who helped on that, where I was talking about Modafinil. I was on Nightline and all. But then the argument was, that's cheating. And my guys, you are holding coffee in your hand while telling me smart drugs are cheating. You are such a hypocrite. Because look, coffee, we'll call it caffeine and nicotine and yes, mushrooms. And if you want to count LSD as a fungal metabolite, which it is, then those are Mother Nature's original cognitive enhancers at the right dose. Otherwise any of them can have negative effects. And when you say that, people are like, but it's really hard to argue against that when they're drinking coffee or tea or chocolate or any of these other mind altering substances. Why do you think you have 30 years of looking at this? Why do you think people are so negative on some but so positive on others?

Well, I'll quote David Bohm who said, real thinking is challenging work. That's why most people just rearrange their prejudices and call it thinking.

Ouch.

Well, it's just the truth. And I'm not trying to be mean to anybody but most people. Actually our education system is designed to teach people what to think, not how to think. And being raised on a farm and having left school in the ninth grade and becoming a father at 18, I had to go out into the world and make shit happen. I couldn't. I couldn't a. I didn't want to settle for cheesy laborer jobs where I was never going to feel good about myself or grow myself. So I had, I learned on the farm. You know, we had a fully functional 140 acre sheep farm. We grew our own produce, we sold firewood, we were fully self contained, we milked our own cows, we slaughtered our own animals. And on a farm, you can't fool around doing shit that doesn't work because you'll starve to death. And my father was a special effects man for Universal Studios before we moved out of LA and immigrated to Canada. My mother's a very skilled and experienced advanced yogi, a weaver, a spinner, a Crafts expert and a very accomplished sculptor. So my upbringing was always a mix of what does science have to say, but what do we need to do that works that we know for sure? So I kind of got raised by a father who was very, very intelligent with many, many different skills, who wasn't afraid to look into the science of various farming technologies or veterinary technologies, but also knew what worked consistently that the peasants used and that farmers used historically. So I kind of came from this grounding where there's a certain limitation where science may say something, but that doesn't mean it's going to work in every situation. And I learned to be practical and to be functional and to get results, or I couldn't grow myself, I couldn't demonstrate the value of myself. So that's really the underpinning that led to the development of my entire career is just really applying the concept of fundamental principles and then saying, here's what I know works for sure because I do it every day. Let's see what science has to say.

So your parents were actually magicians. Anyone who's spend a little bit of time with the special effects kind of guy, they are magicians. They're also scientists. But there's an art to what they do. And they literally are creating magic. ILM industrial. Like it's, it's part of it. And your mom, it sounds like, certainly if you're doing really advanced yoga and all those other things like that, she's got, you know, one foot on another plane. So you, you. That plus holistic farming. I live on a 32 acre farm. We have a dozen sheep, we had a dozen turkeys. Until we found out that this batch of turkeys we got from the turkey hatching place had a bacterial thing. So we have less turkeys than we wanted to. We just figured that out yesterday. And like you said, you know, okay, if all the turkeys die, then no one's going to eat them. And that's a problem, right? So you have to do the science.

Turkeys keep you on your feet.

Oh, man, I don't even like turkeys. They're not that good.

They'll come after you, baby.

They're not that good for you. And man, they're ugly, but they're also kind of cool.

They're mean bastards.

Yeah, they are.

But see, we had, we had lots of turkeys and I learned about turkeys quick. They'll chase you and they'll come after you.

And so will pigs too. You know, we have a. We had a dozen pigs. They just went off to the Bacon, the Bacon house recently. But it's funny because my kids, they're learning that stuff. It's a little different than when you are my, you know, my 10 year old's all into 3D printing because you can 3D print stuff you need, but they spend an hour or two a day working the farm and that's a requirement for them. And for you, it's funny, you were a mechanic and you were a welder. I used to weld Toyota truck frames and I put auto parts in boxes for five years when I was in my early 20s. I'm like, how do I pay for my college and go to college and do all this stuff before I started companies and got a career in Silicon Valley and all. You learn something by doing it with your hands. It seems like it's been lost. And so you had this upbringing with nature and with a cycle of life with hands on stuff, but with science and with, I'm going to call it wizardry from the yoga side of things, all that stuff got baked into you. When did you transition from all right, I'm a marine mechanic and things like that into all right, holistic wellness? What was the hump that took you over?

I don't think I ever did transition, honestly. We made our own bread, we milked our own cows, we, we separated our own milk and cream, we made our own ice cream, we made our own butter, we slaughtered our own animals. My mother joined the Self Realization Fellowship, which is the teachings of Paramahansa Yogananda when I was 12, which was a great relief because Christianity was really very stressful to me because nobody could answer my questions. And I had a lot of them because I found the Bible to be full of very intense conflicts that didn't leave me feeling safe at all. And when I couldn't get answers to questions, I was concerned. And their absolute insistence on not studying the materials of any other spiritual teachers. The first session I, the first temple ceremony I went to when I was 12 years old was a mind blower for me. The leader of the ceremony began the prayer by saying, Heavenly Father Jesus Christ, Paramahansa Yogananda Sri Yukteswar Lahiri Mahasaya Babaji Krishna. Saints and sages and gurus of all religions, we humbly bow to you all. And it was like a wave of peace went through my body. I realized immediately I was with people that were open to and interested in the great spiritual teachers of the entire world and were not trying to convince me that I had to do things a certain way or I was going to burn in hell, which I found radically confusing. But to really expand on what I'm saying as I went out into the world, especially as an athlete, you know, because I was an athlete from the time I was in first grade. I started wrestling in the first grade and I played every sport I could play in school because I just had so much pent up energy. And unfortunately, my parents fought a lot and my real father died when I was 8, so there's a lot of unresolved trauma there. And so I had to find a way to dissipate my frustration, my anger, my fear and my stress. So athletics was my outlet. And one of my best friends was Mr. Canada in bodybuilding. He won the Canadian nationals in bodybuilding in 86. My buddy, who was my sparring partner for three years, Lloyd Anderson, was the Canadian national champion as a lightweight boxer. And then he switched over to kickboxing and won the world title in kickboxing in 89. Many of my buddies were elite skiers. I was a sponsor. I was sponsored by Honda as a motocross racer. When I was a kid, many of my buddies were nationally ranked motocrossers. I raced stock cars, I was a drag racer, I set three track records in stock car racing. And so as I merged into the athletic community and saw all the sort of tricks that they were doing from various powders and supplements and wraps and straps and creams, I noticed that the way they were eating and the way they were living was more based on what was in magazines and what they were reading from various books and things. But inevitably, these guys weren't as strong or as fast as me or they kept having injuries. And I, whenever I had injuries, just listening to my mother's advice and sort of listening to my body, I was able to heal quicker than them. So I began to be suspect of a lot of these approaches. And whenever I would try them, I would start having skin problems, cognitive problems, I would get gas, I would feel lousy, and then I would switch back to just eating like I did on the farm. And I immediately noticed I felt better. So the point I'm making is every time I ventured out into sort of the modern approaches, I found that I was losing performance, I was losing recoverability, I was losing cognitive function. But when I stuck with really just eating high quality meat and high quality vegetables, training well, getting enough sleep and living like I lived on the farm, I felt better, I performed better, I recovered better. And that became the basis of what I taught. Because as I became more successful as a therapist and work with, you know, myriads of Olympic teams, professional sports teams, famous athletes, world record holders, and the list is long. The first thing I would do is say, along with all their intake paperwork, I was like, tell me everything that you're using right now. Some of these guys would bring in big gym bags full of bottles of supplements and pills and this and that. Some of these guys were spending 1500 bucks a month and all this stuff. So the first thing I would do is put them on what I call the caveman diet. No nuts, no grains, no seeds, no dairy.

Amen.

Only butter if you can handle it, and cut out all supplements and drugs unless you absolutely have to take them due to a doctor's prescription. And if they said that, I would call the doctor, tell them why I was doing what I was doing, and ask him if they could take one week off. To this day, Dave, I've been doing this work for 36 years. I started as the trainer of the United States army boxing team when I was 22. I'll be 59 next month. This is all I've done. Not one single human being I've put on the caveman diet has ever come back to me and said anything other than, oh, my God, I feel so damn much better. Why the hell was I taking all that shit?

Now? What happens if someone's on the caveman diet and then say, you know, I'm going to take some turmeric. I'm going to take some blueberry extract. I'm going to take some periwinkle extract to increase blood flow in my brain. Like, do they have to be mutually exclusive?

No, because everything you've just said is really essentially an extract of a caveman diet.

Exactly. So I take a whole lot of pills, but most of them are things that are in food. I just can't eat that much food, or I'd just be stuffed.

Well, so here's the thing. What I do is I get a. What I call a baseline. I say, let's just go back to how we were designed by nature to eat nothing in those pill bottles is in its authentic form. And so, as you know, anytime you start processing things, you break them down. Royal. Royal Lee's research showed very quickly that vitamins function in complexes. There's no such thing as a vitamin in nature that's not wrapped up in a complex that contains proteins, fats, carbohydrates, minerals, trace minerals, enzymes, phenolics, terpenes, and alkaloids. His description was a Vitamin complex functions like a watch. And he asked the question, what part of a watch tells time? Well, the answer is the whole damn thing tells time. And if you lose one piece of it, you don't have a functional unit. So when I create a baseline for people, then I say, okay, now let's look at the supplements you were taking and let's look at whether they're good or not. Let's look at whether or not they come from organic sources. Otherwise you're just getting concentrated toxins. And then let's reintroduce them one at a time on a four day rotation cycle. Because everything that you take affects your physiology from the time it goes into your mouth till it leaves your anus. And that's well researched. You can put caffeine up your ass and it'll get you high.

It certainly will. Those coffee enemas, don't recommend them. If you're going to do them, you should cool the coffee off first.

Yeah, very good idea. So because it takes on average about 72 to 76 hours for a person's foodstuffs to move from mouth to anus, I asked them not to try anything more than once every four days. So they would have at least 24 hours for their immune system to completely rest from that input. And then I would be able to isolate which actual inputs. Because if they were sticking to the caveman diet, they already knew what their responses were to that. So if you add some extract or some supplement or glucosamine sulfate or creatine or whatever, then they have a baseline that they can monitor their reactions. Inevitably, what I'd find is about 75% of the stuff that, that had all sorts of science behind it, was supposed to be so magical, actually made them worse. It didn't make them better. And then I taught them, this is how you determine what works for you. Everything in the world out there is backed by some kind of science. That science are the modern prostitutes of the world. You can get anything backed by science. Every drug that's been taken off the market was scientifically validated before it killed people. And I say we're as different on the inside as we are on the outside. So you have to take the responsibility to determine what actually works for you. And you also have to take the responsibility of determining if something's going to hop you up. What's the long term cost of that? Steroids are hop you up, but they'll also burn your liver out. So I ask them, do you want to be good for a season or do you want to be good for your lifetime? Once you make that decision, I'll support you. But I want to make sure you know the ramifications of the choices that you're making so that you're acting like an adult and not falling victim to somebody else's ideas, dogmas, or fantasies. And that really was. Is the basis. And I've worked for so many professional sports teams and Olympic committees and organizations that had reams of problems and had staffs of scientists and all the fancy gadgets, inevitably, it tracked right back to one of these basic principles that was being abused. And once I got that right, their body started to heal. I taught them how to lift weights properly, how to breathe properly, how to hydrate properly, how to sleep properly. And when they got the foundation principles back in place, and then they could discern which of the things that were being given to them by staff doctors and experts on biochemistry, then they could actually discern what the actual cost benefit ratio is. And I've really supported my athletes in becoming intelligent and learning how to think for themselves.

It's so important to be able to sense that. And I want to sort of gut check my algorithmic approach to this stuff. And knowing that you said you were. How old are you now?

I'll be 59 next month.

59. All right, so you've got another decade plus, a little bit more of experience than I do on this stuff. And what I found is I was wrecked. I had massive toxic mold exposure. I had arthritis in my knees when I was 14. I hit 300 pounds in my early 20s. I had very low blood flow to the brain. Daniel Amen's research, when his first book came out, I went and I got that test done. And when he saw my brain, he's like, dave, this is the brain of someone who lives underneath an overpass on street drugs. You have chemically induced brain damage from the environment you live in. And I had to unpack all of that. And of course, they said Lyme disease and chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia, all of which are toxic mold. And I was down, I would say, running at maybe 10% of mitochondrial capacity. I was wrecked. Sleep was crappy and all that. But when you're running at 10%, if you can do something that moves the needle 1%, you feel it because it's a 10% shift. Like, oh, my God, I got my life back. That's why I notice yak butter tea. Cause I was at 18,000. I can't even remember my phone number exactly. My car Keys aren't in the fridge today. I'm so pleased. Right?

Yes.

And that sort of thing. So I feel like I got sensitivity there where I could intuit. Okay, this works. This doesn't work. But then I started out on the path you described. I said, all right, I'm going to try vitamin C and I'll just do it for a month and see what the changes are. And it seemed to work, but for my knees, man, glucosamine was a life changing thing for me because I could walk without constant pain. When I started taking glucosamine and grapeseed extracts, stop these chronic nosebleeds, I used to just, every day my nose would just start gushing and it was really irritating. And by the way, that's a classical sign of toxic mold in your house. And it has to do with vitamin C and glutathione and collagen synthesis for your arteries and VEGF for people who are really into that stuff. But all these things, I said, all right. And then I did the math and I said, for all the things that I think based on science could be beneficial for me, it's going to take me the rest of my life to try this stuff one at a time. And what if the right answer was I needed to take vitamin C and quercetin at the same time, so I gotta look at combinatorials. So I turned it around. I said, you know what I'm gonna do? I'm pick a challenge. I'm gonna get my baseline and I'm gonna do everything that doesn't seem to contradict itself. Given what we know. I'm gonna do it all at once. And if I get the results I wanted, then I'm gonna back stuff out like crazy to see if I can keep the results. But then I get to enjoy the benefits of it instead of testing things one at a time. Because I have no data that says only one thing is the solution to the problem. In fact, the systemic nature, the holistic nature of ourselves says sometimes you need that whole complex set. And I found great results using the throw everything up. As long as you're not using poisons and toxins and you have pure stuff and you thought about it, that seems to work really well. How would you contrast that line of thinking with the one at a time line of thinking?

Well, there's a couple of ways to go about that.

How would you contrast that line of thinking with the one at a time line of thinking?

Well, there's a couple of ways to go about that. First of all, People come to me very much just like that, quite often. I mean, I owned a physical therapy clinic. I worked in a chiropractic clinic for two years. I worked with an osteopath in the military who trained me in acute sports injury care. I worked in a physical therapy clinic with a surgical center for four years. I owned a physical therapy clinic for three years. So I spent plenty of time in that environment. I did three years of training with the founder of Biohealth Diagnostics, Bill Timmons, who's actually the inventor of salivary testing.

Cool.

And so I did an internship for three years with him, and we traded. I took care of him, he trained me. So when I get a person like that, because today we have so many potential sources of toxins and electromagnetics and all that you're getting bombarded from every direction. You know, there's a new piece of carpet puts out 132 carcinogenic chemicals for the first year. It's in your building. A new car puts out 68,000 toxic chemicals for the first year. So when you start looking at all the potential sources of input, what I found. And my whole system's multidisciplinary. I've never tried to be a person who thinks he can fix everything. I've always developed a team around me of the people that I really trust their knowledge because I see good results with them. So if you were to come to me as a patient, the first thing I would have done is done lab tests on you. I would have done a 24 hour cortisol rhythm test. I would have done environmental toxicity testing, heavy metal testing. I would have wanted to know what exactly is in this guy. I would have tested you for parasite infections. I would have tested you for bacterial dysbiosis. And once I had all the data so I could actually get an idea of what is Dave's physiological load, whether the different factors, I would then prioritize what is the most important thing to eliminate first. And if you had fungal mycotoxin poisoning or a fungal infection, I would have got rid of that right off the bat. Because fungal mycotoxins can modulate the immune cytokines and leukotrines and all the immune messengers. And if you had heavy metal poisoning, I would have gone after that, especially if mercury was involved. Yeah, you know, I've had a lot of those things, too. I had six major concussions and my brain function was. Was so bad from bad accidents. Racing, motocross years, kickboxing years, boxing. And so my brain used to Just stop. Every four seconds, it would just go blank. I used to be lecturing all over the world. I wouldn't even remember what I was talking about. I wouldn't know what city I was in.

I was there, too. I had exactly that. Okay. And you'd still be able to lecture. Yes.

Because I was driven by the fire of passion and concern for people. But the point I'm making is somebody trying to see me who didn't know I had mercury amalgam fillings. I had mercury poisoning. I had too much aluminum. When I was a paratrooper in the military, they lost my shot record twice. And it's the rule that if you lose a soldier shot record, they have to get all the shots. I had all the shots, 23 vaccinations, three times. So I was loaded with all the toxic they put in those vaccinations. And so when I finally got to the point where I really realized I've got to go get some help, I went and saw somebody that did neural therapy for brain mapping.

Yeah.

And they said, you. Your head looks exactly like a person that's had a severe head injury.

Wow.

And I said, I've had six major concussions. I was out for two days, completely unconscious with a motocross racing accident. And he said, your brain completely stops for one second every four seconds. And I. So. So I told him the story that I told you about how I would forget what I was doing, where I was at. I. I literally wouldn't. I would go to hotels and I not remember where my room was.

Yeah. You know, it was very. Exactly this.

I'd have to go to the front desk and say, you know, I checked in here yesterday, but honestly, I can't remember where my room is. And, you know, please don't have, like.

I. I just. I love this because most people don't talk about that.

Yeah.

That's chemical or physical brain damage. Yeah.

With a person like you, I look at all the data, and from a lot of training and a lot of experience, sometimes you have, you know, five or six dragons that are dangerous at once. But you have to say, okay, the body can only handle so much detoxification, so much clearing, and so much behavioral change. So I learned a concept of surrounding the dragon. If there's a problem that's so big that you can't figure it out and the doctors can't figure it out, then you've got to do everything you can do to give the body the resources it needs to activate its own healing systems and. And give it access to the wisdom within it. I think if we give the body what it needs, it can heal from almost anything. But sometimes we have to take away the things like mercury and other toxins that are blocking it from doing what its own thing is. So really, what I'm saying is I use all the available science that I have at my fingertips and in my network to get a picture of what's going on. And then I prioritize, and I also prioritize the use of any kind of supplementation based on what is the most important thing for this person to accomplish right now so that I don't just end up with someone who's taking 55 different supplements and feeling like shit while they think they're doing the right thing.

Well said. I have for 10 years had people say, dave, can I have a list of the supplements you take? And every single time I've said, no, I absolutely won't do that. Here's why. You're not 6 4. You don't have a history of autoimmunity and obesity, and you're not planning to live to 180. You don't have my metabolism, you don't have my blood type. And this stuff is customized based on the data and based on what works and what doesn't work for me. And if you're going to do that kind of stuff, you can't just copy a stack because it isn't going to work. So I'm happy you're putting it out that way.

Yeah. I want to interject one other thing before you move on. People in the kind of condition that you're describing and the kind of. As your condition and the condition I'm describing. Yeah. And oftentimes we're so depleted in nutrition and resources and energy that paradoxically, taking a bunch of supplements like that, if they're good, actually enhances the nutrient variety. Even though it's a shotgun approach, some people all of a sudden start feeling really good because they're getting the molecules they need to activate different systems.

Yes.

And so even the problem is if they take too much, the body has to detoxify it. That's why I tell people, if your urine's really smelly and it gets too dark, you're loading the system up. So back the dose down so that you're not getting. If your sweat starts to stink, if you. So I give them the kind of. The symptoms that they should look for. But ultimately, what's happening is people are shotgunning effectively. And as their vitality comes online and their sense of feeling themselves comes online. They often, especially if they're being coached effectively, become aware when all of a sudden, okay, this supplement that once made me feel better isn't helping or something's wrong and I need to figure out what it is. And I say, okay, what are you taking? So just let's go back to a rotation. Put them in a four day rotation so that you can figure out what's actually making you feel worse and what's making you feel better. And I've rarely ever had a case where someone in a four day rotation cycle couldn't identify the problem.

And four days is the same thing that we use for food rotation diets. And I did the elimination.

That's the same model.

Yeah, I did that late 90s to try and figure out what's going on with food. And it was revolutionary because I figured out, you know what, I can eat garbage on Friday night. So that'd be my cheat day. Because that was. You're supposed to have a cheat day. And besides, I like cheesecake and crusty bread, right? So Friday night I do that. Saturday I'm like, I got a little gas, but I'm fine. And it was Monday when just the absolute feelings of just exhaustion and cravings and all that would hit me. But I never knew it was because of what I did on Friday night. Because some of these things are 24 hours, some are 48, and then they can go up to 10 days, but four days, it gets almost all of them. So I love it that you're talking about four days. What I eventually evolved to is when I travel, I have a stack that I take when I travel that's designed to support me when I'm in hotels with crappy air, when I'm on airplanes, and when I'm on a disrupted circadian schedule, my inflammation stuff is gonna be higher. So it's all dialed in. When I'm at home, I don't pre make my little stacks of vitamins. What I do is I reach for it. And if you're listening, your body will tell you, don't take that one today because you just don't want to. And then you just don't do it. And it's the same thing a cat will do. A cow will sniff that grass and say, ah. And it'll take the grass over there because it's got something the cow needs. They're not just randomly doing it. And.

And if they get sick, they will go eat strange herbs and flowers as very clearly borne out in the documentary called Ho about Harry Hoxie's cure for cancer. So in being raised on a farm, I watch this all the time. When dogs are sick, they'll eat grass.

Yeah.

And so if you just watch nature, they all show you what we're supposed to be like if we're in touch with our instincts. Most people are so trapped in their head, they're like a kite with no tail. They've lost touch with the wisdom of the body, with the wisdom of the instincts. Most people are so trapped in their head that they don't even have access to intuition. I tell people, look, your mind is like a garbage disposal. The mind chops the wholeness of everything into pieces so you can have a concept to work with. But intuition comes in lightning bolts. You can have a whole book come to you in a millisecond. But if you try to put a whole book through a garbage disposal, you'll just get little bits and pieces. It'll take you eight years to get to the place you can get by sitting still and meditating regularly. So you're opening the garbage disposal and slowing the blades down enough that the answer comes. So with, with my life and my practices and the monks taught me a lot about this and what I teach my students is if you have a solid ritual that grounds you and helps you balance activity or working out physically, emotionally and mentally with working in. So you have access to your feelings. Because consciousness has four chief functions. Thinking, feeling, sensation and intuition. So if you're beating your body too much, it really you usually means you're detached from your feeling and sensing capacities because you're under some kind of stress, or you've got a daddy problem or a mommy problem, or a self esteem problem, or you're trying to be a superhero to make something out of yourself. If you're thinking too much, its complementary opposite is intuition. So you can't intuit while you're thinking and you can't sense while you're feeling. Jung showed that very clearly and you can test it on yourself. So I tried to teach people techniques for re connecting to the feeling functions of consciousness, the sensation functions and the intuitive functions. Because very few people have a problem with thinking in our culture. We're programmed into it right from when we enter primary school.

It's interesting, I just had Dan on from Harvard who translated original bone texts. And these are the manuals for meditation from 700 years ago in Sanskrit and some of the original Buddhist things. But he's on faculty at Harvard. This is Dan Brown's name. Really interesting.

I Know who that is?

Yeah, Dan. So fascinating.

He's very well known in meditation research and things like that. Yeah, and just consciousness research.

A complete rock star, but at the same time licensed, I think psychiatrist, psychologist, something like that. So he's got the science, but he's also got the consciousness research side of things. And it feels like a lot of the consciousness things are missing from hustle culture and all that. And you said something that stood out to me. You said, you can download a book in a second. My first book on fertility. 1300 references. Took me five years to do all the research for the book and to start writing it. The actual outline for the book was during an intense neurofeedback driven meditation session. The 40 years Zen stuff I do, I came out of this really altered pure intuition state. Wrote the entire outline just from my subconscious. And two weeks later, Gary Taubes introduces me to a publisher and agent and the whole thing starts rolling. I didn't have to think of that. I already had the knowledge.

It might have been your. It might have been your superconscious Dave.

It could have been. I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna say that I measured which one it was, but it was in there. And it's that. How do you get into that state? How do you teach people to get into a state of intuition and download?

Well, the first thing you got to do is you have to, you have to be very careful about the weekly schedule. So most of the people. One of the first things I do in therapy is I say, bring me your schedule that shows me everything you're doing in a typical week. Just like people have daytimers or calendars that they work off of. And what I do is I look at the relative output of physical, emotional and mental energy relative to time for input. So I look at anything that has an objective to be met versus something that has no objective objective to be met. So what I call unbound play versus achieving an outcome. And then I say, okay, what we've got to do is we've got to build sacred time into your schedule. And I teach them my four doctor model. The four doctor model basically is based on a concept that I developed that I, I borrowed part of it from, from the romans. And basically Dr. Happiness is the chief of the other doctors. Dr. Happiness is the mind. Dr. Happiness is the part of you that's responsible for determining what is happy making in your life. What makes you inspired to live, to grow, to become an engaged life. What are the activities that you do that are stress reducing Maybe it's music, maybe it's dance, maybe it's art. Whatever it is, we're each responsible for figuring that out. And doctor, happiness is the chief of your values. I tell all my students and patients your yes has no value until you learn to say no. And without values, you don't know when to say no. Okay? And our emotions are triggered largely by our values, be they conscious or unconscious. So once I look at their relative output versus their relative input to things that are happy making and that are essential, such as nutrition, hydration, sleep, breathing, thinking and movement, I say, if you really want to be healthy or you really want to achieve your potential in life, we have to identify what I call sacred time. So then I work with their schedule and say, okay, you're going to need to make sure you're eating, ideally for the average person, three meals a day. If you feel like you're not hungry but you're healthy, then listen to your gut and don't eat. But as a general rule, we have to make sure you're adequately hydrated, you're adequately fed, you're adequately rested, and you have adequate amounts of movement to keep your body healthy. And then if that's done, then we focus on movement to accomplish a specific dream goal or objective, be it athletic or otherwise. Then I say, okay, what are we going to do to have time for you to spend time inside yourself? That can be Tai Chi, it can be meditation, it can be breathing exercises, it could be slow walks in the woods. I try to find approaches that naturally fit their personality. So I structure the sacred time into their week and say, okay, now this is how much time you've got left for the outputting. And if you don't keep that balance, you're going to spend a lot more money on doctors and therapists and surgeons. Surgeons. And it's going to get to the point where most of my clients are spending more money than they can make because they're 200,000 or 250,000 or 300,000 into doctors, surgeries, tests, and nothing's improving. Why? Because they're living in a way that's completely exhausting their resources. And they're so detached from knowing who they are, they're not really in touch with themselves, their wants, feelings or needs. They're doing what they think they have to do to make a living or, or reacting to their developmental programming or their traumas without really doing the work of introspection and self connection it takes to identify what's really going on and what needs to be healed. And who can help me do that? And inevitably, what people say to me is, paul, if I do that, I'm going to go broke. And I say, well, you're already broke. That's why you're here. You're broken. That's why you're here. You're paying me $750 an hour because nobody else could help you. And the question is, how long do you want to have to pay me this money to teach you what everybody has to learn eventually, or they end up spending a huge amount of their money on some kind of professional help. And the track record of the medical system in this country is not very good. We're the most expensive medical system, but we ranked 37th for overall effectiveness. You're now a statistic. I don't want you to be a statistic. I want you to be a good example to yourself, your children and everybody else and be a positive change maker in the world. So I simply say to them, how much more money could you earn if when you went to work you were actually happy, healthy, making time for yourself, adequately rested, getting the movement you need, and could focus your mind and knew that you were going to be able to go home, eat, rest, sleep and play, and you weren't going to lose yourself doing something that you didn't want to do anyhow. You're just doing it to make money. Well, everybody, with rare exceptions, says, well, you know, if you look at it that way, you got something. So sometimes I have to start small, maybe only 15 or 20 minutes of some kind of introspective practice or meditative.

Practice, as per day or per week.

Or typically per day, depends on what the situation they're in, how far down they are, and how critical it is. Because if you don't give the body, you see, if you think of it like, look at it financially, if somebody comes to you bankrupt and you say, okay, we have to make 10 extra dollars a week for the next 7200 years to get you to break even. That might fit their schedule, but they're not going to live that long, so they're going to have financial troubles the rest of their life. So if you're in a deep hole, then I say we have to make deep changes. If you're in a shallow hole, then we can start off with small amounts and we can drip feed you and, you know, sip into it, so to speak. So I always have to look with every person at the relative demand that their body, emotions, mind and spirit is calling for in order to achieve Balance. But most people don't really know what health is. They don't really know what vitality is. And they're not really sure who they are or why they're doing what they're doing, other than the fact that they're making money doing it. But most of them aren't doing what they love to do. And that burns people out. And then they go home and they have to medicate themselves with pot, alcohol, drugs to ease the pain of having to go to a mundane existence doing things that they really don't enjoy doing. Often with people they don't enjoy being around just to pay bills so they can drive the car they like and the house they like. But that's a. That's a very. A dead end road that leads to not only a physiological crisis, but a spiritual cris. So it's very complicated to coach people holistically, especially when you're dealing with the kind of cases that I deal with. Because you have to help them grow in so many areas at once. But also because they're in so much trouble, you have to be very careful not to give them control fatigue. By giving them so many things that they have to now work on that it burns them out even further.

Okay.

And so really that's what I've spent my life working on is how do I find that balance and determine what's the most important thing to do First, I learned that you never give a person more than four objectives to work on at once, or they're likely not to participate in any of them because of overwhelm. And so when I look at their life from the eyes of Dr. Happiness, I help them establish values for diet, quiet movement, and then I look at the balance of too much or too little movement, wrong diet, right diet, high quality, poor quality, not enough rest and sleep, or rarely too much. Every now and then you get someone who's just sedentary and maybe they're living off of a trust fund or something and they're lacking activity, so I need to put a fire up their ass. But really, when I look at happiness, movement, quiet and diet, I get a holistic picture of their life. Because you can't reduce a living philosophy below those four factors. Nobody can truly be healthy with three doctors. If you're good at happiness and good at movement and good at diet, but you don't get enough sleep, you'll be in trouble. If you're good at happiness and good at sleep and good at diet, but you don't get enough exercise, you'll be in trouble. So the reductio ad absurdum of holistic health or, or health in general is happiness, quiet diet and movement. And if you exclude one of those, you leave a hole big enough to trigger off some kind of a crisis if it goes on long enough.

So that's a powerful model. You've got happiness, movement, quiet diet. A lot of the practices that you're talking about though, kind of sound like the yogic or the Buddhist. Chop wood, carry water, just do something every day. I have this mindset though. You know what? I have a chainsaw. At least I'd rather have a chainsaw and a water truck here. So I went from my art of living breathing exercises every day for five years and especially before I had kids, no problem. Hour or two of meditation in the morning, I got this and I can create rituals and journaling and candles and shamanic stuff. And then you have kids and you're like, oh, I kind of sort of starting a company and doing this other stuff. And I found that I really could cram months worth of meditation in one week of super intense neurofeedback where I'm spending 10 hours a day going way deep inside and having done it with a bunch of people now through my company does that stuff for the people who don't want to chop wood and carry water, they actually want to have a chainsaw. Is there a way to get at least most of the benefits in either concentrated time or in less time? Just for people who are saying, look, I've got a big mission, I'm carrying a lot here and actually I don't want to spend a half hour a day chopping wood and carrying water. I want to spend a week doing hardcore stuff or two days or one day a week. I'm just going to do nothing but lock myself in a cave. Is there an accelerated way of anything you can think of?

Well, I'll say if you were to look at my resume and see what I've done in my life, you would know that I've been busier than a one legged man in an ass kicking contest.

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Well, say if you were to look at my resume and see what I've done in my life, you would know that I've been busier than a one legged man in an ass kicking contest. But the only way I can do it is to go back to the basics. Because one of the most important things for me is to be 100% congruent with my teachings. When I stand on stage, there's only one person there. I don't need to wear masks. I don't need to be pretend to be an expert at this or that. I'll quote my buddy Laird Hamilton who says the truth is what works. If Dave can do it with electronics, then Dave can do it with electronics. Not everybody can do that. One of the problems I have with what would be kind of standard biohacking concepts is they detach people from the earth. They detach people from the very foundations. We are a biological organism and if you get too trapped in electronic gadgets and shortcuts, then you actually lose touch with who and what you are. And when the power goes out, you're fucked. So I teach people, use whatever works for you, but don't bullshit yourself.

There you go. The ancient traditions are a part of it in teaching people to be grounded, just teaching people to sense the energy field around them. You can learn to sense things faster with neurofeedback. You want to teach someone how their breath works, show it to them on a screen when they're doing it, like oh, I didn't know I was doing that. And so I feel like you can accelerate the turning on some of the senses. Oh, I just never knew that when I felt this. It meant this and that. Oh, this is that state. No one ever explained that to me. And the Buddhists would say, visualize this and imagine this. And there's all these things that are trying to transmit this state of the shape of the field around your head or your heart, using words that suck at that. And so I'm saying, well, okay, this is what it looks like. And so I'm just going to give you a sign when you do it right. And I look at that as accelerated teaching. If I can say what you're doing right is right. For me, it's been really helpful. I didn't know what the heck anything going on under my neck was. And I hooked up a heart rate variability monitor and said, oh, look at that. When I think about all the negative stuff that I have, lots of that I've cleaned out there, then I see a change in my heart rate. Oh, that. Actually, that. That feeling matters. Before that. I'm an engineer. That feeling doesn't matter. It's just some stupid noise from below the neck. You don't have to pay attention. Yes, that's helped me. Right. But I also.

Did you know what you're describing?

Yeah, go ahead.

What you're describing is the transition from what biohacking is to what I call bioharmonizing.

There you go.

Biohacking is traditionally taking shortcuts, but you become dependent upon gadgets to look and feel and perform a certain way.

That's not biohacking. No way.

Well, that may be not for you, but look at what's going on there.

It's in Merriam Webster's. My name's in there. It's the art and science of changing your environment around you and inside of you to control your biology. That's it. It doesn't require tech at all. Right. You can do it with shamanic stones and drums if you want to.

Okay, good. But that's not what. Just because you. I've developed the concepts of many things. I've watched people do stupid shit on Swiss balls and every other thing I've invented. And people say the foam roller is dangerous. You know, certain people have to learn the hard way. What I'm saying is, if you're dependent upon a gadget to do something that is actually a copy of a more advanced technology within you. For example, Steiner said in about 1897, human beings will continue to invent technologies outside of themselves until they realize that every technology is actually a copy of something inside of themselves, or they destroy the world. The question is which will come first. And that's the situation we're in right now. So I have nothing against technologies, but when I was a fighter, I would wear a heart rate monitor. And when I was a triathlete, I represented the army in triathlon. I went to the national championships, I fought on the boxing team and competed as a triathlete at the same time.

That's hard.

Try that on. Yeah, that is hardcore. And I'm sharing how I did it. I used a heart rate monitor, but I paid close attention to my perceived level of exertion. What was the experience I was having? Within about six months, I could tell you what my heart rate was within three beats, no matter what the hell I was doing. So I said, I don't need the heart rate monitor.

That's 100% correct? Yes.

When you learn from the technology by paying attention to it as a teacher and you connect yourself to your inner experience, that's what I call bioharmonizing. Now you're using the advanced technology. Look, a watch cannot figure out its maker. So any biohacking device or pill or supplement out there cannot ever supersede the creator of it. What I'm trying to do with people is say, look, if Dave Asprey can come up with something that can enhance your ability to feel, perform or whatever, look inside yourself to see if there's something inside of you that it's teaching you to do so that then you can be free of the technology. And the next time you need a piece of technology, it'll take you up a notch, you'll grow from it.

Yeah, we use only a little bit of our hardware. So you turn on all of your sensors, make maximum use of everything your body has. And if you do that, there's a name for that. It's called full enlightenment. And something that's interesting. I don't know if you or how much you talk about it in the scope of your work, but you're a registered Native American spirit guide and medicine man and Native American traditional organization trained person. On top of all this other stuff, how did you incorporate the spiritual side of what you do? And why did you choose a Native American path given all the different things you could have done?

Well, because that particular, that particular license as a medicine men spirit guide allows me to use any natural substance in a healing ceremony run under the criteria of a Native American of the Native American Council. So that allows me the ability to run a ceremony and use non synthesized plant medicines to help people heal.

Yeah, for mostly traumatic healing and spiritual healing. And things like that.

Yes, I always have had the spiritual elements in all of my teachings and all of my practices. In fact, you know, I spent a lot. I spent my 15th summer with the monks, learning all sorts of meditation techniques and going deep into time with them, asking them every question I could come up with, learning how they did it. They were super holistic. And so many times, Dave, I've had people so complicated, even with my level of assessment skills, I would be going, I haven't got a clue what's going on with this person. So through all my Tai chi and meditation, I became clairvoyant, claire, audience and clairsentient. And I'm also a remote viewer. And I actually won a remote viewing contest with 750 people taught by the CA's viewing instructor. Oh, you wonder.

Those guys. That stuff was fascinating. Okay.

I went to a course with them, but they had a contest and I won the contest. So what I would do, which I still do to this very day, is I just empty myself. I become completely empty. I become a sounding board of their consciousness. I let their field permeate me and I turn my body into an. Into an instrument of receptivity. So if all of a sudden I start feeling brokenhearted, I know that's not me. If all of a sudden my small intestine starts locking up and tightening up and I feel anxious and nervous, I basically turn myself into a sensory perceptual instrument. And then I connect to. As I'm doing this, I start by connecting to that person's soul, which in my language is consciousness within. And I dialogue with that person's soul and say, I'm here to help your body mind healing. What is it that you would like me to know? And because a lot of this stuff is so out of the box for people, I would lay them face down on the table and I put my hands on their feet to connect to them. And I would just open and go into receptive mode and open my clairvoyance. And all of a sudden I might see video images of them being sexually or physically abused or verbally abused as a child. Countless is the number of people I've helped. I've got pin tail right on the donkey, and they would turn over in tears. Why are you asking me that question? How do you know that? Numerous times it's been things like their dog died and they're heartbroken and they really had a deep relationship with the dog and they don't realize now that their heart problem is because they're still haven't finished grieving from the loss of the dog, but meanwhile, the doctors want to split them open, put them on statin drugs and all this. So once I teach them how to reconnect with the dog and look at this spiritually, and they regain connection to the dog and can make amends with the dog and say goodbye, all of a sudden their problems are gone because they're actually alleviated of a spiritual stressor that medicine doesn't have a measuring stick for. So how I do this is really to interface myself, which is why I have to take care of myself and I have to manage myself. Because if I'm too caught up in money stress or living like an idiot or getting caught in silly political bullshit, I can't free myself enough to empty the bone and become a drum skin that they can play. And I've helped a long, long string of people that were at their wit's end and worked for many professional sports teams when all the doctors and therapists just threw the towel in. I give you a perfect example of this. One of my senior students got hired by the Canadian Olympic Committee because one of their top downhill skiers, and this is right before, I think, the. Either the A92 Olympics ago, and this guy started having. He was having a long problem with chronic back pain, and they had done everything they could do with this guy and they could not figure out how to get rid of his back pain. My. My student, who was a Level 4 check practitioner, called me up and said, paul, I need your help. I just evaluated this guy. He gave me the whole case history. He said, I can't find anything wrong with him, but he's got severe sciatic pain and it's really screwing his skiing up. And the Olympic committee's very worried because he's a gold medal hopeful. So I just went silent and let my soul talk to me. And my soul said, ask him how often he's pooping. I said, shane, ask him how often he's having a bowel movement. Once every three days was the answer. I said, the guy's constipated in the colon reflexes through the sciatic distribution. He's probably got fecal material adhering to the wall of the large intestine, which is triggering off the receptors. I said, the colon has stretch receptors in it that reflexively inhibit the transverse abdominis and the deep abdominal wall. So when a guy like that's backed up, he can't fire his core because the organs actually supersede control in the motor system over the motor system itself. Because if your organs fail, you die. If your back hurts, you're not going to die. So once the colon starts to stretch, it reflexively inhibits the external, the internal anal sphincter. That's why you know the old saying, if you got a peaker, it means your internal sphincter is open because it's regulated. It's a smooth muscle sphincter. The external is not. It's striated skeletal muscle. So the point I was making is this guy's colon is probably stretched out and backed up and is repeatedly shutting his core off. And all that hardcore mogul skiing and training. He's probably got inflammation through his lumbar spine like crazy because he can't stabilize his joints. I said, if you want to test this, find a colon hygienist, take him down, stick a hose up his ass, clean him out. I got a phone call the next day. It's a miracle. The guy has no back pain. One colonic. He's had three years of probing and doctors and therapists and acupuncturists and everybody looking through every orifice, scared to death. He's scared to death. His back pain won't go away. All it took was a hose up the ass and the little education on what he was eating and get his bowel rhythms retrained and off to the races he went.

And you do this just through intuition. You connected, you read it.

Well, I, I do it through intuition, but I also look for the data. My assessment includes a comprehensive assessment of all glands and organ systems. So, you know, because I was just dealing with someone over the phone, I had to kind of take the quick route.

It, it's really interesting. When I, when I started this biohacking movement, I intentionally targeted people who were probably the least spiritually open of the people out there with the language that I used. So I'm a software guy, network engineering, cloud computing, come from a family going back two generations of PhD engineers. So very rational, western minded. When I was growing up, if you would go to a chiropractor, an acupuncturist, it's because you were crazy and stupid and not just one or the other. And as I realized, okay, there's a lot of this stuff that I would consider way out there in the hippie, airy, fairy, woowoo land, it has merit. Some people can see and intuit stuff that others can't and that this is the stuff that helped me come back from being really wrecked. And then I started learning how to do some of this stuff myself. And I said, all right, how do I communicate that in a way that's valid? And I said, all right, guys, we're all going to perform better because we all care about that. We're all going to look at the data and as soon as you start paying attention to the data just a little bit, say, all right, now let's start turning on some of these things. And eventually it leads into the conversations around spirituality. But I found that if I came up and I said, all right, hey, guys, I have a spiritual practice. And I tried this in the early days. You can't go into a board meeting, as you couldn't 15 years ago, go into a board meeting at a venture capitalist on Sandhill Road and say, guys, this weekend I did this five rhythms drumming ceremony. It was super badass. And I have all these good ideas because they just think you're nuts and they kind of. You're out of the club at this point. You go to those same meetings and it's like, well, which of you did what? Plant medicine over the weekend? And it's been a major shift in awareness of spirituality and the value of emotions and the value of meditation. And it's gone from 15, 20 years ago. If you meditate, you're pretty much out there to if you don't meditate, you're probably not so good. Even though I think most of those guys actually don't meditate. They all just say that they do kind of like flossing, but at least they do sometimes, right?

I have a formula for addressing that very challenge you've just encapsulated and how I teach my students to handle that paradigm. Because really what you're talking about is a clash of belief systems. I tell my Czech professionals, always tell the client what they want to hear, but give them what they need. What they want to hear is how it fits their belief system or their paradigm. What they want to hear is it's going to make them drive the golf ball 20 yards further. But if you bring out a blood pressure cuff and you ask them to lay down the ground and you're doing lower abdominal exercises when they're used to doing heavy weights, and they think if they're not bleeding or sweating their ass off that it's useless, they're not going to listen to you. But if you tell them that what you're about to teach them will improve the function of their core and enhance their stability, which will allow their motor units to up regulate so that it can actually generate more force through the muscle joint System and here's why. And you use diagrams so that their left brain can understand it. I've never had a problem even with meditation or spiritual practices, plant medicines, as long as people can understand it from their own paradigm. And you tell them what they want to hear. What they want to hear is that it works. And it works specifically for the objective they've come to you for.

Yeah. And the.

Then you give them what they need.

The universal objective. Go ahead.

I was just going to say, if they think sitting with their sitting on a chair meditating is too out of the box, then I say let's try some binaural beats or let's use one of the modern technologies that would fit more in your genre, such as a heart. So a piece of the em wave technology from HeartMath or, or any of the gadgets. I've worked with them many times. I work with doctors, I work with scientists, I work with fighter jet pilots, race car drivers. I've seen every personality from the hardcore yogi to the person so stuck in their left brain there's a hole in the right side of their head.

The universal thing that everyone wants, that I landed on after years of running an anti aging nonprofit and after being on this super tech teaching at the University of California on the engineering side and then working on the business side in the venture world. Everyone wants control of their own biology. I'm tired of feeling this way. I don't want this to hurt. I want this to work better. I want my brain to work better. I'm tired of like you and I have. I'm having a brain fart right now, but no one in the room can tell. So I've just learned to dance around it. You sort of camouflage those things. So you're inside going, oh shit, what was I saying? And no one knows that that's what's going on inside because you learned it. No one wants that. Everyone has those things. So ultimately it came down to control. And that's what allows the yoga mom to say, what do I have in common with the bodybuilder and a neuroscientist and all that stuff. Like, look, we had different goals for what to do with the control, but it really came down to all right, can I breathe right? Because that gives everyone more control? Do I have more awareness? That gives everyone more control? Do I move right, the exact principles that you're talking about there. And I searched for years to find how do you make those people talk to each other? And how do you take the hardcore engineers who would never. They're so skeptical, they're so wired in to say that that doesn't work because it can't, which is anti science on its face. You say, well, okay, how about let's test if it works and then decide if it can't work or if it just doesn't work. So it was that hook of control or the possibility of control that made them ask the question to say, should I do it? And one of the most memorable things that ever happened in my coaching, which is nowhere near the level of coaching that you've done. I mostly have coached executives and tech people. It was a software developer. And these guys are quite often the best ones, are a little bit towards the Asperger's spectrum, kind of like I used to be. And I had him do the heart rate variability training, the M wave stuff from HeartMath.

Sure.

Just because he wasn't going to start a meditation practice because he didn't believe it could work. So he did this. And after two weeks we had our coaching session and he said, dave, I started doing this and after a week I noticed a difference. And then after two weeks I did it for an hour straight. And he said afterwards, I think I experienced bliss. Now, if you came up in your career and your life with software developer guys, there is no way on earth that any of them would ever admit to feeling bliss. Because it's not something you do if you are a developer and a programmer like that. At least it wasn't. And I think the world has shifted a little bit. But to be able to take someone in two weeks from I am a robot truth table kind of person into I can identify and experience bliss. It's like, all right, we've got the hook there. And of course that's a life transforming experience. You know that because now all of a sudden you're connected to your feelings and that's what opens to the grounding and the earthing and the whole importance of nature and all of that. But if you're cut off from it, I just found for me that the tech allowed me to more quickly develop my senses. And then I went to the Andes. Actually, even before some of that I went to the Andes and I did plant medicine in Peru and I went to Tibet and the Himalayas. So I don't want people to think biohacking is. You just have to use a device. It's like by all means necessary is that you're going to develop physiological control which requires awareness. And the tech is just a hack to give you awareness faster is a perspective.

Yeah. You know, it's interesting that you mentioned bliss because in one of his lectures, Joseph Campbell points out that in Sanskrit, the etymology of the word bliss comes from the word pain. And we can't really get to bliss without going through the pain because we wouldn't know what bliss was until we've known what it isn't. And so this is where I developed the concept of the pain teacher. I tell people your pains are actually guides here to teach you how to live, how to love and how to manage yourself better so you can become more whole and be more creative and more productive in the world and fulfill your own dreams and your own goals and objectives. But I only bring that up because you'll see that most people need enough pain to question their own belief system.

Oh yeah.

Before they will upgrade their belief system. And it doesn't matter. There's all sorts of hippie types that resist scientific advancement and there's all sorts of scientific people that resist the wisdom of a hippie. Which is why people like Ram Dass were so confusing because it was a Harvard professor that looked to be a hippie, but ultimately, at the end of the day, turned out to be a modern wise man.

It's a really fascinating perspective. And we have all this personal development, spiritual development. And you said some other things in other interviews and you actually said the earth is at its edge and I am in alignment with you there. So I care about things like air quality, water quality, soil quality. My farm actively builds soil. I believe we have to have grass fed animals to build soil, which is why I do it here. And I'd like to get your perspective on how the earth's unhealthiness is contributing to people's either spiritual, physical, mental or happiness. Any of those levels and what we could do about it.

Well, if you look at the structure stages of consciousness, which has been researched by people like Brown and Ken Wilber and Arthur M. Young, who is the inventor of the Bell helicopter, but took his money and invested into creating an institute for consciousness studies. Edgar Mitchell and many, many others. Dustin Diperna's great amazing book, which you'd probably find fascinating, Streams of Wisdom by Dustin Diperna basically gives you the historical record of the structure stages of consciousness and how they emerge from each other. But, but basically the first level of consciousness is the archaic level. And the archaic level is really linked to the minerals and to the soil. And if you look at it from a cosmic perspective, I can't remember the exact percentage, but a huge percentage of the Mass of the Earth is actually crystals. I don't remember. I looked it up a couple of years ago, but it was shockingly high. So think of what crystals do in radios, right? Crystals basically are conductors of extremely wide ranges of frequency, depending on the structure of the crystal. But we have a wide variety of crystals in the Earth. And the Earth is flying through a substance that would scientifically be called the ether. But we're in a sea of vibrations, all of which are necessary to inform the Earth. Everything here is being informed by things not here. The sun's not here, but it informs us clearly. So there's a simple example. The moon's not here, but we couldn't live without it. It informs the planet. So the archaic level of consciousness is basically saying that the minerals in our bones and the water in our bodies and the fluids in our blood and the proteins are all essentially products that are not only of the Earth, but are the products of a cosmic interaction. The archaic level grows into the magic level of consciousness. And that's when we were fused biologically with the animal kingdom. And we knew exactly what the sound of a cat meant, Whether it was a sound to be warned or a sound to be playful. We knew when birds made certain sounds. Our very survival meant that we had to actually have a deep enough fusion with the plants and the animals. And think of all the plants that can kill you if you eat them. So we had to have a much more intimate relationship. So at that level, we had the wisdom that comes through us in the unconscious, through the archaic level and our connection to the Earth, because we're wrapped in the biology of the Earth. And then as we became more conscious, we became more aware of the language of all the different plants and animals in nature. And interestingly, if you look at the art from that period of time, from cave paintings, they painted people with no mouths. Why? Because talking wasn't that necessary for survival, but listening was really important. So at that level of consciousness, we were very, very tuned to sound and listening. And when you ask shaman, where did you get the formula for ayahuasca? Where did you get the form of this? They always say, the plants taught me. That's the magic level of consciousness. So as we merge forward in time, we merged into the. We evolved into the mythical level of consciousness is when we started seeing mouths appear. And mythology really is a basically a system of education in which the elders and the shaman and the medicine men and women taught us stories to help us understand things that were hard to comprehend, like what is lightning? So they gave it names and they told stories about it, but they described it as a God because it had the power to kill you or the power to transform things very quickly. We needed to know who to engage as an enemy or who not to engage. We had to have proprietaries and improprietaries to function in a tribal society. We had to understand the passages of life from birth through childhood to adulthood to old age and death. So the mythological story had to basically encapsulate what does it mean to be alive? What does it mean to be in a cosmos that's so vast it's hard to understand what are these strange forces that can kill you and are very powerful? How do you engage the creatures and the people that want to kill you so you enhance your survival, and how do you function within a tribe? So at that level of consciousness, we had to still maintain our connection to the Earth. We had to still maintain our connection to biology, but we had to have stories or we couldn't make meaning out of what was happening. And the next level of evolution of consciousness is the mental level, where we begin to work with concepts and symbols. So, for example, you know how many people wear a cross on their neck but don't even know what it means? Most people don't really know what it means. Most people think the cross emerged in Christianity, but long before that it was a nautical symbol. And Steiner describes that the cross is actually a symbol of our evolution through nature. He says from the ground up represents the plant kingdom. And what is planted in the cross is planted in would be archaic consciousness. The horizontal beam of the cross represents the animal kingdom because their spines are parallel to the earth. And the top sticking up above the horizontal beam represents the human head, which is capable of tapping into the entire cosmos, but has to integrate itself with the lower levels of consciousness. So the cross is actually a symbol of the sacrifices that man has had to made to stay alive and grow its consciousness, to figure out who and what it is. So the point there is that we're at the mental level of consciousness. So what happens is, if we're healthy, all the good researchers say the same thing, from Carl Jung to Stanislav Groff, to all of them that I've mentioned, that to be healthy you transcend, but you must include. So if you transcend archaic consciousness, but you don't include it, you will get in trouble. If you have archaic and magic, but you get caught in a mythology, you can become a Christian who destroys the earth, fighting for what you think God wants, not realizing all your bombs and all your weapons are destroying the very source of life that gives you the opportunity to live, love, breathe and, you know, play. If you get to the mental level, but you don't understand the importance of the soil and the function of the minerals in the soil, and you don't understand how to communicate to the plant kingdom and how to determine what's safe to eat and how to engage animals and how to have a symbiotic relationship, you're in trouble. If you get to the mental level and you don't know what the function of a myth is and how to determine a myth that's working versus one that's outdated and can kill you, you're in trouble. So what's happened is we've got so caught into the mental realm and into worshiping symbols and ideas and concepts that we don't realize we're destroying the planet, we're destroying the biosphere, and we have an outdated myth called consumerism and scientific materialism. And so in order for us to survive, the Earth will do fine without us. There's no problem there. We've got to actually pay close attention to the fact that if we look at the science available to us, it tells us everything we need to know about those crystals in this planet. There's no lack of information out there. There's just a problem with belief systems being so closed. People don't, guys like me are considered idiots or hippies because I'm speaking about things that don't fit a belief system. But a belief system can be as dangerous, it is helpful. It's like a double edged sword. You can protect yourself with it, you can hunt with it, but you can also destroy yourself with it. So we're at a point right now where we have to realize that having a mind as powerful as the mind we've created is like a kite that's very big with no tail on it. It's impossible to control it. And we've lost the real meaning of mythology. So we don't realize we're in a counter myth transition. Whenever a culture loses its myth, it's a very dangerous time because isms pop up. And whenever there's an ism, you get things like Nazism and all the isms. And those are actually stress reactions that result in people that haven't reached an adult level of consciousness needing some deity or some leader figure to tell them what to do. This is why I talk about veganism, vegetarianism, Rastafarianism. Any ism is basically foregoing your own rational Capacity to think and act for yourself because you're committing yourself to a code of conduct based on somebody else's value system. And I have seen many, many patients that healed themselves from cancer by becoming a vegan or vegetarian, but came to me with cancer and I said, guess what? You're extremely protein deficient. Your genes are English and French and the ground freezes in the winter there and plant doesn't. Plants don't grow in ice, so you had to eat animals. So we have to transition you back into some meat. And I have to go through all the follies and all, oh my God, it was a sin. And I say, well, look, you're talking about animal abuse. Guess what? You've got one of the most advanced animals wrapped around your soul, and you're abusing it by not paying attention to the fact that it's touching to you. So you're happy to listen to people on television, but you're not listening to your own heart, your own hormonal system, your own digestive system, your own skin, your own muscles and your own joints. So you can either die the death of an ism or you can upgrade. So what I'm pointing is that's a counter myth. You see, the pain and the symptoms is a counter myth. And whenever a counter myth emerges, there's a transitional period where there's a lot of chaos. And we're in one right now. We're in a counter myth that scientific, materialistic beliefs and a Christian mythology that says we're here because Adam and Eve screwed up and we have to go down here in the rocks and the thorns until the soil, until we behave like good boys and good girls long enough to get invited back to heaven. So who the cares about the earth? We're going to heaven anyhow. All we got to do is be good little children and. And God will take care of us. That is an outdated myth that does not fit with modern science. It doesn't even work mythologically. It's a 220 year old story which would be like, you know, trading your car in for a horse wagon and trying to drive it down the interstate and wondering why you're late to all your appointments and getting arrested because your horse is shitting everywhere. So what I'm saying as simply as I can, we have transcended without including, because our educational systems dropped the awareness of what the earth is, what biology really is, and what our relationship to it is, and what a myth's function is and how to determine when a myth is actually working in Your life and how it. When. How to determine when a cultural myth is congruent with. With the demands of the archaic, the biological magic dimension and whether or not the stories we're telling ourselves are actually congruent with what it takes to stay alive and keep the entire ecosystem functioning. So my answer, in a nutshell, is we're in trouble because we're not using the science available to us, because the science that we need right now is outside the scientific materialist paradigm. And it's more in the camp of quantum biology because it explains not only what we're missing, but it tells us we have access to free energy. And the plants and the cells and the mitochondria in our body are teaching us the truth is right in front of us. But you got to actually look deep enough into yourself, which you can't do if you're caught in a belief system, because they all come with blinders.

So the belief systems driving science right now are. Are on one hand, very powerful, and they've led to so many breakthroughs. But there's also some really big blind spots there, and people who hit rock bottom, whether it's because they're sick and toxic the way I was, or frankly. I got some major improvements when I was a raw vegan for a while until it made me really sick. And a lot of people.

Yeah, well, that's my point. See, what you're doing is actually metabolic typing. The slow way I tell people your body can change from a vegetarian to a carnivore in one day. When I don't lift weights, I can eat as a vegetarian and feel great. But if I go do a heavy deadlift session for 48 hours, I want to eat any animal that walks by. If I'm under a lot of emotional stress, I find that I got to go off a lot of meat.

It.

It actually bogs me down. It makes it harder for me to process my inner reality. Each of us has unique genes, unique biochemistry, and unique personal and environmental and relational circumstances. And our biochemistry is changing constantly to enhance our ability to survive. And no belief system is nearly as dynamic as the truth of our own bodies. So ultimately, I believe everybody has a piece of the truth. But each of us as individuals, has to determine how to pull the tool out of the toolbox and know what job it's for. Or we get caught trying to do everything with a crescent wrench, and that just ruins a lot of cars.

So let's say that we get through some of our isms, and let's say that we don't destroy ourselves as a species. And we'll assume that Rudolf Steiner had some knowledge there. My kids have gone to a Waldorf school for a while. My wife is Swedish and Steiner's Swedish guy.

Awesome. I love Steiner.

His stuff is. You've referenced him several times. So this is a guy for people listening who haven't heard of Rudolf Steiner. He never really told anyone until he was about 40 that, oh, by the way, I sense all this energy in the world and I can see how plants grow and how kids grow. And Waldorf schools and biodynamic farming were his creations based on watching things for 40 years and never telling anyone that. He had all these woo woo abilities until he said, I'm old enough that I don't care if you make fun of me. Looking at all that, though, are you hopeful, like, how are we going to fix the soil, Are we going to fix the planet? Or are you sort of like, we're screwed?

Well, bliss comes from pain.

Okay, great point.

I think we're at a point now where we've got to get rid of nationalism, we've got to get racial and rigidly religious differences behind us because they're very secondary to the issues at hand. I feel we're in a transition as a species from puberty into adulthood, and we've got to stop being raging teenagers, drinking alcohol, driving too fast in mom's car with a hard on, and start. Stop acting like Donald Trump, for example, and start really realizing each of us has a piece of the truth. Every human being has genius within it. We can use the same technology and the same level of brain power that got us in trouble to reverse it. I think we've got to go to the most modern science and I think we have to realize that we need to share resources. It drives me nuts that there's almost 2 billion people on the planet that don't have food or water or a place to call home. But we have enough wealth and we have enough technology and we have the ability to share resources and we have a global problem. We have to work on healing the oceans. We have to work on healing the topsoil and going to regenerative farming strategies. We've got to police the media systems so that they're more ethical and moral and not just filling people's heads full of bullshit. We have to rehabilitate the education system, to bring it up with modern science. But ultimately, what we've got to do is realize we're all in this together. We can't argue and fight we just have to say, okay, let's put what works on the table and let's look squarely at what's wrong. We have to handle the situation in the world the same way I handle a patient. We got a lot of things going on. We've got to classify what's got to be addressed first, who's got the best technology to do it and who's willing to step forward. And we have to tell everybody what they want to hear and give them what they want to need, what they need.

It seems like you used to be able to go to a dinner party and disagree with someone there and it was okay. You just talk about it and it was just okay to disagree.

It's healthy, actually.

In fact, it was intellectually stimulating other someone who has a different perspective. And yeah, people always know if you talk about religion or politics, things can get ugly. But things are 10,000 times uglier now than they were 20 years ago. If you talk about something like that, there's always the overblown person who can't look at things from two perspectives or whatever. Do you think that we're at the late stages of that? Are we done with this? Are we going to be able to have civil discourse over what we disagree about, or is it going to just be always show up for a debate with an actual handgun? I live in Canada, by the way, so my handguns are in the US in case anyone's asking.

Cool. Well, actually, Dave, if you want to hear my opinion on that, which I imagine you do, since you asked me.

Yeah.

If you look at the research on consciousness and you pay attention to things like Maslow's hierarchy of needs or any legitimate structure of values, such as Claire Graves values tree or spiral dynamics, the more stress people are under, the more stress people are under, the lower they go in the structures of consciousness and the more reactive they become and the more they rely on prior programming. Why, when you're running from a lion, it's never a good idea to throw in a cartwheel because to the degree you feel threatened, you have to act automatically. Because we were built that way through our experiences in nature. The problem is, is that we're now reacting to. To our stress by falling back into the very deeper into the paradigm that got us in trouble, which is the Industrial Revolution. It's the scientific materialist paradigm because that's at the base. Most of us were born and raised into that. I came from parents that were much more holistic. So if I get stressed, I think I got to go lay down and have some chicken soup. But most people think I got to go to the doctor and he says, I got to get this organ cut out or I'm not going to be better. And I say, you better look at how the organ got sick first, because if you just let them cut the organ out, the next one will come along in the next year and pretty soon you're going to have nothing left to cut out. So what's happening in my observation is that the world populace, due to the destruction of the environment due to the chemicals in the environment, due to the electromagnetic pollution, due to overstimulation, due to lack of sleep, due to the manipulation of people's biochemistry by medical drugs use, and you know, all the things you and I both know about, we're going lower and lower into our levels of consciousness, which is putting us more and more in a fight or flight state, which is making us more and more reactive. And therefore we're not able to transcend to the higher levels of consciousness that are needed. As Einstein said, you cannot solve a problem with the same thinking that created it. But while you and I are talking about these very evolved ideas, most people are falling back into pure survival mode and using the very problems that we're talking about as their survival strategy because they don't know any better. So somehow we've got to actually get the honest data on the table, look at what is really going on, and then say, here's a pathway that is free of, of the hierarchy gaining all the benefit. See, Bill Gates wants to gain, gain all the benefit. The really rich people want to harvest the profitability of all these things. They always have. But what we've got to do is we've got to somehow lay it out so that everybody can say, okay, we all agree we need water to drink. We all agree we got to get the oceans healthy. We all agree we got a cop, stop cutting the rainforest down and killing the lungs of the planet. We all agree that we have to update our education so that we're current with what we really know. And aren't, you know, 95% of us acting, you know, like we're still chopping wood and carrying water, to use your analogy, right? But the point is, is that when everybody realizes what the problem is, honestly, without a bunch of paid idiots to give us bogus media to say there's no greenhouse effect and all this shit, when the chips are all on the table, we can see, everyone in the world cannot escape what's happening right now. And everyone on the world has A chance to participate, and we have to do it. I say we got to repurpose all of our militaries and use military technology to start regenerative farming, rehabilitate the topsoils, clean the oceans, decrease the chemical toxicity environment, and police any corporation that's a threat to the system and set unified, sustainable laws that you can't have a corporation that does these things to the environment. We have to stop predatory lending. We have to stop lying to people and manipulating their minds with advanced technologies like iPhones, or we're going to die of a disease called mind with no biology to support it because our ideas killed us.

Do you think there's some big bad organized entity, intelligence, cabal, human or intelligence, whatever you want to call it, guiding people into this high stress, high anxiety sort of thing? Or is this just a systemic wave of things? I'm just asking. You're a highly intuitive guy. I don't particularly have an answer for that. I'm just curious what you think about it.

Well, if you look at what consciousness is, one of my favorite definitions of consciousness comes from Edward Edinger, who is a psychiatrist and a union analyst and a very smart guy. Now, I could give you several different definitions of consciousness, but this one will bring home the point. Consciousness is a psychic substance produced not blindly, but in living awareness of opposites. You cannot be conscious without opposites. Therefore you can't have north without south, yin without yang, up without down, in without out. Female without male, female without male means nothing. North without south means nothing. You can't have good without bad or evil. Jung says for a tree to go to grow to heaven, its roots much must reach to hell. There's the polarity. Consciousness demands polarity, whatever source is. Some call it God, some call it Allah, some call it pure potential. I. I call it zero. You could call it the zero point field. It cannot know itself without polarity. And the fact that you and I are here and we have billions of animals and insects that are sentient and have their own level of intelligence, the fact that we're looking at the universe and looking at each other means whatever created us is interested in that.

Interesting.

And you can't have a distinction that you can be aware of without polarity. So the people that we call evil are actually people that just have a different polarity than us. And to the degree that they're successful, it inspires us to become more aware of how we can meet our needs. But if we actually become evil trying to meet our needs, then we collapse the polarity we Become just like them and we all die together. So the point that I'm making is, yes, those people do exist, but they have an important function because they uphold the other polarity without which we couldn't be conscious of free will. Because if you did not have the free will to be negative and destructive and immoral, to be moral and loving and think symbiotically or holistically would have no function. If we didn't have isolation as science, then integrative science wouldn't mean anything. So we're actually. And if you look at the matriarchal, patriarchal shifts every 4,000 years, history shows we go from a matriarchal to a patriarchal to it. We're switching into a matriarchal culture now because if we don't, we're gonna die.

Yep.

Too much testosterone, too much dick swinging, too much. Look how tall my building is. Look how fucking far my rocket can go. I say, you better stop building rockets and take care of the planet, dumb fuck, because only about 50 you are gonna get out of here and there's 7 billion of us that are gonna be screwed. So I'm not anti technology. I'm just saying it's, it's. It's a repurposing of resources, which is more of a feminine approach. So in a nutshell, my answer to your question is yes, those people are there, but on the other side you have the saints. So if you got cabal people that are very, very oriented toward themselves want to control everything. You also have Paramahansi, Yogananda, Jesus Christ, Buddha, Eckhart Tolle, Deepak Chopra, whoever you want to put in that category, upholding the other. Polarity.

Yeah.

But each of us comes to a point in our life where we have to realize that the balance hangs in the middle. And that's what spiritual development really is. You know, to be a good Taoist, you just follow this principle. Not too much, not too little, not too much sex, not too much little polarity.

You have no life into that. That's flat and dead right?

Only when you get to very high levels of consciousness, because then you enter, enter. And I've been into these states many times, so I'm speaking not intellectually, but directly. I've been in states of Tai Chi and on psychedelics so deep there was no Paul check left.

Yeah.

It was just a pure state of awareness in which there was no duality. You're in a non dual state. There is no I thou relationship anymore. The other thing to remember is that you can't have love without those polarities. Love requires a duality. I can't say I love you, Dave, unless you're the object of my devotion and I'm the subject, but I can't even weigh and measure the subject. How do you define what Dave Asprey is?

Objectively, it's very, very difficult to do for any human being.

Right, exactly. So you see what I'm saying is love requires a subject object duality. But once you transcend the duality, you become into a state of unity. You could call it pure potential, some call it nirvana, some call it prajna. There's many, many names for that non dual state. But the funny thing is there's nothing happening there but everything and it's happening at the same time. And in Chinese that's called wei wu wei, action without action. But you can't actually have a love affair there, you can't have children there. So within the non dual reality is only two qualities that's absolutely empty of everything, which by definition means it's full of everything. And because there's no subject object duality there, paradoxically there's no questions to ask because if you're one with everything and you are everything, you already know the answer to all your questions.

That is, it's very difficult to put pictures around that because there's a lot of inherent. Anytime you get non dual, there's a lot of inherent contradictions if you're just only going to think about it. Yet if you're not practicing non duality, you're probably not doing life very well.

That's why Osho said God is a paradox. And if you can't handle paradoxes, you'll never understand God. And the point that that's deeper though that I'm driving at is this is all here, we're all here because you can't know anything and experience it without a duality. And you can't really know who you are until you know what you're not. And humanity is in the process of figuring out what it's not.

Interesting.

But what it is is love. What it is, is love. Evil is there to allow us to be aware of what love is. Bondage is there to be make us aware of freedom. And we, as we grow in higher structure, stages of consciousness, we need less polarity to come to the realizations that we all need each other. We all are each other and we're all star people having an earthly experience or spiritual beings having a physical experience. And I believe the earth is a school for Souls where we come to learn to work with polarity. And the reason it's so heavily trapped in mass is because it's very hard to destroy too much too quickly when you're this heavily trapped in matters. But think how quickly you can be destructive to yourself with your own mind. Steiner says that when you die, you find yourself flying around the universe at the speed of thought until you realize it's you doing it.

Interesting.

Metaphysically speaking, you can create acts of evil so quickly and so effectively in the astral or the mental plane that you can be very disruptive to other souls. So immature souls are brought to Earth to be wrapped up in matter where everything's heavy and slow and it gives everybody else a chance to respond. Imagine if Adolf Hitler would have been turned loose on the mental plane. He would have wiped everybody out before they had a chance. But here he had to amass an army of about a million, spend a lot of money. And it gave us a chance to respond and even the playing field. So really, I think that we're going through a cycle of heavy polarity right now because we're coming to the end of patriarchy, the end of scientific materialism, and our myth of consumerism is breaking down. So we're going into a transition where we have a choice. Either destroy the planet and each other or become more conscious about the common needs we all have and use that as a basis of unification. And from there we will reach a higher level of consciousness.

Having been to those, you know, very odd and unusual non dual states you're talking about, you realize, yeah, we are all one, we're all life, we're all part of the system of the Earth. One of the things that actually brought me huge amounts of peace was a study that came out a couple years ago and they went two miles below the Earth's crust and found, wow, it's teeming with bacteria down here. Way more than we ever thought. Things that have metabolisms we never even dreamed of.

And people say, what if we destroy extreme temperatures?

Oh yeah, and it's. But it's life and it's in the same system that we are. And on some level we're one with that. Our little mitochondria probably have dreams and talk about God knows what. There's stuff going on there. So my long term take on all this stuff is we probably don't really have the power to destroy all life on Earth. We certainly can destroy humans and most animals. People say, what about the 5G satellites? No, they'll be out of orbit In a thousand years, we might all be dead from whatever, right? Lack of topsoil and all. But I promise you that until the sun goes supernova and destroys the physical structure of the planet or something, there will be life here. It just might take another few million years to creep out from some mine. You guys don't have to worry. We're not going to destroy the Earth. We just might not recognize it if we don't fix things. And we won't be here to enjoy it. I get peace from that. Life will continue. I'd rather it look like us, but.

It'S up to us and on a cosmic scale. Mathematical calculations by astrophysicists and astronomers that are doing, looking into this say there has to be at least at minimum 3 billion solar systems like ours that would have planets very similar to Earth. It's just we can't see them. So when you, you know, not to get too, too into other deep stuff. I'm a remote viewer. I can go anywhere that I can focus my mind on. I can get to the sun as quick as I can just focus myself on it and be there. And I've proven my skills. I, I don't have to prove this to anybody I know for sure because I do this. And I don't make a living bullshitting people. I'd have gone out of business doing that a long time ago. The point I'm making is in a physical reality we tend to think of distance from how long does it take to get my car from point A to point B? But your soul is energy and information. And your spirit is, is really the soul is the receptive principle, that which feels and experiences. But spirit is the flow of energy and information. And we can't separate ourselves from anything in the universe, be it the ether, be it the dark matter, be it light. So ultimately, when you lose your body, consciousness is all of that. The point I'm making is those of us that have achieved a conscious awareness of harmony will naturally be attracted to other places in the universe that harmonize with us. Those of us that like to fight will naturally attract it to other planets where people like to fight. So I really think that the Earth is like a schoolyard where we come to learn to deal with polarity. But when we graduate from the Earth, we become a citizen of the universe. And this is what Steiner said. Steiner said all spiritual teachings are teach you to stay awake when you die. Otherwise you become unconscious and you just wake up in the domain that harmonizes with your spiritual development. And since all of it is consciousness itself, or God, if you want to use that word. None of it matters because God's forever going through these cycles of experiencing itself because it has nothing else to do. And the only thing God has to experience is what's implicate within itself. And we are the explication of a myriad of those thoughts, feelings and emotions that you could call the flow of energy and information with self reference. Consciousness itself is self referential.

That's one of the reasons that many traditions are the ones who teach those things. And I agree. All of my study of all the different religions and traditional spiritual practices, they all are doing exactly what you said. They also focus very heavily on the quality of the way you enter the world and the way you leave the world. So birth and death seem to be two very pivotal times for do you leave in terror or suffering, or do you leave in peace? And it seems like if you can have a good death the way a Klingon probably would, or anyone else who focuses on that or a samurai, there's some value to that. And I think as I get to spend more time with people with more experience and more wisdom than I have, that pops out very consistently. All right, what are you doing when you're this time around? But when you look at some of the religions like Christianity, the Gnostic Christianity, and some of the very old things from the Cult of Mithras, there was more of a cyclical reincarnation ish thing, but it got really stamped out. Now it's like you go to hell and you stay there. You go to heaven and you stay there. Why is that such an outlier from most of the teachings that are out there? Why do you think anyway? You may not know.

You mean why is it so polarized to them?

Yeah, why is it so polarized to them? We talk about the cyclical nature of things. You look at Taoism, look at Hinduism, look at Buddhism. Buddhism, you look at almost every ancient way of looking at this. You could go to Hades, but you get out of Hades. There were ways you could do that. But then you get into some of the more dominant belief systems in the West. It's like, nope, you're here once and you're gone. And if you believe that ism, it changes the whole way you treat the planet, the way you treat other people. It changes everything. For the negative. What do you think?

Why they're there? Yeah, because they have to uphold the polarity.

Oh, it's there. Just have something to push against. All right, I'll buy that.

Think about it. If everybody had the same belief, we would never grow.

That's a good point. So there has to be douchebags who are wrong is what you're saying.

You know, the thing is. Well, yeah, you could use those words, but the reality of it is that there's a little truth in everything. And there's nothing more powerful than a belief system. And all belief systems start causing pain when they're not working for you. So we all have the opportunity to graduate to a more expansive belief system. Which is why I say spirituality is, is the process of connecting to a greater whole. You've just described an isolated belief system which will lead to pain. And it'll someone like that, I say, okay, you call yourself a Christian, then I gotta a little tip for you. Go read Eckhart.

Right, right.

Go read Matthew Fox. I give him a list of Christian mystics that blow that paradigm right out of the box, but came from their own tradition who went so deep into themselves they realized that dogma was extremely limiting. And this is why Rumi himself said, no man can get to God until he becomes a heretic. What was he saying? You're never going to find God in books. You're just going to find words written by other people on paper and you're going to believe them. You can't experience God until it's your own experience. And to have that experience, you're going to find that almost everything that you've been taught is wrong. And if you talk about your experience, you will be a heretic. So if you really want to know the truth of God, you got to get ready to get killed by your own people.

Or you just have to not talk about it. One of the two.

Or not talk about it. Yes, but the problem is then you have the weight of knowledge. And when you realize that the truth you've experienced can liberate people, then you.

Feel the weight of moral obligation. You actually have to share it if you know it. Was it Cassandra, one of the Greek, Greek people who was cursed with being able to see the future, but also cursed that no one will ever believe them? And it's not quite as bad as Prometheus with somebody eating your liver every day, but pretty much like that. To the people who know how to see the future and, and don't create it, they suffer greatly. No doubt about it. And I, I'm a guy who has a good track record to see in the future and helping it come. If I didn't do what I do, I'd be miserable. So like, you gotta do it.

Me too. And look at. Here's an example for you. Steiner built an institute to teach people to help them, and the Germans burnt it down.

But they were the.

It was the German government that had to come to Steiner, begging him to help them with their agricultural problems. And he developed biodynamic agriculture to help the very people that despised him. Jesus was killed by his own people. And the list goes on and on. But when you get that deep, you realize death is not nearly what people think it is. And Yogananda says death is like having a thousand orgasms at once. And I've been far enough down that through concussions and through deep, deep psychedelic ceremonies like DMT ceremonies, I've been so far gone, there was no me and there was no memory of me. And I don't even know how I got back here except that I had to have this great interview with you today.

I'm with you there on that. Just that whole perspective is so odd. It's very difficult to talk about in words that people can understand, but that mindset is absolutely real. And when I was beginning on the personal development path of not being just a left brain engineer, I thought about it. I said, all right, fear of death. Any practice they'll teach you, fear of death is a major important thing, and it's probably driving almost all of your unconscious behaviors because the number one rule of the cells in your body is don't die because, well, then you're dead. So if you realize and just accept that, okay, I thought about it. I said, all right, I have no physical evidence that reincarnation is real. Of course, I've had lots of experiences. Neurofeedback caves, shamans, fasting, the whole gamut of them as you're describing, plant medicines and everything else. And I'm pretty darn convinced that that's likely. But before I'd even gotten that way, I just did the logic of it and I said, okay, here's the deal. If I tell myself that reincarnation is real and I can make myself believe it well enough, what happens using just logic? Well, that means I can lose a lot of the fear of death because it's just like starting a video game over again. So from that perspective, you're already free. Now, if I'm correct, great. And if I'm wrong, I'm going to be dead anyway, so I won't care. So there is zero downside to assuming reincarnation is real, because you will perform better in this life if that's all you have. And if you're right, then you'll perform better in your next life. And of course that's heretical if you believe that you have to go to heaven or hell and all that kind of stuff. But I just decided I'm going to take that assumption because it's better and because it leads to better outcomes in all scenarios I can imagine, other than I might be wrong. But then I'll die and I won't know it. So that was, for me, very liberating. And then having had enough experiences and seen enough of that kind of stuff, I don't really worry about it too much. I see what I see, I believe what I believe, and that's all good. But I don't have to be able to prove it because it doesn't matter.

No, no, you know, I, I, for people that propose, you know, get on me and say all this reincarnation stuff's a bunch of. I say, well, do you believe in physics? Most of them say yes. I say, well, look at the laws of thermodynamics. Energy produced cannot be destroyed. And your own science shows that everything that's here can be boiled down to energy and information. So when you look in the mirror, you're actually seeing flows of energy and information. And when your body dies, whatever was directing the energy and information just transforms. You can't destroy energy, but you can transform it. And Einstein himself said the field is the sole governing agency of the particle. So when you die, you become one with the field and you give up your particles until you dream again.

Wow. Well, Paul, this has been fascinating and I'm so happy that we got a chance to go really deep, both on the philosophical sort of earth shaking side of things, as well as to go deep on the self and the body and the meat and the heart of being human. It's been really fascinating and thank you and thanks for your work. Your blog, checkinstitute.com, c h e k not c h e c k. So checkinstitute.com, it's where you teach people, where your writing is. You've done amazing, just amazing work in the world on multiple levels. I very much appreciate you and thanks for taking so much time.

Hey, thank you for inviting me and sharing your platform with me and your interest in my work and thanks for sharing all the love you do with the world and thank you for being brave enough to heal yourself because you became a gift to the rest of us by doing it. You met the pain teacher and you took your lessons and let's keep doing it together.

We will.

A ho Great spirit.

I hope. If you guys. If you guys like today's episode, you know what to do. Head on over and check out Paul's work. He's written several books. You might want to look at the last four doctors you'll ever need, or how to Eat, Move and be Healthy. He's worthy of your time and attention, and no one ever comes on the show who isn't. And some people have a greater level of attainment than others. And if you haven't figured out by now in this last couple episodes, Paul is up there and really knows what he's doing. You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey.

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