The 3 Key Steps To Intuitive Eating, Ego Dissolution, Raising & Educating Children In A Modern Era & More With Paul Chek.

On this episode of the Ben Greenfield.

Fitness Podcast, consciousness is the reference point from which information and energy flows. You are conscious of what is happening within the range of your sensory perception. Imagine if you were a dance floor. Could anybody walk or dance on you without you knowing about it? No. But paradoxically, you're not doing anything. God is like the dance floor. My work with my soul is better than their test because I can find that. They tell me that there's things I can eat. My soul says, don't eat it. When I do eat it, it caus business problems.

Like what? Health, performance, nutrition, longevity, ancestral living, biohacking, and much more. My name is Ben Greenfield. Welcome to the show. Hey, hey, hey. Welcome to today's show. I am incredibly pleased to bring you Paul Check. This is, I believe, my fourth interview with the man, the OG of health and fitness himself, a guy who's been a personal mentor to me, an enormous inspiration, and a wealth of deep knowledge. This podcast, like all my podcasts with Paul Check, threatens to blow your mind. That was a wonderful, wonderful breakfast. That was a great way to start a Friday.

We can thank my beautiful wife, Penny for her magic in the kitchen.

Well, I didn't expect any breakfast. I came up and you gave me your world famous butter espresso. Yeah, baby. Now, you studied the heck out of espresso. I didn't realize that.

Yeah, quite extensively. I did it for a number of reasons. One, I really was working myself so hard when I was your age that, you know, Penny and I would often work 18 hours a day. We would go home, walk home sometimes, and the sun was coming up, and we would be back at work by about 9, 30 or 10. And like you, I was just into everything, studying everything, testing everything. And I had so much spirit moving through me, it would, you know, in Jungian terms, I had an archetypal possession. I was completely and utterly embodied by the, you know, caregiver archetype. And so I found espresso was really helpful for me to stay productive. But I was also studying functional medicine and doing a lot of functional medicine testing on people. And I found that one of the key things that I kept running into is people who had a lot of blood sugar handling problems and adrenal burnout were, I saw this thousands of times, were getting up in the morning and having nothing but coffee on an empty stomach. And so athletes would do that, for example, and by the time they would get to the gym, they were already in a blood sugar crash. And so then you have all the blood sugar handling Issues, you got inflammatory problems, you got hormone regulation problems. And it's very hard to get people that are addicted to a substance like caffeine to change just because you're giving them logical, rational reasons for it. So I saw that behind the biochemistry was the lifestyle factors, but behind that was the issues of behavioral change. And I found that it could take me months of coaching people through the science of change and, and using techniques, building rainbow bridges, saying, okay, do this, do this, do this, showing them how to get off it in stages, replacing it. But people have such a deep connection to coffee or to, you know, caffeine. But the coffee is really the experience, the smell, the taste, the social aspects of it. Yeah, that I, I began meditating on how can I help people through this process knowing that they're not going to change quickly. And one day I was sitting in my office at my glass table here, and I was also doing research on vitamins and I had a big bottle of certified organic time release vitamins. And I'd also studied chelation. And I happened to pick the bottle up and I just noticed the word chelated on the bottle. And a lightning flash went through me of intuition. I went, ah, I need to chelate this coffee. And I knew from my studies if I just tie that coffee up in fat, then I have something. I'm dairy intolerant, so I can't even use cream. But I know from years before I realized what was going on that you could put nice, because on our farm we had our own cream and you could put full thickness cream right from the cow in there. And it was just like having coffee dessert. So I started getting organic butter and experimenting with how much butter. And because the butter has just enough protein that it'll actually tie itself into the coffee so it doesn't float on top. I found that was the ideal. And then I experimented with nut butters all over the world. I hired a professional librarian to do a worldwide literature search to see if there was anyone else that had thought of this. And the only thing I came up with is that to the Tibetans use yak butter in their tea. So I thought, well, at least there's one culture that's doing something like this. So I begin teaching people. Laird Hamilton was one of the people. I taught this around 2001 and he loved it. Right out of the gate, you can notice the difference. And so I was doing functional medicine testing with people, monitoring their health appraisal questionnaires, their body signs and symptoms, mental, emotional symptoms, all the things that I Monitor. And I noticed that people did significantly better. And I was educating. Look, if you're going to drink the coffee, put at least butter or one of these nut butters in it and then be conscious that you need to get some food in you. So if your habit is to get up, get to work, at least have some jerky or some raw carrots or some celery sticks or some nut butter or something to stabilize you till you get to lunch. Because a huge percentage of these people didn't eat any breakfast at all. And they would get to lunch, some of them would then have rabbit food, lunch, and they would then massively overeat at dinner time and go to bed with this massive load of food on them. And that, as you know, has its consequences.

Hyper compensation.

Yeah. So I found that the application of butters and oils like coconut oil, almond oil, cashew, I tested all the nuts. The problem was all those oils even ghee floats on top of, so it doesn't tie itself into the coffee. So you do get a food source. But I found it still caused a rapid escalation of cortisol. And the blood sugar handling was helped a little bit by the butter in the stomach. But the butter is too slow to come in. But the butter, I mean the, the oils were too slow to come in because they have go. Go through the digestive process. But the butter, because it will actually tie the coffee up with the protein in the butter, acted just like a time release vitamin. And it was miraculous. And I was testing myself extensively, doing everything from regular urine ph and salivary ph tests before and after hard workouts, blood pressure, heart rate. I was checking all sorts of stuff out and I found that it was very, very effective.

Well, between that and I think the 18 different kinds of sauerkraut that Penny brought out, salmon, the eggs, I'm feeling pretty good.

Good.

I've got some energy in me. Now you talk about all these different tests, these ways that you are monitoring response to coffee or butter in coffee or butter and espresso, heart rate, cortisol, blood glucose, et cetera. And obviously self quantification is something a lot of people are doing nowadays. But I've seen you engage in, for example, dinners at your house where you'll pick up a plate and just ask your body if that's something that's going to agree with your body on that day. Engage in this process of what I think is described as intuitive eating.

Yeah, I'm actually talking to my soul, which includes all the wisdom of the body. The soul is infused in you, just like wet into water.

Describe to me how intuitive eating works.

Well, there's a number of ways. First, we need to look at the difference between intuition and instinct. Intuition really is asking the totality of yourself a question and waiting for the answer. I mean, this has to get a bit metaphysical or it won't make sense. But if you say, well, what is the soul? The soul is the total consciousness within any living being. Well, then you have to say, well, where does consciousness come from? Well, ultimately, what we call God or source or the zero point field is all that can really be conscious because it's monitoring and experiencing everything that exists. So I tell people, only God can give a soul. The soul is God in you. So, you know, the. You could say that the sum total of how consciousness works in the universe is alive within us, including the source of consciousness itself, because without the source being the source of consciousness, we could not be conscious. Which kind of leads to one of the conundrum in science where everyone's trying to figure out where consciousness emerges from. And looking at brain scans, and I keep telling people they're looking at it the wrong way. What human beings are being measured for is the data they're conscious of. Like, right now, you're listening to my voice. So if someone had a, you know, FMRI on you, they would see that while you're listening to me, your brain's reacting because you're conscious of. But if you're like Ken Wilber or an advanced yogi, and I've actually seen video of Ken Wilber completely stopping his brain dead flat, there's nothing going through it at all.

But you mean like with an mri, they've measured this.

With electroencephalogram technology and brainwave monitoring, he can stop his brain. And a lot of advanced yogis and meditators have been shown to be able to.

What's that even mean, stop your brain?

It means that you no longer are processing the flow of information. You're into a still point, a zero point, but you're in what a. A Zen master would call no mind.

So this would be even like, slower than, say, like a theta brainwave signal.

Yeah, basically. When I saw the video of Ken Wilber, you can see the typical readout of, you know, conscious activity in the brain, and it just flatlines like somebody died on an electrocardiogram. Holy cow. Yeah, and I've read studies. There's a great book.

You'Ve got a.

Lot of books right there, Destructive Emotions by the Dalai Lama. And that book is. Goes in is investigations with the Dalai Lama brings people, scientists together every year pretty much for a conference. And he chooses the top people in specific fields. This one was on destructive emotions. But it was when they first really started using advanced brain science to determine what was going on with monks minds when they were meditating and in different states, they would give them different challenges while they're in an MRI machine. And the Dalai Lama brought them these advanced meditators to test. And one of the top researchers in the world on exploring consciousness through brain studies was leading the project. And the researchers over and over said, oh my God, we had no idea that what's happening with these monks was even possible. They would scientifically, they can't explain it. The point being is, is that if you look at God from a scientific perspective, the only numerical value you can give God is zero. Because many of the religious traditions speak of God as unconditional love. Or words like omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent, omni means all which mathematically equals the absolute. And the absolute can only be be encapsulated by zero, because it's no thing, yet it's everything. Itzhak Bentov in his book Stalking the Wild Pendulum. And Itzhak Bentov was a very, very interesting man. He was the first man to scientifically investigate how meditation affect the physiology and the mind of the human being. And he's the inventor of the heart pacemaker that's still used today. So he's a very skilled scientist, he was a remote viewer, very advanced meditator, wrote three beautiful books. But Bentov basically describes how frequency that can be measured ultimately goes faster and faster and faster until a signal is everywhere and nowhere simultaneously, which is the zero point or the absolute. So if you look at a sine wave, like a typical sine wave, you get your horizontal line, like an electroencephalogram. You've got a positive and a negative. So positive cycle goes above the line, the negative cycle goes below the line.

Yeah.

But the line itself is the reference point from which emergence begins. So it would be the functional zero point. Even on a mathematical chart, it would be the zero point. So what I described, and I've meditated on this deeply and done medicine journeys, exploring it for many, many years. And when I ask my soul these questions, my soul says consciousness is the reference point from which information and energy flows. You are conscious of what is happening within the range of your sensory perception, which ranges wildly. And Ben Tov showed right in his book Stalking the Wild Pendulum, which is sitting right Here, the reference range of a human being goes all the way down to atoms and all the way up to very, very high vibration realms where you have angelic beings and other beings. And many people think, oh, angel, angels, that's a bunch of airy fairy. But really spirits, angels, and those types of beings which are consistently discussed throughout the entire shamanic and religious history of humanity. These are in every single culture. They're there. Buddhism's full of them, Islam's full of them. They're there. But what Bentov described and also what Rupert Sheldrake and Matthew Fox describe in their book the Physics of Angels, is that what we call angels and spirits is really the flow of energy and information. In other words, our human psyche perceives the flow of energy and information. If I see. Do you imagine a pink elephant? An image of a pink elephant comes up. But really all that's vibration. I just put a bunch of vibration into your ears. You interpret it as, imagine a pink elephant, and a pink elephant becomes the image emergent of the flow of energy and information. So all cognition is really our sensory systems selecting information that we then have decoded through our own use of symbols. Cat means cat. And we generate an image based on our connection between those vibrational information flows. Like hot water. We know it's hot. It's. It's heat, right? It's vibration. And so what we're calling spirits and angels and all that is really the flow of energy and information that is then anthropomorphized. We put our human interpretation on it. And basically anything that can be interpreted in any way in the universe is information. And energy is what it takes to cause information to flow or to move. And if you look at something like a house or a mountain or the chair you're sitting on, it's energy and information. So the point that I'm making is when we're talking about a soul, we're actually talking about the zero point that is always behind any vibration. According to current research, you have 30 billion billion biochemical reactions per second in the human body. And every one of those produces a measurable vibrational shift or frequency. So if you say every single. Every single thing that's happening that we call life is producing a sine wave. Well, the zero point, the way I describe it to my students, imagine if you were a dance floor.

Okay.

Could anybody walk or dance on you without you knowing about it?

No.

No. But paradoxically, you're not doing anything. You're just laying there. So God is like the dance floor, and Everything else in exactly what the Hindus say. Layla, Maya. Maya means the grand illusion. Layla means the dance or the play. So God is that zero point which is expressing itself as polarity. Zero only has two qualities. It's absolutely empty. Yin, that which is receptive, and empty, that and yang, zero, that is full. Zero has no boundary, no border, no definition. That's why God's often described as.

Would that be synonymous with infinity?

Well, not really, because there can be multiple infinities. So you can have the. The infinite life of stars versus the infinite life of a bug versus the infinity of light. Scientists have described that. You can't really use infinities because infinities can be classified specifically, you understand what I'm saying? Not all infinities equal the same thing. Their infinities can still be relative to each other. Eternity would be the zero point, okay? Because it can't be measured or weighed. There's no beginning or end to it. Another way to think about this is, and I learned this from studying Fred Alan Wolfe. If you take a piece of string and you lay it on the table, we'll call the left end of the string the past, the middle of the string the present, and the right end of the string the future. If you take the string and tie the two ends together, you don't have past, present, or future anymore. You have now. So the zero point that we call source or God is the past, present and future all bound up into one experience of itself. But what I'm saying is zero has two qualities. Absolutely empty of everything and absolutely full of everything. And those two constantly interact, which is what produces spirit. So spirit is the flow of energy, information, and soul is that which is experiencing it.

So how is this flow of information relevant then to the idea of you picking up a platter of food from the table and. And identifying via intuition whether or not it's something you should eat versus some other form of self quantification.

That's where I'm driving at. So when I'm asking my soul a question, I am quieting my mind and doing my best to empty myself so I get to the dance floor. Or the zero point, the point that you would be at if your brain completely stopped. I'm emptying myself. So I'm saying, dear soul, is this salmon an optimal food for me to eat today? And then I will feel a surge of energy, or I might, you know, I've been doing this for so long, my soul will communicate to me an image or even appear to me as a woman and speak to me, like I'm speaking to you. For most people, it's a surge of energy, an uprising of energy.

If that food is something that would be appropriate for you at the time.

If it's inappropriate, usually you have a sinking of energy. The best way to describe it is, what do you feel like when somebody is lying to you and you know it. While they're talking to you and they're.

Telling you, like an unsettling feeling in your gut?

Yes. It feels like you're falling into yourself. Right. And so when the soul is saying no. Most people will have the experience of energy dropping down. And the feeling of discordance, of incongruent incongruency. And over time, I teach people to practice. And each one of us has our own natural voyances. In other words, some of us are naturally clairvoyant. Some of us are naturally clairsentient. Some of us have immediate knowing. Some of us are clairaudient. In other words, we don't know why, but we're having voices in our head that are telling us things that keep turning out to be true. So each of us is gifted, you could call it genetically or spiritually. With a voyance. And once you learn to work with one voyance. It will open the doors to the others. Because what we have to do is break out of our programming and our cultural programming is that all this stuff is. So once you realize that by following the voice of the soul. Which is what's speaking to you through your voyances. Your life starts functioning a lot better Than when you're calling the shots or your ego is calling the shots. So people come to the point in their own spiritual development. Where they realize it really doesn't matter what all these scientists say consciousness is or isn't. It doesn't matter what my parents say or what anybody says. Because my experience is when I listen to that still small voice in my head. My life works a hell of a lot better. So when I listen to it, about selecting diet or about selecting exercise. Or which airline route to take. Or whether I should or shouldn't make this or that financial investment. Things seem to be magical and things happen that I come to the realization I could have never done. With my own conscious process.

That reminds me of a quote. I believe it was Rudolf Steiner that you quoted. When we were over there in the kitchen drinking our espresso. What was that quote?

Steiner said, human beings will convince. And he said this in around 1900. He said, Human beings will continue to invent technologies outside themselves until they've either destroyed the planet or they come to the realization that everything they've created outside of themselves is a copy of a technology that exists within themselves. And Steiner was a master of all this.

So based on that, what do you think of things like food intolerance or food sensitivity testing as a way to precisely quantify this versus something like intuitive eating?

Well, the thing is that you have to realize that the ego is a very, very strong construct. It's a survival construct. And it's most significantly created by enculturation. When we fit into a tribe or a culture, there are to do's and not to dos taboos. There's rights, there's customs, there's beliefs. I mean, you know enough about tribes to know that not everybody believes the same thing. Then we have their myths. So whenever we have to go through an enculturation process, we have to adopt certain ways of relating and certain idea structures that are inherent to that race or that culture or that tribe. So the ego actually is a construct of ideas passed on to it through its family first, its tribal society and its society and its culture, which are meant to help us survive. Right. There's, you know, for example, if you start having sex with children in public, some Christian might shoot you or someone else, you know, might choke you out or whatever, because it's very against our cultural practices and norms to do that. And you'd probably end up in a prison pretty quickly. So the impulse that we have through our biological instincts, our animal instincts, and other factors such as, you know, not all ideas are created equal. In other words, what the way some people relate, whether it be to children or to life or to money or to sex. I mean, all you got to do is study all the weird sexual practices out there. And some people think that's completely normal and think, think that we're weird for being a little more conservative. But the point I'm making is that the ego structure is really often referred to as an ideaplex. It's, it's a set of programs that you use to navigate to enhance your survivability and ability to cooperate within the society or a tribe or a society or a culture. And so those ideas in our culture, which is largely a scientific, materialist culture, negate concepts like the soul. They negate concepts like spirits. They negate the concept that somebody can feel the vibration of a plant or a tree, or talk to a plant or a tree. So when a lot of my students come through my training, they have a, you know, a Real withdrawal. Fortunately, I have a library full of very, very good scientific investigations that actually show a lot of the scientific materialistic stuff is, is wrong. And people like Itzhak Bentov gave very solid scientific explanations by just looking at the science of what the human body can perceive through its nervous system relative to what society believes and things like that. So what I'm saying is, is that it takes quite a bit of time to learn to work with your soul because the filtration system is your programming and it's also your genetic programming. We have many levels of ancestors working through our genes. And my spiritual research and research that's now available shows that we think of the DNA is not really a bunch of information like it is in a computer. It's an antenna system that's tapping into morphogenic fields. It's tapping into the collect unconscious of the planet. And it's even tapping into the field we call mind and the non local mind that is everywhere and nowhere simultaneously. So our genes really.

There's research on that now.

Oh yeah. You can look at Greg Braden and he shows some stunning research. He shows for. Also he showed that the Michelson Morley experiment was repeated by the US Navy, I think in 79 or 89. And they actually prove that the ether does exist.

What's the Michelson Mori experiment?

Michelson Morley, they were the first science because Einstein was stumped by the fact that there had to be something in what we call empty space to suspend planets and stars and bodies in space. Because if there was nothing there, then how could they be there? How could they stay there? So, and alchemy has been talking about ether for as long as alchemists have been around, which is a long time, especially if you go to Egyptian alchemy. And whoever built the pyramids obviously knew these technologies. So because Einstein's math showed there has to be something there, which he called the ether, Michelson and Morley were the first scientists to put together an elaborate experiment to try to test it. And so they were using a method by assessing how much drag there was. I can't remember the exact details, but they basically said if there's something in space, it has to create some kind of friction and therefore they could measure it. And so there was, it had to be done right when the moon eclipsed the sun. It's been a long time since I read the research, but basically they could not prove the existence of the ether. Now some of these astute scientists of the day said it's wise to remember that absence of proof is not Proof of absence, because a lot of the great scientists, mathematical equations kept showing them that there was something there. Point being, Greg Braden cited US Navy research showing that they had used much more elaborate testing with laser technology, and they proved that the ether does exist. And he also showed recent research, quite recent in the last couple of years, where scientists took. They made a vacuum and they used photon counters that can count single photons. And so once they created a vacuum, they had the photon monitors watching and they would see that photons would spontaneously emerge and disappear like popcorn popping out of nowhere. Then they wondered what would happen if we put a strand of DNA in there when they actually show this. Greg Braden shows video footage of what happened because you can actually. The photon counters can actually pick up the photons. They put a strand of human DNA in there and immediately all the photons wrapped itself around the DNA and all the photons took on and recreated the shape of the DNA in light, as light. And they showed that DNA was organizing the spontaneous emergence of subatomic particles popping out of the zero point field instantly. So they showed that DNA actually is interfacing with the quantum world and organizing it.

Wasn't that whole shape discovered or, or initially, I guess, imagined when someone was using a Lysergen?

Francis, Francis Crick, I believe it was, was on LSD when he basically had the vision of the double helix, and then later it was proven scientifically. But yes, he was using LSD at the time. And that's one of the ways I did the research years ago, because, you know, I keep a list of notebooks full of the questions I have as I'm doing research into health or spirituality or whatever, because it's just, you know, as, you know, there's lots of a guy as smart as you will have as many questions that he can't get the answers to as he has the answers to. So I investigate these things. I do it through scientific research and books and worldwide literature searches. And I also go deep into meditation and I also do medicine ceremonies. And I. I go into meditation. I have my soul guide me. I paint mandalas to, with symbols on them to tap me into that frequency. For example, if I want to meditate on how the world is created, I might take a black canvas and paint the symbol Om, which means the sum total of vibration that is behind creation. It's an ancient Hindu symbol. And a U M a M underscore means ah, I awaken. Ooh, I'm dreaming. M. I'm falling asleep. Underscore dead silence. End of cycle. Ah, Spring. Ooh, summer, I'm dreaming, I'm living out my dream. M Fall underscore winter. So you see if you study the Hindu system of the cycles of the Yugas, that every single thing in the universe has this spiraling cyclical energy and it's constantly going through this four cycle of four. And Jung said that number four is the number that represents wholeness. You can find it everywhere throughout the universe. And then you look at Rupert Sheldrake's wife, Jill Purse, I think she's got a book sitting right behind you called the Sacred Spiral. And she's an expert at geometry and sound healing. And she goes deep into the fact and gives all sorts of ancient discussions on the fact that seers would see spirals through space. Then you get to string theory and it says that every at the base of everything is vibrating strings. So you start seeing that. You know, when you start studying the mystics and the most advanced scientists who are open minded, like David Bohm and people like that, you see all this convergence of all this information. But my point I was leading to is I was asking questions of my soul because I just did not believe that when they were doing the genome research and they kept calling all the other DNA junk DNA, I said, that's ridiculous. That's like saying that evolution, billions of years of evolution, has somehow made a mistake and we're carrying around more junk DNA than we actually have working DNA. And my intuition was, because I've spent years, you remember, I started meditating and being trained by yogis when I was a kid. And so I've had plenty of time to go deep into these things. And I can talk to plants and I can talk to trees and all the shaman got all their recipes from the plants and the trees and the animal spirits. So these things were not foreign to me. So I, when I saw this stuff coming out, I said, I'm going to investigate and find out what the hell this DNA is. So I did at that time, as, as many years ago now, I did a LSD journey and just went into meditation. And what my soul showed me, which was quite phenomenal, my soul told me, look at the sun. And so I looked at the sun, but I had to be very careful, it was so bright. But I tipped my head down so that the sunlight would hit my eyebrows and bounce through. Kind of like sun coming through the leaves. How you can look at the sun if you look through the leaves on a tree, it'll protect you enough, but you see the kind of color spectrum like it was going through a prism, right? And what I saw when I went into meditation and relaxed my mind was that photons were leaving the sun and they had immediately start spiraling around them, each other, like the whirling dervishes, the Sufis. Ever seen the whirling dervishes spinning around each other? They go.

I don't think so, no.

Well, Rumi started the mavlevy order. But the whirling dervishes will spin and they have these dresses that open up like umbrellas and they go into like a ballerina posture.

What's a dervish?

A Sufi master.

Okay.

Which is the mystical branch of Islam. And so they will do these spiral movements, which takes them into a complete state of ecstasy and union with God. And so as soon as I saw these photons coming at me, they were spinning around each other, kind of like male and female courting each other, dancing. And my soul showed me that the, the photons actually have a positive negative relationship, which scientists didn't believe was possible. And then, lo and behold, I found in Phil Callahan's research that during solar flares, the solar flares are so strong, they can make photons turn into monopole entities, which is where we get paramagnetic and diamagnetic energies from the sun. So you actually have a polarization, the south paramagnetic substance has an attraction to the south pole of a magnet, a diamagnetic to the north pole. But scientists believe that photons were not polarized like that. But Callahan showed through his research that indeed during solar flares they are. And this is behind the basis of how the soil gets charged. And I talked about in my, my video that you see on YouTube or buy from the institute called Nutrition the Dirt Facts, because this is at the basis of soil science. And so what I saw was that these photons were actually creating a matrix that looked exactly like DNA. And that becomes the energetic blueprint that informs the biological process that we call the sperm meeting the egg. And that our DNA is actually tapping in to the information fields throughout space, wherever we go from non local to local. And that what they call junk DNA is actually the DNA from the evolution of species all the way from single celled organisms all the way up to man. And we have a recorded history of every single thing that's happened on this planet in our DNA. And whenever we go into a meditative state or we can use our conscious attention. So what I'm saying is if you're talking to a tree, you're tapping into what they Call the junk DNA, which is the genes that tap into the frequency that the trees are on.

I think the disconnect for people will be when you talk about being able to tap into that DNA, being able to reach that zero set point. Now when we get to the practicality of this, how can someone actually learn to do that? You know, whether it's around food or like you mentioned, exercise or anything else.

The prac. The practical application. And in my primal pattern eating online course, I take people through a three step process of learning how to be guided at three levels. One is diet logging. So the first level of training is you have to work within the ego structure. There's no sense trying to learn to communicate with your soul if you've got too much religious or scientific programming because you'll never trust it anyhow. Only people. When I test people in my class and teach them how to connect to the soul, if they get a clear response, then I show them how to ask questions. I say, okay, ask a question. When I was seven years of age, this happened. Is it true? And they'll find that they can get the answer. But the way you, the one thing you have to do to be able to soul connect is you have to be brave enough not to try to answer the question from your own ego structure. In other words, if you haven't reached a point in your life where you can sense yourself thinking and know that you're the one doing the inner talking, right? Like if I'm talking to you and you think, oh, I got to remember to ask Paul this. You're aware you're doing that, aren't you? You can feel your own mental processes. So only when a person gets spiritually brave enough to disconnect from their own internal process and see what arises without them getting involved, can they ever access that which is behind those network, that network of social programming which is a network in the. In, it's not in the brain, but it's in the field. And that's the other thing.

Can, can someone learn that type of ego dissolution without the use of, say, plant medicines?

Oh, absolutely. I, I learned it way before I was using plant medicines. Y so there's lots of ways it happens and many people have stumbled across it. When most people learn it is when they're in a deep crisis, when they're completely and utterly beyond themselves, when they're completely out of their wits.

Like, yeah, I recently read a book about that called. Well, there's two books I recently read. One called the Second Mountain and one called Falling Upwards. And both are based upon the idea that we reach our sense of knowing what our true purpose is in life or what's going to bring us joy or fulfillment or happiness when we're going through a period of intense pain or suffering in which our ego has been dashed to the ground and we realize everything we've been striving for could be in vain. And it's then that we throw up our hands in despair and realize, well, I'm not everything that I thought I was.

That's right. And many, there's many great accountings of people that survived the Holocaust and wrote books about tremendously powerful mystical experiences that they had. Even Victor Schauberger, who's one of the world's experts on water, talked about experience in concentration camps. And what's the guy, I can't remember his name. He wrote an amazing book about life.

And, and man's search for meaning.

Yes, Victor Frankel. Yeah. And that happened through the Holocaust. And so there's many people and you, and you talk to near death experience people, people that have near death experience. They've all had these kinds of profound. Not all, most of them have had profound experiences of realizing that everything they thought was true was completely wrong.

So you have to set aside your preconceived notions and pre programmed thoughts and beliefs. Let's say with nutrition, when it comes to your idea of how molecules might be interacting in your body, your idea of whatever it might be, lectins or gluten or anything else, and instead dissolve your ego, set that aside for a moment and simply listen to what your body is telling you.

Well, it's not your body, it's your soul. Your body's like a two way receiving center, like a two way radio that's you're using to tap into the frequency. Just like you can use a television by just changing the station or a radio by changing the station.

Have you found that when it comes to things like, like food intolerance tests for example, that this type of approach seems to agree with what those tests tell someone?

It depends on how good the person is. But my body, my work with my soul is better than their test because I can find that they tell me that there's things I can eat. My soul says don't eat it and when I do eat it, it causes problems.

Like what?

Geez, I'd have to think it's been years since I did the testing. Well, coffee, huh? You know, I tested strongly negative, reactive to it. But as long as I drink less than one shot of an espresso a day. I find it very supportive to mental especially if I'm writing because coffee is referred to as the writer's drug because it linearizes thought.

Steiner said coffee and cigarettes, baby.

Yeah, it's coffee and tobacco. Steiner said coffee and tobacco linearized thinking. But teas, particularly the teas that flower, are best to use for creativity because they bring your mind into more of a spherical search for whatever it is that you're interested in. Marijuana does the same thing. That's why people can't get much done on marijuana because it sends their mind all over the place in a sort of a circular hunt which is really terrible if you're trying to write an article or get a paper done or an analyze a patient's shop chart or something where you need a good linear process. So there's one example.

Yeah, it's interesting the synergy between a lot of these things. Even smokers who drink coffee have been compared to smokers who are non coffee drinkers and they have a 30% lower risk of cardiovascular disease simply because of the protective effects that caffeine can have on some of the effects of tobacco and nicotine.

There's also other things that they don't talk about. Look, if you study the Hunza northern India, which Major General Robert McCarrison who was sent by the British military to investigate, they wanted to find who the healthiest people in the world were so they could model the diet plans for the military for feeding soldiers. Because in the first and Second World War, in the First World War, 49% of all British recruits were turned away due to being medically unfit, most of which was malnutrition. In the Second World War it went up to 51% in England, I think 51 or 52% in the United States. And they stated they determined it was a state of national emergency because they had to reject 17 to 25 year old men who are supposed to be the healthiest men in their culture. And so they tasked Major General Robert McCarrison an MD with researching worldwide to find out who the healthiest people were so they could build a diet plan based on the healthiest people. He decided it was the Huns of Northern India who at he found men at 110 years of age still working in the fields and siring children and living like they were 45. He found that many of them were regular smokers and drinkers and it had no apparent ill effect on them. So my point is in many cultures have found that George Burns was A drinker and a smoker. And I've seen documentaries from all over the world where someone's 102 and they've been smoking since they were 13. And Shaman, I mean, there's an. There's an entire culture of tobacco, shaman, which I've studied. And they drink tobacco, they eat it, they smoke it, they fuse themselves with the consciousness of the tobacco plant, and it has no apparent ill effects on them. In fact, one of their tests for a healthy person is if you can take a full breath of Nicotina russica, the strongest tobacco in the world, and have no negative effects, they say you're healthy. And I actually have tested people on that. I've had people take one breath of Nicotina Rusica and pass out completely unconscious. And lo and behold, they had all sorts of internal traumas that were not resolved, from childhood traumas to relationship traumas. So, you know, these are things I've spent years testing and testing on myself and willing others. But the point that I was leading to is that what we often forget is that the psyche is more powerful than anything in our body. It's ultimately what's directing our body, because the psyche is the basis of what you believe. And what you believe is, you know, if you believe you can bend a spoon, you'll bend a spoon. If you believe you can walk on fire, you'll walk on fire. And what my point is is that if you get a lot of joy out of drinking espresso or out of smoking, now, what we got to remember, there's like 400 and something carcinogenic chemicals in a commercially traded cigarette. But that's not what these cultures were smoking. They were smoking their own homegrown tobacco, which is clean as a whistle. And that's what I use. But. But if you get a lot of joy and connection to the spirit world, and it is an adaptogenic effect that gives you a sense of connection to the earth, connection to the elements, and makes your life more joyful. Those psychological effects are far more power than the negative physiological effects of the tar it might give you in your lungs. So we keep forgetting that the psyche is more powerful than the physiology. And you can track that right back to spontaneous remissions from cancer, when someone just simply decides they do want to live or they do some healing work, and all of a sudden, tumors the size of oranges are gone in two days. And medicine and science can't explain that, but it's the power of the psyche. And Jung spoke extensively of the power of the psyche.

Yeah. And in Our last podcast, or perhaps the podcast before that, because the third episode we've recorded, we actually had a discussion about your intriguing use of these different blends of tobaccos and essential oils and plant medicines and the, the volcano bag that you use. So if you're listening right now, I'll make show notes for this podcast@BenGreenfieldFitness.com PaulCheck3 PaulCheckTheNumber3 and you can go listen to my other two episodes with Paul. But no discussion of this. Yes, go ahead.

I want to just finish the connection so everyone doesn't get lost. So the first stage I teach is logging. So what you do is if you have a daytimer type calendar in your phone, like Monday, almost every phone has 1 starts, 24 hour calendar, you know, 6 o', clock, am, 7 o'. Clock. I say write down exactly what you're eating and drinking, even spices. And then whenever you get a symptom, from brain fog, to back pain to neck pain, to indigestion to constipation, to feeling the need to frequently urinate, to skin problems, whatever it is, if it's not optimal and it's not something you'd call ideal, write it down. And after about seven to 10 days, you will start seeing a pattern such as this. Within an hour of eating chicken, my brain gets foggy and I feel very tired. And look at this. Over 10 days I ate chicken four times and within one hour it happened. And I say, whenever you start seeing the pattern of negative physiological or psychological, could be mental, could be emotional in connection to a food if you can't track it to the one food. So maybe it was chicken, corn and peas you ate that day. Then you have to say, okay, which of the foods on that plate do I eat the most often? Because that's the ones you're most likely have developed an intolerance to. Because if you have leaky gut, that's the food that's getting through the most often. And your immune system's gonna build antibodies against it. So then you say, okay, I eat chicken more than I eat corn and peas. So you take chicken out and lo and behold, your symptoms go away or they get a little bit better or nothing happens. Then you say, okay, now I got to take the peas out. And the symptoms either go away or they get better. And then you take the corn out. Now, if each of them got a little bit better, you might end up finding, guess what? You have an intolerance to chicken, peas and corn. And they're three things you Eat a lot and you have been for a long time. So then you got to take three months completely off to let your immune system reset itself. And you also have to do the work to heal a leaky gut syndrome where that, that has to be done too. You have to look, do you have a parasite infection? Do you have an internal fungal infection? Do you have a dysbiosis? So you can't, you know, you, you have to know how to finish the job. Otherwise what happens, you go through the labor of identifying what foods, but you keep taking medical drugs or drinking alcohol and empty stomach or being in stressful relationships and you find it works for a while, but next thing you know, there's nothing you can do.

It's a good point. In many cases, you're not allergic or intolerant to that food. You simply have antibodies from that food entering your bloodstream because of a pre existing leaky gut issue. And I've found that many times in clients is once they followed for 12 weeks bone broth and l glutamine and colostrum and lignite and other things that help to restore the function of the zonulin protein in the gut and heal the lining. They can return to these foods just fine.

And when I was a vegetarian, I could eat all sorts of foods that normally I could not eat at all. For example, anything from peanuts causes like hives to show up on my body, like an acute immune response. But I was a vegetarian. My body started craving. The smell of peanut butter just practically made me horny. I'm like, wow, my body really wants peanut butter. I was afraid to try it, but my soul said, try it. And I did. And I had almost zero reaction to it. I'm like, oh my God. Because as a kid, I love peanut butter. But then I realized later it was causing me a lot of problems and had to get off of it. And it showed up on my food intolerance testing multiple times. But when I took meat out of my diet, my body was able to adapt and I could eat several things that I could not eat before. And peanut peanuts and peanut butter and nuts was one of them. I can't normally when I'm eating meat, I cannot eat any nuts. But the next step is muscle testing. So I use a duck bill muscle test where you use your index finger and thumb shaped like a duck bill. And you start with a baseline. You just, to get a baseline, you just say, okay, how much energy or force does it take me to just overpower the joint? That would be your baseline and then to teach the students, I say, okay, now what I want you to do, to show you how this works, state your name and your age out loud. And then ask your body, is that true? So my name is Paul. Check. I am going to be 58 this month. Dear body, is that true? And it tests not only is good but stronger than the baseline. Then I say, okay, now I'm going to tell a lie, and I'm going to try as hard as I can with my muscle test. My name is Margaret Jane Spa, and I'm 74 years old. Dear body, is that true? And I'm. No matter how hard I try, I'm weak as cheese. The body will not support a lie because from an evolutionary perspective, it decreases survivability. And the way I explain this to my students is imagine being in a tribe and you are all starving because there was a famine. And you're out trekking through the jungle looking for food, and one of you wanders off and finds a. A bundle of bananas and decides to hide them and keep it a secret. And you eat a bunch of them and hide the rest, and you run back and join the tribe. And the tribe looks at you and says, did you find any food? And you say, no, and you lie. So the question I have for the students is, did they increase or decrease their chance of survival? What's your answer?

Well, if you look at it from a tribal standpoint, they would have decreased their chance.

They decreased it. And in nature, you can't survive alone. You're not going to make it out there alone. So once you realize that you need each other to survive in unbridled nature, by feeding yourself and withholding from the others, you've decreased not only your chance of survival, but everybody's. Because if they die, you're alone, you'll get eaten. If you share it, then all of you have better blood sugar and better chance of being cognitive enough and alert enough and aware enough to find more food. So the point that I'm making is the body will not support a lie. And the only time this is a problem is if you have a frank addiction of all the people I've tested. So one of the things I used to do and I still do for my students is I would take all sorts of things like organic versus commercial raisins. I would take table sugar versus certified organic sugar from, say, cane cane sugar, certified organic versus just processed white sugar. And I would put them in envelopes that just had a letter and I had the code to know which. What was in it. And I would simply say, just put that in your pocket or stick it in your breast pocket or put on your body and just say, dear body, is what's in this package good for us to eat and muscle test on it? Nobody tests strong for sugar or saccharin or, you know, any of the aspartame or any of these, even the commercial foods. And so if they said, well, I tested pretty good for package D, which was commercial raisins, but they didn't use the package with organic raisins. And I would say, check it against package F, and every time, package F would be a better muscle test. But when every now and then, somebody would test positive for aspartame or positive for sugar, they get stronger. And when I investigated, they were addicted. So what happens if you reach the point of physiological addiction? Then you cannot rely on your body to give you honest biological feedback, because the system itself is confused and it is basically crosswired. It's like it itself can no longer give you reliable information. So you have the logging, which teaches you to pay attention to your body and realize that those symptoms are there because your body's doing exactly what it has to do to keep you alive.

And then the muscle testing after the logging and then the muscle testing. By the way, I always thought muscle testing was. Was bunk, or at least difficult to replicate reliably until I went to the offices of Dr. Craig Bueller in Salt Lake, who works with a lot of professional athletes with deep tissue work called advanced muscle integrative Technique Amit. And he actually invented a device that quantifies the amount of force, the pounds per inch of pressure used during muscle testing to be able to proceed precisely replicate whether a practitioner is pushing harder or pushing less hard when testing a muscle. And then he will go through the body, place his finger or his hand upon certain muscle points, then muscle test you. At the same time, identify muscles that are turned off, and then with deep tissue work and trigger point therapy, turn them back on. That was the first time I realized, holy cow. I mean, because he turned my glutes back on and I had peroneal issues, and he did all of this with this muscle testing device. So, yeah, it was definitely something to it.

When I was a younger therapist, at one point, I had a device that would give a readout in pounds and ounces. And it was like a handheld pressure plate. So I could have someone do a deltoid test and push down on their hand. It would give me an exact readout. So I would just stop it when their hand started to move. And I had so many left brainers that didn't believe in that that I had to find a way to validate it for them. And I could show them beyond a shadow of a doubt that they were much stronger. For example, I, they might have a short leg, like a left leg might be X millimeters short and it was causing torsion on their pelvis. So I would use the muscle testing to determine what amount of heel lift I needed to stabilize their pelvis. And so I would muscle test them until they were level because a lot of people would use heel lifts based on the measurement of the X ray. So if it said you were 5 millimeters short, like I'm 5 millimeters short because I broke my left leg in five places cliff diving and I lost enough bone that my, on a scanogram, my left leg's actually 5 millimeters short. But sometimes you can't use exactly that much heel lift because there's a mathematical ratio. Your acetabulum comes into your pelvis at an angle, so there's a lever arm. So if you add 5 millimeters under the heel, it might lift your ilium. Right, 10 millimeters. So there's a mathematical ratio. So I, what I would do is I would stack business cards under their heel and a little bit at a time until they tested strong and I would custom get heel lifts custom built. But because there was so much doubt amongst doctors and therapists, I used a calibrated system to show them that I could show them in pounds of force generated that it worked. And there's great stuff on muscle. I got all sorts of comprehensive books on it in my library and the science of it and how it works through the brain circuits. And George, George Goodheart is the man that really pirate pioneered that. But the, the people that have the hard time with muscle testing are the people that are addicted and the people that don't believe in it. Yeah, well, if you don't believe in anything, it's not going to work for you. And that's one of the diseases of our culture, is not being open minded enough to try things. And therefore you don't have the ability to learn because you're programmed. You're now a biological robot with no chance.

What's the, what's the third step?

The third step is the soul. So because the soul is challenging for a lot of people because of religious beliefs or because of a lack of religious beliefs or confusion, what I tell people is always muscle test against what your soul says. So if your soul says, what happens is they often can't feel the response very well, especially if they're tired or they're using stimulants like coffee and they're too buzzed up because you have to be able to feel a subtle response like that. So I say, okay. If you find that you're having a hard time listening to your soul, then double check it with muscle testing or say something like, dear soul, it sounded to me like you said, yes, I could have two eggs today. Dear body, our soul said, we can have two eggs today. Is that true? Yes. If you get a no, then follow your body until your access to your soul is as strong as your muscle testing.

All right, so when it comes to the soul, soul connection, any last elements of that when it comes to piecing together these three steps to intuitive eating?

Yes. The biggest challenge with soul connection is that if the ego has any attachment to the outcome. So if you say, dear soul, can I eat these chocolate chip cookies? And you psychologically say, are in a stressful period of your life, but in your childhood, when you're eating chocolate chip cookies, where usually times of celebration, parents weren't hard on you, then the child in you will want those cookies. And so it will negate the impetus impulse of the soul, and it basically, the ego learns to mask the soul. So what I teach my students is you have to have legitimate spiritual courage. You have to be brave enough to hear no, when a part of you is addicted or a part of you wants it, or a part of you needs it for comfort food. So it's a legitimate spiritual quest. And only the people that are brave enough to truly listen to their soul and find out what happens in their life ever find out the truth and the power of the soul. The rest of them say, oh, my soul said I could eat a whole box of Oreo cookies, or my soul told me to go out and rape some chick. I'm like, no, that's not your soul. That's either your shadow or your ego impersonating your soul until you. And I always encourage people to meditate because if you don't practice calming your own mind and getting behind your thought process so you can witness it. You can't differentiate what I call the energy signature of the soul from your own ego structure. So when I'm teaching soul connection through food, it's actually me introducing my students and my patients to a legitimate spiritual practice that takes as much commitment as any legitimate spiritual practice and requires a level of spiritual courage that you must confront your fears and your addictions, or you will always be have to go back to muscle testing or diet logging or blood testing, and you won't ever be able to grow because you're not ready to grow as a human being. You want to stay stuck in the position of a child or a victim or a saboteur or a prostitute or a poor me syndrome.

Yeah, it's kind of interesting because a lot of people will. Instead of listening to their bodies and making those necessary dietary modifications, we now have the ability to be able to use supplements to cover those up. Like, for example, people will say, okay, well, caffeine seems to, you know, whether because someone is a fast genetic metabolizer and has a COMT gene that would or a CYA P gene that would dictate a fast coffee oxidizing or a slow coffee oxidizing response, or whether they have some kind of a pancreatic enzymatic deficiency to being able to digest that hunk of meat that their body is telling them not to eat. They'll say, okay, well, I'm just going to take L Theanine and Tulsi with my coffee and I'm going to take this massive dose of enzymes with my meat.

That's one of the whole problems.

I'm going to take a histamine blocker with this version of alcohol, and you can literally have a closet full of supplements that allow you to never engage in intuitive eating because it's so easy to temporarily cover up the harm, but.

You never grow up.

Maybe a little hard on the pocketbook, but you could do it.

Yeah, it's rampant. It's part of the medical model. It's also one of the reasons I have a problem with biohacking, because a lot of biohacking is using some kind of supplementation to cover up a response you're getting from the body when you're eating something that isn't working for you or drinking something that isn't good for you, be it chocolate, coffee, you name it. And so exactly what you say. But what happens is you are not listening to the wisdom of the universe. You just meditate on what it took to create Ben Greenfield. And when you really do that, you'll realize that the entire universe is involved, every bit of it. And the level of technology that we exist in and as is so far beyond anything medicine has, that if we don't have a legitimate willingness to grow spiritually, to come deeper into the mysteries of life and meaning in service of other human beings, because ultimately we come to the realization we can't do it alone on any level. And that we need each other and that, you know, one of the most painful things for me is I've spent like you my whole life studying and researching and practicing and studying the mystics and working with yogis and learning so much it hurts me tremendously to walk through a shopping mall and see how sick and beat up and to go to hospitals and having worked in rehabilitation and see all the shortcuts, the drugging and the bullshit. For me to just watch that go on and not do my best to share what I know with people is too painful. I can't do it because I know what life is. I know what God is. This is not a theory for me. God's not something I read out of a book. God's something I eat, sleep, breath, breathe, shit, wear, sing, to dance, to, hug, kiss and drive every day. So if. If we keep playing these technology games and science games, we are, to the degree. I'm not saying there's not a place for all of that. Look, I use digestive enzymes, too. There's a time and a place for everything, but I don't use them to. To cheat myself there. There are times where I actually might do that, though. I have a bad reaction to popcorn, but I love popcorn. And I don't want to live such a limited life that I can't enjoy popcorn once in a while. So on popcorn night, I take two tablets of hydrochloric acid.

I'm the same way with the wonderful lavender butter popovers at my favorite restaurant in Spokane, Wild Sage. And so I always show up to Wild Sage with a big bottle of dipeptidase, Peptidiol, or the gluten guardian supplement in my bag. And I pop five of those before I go in because I do want it. Enjoy myself.

And so I tell people, your body is a garden. It's up to you to take responsibility for how many weeds you're going to let grow in the garden, how many parasites you're going to let in the garden. And at the end of the day, you're that garden. So when I eat the popcorn, I take full responsibility for the itching and the immune reactions. I know I can manage it with supplements, but I also know that if I do that too often, then I'm actually creating far more stress than in my. On my body, than the joy could ever compensate for. And that's called being an adult.

I'm really curious how you do this with children you just had. Well, what is this, your fourth child? Your Third child, new baby. You have a pretty big gap between the latter two.

And the first junior will be 40 next month, and Mona's three and a half. And Zoe was born on July 20.

So less than a month at the time. We're recording this.

Yeah.

How do you plan to educate your kids?

Well, you know, Even with Paul Jr. I tried to ground him in the realities of how the world works. And I said, look, you know, there's no such thing as a free ride. And so when he wanted a toy when he was like 7, 8 years old and onward, I would say, I'll meet you halfway. So the one thing he figured out on his own that he could do was collect bottles and cans and, and cash them in for money. So I remember one time he wanted a remote control car, real nice. When it was 250 bucks. I said, I'll meet you halfway because I want, you know, I'm not. If I just give you stuff, you're going to expect mommy and daddy to give you handouts all the time. When the world doesn't work that way. So he got up every morning. It was quite funny because the bums used to get really pissed off at him because he would get up so early that they would find him in what they called their garbage cans. And he would actually get into some pretty harsh interactions with bums that were pissed off because he was collecting all the bottles and cans. But he saved up 125 bucks.

So you're teaching him self defense simultaneously?

Well, I was teaching him the tactics of negotiation and saying, okay, Monday, Wednesday and Friday, you get it. Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, I get it. And so when he was a teenager and he started getting into drugs because there was tons of drugs in the high school he went to and he wanted to explore and he would come home stone and think he could slide it by me and him. And I actually happened to be working with some police officers that were injured from the SWAT team and also the drug branch of the police, San Diego police. And I told them what was going on with my kid and they brought me their handouts that they used to train police officers on the exact chemical makeup of the drug, the side effects of the drug, and the behavioral characteristics of people on the drug and what the long term consequences of the drug were. So they had all these reports for the police officers and they gave me their whole file. And I had Paul Jr read it and I tested him on it. And I said, my brother was a drug addict. I was raised with a drug addict, and my father was Very violent. And long story made short, I saw what happens when a parent forces you, tells you no, gives you no control and beats the hell out of you. And so I said, I am not going to physically abuse you. I am going to let you learn. If you want to play with adult substances, then you have to be an adult about it. So I want you to read all these. So whenever someone offers you a drug, you know exactly what you're putting in your body and what the consequences are. So he read that and I said, the rule is as long as you can pass your grades at school and get your homework done, I'm going to let you explore, but I'm also going to tell you that you don't do this stuff and drive around in cars or do stupid things like go to video cage. You need to go and go somewhere like a canyon or sit somewhere safe or let me know you want to do it and I will have you come here. And if any of your friends are coming, I have to have permission from their parents. Well, none of them were brave enough to get permission from their parents. But basically by the time he was, you know, 18, he had explored all sorts of drugs from cocaine to crack cocaine to lsd. And he navigated it and he knew the consequences and he took responsibility for it.

That is. Nowadays one of the versions of that form of parenting is called Love and Logic. And there's a book by the same name and we use a very similar approach in our house. There's no distinct nose. Like, you cannot do that. Sure. When river and Taryn were young, they would approach the fireplace in the house and that was a, no, don't touch that. And I would stand up and get their hand just because I didn't want to have to deal with a third degree burn on an, on a two year old. But our style of parenting now is the same as what you've just elucidated, where we'll educate river and Taryn about the consequences of their decision.

Yes.

What does the protein gluten in excess, especially when combined with glyphosate due to the lining of the gut. Before you go to Braden or Matthew or any of your other friends birthday parties, just know that and then make the decision for yourself. And, and you know, sometimes they will, you know, they'll indulge in what they want to indulge in and put up with the tummy ache the next day, but they know why. And furthermore, they're not having the cupcake, as trite an item as that might seem. Because it is forbidden fruit. Right? They're eating it because they're, they're interested and they understand the consequences. And we'll do the same in our house. You know, they, they know, they already know the effects that porn would have on their neurotransmitter balance on the way that they might view women as objects, et cetera. But there will be no rule in our house that they can't. They can go to Pornhub whenever they want when they're 12 or 13 or whatever, but they will be educated about the physiological effects of that on their body, the psychological effects and the consequences they would need to deal with as part of that.

Yeah, Paul Jr. Was the first, youngest level four practitioner ever to graduate just when he turned 19. So by the time he was 19, he had enough knowledge and skill to know that if he ate gluten, what the response was, exactly how it got there, and that he was responsible for that. And he had developed enough knowledge to take adult responsibility for himself, whether it be recreational drugs, food, alcohol, sex, whatever. So my approach to raising my kids is protect them from what they're not old enough, mature enough, and wise enough to understand. Like you got to protect a kid from fire or sharp objects or a chainsaw. And when they have the intelligence to understand what it is they're dealing with, like what is a chainsaw and why is it very dangerous and how does it work, then I teach them the consequence. Like when my father was teaching me to use chainsaws, he showed me, look, this chainsaw can catch a knot and kick back. And if that thing hits you in the face, it'll cut your face right open and might even cut your head in half. He we would be falling trees and he'd say, look, this can pinch the saw blade. And if that saw blade gets pinched, you might not be able to get it out. You're going to have to go get another saw to fall a tree into that tree. Then you're going to have to get your saw and run like hell before you get hit by one of the trees or you got to wedge it. But sometimes you can't wedge it because there's not enough wood left. If you wedge it, it'll split the tree and it can come right down on top of you. So I actually learned real time, real life situations with real live explanations and, and sometimes demonstrations. Like my father would purposely hit a knot and watch the saw jump. And he knew it was going to do and he'd see what, see what happens. So by the time I was holding a chainsaw and using it all day. I knew what to do and I knew that, you know, you, you don't want to play with fire, with something that can cut your arm off or your leg off. And so I think most parents today are too busy to really parent and they don't spend the time to do the research on the things that they need to know so they can inform their children. So the next thing you know, they're running off to doctors with every pimple.

Or they trust an outdated educational system designed to support the agricultural revolution.

Yeah. Designed to brainwash kids so they don't know how to think for themselves.

And you know, the creation of factory workers which was necessary at a certain time.

Yeah, but especially for the factory owners now.

Exactly. Experiential education and this so called unschooling movement in which children learn through life experiences, through consequences and through a practical hands on education to me is so much more palatable. That's how we're educating river and Taran now. But with your kids, are you going to. Because another approach, and this is one that a great author named Seth Godin talks about quite a bit, is to use institutionalized education that we pay for and that's readily available and have your children go there and learn how to play well with others and be good little factory workers and learn their math and their STEM and their reading and writing and handwriting within the lines and everything else. And then when they come in the door from school, then your responsibility of educating them in the other matters of life begins.

Yeah, well, how many parents will do that?

Well, that's the problem. And I'm curious what you plan on doing.

Well, what we're doing. And I researched education systems worldwide and having spent 25 years studying Steiner's work, and he developed the Waldorf school system based on how the brain grows and develops. And a lot of the things Steiner was sharing in the late 1800s and early 1900s have, have now been proven by advanced brain imaging and technology. So you know the list of things Steiner showed us. Steiner invented by biodynamic farming in response to a crisis in Germany. And research shows biodynamic farming produces the most nutritious food, bar none in scientific investigations. And he used all sorts. I won't get into too heavy into that. But my conclusion was Steiner's system is the best because Steiner does not want the kid's left brain being activated before about 7 to 10 years of age. Because the right brain has to come online first because it's the Brain that makes connections to everything.

That's why free play and creativity is so important.

And so his whole system for the first probably eight or nine years is all storytelling, arts and crafts, singing, dancing, acting, stories out. They do plays, all of which have educational meanings. They each take a role in the play. They hand make their own costumes. They're doing arts and crafts. They're. They. They have gardens at the school. They all garden every day.

And this would be Waldorf.

Waldorf.

Okay. So. So you'll probably find, like, a good Waldorf school.

I already have. Mana's been in there. This is his. He started when there's a minimum age they start. I think he started at two and a half. There's a certain criteria they have to meet to go into the beginning. So he's going into his second year now. He love it. And I've had many patients with kids in deep crisis, from health crisis to psychological crisis to depression to anxiety, you name it. And many of them had their kids in Catholic schools and public schools. And every single person that I've encouraged to take their kids to Steiner school has profusely thanked me because not only did the kids heal, but it opened them up to the world of their creativity. So Steiner's whole model is built on this. The system is built based on how the brain grows and develops and integrates itself, just like you can study embryology and see how a fetus grows and develops. So Steiner's system includes movement, it includes food, includes meals. They don't want the kids having. They. They want no exposure to screens. But we said to them, we're not going to give Mana no exposure because we want him to have some awareness of technology because the world he's going to go into. If you think of how much technology is advanced in your own lifetime and in my life, I mean, there was when I. I remember when faxes came along.

It's going to be exponential now that technology is creating technology rather than humans creating technology.

Right. So I said to the Steiner school, look, I will minimize my son's exposure, but I. And I will make sure he's not watching things on there that aren't good for his mind. But I will let him watch things. Shows that show how a tractor works or, or show how to make a puppet or things that I think are educational, inspirational. Like there's a guy show called Blippi. And this guy, you know, goes out and shows how tractors work and earth movers and bulldozers and. And he's a real comical guy and, and it's all very good educational material. So. But the point is they want minimum screen time and maximum engagement in natural expressions of the child that bring it into the world of wonder, mystery and connection. And they do a lot of painting and coloring so that the child learns that they have this creative ability and they get their hands and fingers dirty, metaphorically. So by the time they start going into studying mathematics and memorizing things, that their right brain is intact, works well, and they can ground, shall we say, specific knowledge into general life experience and general knowledge. And that's the approach I'm going to take. And you know, the other thing is with all this vaccination stuff, well, pretty soon you're going to have to homeschool. So I've been looking into. There's groups of parents that don't want their kids vaccinated. So now there's groups of parents getting together, taking turn.

Well, we're in California where you can't file an exemption.

Yeah, well, you can't now.

No religious, no philosophical, no medical exemptions allowed.

So we just, if we, yeah, if we, if we, if we can't. Because now that they passed the mandatory exemption, he may not even be able to go to Steiner school. So we will just get a group of parents that feel the same way as us and we might invest in a. Hiring a Steiner teacher to, to train the kids privately.

Yeah, until they all get wiped out by measles. I'm joking.

Yeah, well, you know, you can get wiped out by your parents as well, so.

Yeah, but I mean, speaking of getting wiped out, all joking aside, you and I were talking in the kitchen about children and the potential danger of an imbalanced approach to education that's based on technology due to this whole so called zombie apocalyptic scenario in which there is a realistic possibility of a solar flare or as you referred to you called it, what, a magnetic pulse?

Yeah. Magnetic pulse weapon.

Yeah. In which we, we might revert to a state in which we have to learn how to survive. I feel that it's how to make fire, how to cook, how to hunt.

How to farm, how to garden, survival skills. When you told me how you're raising your kids, I was like very, very impressed because you're teaching your kids basically what my father taught us. You know, my father, as mean and dangerous a man as he was, was a really skilled survivalist, a master hunter. You know, I was skinning animals and shearing sheep and castrating and all that stuff on the farm. It was hands on. I mean, from the time I Was eight. I was responsible for tractors and working in fields and driving hay wagons and farm trucks. And I had adult responsibilities and learned how everything works and was engaged in everything and, you know, had to learn how nature works. And it didn't matter whether the power goes out on a farm. You got to take care of the animals, you got to get the field work done. And if it means no tractors and no electricity, then you're out there bare handed.

So you learn a lot about life and death.

You do.

River and Terran, in fact, every day kill sick chickens and drown baby mice taking over the barn. And I mean, and they've had to learn hard lessons about the coming and passing of life.

You know, example is we had a bad parasite infestation. I believe it was our potato crop or one of our crops had a very bad parasite infestation. But my father didn't want to use chemicals, so he bought 5,000 praying mantises, which turned out to be the perfect bug to eat those. And we got a huge shipment. Every one of the praying mantises was in its own little cardboard cage, kind of like Chinese food comes in a little. And we had to unpackage and release those into our fields.

I did not know that we had to do the same thing. We had locust infestations. Where I grew up in Lewiston, Idaho, and I was in Fruitland, Idaho, we, we brought in praying mantises. And I remember they didn't come in individual boxes boxes, but we had like cages of praying mantises that we had to release. We had, we had pigs, we had chickens. And this all started with us just buying this stuff to manage the local locust population.

Yep. And so we, we sat and watched the. It's fun to watch a praying mantis because they're great hunters and they hold on to them just like we hold on to a corn on the cob. And they'll just eat them up.

Yeah.

And so for a kid, imagine releasing 5,000 of these things into like a 10 acre field and watching them just clean that place out.

Yeah.

And then your crops are healthy again. So, you know, I was fortunate that my parents are very holistic. You know, my mother's a spinner, a weaver, an artist. We made all our own food. Our flour, our butter, our eggs, our cheese, our ice cream. Everything came off the farm. We butchered our own animals. Now, a lot of kids can't get that kind of an education in this city, but we all have a choice. As parents decide what is important to us is it Important to be a lawyer working in New York City where you can't teach your kid jack shit unless they're watching it on MTV or some crazy ass television. Or do you say, I've got the responsibility of my legacy and one day I'm going to die and these kids need to know how to take care of themselves. And I think that's all up to each individual parent to decide what they think the risks of life and the future of life is. And we're facing, as you know, you and I could talk for 20 hours about all the ways that the system could collapse and bring people into a state of trying to exist. I mean, think of it. If the power goes off, the entire food delivery system worldwide is run by computer Systems. And within 72 hours, there will be no food and everybody will be raiding the supermarkets. There will be mobs. It'll be Mad Max reinvented. And so when people just live complacently, it's, it's just complacency. And so, you know, we're, we're. I'm raising my kids not in a hardcore way, but I want them to understand exactly what you're teaching.

Hopefully they'll be the ones not inside the supermarkets but out in the backyard harvesting dandelion and making a bow.

And, and during the Second World War went with all the food shortages, 50% of the food eaten was grown in people's backyards. And many books in my library show that across the board, people's health significantly improved because they weren't getting junk from stores. Yeah, they were living out of their backyards. And so we have a garden at home and Mana eats out of it. He goes out with Penny and Angie. He, he, he gardens. He eats the peppers and the tomatoes and he loves it. And, you know, he goes to like, birthday parties with friends. And he's the only one that brings real food and he's the only kid that eats vegetables. And they look at him like, wow, your kid is unusual. He's eating raw broccoli and he loves it. I'm like, that's mommy was eating that when he was in her tummy. And that's why we feed him. And so like you said, you teach the kid. Look, okay, you eat that cupcake, tell me what happens in the morning. And now the kid makes the connection. It tastes good for about two minutes, then it feels like shit for three days. And they usually start policing themselves.

Yeah, they do. As you mentioned, we could talk for a good 20 hours or more. There are a lot of Questions that I wanted to ask you today that we didn't have time to get to, like plant medicine and Christianity and spirituality and purpose and meaning. And we will definitely do a part two of today's show because I have great answers for you and I know you do. However, there is one question that I really do want to hear your answer to, and it's relatively straightforward and simple. Is there something you haven't been asked in a public forum or on a podcast? Is there a question that you haven't been asked that you wish you had been? A message that you want to get out to the world that you haven't yet been given an opportunity to get out?

Well, the question, because you sent me the list of questions in advance so I knew what we were going to talk about. When I saw that, I thought, what is the one question I wish somebody would ask? And it's one of the biggest criticisms I get from people is that I talk about God too much and they don't want to hear about God. And I've explained many times why I do that. But the question nobody ever asked me is why do I love God so much? And the answer is, because God is unconditional love. God is the source. God is the zero point field. God is the empty and the full meeting each other. God is that which is coming to know itself through the experience of life, which is us. We are God experiencing life, and God is growing and realizing itself through us. When we grow, God grows. You can't evolve one iota without adding it to the entire world or the entire universe, therefore, God. So I've had many profound union experiences and God experiences with and without plant medicines, you know, too much to explain in a few minutes. But I find that through working with my soul, I've come to learn that if I am brave enough to get the answer to anything, I can get it. And the only limiting factor is my own fear here. If I want to know whether my child will be born healthy or whether my child's going to come through a C section, I can get the answer. But I'll give you an example. I asked my soul, is Angie going to be able to give a natural childbirth at home? Because last time we had an emergency situation, she had to have C section.

We had everything for this last baby.

Yeah, we had everything all set up for Mana and she had to have a C section and an emergency. But this time I said to my soul, will Angie have a natural childbirth at home? And I asked about six times. And I kept getting a yes. So when all of a sudden a crisis came and here we were facing a C section. I said, okay, how in the world. There's only one way I could have got a yes when my soul never would have told me yes if the answer was no. Because I learned every time I thought my soul was telling me to do something, and it turned out to be a problem that my ego was generating that answer because I had some kind of an attachment to it. Well, none of us wants our wife to have to have a C section or go through surgery. So I went deep into meditation and I said to my soul, I thought you told me several times that my. That Angie was going to have a natural childbirth at home. And my soul said, no, I told you several times to be ready for anything. And you were afraid to have to go to a hospital because of your angst and resistance toward the Western medical system. So you chose to tell yourself that you would have a safe childbirth at home. I told you to be ready for anything. So I found that the truth of God and the truth of life, the book of life, is open to all of us. But because we are afraid of fear, we are afraid of not getting our own way, we're afraid of hurting, we're afraid of change, that our ego structure blocks us from the wisdom of consciousness. That is an open book. And true spiritual growth is being able to handle reality. And so I love God because God is all there is. And I believe in the first principle of Sufism, which says there is no God but God. I worship everything and everyone. And life and its challenges are the challenges of God coming to know itself, consciousness coming to know what it is capable of and what it is. And to me, it's one thing to be a badass in a boxing ring or winning a race or thinking you're cool because you have lots of money. But to deal with the pain of God's own growth and God's own self realization and God's bravery, God is brave enough to live, to die, to be tortured, to be Hitler, to be the child getting sexually abused, to be the person getting murdered. And at the same time, God is the mystics and the great surgeons and the great teachers and the great lovers. And most people aren't mature enough to realize that God can't truly come to know God unless God's brave enough to dive into the darkness of God with equal commitment to the light and the love of it all. So I love God because God's totally alone. And it is through that aloneness that God God manifests the illusion of separation without which love has no purchase. You know, if you're, if, if you're all alone, there's no way you can really experience love because you don't know what love is. Love is the flow of energy and information through empathic and compassionate connections.

That's where the interdependence comes in.

So I could never know Ben Greenfield and love him if I didn't have the illusion of separation from him. But really what's looking through Ben's eyes at Paul and Paul's eyes at Ben is the same consciousness, and that's God. And so my love of God is really my love of the genuine desire to grow and to experience and to accept and to honor and to worship.

Well, I think, Paul, that if there's one big takeaway that I got from this discussion and really a message that's the universe seems to be sending me repeatedly of late. It is not only that need for interdependence and how much we do rely upon each other, but also the importance of learning how to set aside the ego, learning how to dissolve the ego. Whether it comes to your eating, whether it comes to the way that you educate your children, whether it comes to the way that you treat yourself and your approach to your consciousness. The ego's a, well, you know, it's.

It'S, it's, it's a, it's a double edged sword like everything in God, right? You got, you got fear and you got connection. You know, you got good and bad, you got light and dark, you got good and evil, right? Isaiah 45, 7 in the Bible. King James Bible, I create the light and the dark. I create good and evil. I, the Lord, do all these things. But the ego is absolutely a gift from God. Because without the ego there isn't a sense of self. There's no way to navigate a society, a culture or a world, or a sense of individuality. So first you have to gain an ego to have that sense of identity and capacity. But then as we grow spiritually, we learn to let go of what's often referred to as the false ego, the I, me, mine, you know, that territorial ego. And we grow to realize that the real truth of ourselves is that we are our enemy. Which is why Jesus said, love thy enemy as thyself. And what you find is that the basis of all religions is the golden rule, do unto others as you would have them do unto you. And I've told people, look, if you just get rid of everything in the 900 and something pages of the Bible and just repeat, do unto others as you would have them do unto you for thousands of pages. Maybe people would start getting it. And when you look at religious motivation as the primary source of almost all wars, we come to the realization that the ego is not only a dangerous thing, but it brings us into the conflict. So just like my son had to learn about drugs and our kids had to learn about fire and sharp objects, we should have matured enough by now to realize that we all need each other and we don't have to beat the hell out of each other and torture each other and torture the planet. But the ego is something that has to both grow through the formative forces of life experience and is largely influenced by our parents. But then the spiritual quest is when you come to the point where you realize that the ideas that have been programmed into you aren't creating happiness and they're not creating freedom and you have to reach deeper and question your own thoughts. Steiner called that the birth of the awareness soul. The day you realize that your own ideas and the ideas of experts don't work for you and you question with deeper thoughts. So if you have diametrically opposed experts on any topic, like should I take cold showers? And Ph.D. so and so says no, it's bad for you. And Wim Hof says it's good for you and he's got all his research behind him, then you have to do your own research. You have to jump in the cold water. Carl Jung says intellectualism is a common cover up for fear of direct experience. So we reach the point where our ego takes us to where we can't rely on other people for direction. We have to be brave enough to have a direct experience experience. And I think that's what a lot of the illness is in the world today. It's people listening to somebody else's ideas and not listening to their body and having the direct experience and taking the responsibility for their own body, their own life, their own relationships, and overcoming their own shortcomings. To become a better lover, to become a better friend, a better teacher.

In a state of constant busyness and distraction, which is so rife it is in this modern era, it is very simple to ignore that still small voice in the silence. Yes, it is your ego to drive.

The ship, but it's also very simple to end up on drugs and have your life falling apart and your dick doesn't work and your sex drive is gone and your back hurts, your neck hurts, you can't shit, you can't Digest. So the real spiritual quest begins when you decide that your body's talking to you all along, and you have to stop renting your problems to doctors and therapists and really fully participate in being your own gardener. And then you realize when you're your own gardener, bullshitting yourself doesn't help you or the garden.

Yeah.

And that's the real spiritual quest. And you don't need a religion. You just need relationships. Right. If you want a real, real religion, just fall in love with somebody and be honest about their feedback and encourage them to know that you aren't criticizing them, to beat on them. You're saying the things you're saying to help them be a better person. And when you love somebody enough to be honest with them and you love yourself enough to trust that people you should be trusting are giving good feedback, then you've found the temple of the divine.

Paul, I love you. I love your butter espresso. I love your salmon and eggs breakfast. I love your beautiful heaven house.

Thank you.

And I love that we could do this podcast together.

I love you, too. And you're a real honest seeker. And you've often come to me with real, deep, honest questions about your own life and about everything. And I always love seeing how full on you are. I mean, you are deep into it, man. So I get the joy of hanging out with a guy who I consider to be as much of a pioneer as I've been in my life. And you're not a guy who's afraid to enter the rodeo and ride the bull. So congratulations, and it's lovely to see you put your children and your wife in such a high place in your life. And to me, you've entered the real truth of religion there.

Thanks, man. Thanks. Well, I know we're releasing this on our respective channels for my listeners, I'll go ahead and find links to all the books, each and every one that Paul mentioned, all the resources, my other podcast with Paul, and a lot more. And I'll put all that@BenGreenfieldFitness.com PaulCheck3 PaulCheck the number three. And.

And for my listeners.

Stay tuned for more wisdom from Paul. Check. And go ahead.

Yeah, I was just going to say for my listeners, Ben, if you can give me the link to Kion and anything that you want to share, Penny will weave that in to the podcast because I'd love them to have access to the depth of your genius. I remember the first time I heard you on a podcast. The first thing I said to myself is that's one smart guy and I gotta meet him. So here we are.

Here we are for for the. For the probably the dozens time we've got to got to hang out. So I'm stoked. It's been a pleasure to get to know you over the past few years and I can't wait for the next show.

Let's do it.

All right, man.

Thank you, bud.

Thanks.

Blessings.

Well, thanks for listening to today's show. You can grab all the show notes, the resources, pretty much everything that I mentioned over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com along with plenty of other goodies from me, including the highly helpful Ben Recommends page, which is a list of pretty much everything that I've ever recommended for hormones, sleep, digestion, fat loss, performance, and plenty more. Please also know that all the links, all the promo codes that I mentioned during this, this and every episode help to make this podcast happen and to generate income that enables me to keep bringing you this content every single week. So when you listen in, be sure to use the links in the show notes, use the promo codes that I generate because that helps to float this thing and keep it coming to you each and every week.