Duncan Trussell Family Hour - 704: Mitch Horowitz

Episode Date: August 10, 2025

Mitch Horowitz, author of Duncan's favorite books on magick, the paranormal, ESP, and manifestation, re-joins the DTFH! You can find Mitch's books everywhere fine books are sold! A few of our favorites include Practical Magick, Modern Occultism, and Occult America. Click here for Mitch's full catalog! New Zealand and Australian family! Duncan is headed your way this month! Click to get tickets for his shows in Auckland, Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, and Perth! Thank you, and we love you!! This episode is brought to you by: Try your first month of BlueChew FREE. Visit BlueChew.com for more details and important safety information. Minnesota Nice Ethnobotanicals wants to help you escape the matrix of stress and reconnect with the earth’s ancient wisdom—go to mn-nice-ethnobotanicals.com/duncan and use code DUNCAN20 for 20% off your first order of Amanita Muscaria Capsules! For a limited time, our listeners get 10% off at Ridge by using code DUNCAN at checkout. Just head to Ridge.com and use code DUNCAN and you’re all set!

Greetings to you, my friends. We have a premiere episode with one of our most requested guests. But before we jump into that, I would like to invite you to come see me overseas. I'm going to be in Australia. A lot of the shows are selling out. So get your tickets. You can find them at duncan trussle.com. I'm really excited to head down under and see my dear Australian friends. Today's guest is the author of some of my favorite books on Magic, The Paranormal, and ESP Out There, Also Manifestation. He writes so many books, I don't understand it. Every week he seems to have a new book out. He's prolific, brilliant, and a very sweet dude.

So get ready, strap on for today's episode of the DTFH with the author of Occult America, Modern Occultism. practical magic, the Miracle Club, and many, many others. Please welcome to the DTFH, Mitch Horowitz. Mitch, it's great to see you, man. I was so happy when I texted you, you had time to do this. It's always wonderful to catch up, and I would love to hear a, you know, a Jack London point. I don't know if you know any, but you think you'd do them for me? Oh, I'm so glad that you asked, and by the way, very good to see you.

Here we go. Old Longings, Nomadic Leap. at customs chain again from its brumel sleep wakens the ferrine strain epigraph to call of the wild what's brumel mean oh like wintry the the seed asleep beneath the snow running the first fourth in spring yeah brumol sleep yeah so we're all about jack london today oh yeah we got to be i mean the only poet anyone should be paying attention to right now is jack london why because we have an object from interstellar space in route have you heard about this i'm curious your thought no should i know about this uh should i be canceling things well it's fascinating it really is because um avi loeb who is this harvard astrophysicist

thinks that like umamumauma remember that giant for lack of better word turd that flew through our galaxy. He thinks that could have been like some kind of probe and that just mainly because of the way that it did the slingshot thing off the sun

it used exactly the technique we used to like zoom up satellites or whatever we're trying to get out there. And now I think for the second time in recorded history maybe the third another interstellar object is in

route, which would follow the pattern. First, you would get the probe, then you would get the payload or whatever. And so in the UFO community, people are really losing their shit over this. That is fascinating. You know, let me share this. This is a historical note as to why we should all take a deep breath before we go. That's ridiculous. I was researching this just yesterday in connection with an article I've been writing about the great paranormalist writer Charles Ford. And Ford was very neutral about the phenomena that he documented, but he was resolutely unwilling

to close the door on weird shit, you know, apropos of what you've just been describing. Because Ford cited in his work, and I researched this to confirm it, and he's absolutely right, that throughout the sense, 1700s, the age of enlightenment, including well

up through the end of the 1700s, scientific authorities would mock villagers and workers and just everyday people who reported shooting stars and who reported what we call today meteorites.

They said, that's bullshit. Fiery rocks from space are not hitting Earth, and they attributed it to plebeian imagination, And then I guess they would say people like you and me just get high off of anomalies and fuck them, fuck the plebs, fuck the weirdos, they never know what they're talking about. And of course, the plebs and the weirdos were correct. Fiery rocks from space were hitting Earth, and authorities, post-enlightenment authorities only grudgingly came to acknowledge this in the early 1800s, not very long ago, because the evidence just became overwhelming. So these popularized reports for a damn near a century were dismissed in scientific literature

until such time as they turned out to be correct. And there are other such incidences around that time too, like mesmerism was dismissed until we discovered something called hypnotism, until we discovered something called the subconscious mind, none of which was part of the lexicon of daily life. It wasn't until the 1890s that Frederick Myers and William. James, and then a little bit later, Jung and Freud began to discuss what was called the subliminal mind, which eventually we came to call the sub or unconscious mind. Today, I don't think we get through a day without using some reference point to that, and it was not only not part

of daily life, but it was all but ridiculed until the 1890s, not very long ago, because authorities thought the mind is cognition. It's what you used to make life. lists and solve math problems. The idea that there was this sub-glacial mind was bullshit to all the smart people. Well, I think... Let's hear what Avi has said. Well, that's where I think it does create, for a lot of people, a real chin-scratching moment because Avi Loeb is an astrophysicist at Harvard.

This isn't some plebe. This is someone at one of the top universities on the planet saying, you know, we do have to consider that this thing, there's all these aspects to it that are anomalous, it doesn't seem like an interstellar object. And, you know, and he's a scientist, so he's saying, you know, obviously this could be lack of data, this could be a million things, but I can't remember all the things. It appears that its propulsion is changing. That shouldn't happen. and it's slowing down, speeding up, things like that. And so this brings us to a point that a word,

or I guess a concept I just read about in a book about AI, written by one of the founders of Deep Mind. And it's a really like parent, it's an apocalyptic book. This is one of the creators of Deep Mind, but he's saying that there's a cognitive bias towards optimism and humanity that with AI in particular people are like, look, we'll figure it out. It'll be fine. And he's saying, no, you don't understand. This is different than the other stuff that we figured out. This is similarly some object shooting towards space. You could see how there's just no way for most of us to wrap our minds

around what that could mean. And, you know, whether or not it's a Harvard, even though it might be a Harvard astrophysicist trumpeting that this, we should be really paying attention to this. You're like, oh, whatever. Nah, it's probably nothing. Eventually, it's going to be something.

Eventually, it's going to be something. I'm going to write an article with that headline. I would be honored. I think that we as a human community are in a very strange place nowadays because something is shifting in our reality. It's shifting, I mean, look, I think terms like inner and outer, up and down,

these are all just generalizations that we use to communicate with one another. So when I use them, I'm just speaking colloquially. It's coming from an outer perspective, you know, apropos what Wavi is discussing, uh in terms of that truly unsolved extraordinary fraction of of ufo cases in terms of all the the weird verities that we're learning about our reality last time i was on and and the humanity has just completely passed this by another similarly credentialed scientist leor shemir who's the head of the deep space hubbell telescope program wrote a paper hypothesizing that our purpose planet sits in a gigantic black hole for the simple reason that Hubble has permitted us to photograph hundreds of galaxies never before seen and it turns out that 50% of them are moving

are rotating in a direction opposite from ours and that shouldn't be that's that's anomalous one would expect that it would be a fairly even divide but 50% of the other guys the other galaxies billions of light years away are rotating in an opposite direction from ours and he said one possible explanation for that could be that we're an anomaly we're sitting inside of a black hole viewing the world as if our experience is normal and it's not and it's just it's just among these things that

oh well and in today's news we live in a black hole and in today's news we live in a computer simulation And in today's news, an alien craft is using the sun's gravitational field as a ricochet to come and visit us. Let's see if we'll be happy. And that's just what's going on in terms of the macro world. In terms of the micro world, we're continuing to experience things that we as a human community have not yet been able to swallow. like Microsoft engineers are saying that their quantum computing model

which none of us have been exposed to yet so we just have to take their word for it but that their quantum computing model recently solved a math problem so complex that it would take an estimated 10 septillion years older than the universe you'd have to like start at the beginning

and then do it 50 times to solve the problem. Right, right. So it's impossible, and yet the answer came. And the answer came not only in less than 10 septillion years, a figure which, for all intents and purposes, does not exist, because as you was just saying, we have to fucking multiply the universe 50 times.

And yet the answer arrived in less than five minutes, which the scientists, the Google engineers, said this is possibly evidence for the existence of a multiverse. because the answer's there, Willow plucked the answer, so to speak, from somewhere, and the answer was reached without time existing. And part of our culture is in denial about this. They literally can't absorb the news. Gertjeep spoke of a buffer where I'm unable to permit in impressions

that are contrary to my self-perception. So my self-perception is, I live in a linear universe, I have to be on this discussion with Duncan at a certain time and place, and everything feels very, very normal. Water is always a liquid, but for the fact when it's a gas or a solid. So everything's fine. And there are members of our culture unable to let in these things. So I don't think it's that we don't give a shit.

I think it's that we're almost unable to, we can't let it in. We just can't let it in. kind of, um, this episode of the episode of the DTFH has been brought to you by my friends at Blue Chew. I'm sure you're aware of the fact that we have an object coming into our solar system from deep space that doesn't seem to be having character. that a comet is supposed to have, meaning could it be a spaceship? Maybe. And that's the kind of information that doesn't give me boners. In fact, that's a boner killer. I don't want to be thinking about whether or not some alien mothership is coming to planet Earth when I'm trying to pleasure

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always thought this has to be bullshit, but, and maybe you could verify or debunk for me. But I've heard that, what, certain indigenous people, when they saw European ships for the first time, couldn't see them. Like, because it was so outside of anything they'd ever thought of, and there's a thing floating out there. They've never seen it before. None of it makes sense. And so it just sort of, it's the Westworld moment. I don't see anything at all. and yes that is terrifying because the implication being what aren't we seeing right now i mean that's a that rabbit hole you know that leads you to like some pretty dark places that leads you to the reptilians you know these hyperdimensional beings that love to experiment

on us the whole thing is just a lab they're everywhere watching studying but not just that the paranormal. I mean, you know, the expectation of privacy goes out the window if there's hyperdimensional beings that just can see us and we can't see them because of some lack of cognitive ability to process whatever that data set is. And yeah, and maybe that's the resistance to all of this stuff. Because to me, when I look at, though thrilling it may be, aliens, mothership coming, some kind of AI god an emergent AI god a complete shift in the way we do everything

free energy no more teleportation whatever it is there's a part of me that strangely wants to resist that future that want things to stay the way they are right right yeah i'm laughing because i'm I'm reminded of a Steely Dan lyric. I know you're not my enemy, but I like things like they used to be. I know that sometimes. Yes! And, you know, it's funny, man,

the ancient Gnostic sects, as you and many of your audience know, they were this amalgam of proto-Jewish Christian and pagan circles, who, if they couldn't be described quite as Jewish, quite as Christian, or quite as pagan, they were sort of an amalgam of all three at a time of great transition in the world,

maybe not vastly different from our own time of transition. And circumstances differing. And they believed that man lives in Erasat's existence, that we are trapped under a dome of illusion, and that only knows us seeing, knowing in some greater sense could penetrate that dome of illusion and get down to business of of who we really are and I I feel almost embarrassed saying this because I find myself using the Gnostic example over and over and over again because it keeps showing up in our media in the

most unexpected ways but if nothing else media must be a common language where we all experienced things. Like last night, we were watching the John Carpenter movie, It Lives. Okay. And, or they live. They live. They live. And it's a Mandala moment. I'm quite sure it was it lives growing up. They live. And anyway, you know, the story, a guy puts on a pair of glasses and suddenly sees life for what it really is, which is that humanity is being imprisoned and replaced by a race of bad guys. And it's very jarring. And now, this movie must go back a generation, but there's the Gnostic theme

that keeps rotating through our media, and what's significant about that theme today is that it is capturing the attention of people worldwide. I personally think the first 20, 25 minutes of the Barbie movie is the best popularization of Gnosticism I've ever seen. And that movie was viewed in Saudi Arabia. It was viewed in China, and it was popular. And I can't imagine two societies,

he's more radically different from our own and in some ways from one another. Saudi is a theocracy. China's unofficial atheistic nation. Neither pays a great deal of attention to the rights of the individual, but we in America,

China, Saudi, we're all grooving to this movie. No one's confused. No one's saying, fuck is going on here. What do you mean she starts thinking about death and she sees her world as fake? What does that mean? So the fact that that can communicate across such vast cultural differences,

it says something, Duncan. It says something. You know, I remember I wrote a book called One Simple Idea. It was a history of the Positive Mind Movement. And that book was translated and published in China, in Mandarin. And Chinese government censors were kind enough to cut 38% out of the book. Oh, my God. What 38%?

I gotta know. I want to see what they... I know. I've tried really hard to learn precisely what, and best I can tell from talking to the translator, anything metaphysical, anything that suggested that you lead a life that goes beyond flesh, bone, motor skill cognition.

That shit is verboten to the government censors. And this was at a more liberal time in China. And I was speaking to the translator in Shanghai, and she's a great person and she would ask me certain questions and I would describe something and she would laugh she would crack up she had no fucking idea what I was referencing like she would say you reference the word soul what is a soul whoa and you know next thing you know I'm trying to describe like Casper the friendly ghost and she's laughing wow because she grew up without that concept and the notion that there's some you that can't be

touched or felt in the conventional way. To her, was funny. She wasn't scandalized. She just was like cracking up. Wow. And she was like, what the fuck are you guys learning there? And yet, that same cultural divide that I could not bridge one-on-one with a very nice person who was doing her very best to translate this book, that divide was bridged by a movie

that says, we're all living in plastic dollhouses. Right. And we better wake the fuck up. They got that in China. They got that in Saudi. They got that in America. It's resonating with all of us universally. It's not just a chimera.

So, Zhijek did a whole breakdown of they live, and specifically the fight scene, because that is one of the longest fight scenes in a movie. And his point is the reason he chose to make this an extended fight scene is because that's what it's like trying to get somebody to see the truth if they don't want to see it that's brilliant isn't it brilliant so so so he i didn't understand it i thought carpenter was being indulgent because like well you know he's got two physical actors and he's just going too far no that's what i thought too that's what we all thought

but at least according to jizsac that is just not some some some flamboyant fight scene but that's the that is the experience anyone has had historically if they God help them, if they stumble upon some truth that's right in front of everybody that nobody wants to see is that being nice about it doesn't do anything. No one wants to fucking hear it. Eventually, you have

to bludgeon people until they see it and they have no choice but to see it. And it's this, you know, it's pointing towards I guess like one of the great double-edged

like sword aspects of being human is that we are very good at getting used to stuff as opposed to other animals. We can get used to anything. But once we're used to it, we don't want to get used to something else. We're used to this. It's a lot of, maybe evolutionarily,

the risk in accepting some new thing inevitably leads to a higher probability of dying or something. Maybe that's the resistance. Maybe, I don't know. It's fascinating. Gerjeef used to call it the terror of the situation. What you described is exactly what he was referencing, the terror of the situation,

that as he saw it, and I know it's true, we are asleep, not in some metaphorical way, but actually. Yeah, you know, we go through life and prepare lunches for the kids and do the things that are necessary to get through life, pay the electric bill. But we are in a state of some ambulance in as much as the most hypnotized

patient is in that state. And we are asleep to our nature and we do not receive impressions of who we are. And it's unthinkable and it's unfathomable. And when people hear that, of course, they immediately want to argue with it

or they say, oh, I get it. It's like this or it's like that or something of that nature. Jacob Needleman used to say, it's not like anything. Discovering I'm asleep is not like anything. It's not a metaphor, and it's not a word from a translation that I read somewhere. It's sleep. It's actual.

And I suppose, I mean, Gertief's massive epic parable, Belsab's Tales to his grandson, a friend of mine said, the whole thing could really be understood as a parable against war. Everybody knows that war is wrong. It doesn't mean shit. I was asked to write an introduction. I'm not sure why they asked me, but I was asked to write an introduction for the book All Quiet on the Western Front.

Wow. And that's the classic of World War I. And I'm reading this, and it's short and it's compelling, and it's horrible. And I'm like, it never made a particle of difference in the human situation.

If anything in the 20th century, we all fucking went wild. and the 21st century is off to a great start we all know it's it's you know it's this horror and it doesn't matter and i've got to believe there's there's some sleep in that oh my god in me there yeah well you well you kind of have to i mean i guess the when i was a kid i think a lot of kids are maybe because my mom's a psychologist and i somehow found out about schizophrenia. It is, you know, shows up in your 20s.

And boy, I had some serious schizophrenia hypochondria. And simultaneously, I started listening to the Robert Monroe astral projection tapes. And so, which work, they fucking work. And so I started having like out-of-body experiences related to this. I didn't know what it was, by the way. I didn't know it was hemisink. My mom just had all these tapes and put it in. And so if you report to a psychologist, I've been having out-of-body experiences.

You see, I'm listening to these tapes. And now I'm going on my body. That out-of-body experience, that is one of the symptoms of schizophrenia. Not a good sign, man. And so you're not going to get from a psychologist like, yeah, that shit works, man. The CIA was using it, brother. But what you will get is this, this. feeling of like oh my god am i going crazy and i think what we're talking about the problem is that

if everyone is asleep if everyone is addicted to some default reality system that is no longer really reflecting reality reality then in a way to wake up to some alternate way of life or other things out there, what you're, one of your, one of your focuses is, the possibility of some extraordinary ability that is yet to be quantified in any way that people accept it, then you do, you're going to have to go crazy a little bit, that you, at least according to the people in default reality, you're going to seem out of your fucking mind. what the the billboards are alien messages with shut up psycho no it's true man you know whatever whatever but it's it's and so somewhere along the way you're just going to get exhausted right

like isn't there you know you might just decide you know what fuck it i'm just going back to sleep this is a waste of time it might be real might not be real but i think it's easier to just you know march with the other fucking drones and not acknowledge the fact that we seem to only be tuning into a sliver of reality as it is you know the mayavadi that's what the harry christians called them you know the followers of maya of illusion you know what i mean you must feel that all the time mitch well well here's a fucking glitch in the matrix i i mean you know you you had an opening today you you texted me last night while we're watching they live and i don't know if you're aware of this i i posted very little on social but i did post one or two things i just got back from a a week plus retreat at the monroe institute i didn't see that oh that's cool this is fucking sick this is sick duncan because i thought to myself i i want to come on i want to talk about my experience at monroe and and i don't want to i don't want to rant and raves so that anybody feels

that I'm trying to sell them on something because I'm sure shit I'm not. You went to the fucking Monroe Institute, man? I went to the Monroe Institute for about eight days and I took what is called their gateway program, which is the entry program. The experiences I had at Monroe

were so extraordinary that I've said this to the group and I'll say it to you and to your listeners. I can say, and this is just one fraction of the experience, just a fraction. When I was in my late 20s, I did psychoanalysis for five years. Very intense. Four days a week cost me $150,000. I like and I respect my analyst and I believe

she was a good person. I got nothing out of it. I received an answer to a question. I guess it was a whole body experience which I think includes the extra physical it must include the extra physical that had eluded me for five years in fucking psychoanalysis and that was one fraction, one fraction

of what I received during that time, the technology that Robert Monroe, who was a radio broadcast executive at one time he was the president of CBS News, successful guy out in the world, he determined

that binaural beats, which he basically invented as a therapeutic method, binaural beats, frequency, sounds, color, etc., could introduce that samadhi state into the mind that is sometimes spoken of in Tibetan Buddhism and more so could open up the individual to experiences of non-locality, including out-of-body experiences. Monroe remarked that about 15% of participants have out-of-body experiences.

I did not have one. But what I did have has filled a notebook with insights that are greater than anything I have experienced on the path, and I'm 59 years old. Wow. And I have made my effort. I have made my effort.

It may be that the efforts that I have made helped prime me for that experience, but the... This episode of the DTFH is brought to you by Minnesota Nice. Listen, I've been hearing about aminidomaskaria forever. I've read the sacred mushroom in the cross, but I was uncertain about what aminia was and what it could do until I was lucky enough to get supported. by Minnesota Nice, and they sent me their incredible aminita muscaria capsules and delicious

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M-N-I-C-E-E-T-H-N-O-D-H-N-O-F-N-O-F-N-O-T-H-N-O-T-H-N-O-N-E-N-O-N-E-M-N-A-M-M-N-A-M-R-E-L-E-L-A- We in 2025 cannot engage life in a mature way without acknowledging the extra physical. Just in the same way that the Google engineers said, this answer should be impossible because it outstrips all the time we've got, so to speak, and yet it's real. And it's exactly the same with cognitive retro causality, backwards causation, telepity, precognition, ESP, what I call selection, what some people call a manifestation, a law of attraction. I use different terms for different reasons. But this concept that the world is as you are and that humanity does possess this extra physical quality of life, this could be that. bridge that gets us a little bit awake to start seeing one another because we realize we participate in a common life.

Before the French Revolution, everything in France was politicized. Everything was seen as political, which is not much different from our circumstances right now in this country. Everybody thinks everything is political. And there were people who were advocates in France of a more just society, and alternative to the aristocracy. Not necessarily revolutionaries, but desperate to find reform and opening in that society. Many of them were interested in mesmerism for the simple reason that once you discover

that extra physical capacity, you do see this common basis to life. So like a lot of people who were against slavery, for example, in France, vast slaveholding plantations in the West Indies, they were interested in mesmerism because they realized they had that extraordinary, realization that a nobleman and a slave on a sugar plantation somewhere could both be put into this so-called mesmeric trance, not language that we use anymore, and these universalistic,

non-local and in some cases very plainly out-of-body experiences spoke to the commonness of humanity. I think this is so important for the individual, and I think it's important for us as a human community. I'm shocked when you brought up Monroe. I thought, well, maybe he saw my post. I didn't see it. You didn't see it. And I met at Monroe, one of my heroes,

America's, I suppose, most accomplished remote viewer, part of the nation's psychic spying program, still with us, Joe McMonicle. Wow. And Joe McMonicle is 78. And I'll tell you, it was so extraordinary because he spoke to the group

and we got to hang with him and asked questions for a while. And I want to say this very curious. carefully. What came out of Joe's mouth? It was the simplest things, the simplest things, but they bore weight and gravity because of who was saying them. Joe has been in combat. Joe has killed people. So when Joe says, violence does not solve anything, life is relationships. Relationships are all we take with us. There's nothing we as humans can build that can be fully protected. The only choice is to cultivate relationships.

And you hear that, violence doesn't solve anything. Anger doesn't solve anything. And it's like, yeah, yeah, thanks for the refrigerator magnet. But when you hear it from somebody who has earned the statement, who has lived life in both places, you know, it's true. And that too was a beautiful experience. There were things that were so intimate that I learned about myself during that time that I cannot yet share them,

because they're just too intimate. But I did have this weird experience apropos of what just transpired between us. This was like an invited week. I guess they wanted some media people to come and if you had a good time, you know, spread the word. And there were people present at this thing who had no idea we're going to be there,

some of whom I needed to come to a better place with, personally. Yeah. And if I had heard they were going to be there in advance, I would have been like, oh, that's going to fucking stress me out. Putin. Not knowing was good. Putin was there.

What? Putin was Vladimir Putin there? Putin was there. And, you know, we broke bread. And he's going to try some new things. Oh, that's great. And I needed, you know, this. And the other person for whom I can't speak, you know,

that other person needed it too. And there was a lot of things like that that went on that are off the charts of any actuarial table. There's no law of large numbers that can account for this weirdness. And so when I say the world is as you are, I want to argue with that statement. People want to argue with that statement,

and they should argue with it, they should argue with it. But standing in the paradox of that statement, I don't know, man, I feel like paradox, that crisscross, you know, crisscross. Maybe that's what the Zen Buddhist mean when they refer to the middle path.

But that's what's really meant by it. Standing in that crisscross of paradox and truth is the search. And I know that statement that the world is as you are, I know it to be true. I also know it to be confounding because I don't blame, and I never will blame people or populations for tragedies that befall them. It's not their fault. Right. And yet that statement is true.

I mean, technically it's your fault if the world is you. You know, like all problems, all harsh, all disasters. It's your fucking fault. The world in me, it's Horowitz. There's some people who feel that way, and I've got the expulsions from organizations to prove it. It's like, fuck this guy. Look at this world. And I trust it to be true.

Did you, did you, and I want to go back to what you were saying about the world is you, but before I forget, did you get to use any of their technologies? Did they, emmy sync you and stuff? Oh, yeah. It's all day. You might have a group meeting where you talk about, listen, this is where we're going to attempt. You go back to your room, each room, and I love this because I love small spaces.

It's like a train car where you're a sleeping car. You go into your bed. It's very comfortable. You draw a blackout shade. You put on your headphones, and you might have a session where there's maybe binaural beats. You do certain exercises to prep for the session. and then the voice of Bob Monroe or another teacher

will guide you through an exercise and there's a frank effort to get somewhere. I mean, I have to say, and I say this with esteem, it's results-based, it's results-based. No, it works. They don't use the term manifesting, they use the term patterning, patterning. And it's very helpful and it's very useful.

And they might ask you, for example, this is one exercise I did that was very powerful to me and the results were so intimate I can't yet share them but you will for example go to some greater state of awareness consciousness

which is non-local in nature and you will ask for five pieces of guidance that you need in life starting from the most important so five will be the most important and then you'll work your way down and the guidance that I received

it was so simple and the truth is always simple it's just that we can't do it because of the terror of the situation right you know and people say oh my God you know look if what you're saying

to Duncan about man's incapacity to let in messages wasn't true and it is true it is true but if it wasn't true we have the tools to fix the world the Tao Te Ching would fix the world right the beatitudes would fix the world right for people of my tastes Nietzsche would fix them right we have all the messages take your pick

what would you like you know you like ethics read Marcus Aurelius right you know you like marching music read Nietzsche right you like you know I mean you want to treat somebody like a human being read the beatitude right you know and we'd be fixed it'd be fine but we're not fixed and there's a reason for that right yeah well what do they say a broken machine cannot fix itself there is you need something outside of the black hole i mean really i love the black hole uh theory that we're in a black hole not just because it i found it interesting how much it bum me out i don't even know why like why do i care what hole i mean we're not normal but yeah but but also it really is you know

know, as they say, as above so below, it really is a perfect way of describing how a lot of people are in their own subjective black holes. And what you're talking about is everyone walking around in this singularity one way only and, you know, completely like lost in their own personal bubble filled up with all of the things that they consider to be very, very real, very very important but ultimately are just like the the qualities of the cosmic subjective prison they're trapped in and yes so if that so you probably if you're in a black hole you're gonna need something very advanced to pull your ass out of a black hole we don't even think that's possible right but you know what i mean to follow this stupid metaphor it's like you what what

what you're talking about is if you keep trying to just rearrange the posters on your wall thinking that that's going to create some substantial change in your reality, it's not going to happen. You've got to clear some space for new posters. You've got to, you know, open the window maybe. You might be amazed. It's better than a poster. It's something out there. But those, you know, one thing that seems like all of the wisdom traditions have in common is the necessity to ask that, you know, in the Bhagavagita, it says, don't disturb the minds of people who are asleep. Let them sleep. What are you doing? They don't want it. Wait until they want to wake up. That's the real annoying thing about it, right? Is that it's like, not only do you need to ask,

which in whatever way that may be for you, prayer, but you can come up with another term for it but you also have to ask interpersonally too because anyone worth their weight and salt is not going to bludgeon you with some kind of metaphysical shit right man because they've tried a million times with people who weren't interested it's a waste of time you got to ask a reason want to be a mason ask a mason like it's over and over and over again different versions of you have to ask first so yeah what's your way of asking? Well, I do pray, and I believe prayer should be a radical thing. I think anybody can form a relationship with a deity that our ancient ancestors might have known or something that maybe

is by a different word unknown. I mean, one of the things I write about in practical magic, and I fall to my knees at this, I fall to my knees, our Neanderthal ancestors, pre-Sapien ancestors, a lot like us, but not us. They had a spirituality, and we know this because they had talismans, like bear claws or eagle talons. I'm wearing a talisman around my neck right now. This is the Mexican folk saint, Jesus Malverde, said to be angel of the poor.

Some people see them as the narco saint because narco gangs adopted him, but that came much later. Anyway, these Neanderthal ancestors, which are pre-human ancestors, they carved statues which later came to be called Venus figurines in the 19th century. Oh, yeah, I know what you're talking about.

Yeah, yeah. And these were bulbous female forms that were thought to be fertility statues. These bulbous female forms were their representation of a deity or an extra physical intelligence, presumably, with whom they sought a petitionary relationship.

And I believe that that petitioner relationship with the extra physical is something that not only is it not conditioned, but it even predates human biology. I mean, can you dig that? Can you dig that? It predates human biology. I mean, they were a lot like us. Don't get me wrong.

They weren't us. And yet they had a spirituality. So it seems to me that there must, there is a door there. There's a door there. It's very difficult because while we're searching, while we're trying, we also must cooperate with the world and like you were just saying Gerjeev was often asked about this

and he was teaching before the Russian Civil War in St. Petersburg and that's where his circle of students was and then when World War I broke out one of the young men came to him and said listen I'm against this war I've been drafted I don't want to go to war you know what should I do and Goerchief said look unfortunately you have to go

because think about it you don't go the czar's police are coming tomorrow they're going to take you away they're going to put you in prison does that make your mother any better off does that make your sister any better off you know go and you know try i mean you know try you know be intelligent do everything you can but you're sure is shit not going to be helping your family if you get arrested and so the the young man went whether he lived or died i have no idea of course and neither did gerjee because it in in a short time ahead and he and his group had to flee st petersburg because some of them were white russians and they would have been killed.

And he did say this, and I want to share this. And again, God damn, it's so simple. People are going to hear it, and it's going to go in one ear and out the other. But he said that there is a metaphysical law behind it. These were his words, unflinching perseverance. Unflinching perseverance. You keep trying and trying and trying,

and something will come to your assistance. It's almost like you've earned, you've paid your debts. You've paid your debts. may be very, very hard, but you just have to keep going. And that appears in a story that he tells in his book, Meetings with Remarkable Men. And it's a very complicated story, and there's a lot of people who are going to be like,

oh, God, get to the point, but the point must be earned. And maybe it doesn't help anything that, you know, the Mitch Horowitzes of the world go and say, well, this is the point, you know, because it's not heard, it's not earned. But read the chapter, the material question in meetings with remarkable men. And don't read it before you go to sleep at night.

And don't read it when you're drinking because you ain't going to get it. Right. You sit down when you're alerted and you're ready and read it. And these simple things that we throw away, they matter. They matter. We just can't. They don't penetrate because of our condition. Yeah.

We live in a black hole. Yeah. It's a black hole, man. You're not getting out of black hole if you don't have some tenacity. It's a black fucking hole. You got to keep. Ryan. And this, to me, what you're saying, this is where I align with the new age idea of this being some kind of university. It's teaching you something. And it's teaching you something incredibly basic. And it's perfectly set up as a teaching module, which is what you're describing there.

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Yeah. If you think in terms of this place as some kind of gem, there is built in resistance to discovering one's divinity or godhood. Because these sorts of things that we're talking about. They're God-like abilities. If you have but the faith of a mustard seed, you can move mountains. Nobody wants to take that literally. People want to take a lot of what Jesus says literally. But for some reason, that one, they don't want to take it literally.

And yet what he was saying aligns with what you're talking about, which is you can do anything, anything. But you've got to believe. and also you've got to keep trying. And that these two, it is so simple that it, and also I think the part where you lose people the most is believing, I can do that. You don't burn a lot of calories on belief, but tenacity. They'll never know.

They'll never know. They'll never know. Yeah, it's that, it's the other part of it, which is in an action. Belief is, because if you have faith, the faith, the size of a mustard. see you can move mountains there's the move part is in there you still got to move a fucking mountain you know and that that part is what we it doesn't sell it's that you know no no no you don't understand like you could do anything but and everyone's going to say you're insane because you're not supposed to be able to do whatever the fucking thing is you want to do but yeah if you

keep trying it's like you graduate from some class or something and this thing shows up in your life. I've experienced it. You've experienced it. Without question. And I want to say, because there's undoubtedly people listening or viewing who are going to say to themselves, are going to say, you know, in response to this, you know, in Buddhism, in Taoism, in Vedism, they speak of effortless effort, you know, the pathless path. It's not about trying, et cetera. And again, I would say, let's think of that crossroads, you know, let's think of that middle path, which I've come to understand as accepting paradox. I register the effortless effort. I register that. I do, and I honor it. But the trying, the unflinching perseverance is also part of that

equation. We as human beings have to live within that paradox. There's no recipe that's ever going to make it entirely clear. It comes as an experience. It came to me at Monroe. So as an experience, people speak of, you need to work energetically with it. I don't use the term energetically because I'm not always fully sure what it means, but I accept it. I accept it as a metaphor. I accept it as a metaphor. I accept it as possibly literally true.

But people say, you know, the healing, the relationship healing and so forth. It takes place energetically. And I, whatever language a person wants to use, I know that to be true. because I have been in and out of therapy for all my life. You know, couples therapy, psychoanalysis, this, that, belly aching to somebody therapy. Yeah. And listen, the culture has changed for the better in that regard,

and probably therapy has changed for the better in that regard. But it was not helpful to me. It was not helpful to me. This episode of the DTFH is brought to you by Better Help. Right. Better. Yeah, sorry. blew that fucking sponsorship.

I guess Ben Shapiro ain't having me on. I've benefited from it, but not the talk therapy. I've benefited from the, where they wave that fucking wand in front of your face, shit to deal with trauma. That works. Oh, my God, the bubble wand. Yeah, we got this one on, right. It's just a bubble wand.

Yeah, but no. The Monroe Institute stuff is profound. When I was listening to that, those tapes, I didn't even know what it was. my mom just had it she had journeys out of the body i was reading that she happened just got that book oh it's good and that that the the the the way to do it illustrated in that book watch the fuck out dude because that works and talk about yeah not knowing what you're asking for when i wanted to do astral projection i'm reading this book he makes it sound like you know you're voyaging through spacetime which sounds awesome but my experience with it was unadulterated terror it is so scary

and the precursor that he describes in there happen to me your body shakes you have this weird like vibration that starts going through your body and then you're out and you want to get back in that's all you want you don't want to be out of your fucking body once it finally happens you know it's ominous man you there's a real you understand the buddhist attachment to the body thing that they talk about the the way when you die you try to just jump into a new body quick because it feels dangerous out there like a mollusk crawling out of its shell you feel like you you there you suddenly are susceptible to harm that normally you're not susceptible to in your body at least that's what I felt like.

Yeah. Well, it's probably also a trauma like exiting the womb. You know, I was in the delivery room for the birth of both my sons, and I could see, and in the case of one in particular, you know, exiting the womb is no fucking picnic. You know, you don't want to be there. You want to return to the familiar. You want to return to what you knew. And I think that experience follows some of us. There you go. There you go. I was joking before I like, you know, these little train car. sleeper compartments. I do. I like small spaces. I have no doubt. That's some residual wish to return to the womb. I remember when I was a little kid being in the car with my grandmother, we were passing through a toll booth, and she said, I'd like to work in a toll booth. And I was like, why would you want to work in a toll booth? And she said, I don't know, I just would. And I suspect it was that very thing, that being in that small space, you know, it follows us. And I think that's one of the many attractions to staying in this this black hole that we know. I mean, it's funny because Shemir's discovery, Lyra Shemir's

discovery, his hypothesis, it is the metaphor for our time because it tells us at the very outset, we are not necessarily normal according to the cosmos. And that's what Gurjeev said. He said, man sees reality upside down. And of course, we want to hear that as a metaphor. And it's not insofar as we think that the counterclockwise motion of our galaxy is normal, and it turns out to be the anomaly, the aberration. We're the weirdos. We're the Fortiana. Yes, we are, but not you and me.

We're the most normal. Mitch, you are the best, man. Thank you. Our conversations, I think about, I just chew on them for months after I talk to you. And thank you. You're so generous with your time. can you tell people where they can find you you got any new books out you seem to write a book every couple of months i do there's a lot practical magic is out right now i got a new one called the

sixth sense which is about ESP research and its practical application that's coming out late in the fall i'm starting a new one called multiverse and it's going to be on the theme that you and i were talking about yeah and i got to be careful with that one because it can be it can be a real seduction to get attached to concept, you know, multiverse. It's a helpful concept, but it's just a concept. I did start, I got a newsletter called Mystery Achievement on Substack, and I'm grooving to that. I'm enjoying the independence of that. The Charles Ford article I just mentioned is up there.

And so I'm doing this, that, and the other thing. You know, people can find me, you know, the website is Mitch Harowitz.com, social on Instagram is at Mitch Harwood. Horowitz, 23. Great. All the links you need to find, Mr. Horowitz, will be at dugatrussle.com. Mitch, God bless you.

Thank you so much. Thank you, my man. Thank you. Thanks, ma'am. Great to see you. All right. That was Mitch Horowitz, everybody. Thank you, Mitch.

Thank you to our sponsors. Come see me in Australia. Check out my other dates at dugatrussle.com. Subscribe and like on YouTube. Leave a review for the podcast on iTunes. And God bless you. you all. I'll see you next week.