Kyle Kingsbury Podcast - #149 Duncan Trussell

Episode Date: March 30, 2020

In my favorite episodes of the year, host of the Duncan Trussell Family Hour, Duncan Trussell joins the podcast and amongst other things we learn about how Duncan grew up and what led him down this path. We also dive deep into plant medicine, spirituality and more.   Connect with Duncan Trussell: Website | http://www.duncantrussell.com/ Instagram | https://www.instagram.com/duncantrussell/ Twitter | https://twitter.com/duncantrussell YouTube | https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTofCOHO5Pik4GrqwDzk2Gw   Listen to the Duncan Trussell Family Hour | https://apple.co/2UHQsw0   Help support the podcast by visiting our sponsors: Ancestralsupplements - Grass-Fed Colostrum  https://ancestralsupplements.com Use codeword KING10 for 10% off / Only Valid through Shopify Option   OneFarm Formally (Waayb CBD) www.onefarm.com/kyle (Get 15% off everything using code word KYLE at checkout)   Check out Vital Farms pasture raised Ghee and enter to win Onnit products and and a year's supply of Vital Farms Ghee | VitalFarms.com/Ghee   KKP Connect with Kyle Kingsbury on: Instagram | https://bit.ly/3asW9Vm   Subscribe to the Kyle Kingsbury Podcast Itunes | https://apple.co/2P0GEJu Stitcher | https://bit.ly/2DzUSyp Spotify | https://spoti.fi/2ybfVTY IHeartRadio | https://ihr.fm/2Ib3HCg Google Play Music | https://bit.ly/2HPdhKY    

All right, y'all, welcome to a very special show today. Somebody who's been a bucket list guest of mine that I've had on my bucket list since before I even started podcasting, really. A guy that I've learned from quite a bit. One of my favorite guests of the Joe Rogan Experience and one of my favorite podcast hosts, Duncan Trussell, who is the host of the Duncan Trussell Family Hour.

I went on his show, I think, I don't know, it seems like a year ago. I don't know. It's hard to track time right now because as I'm sure we all feel every day feels like the same fucking day. A little bit of Groundhog Day going on here, but I went out to LA and I had a short list of people I wanted to podcast with. I hit up Duncan on short notice and I was able to make my way out to his place out near downtown and it was fucking phenomenal. I got to learn Duncan's backstory, how he grew up and really what steered him into becoming one of the people in my mind who was really a spiritual master.

I know he'd never call himself that, but he's such a fucking beautiful balance of somebody who is learning and on track and walking the talk, and at the same time doesn't't take himself seriously is incredibly funny and a gifted comedian and just a fucking beautiful, absolutely beautiful soul. So I had a blast. He's been my favorite podcast this year in 2020. And that might remain the case. He also helped me out quite a bit here in this podcast, you'll hear, you know, one of the things that I've people ask me, like, how do you figure out questions,

especially other podcast hosts? Do you write them out that kind of stuff. And the truth is, I've written questions for people in the past, and it feels too rigid. So I do like to just go with the flow of conversation and see where it takes us. But, you know, I was reading this book, Vedanta, the Vedanta Treatise, and I think it's a phenomenal book. Also has some rigidity to it. And I bring this up to Duncan on the podcast and, you know, he has, I'm talking about how rigid it is. And he's like, oh, I know that spiritual teacher, you know, it's the, you got to do it this way or you're not going to get enlightened. And there's only one path. And he really dives deep.

I know that's butchering his, it's a shitty impersonation, but he really just dispels that. And he says, or, or the pathway is love. And he talks about Ram Dass' teachings and Chogam Trungpa Rinpoche. And I, right after this podcast, And he talks about Ram Dass' teachings and Chogam Trungpa Rinpoche. And I, right after this podcast, listened to Becoming Nobody on Audible from Ram Dass, which is just an incredible series of his lectures when he was in his 50s.

And highly fucking recommend that. It is just a beautiful, beautiful, many beautiful teachings from Ram Dass. And it put a lot of things in context for me, I think it will put a lot of things in context for people right now dealing with COVID, being on lockdown. And you know, if you've lost your job, really, just seeing what is the point in all this? What? Why are we here? What am I doing in life? How can I be of service to others? And how can I put all of the pain and suffering that's going on in the world into some sort of perspective and draw meaning from that? You know, Viktor Frankl's book, Man's Search for Meaning is such a beautiful book because it's really how we make the challenging and hard parts,

how we make the suffering matter. And that is through finding meaning out of it, finding some substance that we can draw from and cultivate and Becoming Nobody did a lot of that for me. Also Meditation in Action, which is a book that Duncan has recommended a lot. That's also on Audible. It's only three and a half hours. It is flawless. Just an incredible book from Chokam Trungpa. And yeah, so to say that I learned a lot on this podcast, it's really an understatement.

It also led me as one breadcrumb leads to the next to those two books, which have really put so much in perspective ahead of the curve from what we're experiencing now and still right now, incredibly relevant to the times that we're in and what we do going forward. Also, Charles Eisenstein, fantastic guy to get into. Duncan didn't recommend him, but The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible is a book I've recommended a couple of times on the podcast. Highly recommend that book as well for our current state of being.

So much to read, much to learn. I encourage you all to carve out time for yourselves. If you're like me, and I'll be doing a solo podcast on this soon, what do you do with your time when it appears there is no schedule? You know, we all know that children do very well with routine. And with all the schools shut down, if you've got kids, you're probably thinking to yourself, every day is a weekend, or I still need to work and I feel claustrophobic with no time,

no space, and no office to go to. And, you know, we also know that elderly do really well with routine, right? It's one of the reasons when they go into hospice care, they have a schedule. Well, guess what? If you're an adult that's in between youth and elderly, you still need routine. And everyone needs space. It's something that they talk about in Conscious Lo loving by Kathleen and gay Hendricks, which is a phenomenal book on relationship. All bad relationships have some

sort of codependency and all good relationships have interdependence and independence, and they're interconnected, but there's a healthy amount of space and closeness, spaciousness and closeness. And as we think about that for ourselves, that means we all need some sort of space for ourselves, time away from our kids, time away from our partners. And if you can't get that right now, by taking your usual trip to the office or your usual trip, anywhere to the gym, for that matter, anywhere you would leave to have alone

time, it's really important you still carve out a little bit of space for yourself. That can be meditation. Like your kids may not nap. I get to nap with my son, which is phenomenal. And I'll usually, if I'm not tired, just meditate in bed with him while he's napping. But just going for a 10 minute walk, you know, something Mark Bell brought up a long time ago on this podcast was how important it is to just hit a 10 minute walk. Do that solo. It's great to do with the family, but do that solo as well. And the more of those you trickle in, especially if it's post meal, you know, after breakfast, lunch, and dinner, you get a chance to be in nature. You can kick your shoes off and ground while you're walking, earthing, all that jazz. But really it's about

carving out space for yourself. And it can be a contemplative walk where you're thinking through things. Or it can just be meditative where you feel each footstep on the ground. And you focus on your breathing. And you carve out a little space of stillness. And the last book that I recommend, which is a book Paul check just had this guy on a meet Gus Wani and Valentina on a sore. And the book is called quantum spirituality. And it is the science of spirituality through quantum physics. And this guy, a meat has has written a number of books, one of them the physics of God is it'll blow your fucking mind. It's just really incredible. But quantum spirituality, which I'm about halfway through, is highly recommended and fantastic and also putting a lot of things into perspective. But one of the concepts he brings up in that is how we

take something from the quantum or the unknown or the Tao or whatever you want to call it, God's space, or if God is too big of a word or has too much lineage that you don't appreciate, how we call things into being. How do we create as co-creators? And that is a series of do, be, do, be, do. Almost like a song. So one of the things that we've all been doing in the West or, I mean, even in the East, especially in Japan, is we're really good at doing we're really

good at this masculine archetype of busting our ass and going for it. And we're not too good at being and I'm speaking from personal experience as well. But when we cycle those back and forth of doing, getting stuff done and being, being in stillness, being in nature, being in our quiet center, whether that's through ceremony or song or dance or just being in stillness, we find that creativity starts to become a little easier. We find that tapping into our knowing and our intuition is a little easier to access. We also find that processing power improves because we're tapping into the subconscious, as well as using the conscious mind to figure things out. And there's a lot right now that we can't figure out. We can't wrap our heads around how long is

this going to last? How many people are going to die? What the fuck does this mean for the economy going forward? All of these things are questions that are largely unknown. So we can just observe as we're going through this. But the thing that we are in control of is we are in control of ourselves. We are in control of our own mental emotional state if we're paying attention to that. So what are the key ingredients that help us to live each day a little bit better, to be our best as a father, as a husband, as a mother, as a wife, as a son, as a daughter, as a member of society, as a member of this planet. And as the late great Don Howard says, para bien de todos, for the good of all, how can we be in service of all?

Well, it starts with being in service of ourselves. And if we're not taking time for ourselves to fill our cup each day and taking time for ourselves to be in our being and not in our doing, that's just not sustainable. And we're seeing right now on a global scale, what is sustainable and what is not. It's not sustainable to rape the earth. It's not sustainable to continue to burn fossil fuels at the rate that we're burning them. There are lots of ways that I'm going to bring up that Charles Eisenstein brings up in his book and that you'll hear about on my, on the solo podcast. There are ways we do remedy this. There are ways that we come out of this better, stronger, more united, and more in harmony with

the earth, which is a super conscious being. And you can figure that out for yourself through the direct experience of plant medicine. And of course, we dive down that rabbit hole with Duncan and I. I know this is a hell of an intro, and there's a lot to talk about because of the fact that there's so much going on. And this podcast was done months ago, but still quite relevant in how we go about our lives and our everyday business and tons to gather from this one with Duncan Trussell. So thank you guys for tuning in. Remember click subscribe.

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The complex goodness of ghee is even more convenient and ready to dispense, no spoon required. Look for Vital Farms ghee in a squeeze bottle exclusively at Whole Foods Market in the original and Himalayan pink, or visit vitalfarms.com slash ghee, That's vitalfarms.com slash G H E E for a chance to win on it products and a year supply of vital farms ghee for free vital farms, pasture raised bullshit free. These guys are the best. Thank you guys for tuning in. I love you all. I hope you're safe and healthy. And most importantly, I hope you're figuring out and sorting life by carving a little time for yourself. Thank you guys. Give my boy Duncan Trussell a shout out online. We'll link to his Instagram in the show notes. And of course, one last little tidbit. Tosh and I are jumping

back on social media through her account. So look for Kyle and Tosh on one Instagram page there. I'll have more about that on the solo podcast coming up. So again, sorry for the ramble, but here you guys go. Without further ado, my man, Duncan Trussell. Yeah, I did watch this. Do you know who Kalindi I is? No. He talks at all the psychedelic symposiums and shit like that.

And he talks about, I mean, I'm not going to edit this out, but it has been discussed on the podcast, I guess, a number of times now. So my apologies for everybody that's got to hear about my 30 gram adventure. He talks about his heroic dose being 20 to 30 grams. And so I was like, I think I'm ready, you know. And I thought what I had was kosamui which is like a super looks like tycubensis very loving yeah but it actually was penis heavy so I had 30

grams of penis heavy and that was what happened how's Jesus doing I saw Jesus I fucking saw Jesus I went to hell hell was very personal five layers that were the eternity eternity each layer was eternal wow and only got out through like truly surrendering to what to the experience of being locked there like i thought my con i had died my consciousness was there forever now yeah and it was and i could consciously say i surrender this you know any of these bullshit mantras and it didn't matter dante's inferno on the gates of hell abandon all hope ye who enter here and everybody thinks that's like the first depressing thing you see when you go in but i

think that's the wisdom of how to get the hell out yeah true surrender true surrender if you're in hell and you have any kind of hope you're fucked because that's you know what is it uh the part of the soul that burns in hell is the part that clings to life meister eckhart that's, you know, what is it? The part of the soul that burns in hell is the part that clings to life. Meister Eckhart. That's also in Jacob's Ladder, like one of my favorite movies about MK Ultra. But yeah. Fuck yeah. Yeah, that was it.

I mean, I had like a, that was like the last conscious thought was the only way out of here is surrender and then i remember trying to say i surrender and just watching it loop and probably three or four times through um in any stage i would catch and be like oh it's it's it's playing again it would like start at the beginning and progress to worse to worse to worse to truly hell the most graphic gnarly nasty shit yeah and then um after a while of me seeing the loop it would just be like whatever you know this you know, this is going to happen next. That's going to happen next. I'm stuck here forever. And then I'd get to the next plane. Right.

And then from there, the next plane. And then I finally came out of it. And I was like, I still thought I was dead. How do you know you came out? So I could see my body again. And I saw my body and kind of laughed like my consciousness can't picture myself without a physical form. Yeah. And so I took a cold shower.

I felt nothing in the cold shower. So I still thought I was dead. And, um, you know, looking at my son, like brought me out of it, like seeing a picture of him.

And then I was like, wow. And I looked at my clock. So my phone was off and it was 1201 AM. The whole thing lasted three and a half hours. Holy Lord. And I was like, I'm fucking alive.

Like it was such a dope rebirth it was the best ever i've died in ayahuasca and 5meo but never thought i was dead still and it really was like the ultimate rebirth which was the last thing i wrote on my intentions list it was spectacular wow and for hours i was like never again i'm good and then probably around sunrise because i didn't sleep that night I was like I'm gonna do this again oh it's ultimate report card where I'm in resistance where I'm in acceptance yeah wow holy shit you're a brave man yeah I think uh that's certainly not for everyone I know I talked with these forced about it he um have you listened to any of his

music yeah it's amazing. Yeah, dude, it's incredible. I saw him live. Yes. Did he do like a ceremony playlist? Man, they're incredible. It's like aromatherapy during the show. It's seriously badass.

And I was with a group of people and we all just started tripping and we weren't on anything. That was what was weird. I'm with a bunch of old hippies. We're all looking at each other like, what the fuck? Are you tripping and we weren't on anything like that was what was weird every like I'm with like a bunch of old hippies we're all looking at each other like what the fuck are you tripping to like they he really knows how to use a medicine dial it out the fuck yes for sure yeah yeah and what's his what's his partner's name Raja yeah yeah no yeah Rada Rada just incredible Raja is the tiger in Aladdin there we go go. All right. I got him. I got him straightened out. There you go. Very close. Yeah. She's fucking incredible. You know, he's walking around. He plays every instrument from piano to Native American flute to harp to

harmonica. And he's got this angel voice. He really does. Yeah. Dude, the whole his music for Mushrooms album, which is what I was listening to during that journey, it's like a five-hour prayer. It just fucking pulls you in to Source. It's so special. They're great. Yeah, we had just a one-hour ceremony playlist that he did, or not playlist, a one-hour live session that he did for us in Malibu for Aubrey's Fit for Service last year. And it was out of this world. I love him. Yeah. Yeah. Incredible. Well, I mean, I've been, I've been wanting the podcast with you for some time, so I really appreciate

you having me back to your home. Are you kidding, man? I love having you here. Yeah. The house sucks up the good energy. Holds it for a little bit. There we go. Um, let's see. I want to, uh, you know, as with the, the, the format of every show i want to dive into a bit of your background you grew up in ashland ashville well i say that like i i was born in georgia and then traveled all over the like we moved to several different locations when i was growing up so i landed in asheville hendersonville North Carolina area. And that's where I went to high school. So I say that. For people that don't know Asheville, and I've never been, but I've heard a lot about it.

It's kind of like the new hippie town. Yeah. Well, yeah. Like when I was growing up there, there was a place called Lexington Avenue that was dangerous. It was like a place where people bought crack. And it's like it was like a place where people bought crack and it's like it was like rent was so cheap and all these artists were living in warehouses there and it was really an interesting secret little like hate ashbury situation up in the mountains and but also a

little grungier than that and then damned if the thing that happens to any place like that happened to asheville which is it just you, people started wanting to live there and more people came. And then soon all the crackheads were gone, which I can't complain about necessarily. I'm sure not all of them are gone. But you know what I mean? The place just got turned into like a more civilized place with a thousand art shops and pottery shops. And it's a beautiful, beautiful city up in the mountains.

A lovely place. I really love it. And I went to college up at Warren Wilson College, which is not that far away from Asheville. Yeah, and it's got kind of like a, I mean, there's festivals there. It's definitely like a woke town, I guess you would say, in terms of like what it's drawing in, the type of people that are showing up and yeah yeah that's cool so like how i i just have questions i guess

around going from a place like that where you started off almost like you know living in san francisco during the 60s but maybe not to that degree but similar in some ways right and um and then coming into, you know, what is the arc that I guess drew you to comedy? And I don't know, you know what I'm saying? I just got lucky, man. For me, it was luck. I was never one of those, like I loved comedy.

And when I was growing up, I would buy these truly tasteless jokes books when I was like in junior high school and I'd memorize them from front to back. And then I would just tell them on the bus to people, and they would laugh, and I loved that they were laughing. But I never, ever connected that to me being a comedian. It was just fun to make people laugh.

But I never had the confidence. Like, I'm going to be a comedian one day. Went to college, studied psychology, went to india you know had like when was your trip to india or imagine the first you've been there more than once once just once i want to go back but it was god i was probably 26 i'm 45 now so it was a long time ago. And we were taking this class called Introduction to Southeast Asia with this brilliant professor. This is a hippie college. I think 400 students at the time.

That was how many students there were. Classes were under the trees and stuff. And this professor was like, listen, I'll never forget. He's like, you're going to start experiencing the years in the way you experienced telephone poles when you're speeding up in a car. He said just flat out, he's like, quick, don't be at college. This is a waste of time. Just go to India. That was like the first lecture. He's like, just, you know, do you want these student loans? By the way, Bill Mosher, if you're listening, I'm misquoting you or something, getting you in trouble.

I don't remember if he clearly said that. But it was this wild invitation to just dive into the world. And he had done it. He'd gone all through India his entire life. He was a real mystical person. So anyway, that convinced me and my friend Emil Amos and my other friend David McLean to like just go to India and travel through India. But regardless, it was a wonderful time.

And after, you know, that I really didn't have any goal of anything. I had a bachelor's degree in psychology. What are you going to do with that? Teach junior college. Yeah. Teach a junior college or something. Maybe. I just sort of, you know my grandmother passed away

i inherited ten thousand dollars i thought that would last me for like two years or something ridiculous like that and i'm like i'll just move to uh la because it seemed like a fun city to live in i wanted to live in a big city i was i wanted to either go there new New Orleans. So I went to LA. I bought, like my landlord is a crackhead. I bought a vial of acid. Just basically was doing what I'm doing now. Well, not the acid stuff, but you know what I mean? Just basically, and I mean that, like I really don't like, and when you get older, you kind of like tire of that,

that particular medicine. But yeah, I just had some synthesizers and then i ran out of money and i needed a job and my landlord had given me this tour of um la that involved the comedy store and i remember i like touched the building and gotten this weird feeling and so then i just started applying for a job there and just bob bugged the shit out them. Now, subconsciously, I probably wanted to be a comedian. But consciously, I didn't have the guts to admit it to myself. And so then I got the job at the comedy store, working on the phones a few days a week. And then they moved me up to the job of the runner, which was driving Mitzi, the owner, around in a van.

Pauly Shore's mom? Pauly Shore's mom. So in doing deliveries for the store and stuff. And then, you know, the way they talk you into that job is by saying only like comic, only people Mitzi thinks have a chance at being a successful comic become the runner. Now, really, I think the reality of that speech is

comedians who are like, fuck this job. I got to get out of this job without pissing off Mitzi. Lie to the next dummy. Sure fire away to get 15 minutes of stage time. You're guaranteed. You're on the fast track now. Yeah. So yeah.

And then because I was driving Mitzi around, the talent coordinator, Princess Corey quit. And then I became the talent coordinator. And then as the talent coordinator I started having these like long conversations with Rogan this is like pre-fear factor pre-pod I think this is pre-podcast none of us were podcasting except over the phone just yapping the same way we do now right now we're recording shit it was the exact same thing we would talk and just talk about aliens and dmt and float tanks and the government and conspiracy theories so i i started

getting to be friends with joe and simultaneously i was doing stand-up and he saw me have a good set thank christ and started taking me on the road with him. And then, yeah, that's how it happened. So it was all just a circuitous sort of like luck after luck after luck after luck. And then I got to be a comedian, which to me is like a dream. It's a dream come true, even though I didn't know I was having that dream or wanted that dream. Yeah, that's super special. It seems like you were drawn there.

And, you know, hearing rogan talk about that on his podcast like so many of you came up from the same spot from the comedy store you know like what a cool space yeah it's great it's a it's a it's a hogwarts for comedians and and it's just it's a it's a organism that has a really powerful defense mechanism. And either you are accepted in, it's like when they give someone like a heart transplant, either it accepts you or it rejects you, but you can't confuse its acceptance as rejection, which a lot of people do.

Because comedians can be such horrible assholes. You know, they will brutalize you. You know, they will brutalize you you know they will psychologically find exactly where you are the most insecure and merciless mercilessly just you know in various ways warp that and twist it which helps you because like what are you what are you going to be like insecure in front of an audience of strangers. Like it's a weird Shaolin temple that teaches you through chaos. And, and also by watching great comics go up to,

you know, cause when you're a young comic, you're seeing like the best comics roll through there and you're getting to see what that looks like. You know, I feel like that. I don't know. I wouldn't call it bullying,

but like the, uh, you know, the stern, I would call it bullying. So, okay. So, cause this goes, I've seen the parallel in fighting, you know, like stern. I would call it bullying. So, okay. So, because this goes, I've seen the parallel in fighting, you know, like the guy who's

been in the gym, you're the first guy to show up. It's like, all right, let's see if you want to actually do this. Yes. And they just beat your ass for months. Yes. And if you can withstand that, then three or four months into it, a coach will hold pads for you and actually start to teach you something. Yeah.

That was my experience at AKA. And, you know, similarly, a lot of great people have come through there in fighting but i wonder like is there an aspect too because rogan has talked about this and i'm sure you have too as well like a lot of people that get into that that are drawn to see the world through a different lens have had some darkness inside that they maybe haven't looked at and that's what allows them to see the hilarity and ridiculousness of life through a different lens are you you mean the stereotype of comics having fucked up pasts yeah yeah that that's true most i mean like it is very rare to run into a comic that doesn't have something back there that is hurt them or cause them to go into a kind of like dark nihilistic existential place or that, you know, they're, it's a variety of, and, and, you know, like now it's people don't want to

believe that. And, and I certainly don't think that to be an artist, you need to go to the university of pain or whatever. Uh, you know know i think that is a confusion people have and it's a sad confusion because then people who feel like they haven't met whatever their quota of pain is to make good art start hurting themselves and i don't think that's a necessary hurt yourself through practice you know not through like abusing your body or fucking your life up or something like that you know this is the problem is people see somebody like richard pryor who like of all the comics jesus look at his past his mom was a prostitute you know like he like he had it rough as rough could possibly be and uh so people see that and then they think oh fuck you fuck, you know, what do I got? It's like, well, you're alive, which means you're dying.

How about that, for one? You know what I mean? We're all sharing that experience. We're all being slowly boiled to death by time. So it's not, you don't need to, like, have an alcoholic PTSD father, a prostitute mom, or to have been physically or psychically or sexually abused, or to have a drug history, or to have been physically or psychically or sexually abused or to have a drug history or to have had your friends die unexpectedly or all the stories that you might

hear you you'll if you want to find suffering in your life it's your life because the you know that's where we're at right now it's a temporary place it doesn't have to be that way that's all so anyway that's some weird dumb caveat or whatever which is most comics i've met do have not non-standard childhood yeah so i wonder then that begs the question were you just led to comedy because it was fun to make people laugh or was there something there too in your past that potentially allowed you to see the world through a different lens in a similar light of what we've been talking about?

Yes. You see, what happened to me was I had a wonderful father who has passed now. And I wouldn't really talk about this stuff while he was alive that much. He was a wonderful man. I don't think talk about this stuff while he was alive that much. He was a wonderful man. I don't think I've ever met anybody as in love with life and brilliant and just unique. He was just, you know, had he had just if he'd run in, if he had not been born in Talbot in Georgia,

and if he had run into the right people, he would have been a musician or maybe a comic probably an author but he went to vietnam he signed up for vietnam did two tours of duty in vietnam uh got ptsd fucked up his back a boat ran over him yeah and uh you know he came back here because he came back here marry my mom thank god honestly if he'd met any of these imaginary phantasmal artists that sometimes i think about then i wouldn't exist and we wouldn't be here right now so i guess it's great he didn't thanks vietnam but the it's not for the fucking vietnam conflict i might not be here, man. So anyway, he coped with it in the way a lot of vets cope with it now, which is self-medicating. It's a brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal disorder to have. And so he coped with it with alcohol and, you know, had it like, I don't think he, I don't think they just at the time were equipped to even

understand what it was i don't think back then they knew it was a memory issue wouldn't talk about it yeah absolutely you wouldn't talk about it except maybe when he'd had a lot to drink and then you couldn't really quite understand what he was saying and it was bad it was just bad and so but he wasn't all that he was also this beautiful bright light in the world that like was just a wonderful wonderful dad but that he wasn't the kind of dad that was going to stay married and uh that's because my um well anyway the point is a lot of stuff traveled all around you know and i think that's probably what gave me like a lot of people are gypsies and think they're not gypsies.

You know what I mean? We've got families traveling all over the country with one parent or the other chasing a dream, running away from a demon you know what i mean trying to get away from something to some imaginary place boozing it up doing all kinds of weird fucking like painkillers and opioids not being able to hold down jobs and you know like going from place to place to place always moving packing or unpacking packing from one place to the next and then pretending that they're not gypsies that they're not nomads when they are they're always on the move like we are always packing man we are always in a moving truck we are always going to a new place and like that's so i feel like i grew up

as like a gypsy that didn't know he was a gypsy the only difference is gypsies know they're gypsies and they celebrate that nomadic life so the gypsypsy kids, I don't think, are fantasizing that at some point they're going to settle down somewhere. Whereas like the type of kid I was, there's some idea that at some point you're this is the house you're going to live in for an extended time because you always meet people in these neighborhoods and cities and states that have lived in a fucking house for their whole life. You go to somebody's house in high school and that's the where they were born yeah you see like every notch on the wood of where they grew from six inches to yeah obviously there's no six inch kids hopefully in the world but you know how whatever their their birth height was all the way up crazy you know yeah it's crazy and that doesn't guarantee by the the way, a great childhood. P.S. Those people have their own ball of hell to build your home upon. And you're not going to find it anywhere but inside yourself.

You've got to do that in you. They've got to find that piece of land in you and build the place in you. And then you've got a shot. That's how I feel about it anyway. No question. Well, I'm sure many, many, many millions of people and for many, many thousands of years that's what that's how i feel about it anyway no question well i'm sure many many many millions of people and and for many many thousands of years that's been taught did you grow up with any type of like western religious background christianity okay so okay yeah my mom was a my mom's side of the family were christians um my mom became an episcopalian

so like catholic light and so there was a period of time where we were like you know reading from the Bible and I really liked that I love Jesus stories and I never had a bad experience with it we didn't get like shame-based Christianity we just got like you got the gems without the guilt that That's exactly right. We got hippie Christianity, mostly. You know, really beautiful stories of Christ and not a lot of hell. You know, mostly like love stuff and, you know, self-sacrifice. That's what I think true Christianity is. So that was my childhood.

We got that. And then my mom got into like the New Age movement. And then that's where i sort of mildly tuned into ramdas and um you know the people who i'd even at the time i didn't know there are buddhists like jack cornfield and people like that pima children those types of people so and then when i was in college i minored in religion so amazing yeah yeah so when you had finished college when you did your trip to india describe that because my dad's going to rishikesh to sit with muji for a month oh wow and he's you know he's never done it

before uh he had his first like really breakthrough journey he's done ayahuasca with me in the past but a year ago we did psilocybin and mdma and he had three grams of penis envy and said like i have prepared him for that not the other way around like full downloads full wow full immersion into infinite source like understanding his own divine nature as not separate understanding that he is eternal just as as it all is you know but like really powerful especially as he's getting older and processing the death of my grandmother and death in general like really important but yeah he's gonna go on uh february 10th so after this podcast comes out i think he'll be there wow and you know two and a half hours a day with muji

cool and um just in meditation and silence the rest so wow but talk about talk about your experience there had you heard of ramdas prior to going yes okay but i you know this was not like at the time when i was in college i got lucky because i got to be best friends with this guy named emil amos who is a brilliant musician he's like the drummer for this band called Om and they're like the most hardcore band ever he also like has his own band the Holy Sons and like he was like it's like running into someone who

fell out of like a Camus novel or something like he was a real outsider and a real existentialist and like not like so like not like an obnoxious dude at a cafe thing but someone who was like really um just a genius you know and so i i got to be friends with him and our minds were being drawn more into uh existentialism at the time i mean i was still

into hari krishna chanting hari krishna and the mystical side of things but we were not really going to india on a spiritual quest as much as just wanting to see this crazy place we were looking at it i think more from a kind of like pseudo-anthropological perspective like let us go and see this other place that we've heard so many weird things about not like i'm gonna go find a guru or i'm gonna go meet i'm gonna go to the place where ramdas's guru was or find any enlightened beings or anything like that we were like excited because we heard you could buy valium over the counter in the pharmacies there wasn't as we were like going we were like eating valium i remember we were in new delhi

on valium watching titanic and like i fell down the steps of a movie theater in india because i was so fucked up on valium ride around in rickshaws on valium we didn't do valium that much because it's nasty that's a horrific drug man it like it can grab you yeah it's gross had my ass in college for sure yeah it's so gross it's i still feel queasy from that summer but like um that wasn't the end of it you know we ended up going to dharm sala we ended up going to varanasi we ended up going to um some really heavy spiritual places, Varanasi being the most intense of them. And it changed all of us, you know, it really did. It is a powerful, chaotic, beautiful, ancient place that really puts your little life into perspective. Because all of these cities, many of of the cities varanasi is one of the

oldest i think they call it the oldest city in the world i'm not sure if it is it's one of the oldest cities in the world and you see it i mean the city's alive it's a it's a sentient consciousness bound together by disparate religious philosophies ideologies it smells like barbecue because that's where they burn the bodies in india oh that's where the people go to die. Yeah. Okay. And then if they die there, the belief is that they don't come back to earth. Yeah, that's right.

It's like a fast track to enlightenment. Exactly. Yeah. If you die in Varanasi, you don't have to keep reincarnating. And even if you bathe in the Ganges River, it's considered to be a very holy, sacred thing. Which when you see the Ganges River and see the dead cows floating by saw a dead baby floating in the water you know when you see it but yeah it's like it's this collision of life and death it is a portal for sure into the bardo and you um depending on where your mind is that it will it meets you at that level. So for me, that was standing on top

of this platform, looking down at this old man getting cremated and, you know, watching his face kind of collapse in. And this little boy, a little Indian boy was standing next to me and he was like practicing counting with me. So as I'm watching this human being's body turned to ash, there's an Indian kid going, one, two, three, four, five, three, one, two. The most intensely crazy, like it did feel like i was in the spirit world or something you know and then yeah so it moved us man it was beautiful but if i were to go back there it would be a different trip to india all together sure um but i'm glad we took that i like the chaos dives man i say just go for it i'm glad we went there with no real spiritual intent other than journeying into the world which is the one of the ultimate spiritual intents yeah you know and that's i highly recommend just doing that just go there that was what my professor taught us i

just go to india see what happens something will happen for sure something will definitely happen it's just who knows what it's a roll of cosmic dice. Yeah. So you had that seed planted from your teacher. At what point did you get the seed planted to start looking into some of these sacred Eastern traditions from Taoism to Buddhism to Hinduism? Okay. Yeah.

That for me, I've had a few like real moments of like getting lucky enough to um like sort of have the scales pulled off of my eyes you know because the problem is is like if you knew it you wouldn't need to like look into it, right? So this is something Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche says, confusion is actually a state of enlightenment, meaning that it's on the continuum of enlightenment. You can't, if you're not confused, you're either dead or I guess enlightened, you could say. You know, you're already, you have realization.

So you're, what the confusion people have, and I think by confusion, he meant just what you're talking about, that your father found a general sense of not really being connected to the macro, but being sort of bundled up in a nice, tight, uncomfortable, claustrophobic micro situation where you're just bound and gagged by your own habits and identity and expectations and preferences and fear and all that. Very claustrophobic situation to be this tiny, neurotic little floating pixel of meat and infinity, you know?

And if you haven't quite figured out a way to even briefly connect with that macro situation, the unit of consciousness source, as people call it, then you're probably freaking out as a natural result of that. It's confusion because clearly you are connected to the thing because you're in it and therefore you're connected but it doesn't feel like it does it for a lot of people it feels like someone tied a tourniquet around whatever the thing is that pumps the sweet mother's milk of the divine into a person's life maybe it comes to in your dreams or something right right? So, yeah, man, like, so that's the first step is like, you don't know, probably. And I'm not saying I know now, but

through psychedelics, you can get a little glimpse of that. And for a second, maybe you do know or see the very least, you know? And for me, not just with psychedelics, but anytime I've had that experience, my mind returns something on the lines of, holy shit, this isn't what I thought it was at all. This isn't what I thought it was. This is in fact completely different. Whatever I thought it was, was a fabrication or a composition or at the very best, like a very rough, blurry sketch based on some reading or something or movies or you know just a fantasy of what maybe we're dealing with here in this dimension in all dimensions you know so to answer your question i was on lsd and i was reading the and this isn't buddhism it was actually christianity uh i was reading the new testament

on lsd and i'd never done that before the book of john and um i just remember like all of a sudden like the thought pattern before i got my mind blown was somebody wrote this. Like regardless of the existence of Christ or whatever, somebody wrote these words down and these words are so intense. Like the state of mind, as I was thinking, the state of mind you'd have to be in to write down in the beginning was the word and the word was made flesh i don't have it memorized anymore but i remember just the cadence of the particular translation i was reading and then the

just suddenly it was like i was like you know to what's that fucking awesome ministry song where they comes from god it's that fantastic movie about float tanks. Anyway, there's a sample where it's like a schizophrenic who's been given azitis saying, I feel like my heart is being touched by Christ. And that's what it felt like. You know, it was like, oh, my God, literally. Oh, my God. god literally oh my god this is the most beautiful mystical cosmic powerful thing i've ever ever touched minds with it's not the domesticated gay hating hell threatening jesus that you know that some some people think it is and it certainly isn't.

The uncomfortable wearing a suit in church thing, this is some kind of psychedelic. This is beyond. This is what psychedelics come from. This is the source of psychedelics. And so that was a really powerful moment. And then another time I was in a Hare Krishna temple chanting Hare Krishna, not on LSD. I think I got stoned.

And just a similar thing. It's just like, I know it's like for a second, either you're able to see it or it decides to let you see it or both of you decide it's okay to say hello. And it was a similar experience of realizing that in that case Krishna the deities the various symbols of God in the Vaishnava Bhakti Yoga tradition were not just like idols stone statues that primitive savages decided to construct and start praying to out of

some desperate sense of making contact or overcoming their fear of death is like a lot of cynics skeptics might say but actually for whatever reason it seemed seems that one of the ways that the divine intelligence likes to express itself in this particular dimension is via the beautiful uh form of krishna uh and rada krishna's divine lover not raja it is the divine tiger yeah it was it was amazing because it was like, oh, oh. And then you realize, oh, these deities, they're alive. And this is like some kind of thing poking into our dimension. And you can't see it. You can't see it unless you're like chanting and praying and meditating. Some form of altered state of consciousness, whether with substance or without.

Purification. Yeah. Some form of purification some way of like at least for a second pulling open like the sleeping bag of preconceived notions regarding the universe that someone zipped you up inside of it's like a cocoon and then you can peer out for a second and see oh my god i was actually so fucking proud that I wanted God to look the way I thought God should look. I wanted God to appear in some form that made sense to me. That's how crazy I was, is that I was expecting God to conform to my expectation. And that's a really wild mistake for a little floating meatball in the soup of infinity. It's so true though. It's not man is made in God's image as God is made in man's image.

People who have the misconception of what God is make God in their image. You know what? I used to think that and like that is a thing you know and it's a crazy you know to say okay wait what are you saying you're saying like one of the forms of the divine is like an elephant headed thing that like you know rides a mouse is that what you're saying you're saying man people didn't make that you're saying that didn't come from the mind of a human and i think the answer is like this you take a player piano and you put sheet music into the player piano if the player piano is in tune and you put in as a nice player piano you put the sheet music in and it's going to sound in tune good the sheet music's going to

sound really good if you got a player piano that's kind of out of tune the sheet music's going to sound out of tune if the player piano is missing keys whatever the composition it's attempting to play is going to sound fucking weird so i think that the best way to put it would be out of some kind of merciful nature this thing shows up into uh human consciousness and the human psyche and the human psyche doesn't make it in its image it plays it the way a player piano plays with the available um notes okay and so for so so it's like a transmission and the human mind is going to see that transmission as a humanoid or some something like that but i don't think it's fair to say the human mind created that. I think it's more along the lines that the human mind was able to accept a specific form. The God that judges you when you die.

The God that's keeping track and tallying up how well you pray, what good deeds you do. Well, that God, that has not been my experience with touching the divine. No, not at all. Neither myself. Not in the fucking least bit. But I'm saying that's the God I was taught. That's the God I was taught through fundamental Christianity. That's the God that when I talk to family members who are still tied into that, don't want to let go of that out of fear that they'll burn in hell if they don't see it the exact way they were taught.

Man, I know. It's like this is the, you know, this happens. There's sects of various of Vaishnava Bhakti Yoga that become fundamentalist and, you know, aren't what you would call sex positive by any means, you know, or aren't like, and, you know, I't uh my my opinion on that stuff doesn't even matter you know i understand why people are seeing this terrifying god because on one level it is terrifying and that's you know in hinduism vice java bhakti yoga krishna shows up in all kinds of forms. And that's called the Leelas. So God can come to you as a friend. God can come to you as a lover. And God can come to you as death. And that's one of the forms of Krishna is this lion-headed being

that is ripping the intestines out of a king that he's laid over his lap, just pulling coils of his guts out. And the king is someone who thought he was more clever than the universe this is the book of job you know which i love which is job just gets his fucking ass kicked over this bet between god and satan now obviously this isn't we're not this mythology you know it's just so annoying when people are like oh you what so god and satan were really in a fucking betting match? No, no, of course not.

We're talking about a fractal here that's a story that's got a lot of data in it that's been sort of wound up into the symbol set that you can unpack. And if you unpack it and you're brave enough to do it, you're not going to get scared. You're going to find some relief

because there's a one form of the universe isn't some lovey-dovey sweet thing i mean look at kobe bryant yeah that's not what you would necessarily call a merciful moment in the history of humanity or sports you know what i mean that was horrible horrible what kind of god would do that? That's what Job was asking. And the answer was, who the fuck are you to say, I made whales. I'm the guy who made whales. Or this is that beautiful poem or girl that made whales or sum total or whatever you want to say, collective of entities or alien or whatever. It's that poem and I don't have the whole thing memorized.'s so beautiful tiger tiger burning bright in the forest of the night what a mortal hand or eye did frame thy fearful symmetry and i love that poem because it's like who made the fucking tiger the tiger eats people what kind of god is that is that a lovey-dovey sweet god the god that made a fucking

monster that wanders through jungles and eats children out of villages? You know, what kind of God is that? So that is one form of God. And so if people decide to connect to that form of God, you know, I can't necessarily say that that is wrong in the sense that that's one of the masks that the divine wear. It's an aspect. Yeah.

And some people, that's how they connect. They connect to that aspect and uh fortunately that's just one of the aspects there are many other aspects and this is why my heart usually veers towards the east because you're invited to uh sort of connect with all the aspects not just one yeah to see through all lens but you know and i've talked with aubrey and uh ted decker and paul selig and like what's possible for us to have life right now must be inclusive of everything we experience in order for us to experience it this way and how boring would life be if we just fucking came here and it was so perfect it's

like the alan's alan watts dream right if you could dream every here and it was so perfect. It's like the Alan Watts dream, right? If you could dream every night and live however many lifetimes in that dream and it was the exact dream that you wanted, eventually you get to a point after you had every single thing fucking given to you where you were like, let's throw a curve ball in there. Yeah.

And over time, you'd dream this dream right now. Yeah. Because you would experience so much ease that you'd want the challenges that we're dream right now. Because you'd experience so much ease that you'd want the challenges that we're in right now. You'd want the ability to grow and learn and to remember who we are. Listen, man, I play God of War at maximum level now because I got too good at it.

That's the Alan Watts story. He's like, we're eventually going to turn the simulator up to maximum difficulty. And we're probably not even close to that now as humans, because we're in the human realm. So we're in the human form. So it's not quite all bad. It's actually considered in Buddhism, the ideal form for gaining realization, just because

we're not so like trapped by our instincts or down in those hell realms where it's like, it's like the odds of having an epiphany when you're sort of i mean just think you know like it's that bob marley quote a hungry man is an angry man it's like you know the hell realms when you're really like freaked out it's more it's challenging it's more challenging here in the human realm at least we have the ability to separate ourselves from our thoughts and overcome our um entanglement with our thought patterns you know unlike the fucking dogs outside that you're yapping right now you know they can't stop that's a sneeze for them

like sometimes i see the sunlight and i sneeze i have no control over that it just has been happening ever since i was a kid there's no control over it these poor animals it's the exact same thing but with running you know something moves and they're like oh fuck here we go and they're off running they're not like choosing that you know so that's the animal realm and then the realm of the gods you know this is a whole different challenge because now we have what we want we have so much access and so much this and that, that really the concept of spirituality, meditating, achieving liberation, it kind of seems like a fun pastime,

a kind of hobby that one might engage in in between trips to the Caribbean or whatever you're doing or flying about on your plane. And in the realm of the jealous gods, that's where the entropic forces of the universe start happening to the gods where they actually start moving back down into the human realm this is when you run out of money baby this is when the check doesn't come when you need it to we've all experienced that you know where i was like wait what the fuck i just had wait what's it this happens that's jealous gods and then that you know, if you have the right reaction, then you can become human again.

Because you're like, oh, right. Money's not what makes me happy. Money's not everything. That was fun as hell. But when I really look back at those times, I was kind of freaked out in a different way. This is the human realm. Or you can go the other way on this wheel of suffering and land into the animal realm because you can get resentful and shit as a jealous god and freak out anyway the point is

it's a cycle of consciousness that within which the human incarnation that people listening to unless there's some nordic aliens out there which would not surprise me kingsbury perhaps some aliens listen to this shit the human realm you know is a very desirable place to be because we can uh actually utilize this human form to um achieve uh liberation or at least keep our karma going in that direction yeah i love that i've been reading uh the vedanta treatise you read that book? No. Parthasi? No. I think you'd love it.

It's a great one. But yeah, he just, he breaks down so much from every religion. There's quotes from the Bible. There's quotes from Buddhism. There's obviously a lot of, he's Indian it in plainly that every search to find anything that we have from joy to bliss to love externally is fleeting. And that it all must come from within, but it already exists within. So it's just a matter of tuning into that.

But it's the deepest realization to achieve self-realization is to understand that it's already there it always has been there and to tune into that yeah so he's very careful too i mean he shits on yoga and fucking meditation and says they've been hawked and sold and fucking made money and it's and it's these practices that have made their way into culture without the meaning behind it yeah and that you must train your body and your mind and your intellect to be able to meditate effectively and get to the zero point field. Otherwise it's a fucking complete waste of time. Yeah.

Unpack some of that for me and like how you practice dropping in. Because I think that that's something that I've talked about before. And Paul Cech talked about this, you know, when leaving your body on like a heroic dose of psilocybin or 5-MeO, if your body needs anything, it's like a dog outside barking, feed me, I'm thirsty, I need to go outside, my hips hurt, I can't sit in Lotus. Whatever it is, you have to tend to that. Then if you have a mind that's full of desire and chasing and thinking about all this shit that's going on in your life, that's the dog still barking. And if your intellect is in a state of desiring more knowledge,

more wisdom, the acquiring of these things, then that too will be a dog barking. But when you've exercised them all appropriately and you're able to move past that, that's when you can drop in to Samadhi, Satori. Well, it sounds like a lot of conditions, man. It does. But you run into that all the time there's always that

like and that is one of the it's like in fundamentalist christianity it's the that's there there's your uh version of it uh from the east now we've got like and you that is a style of of rhetoric when it comes to talking about this sort of thing is to lambast the west's adoption of mindfulness or meditation or this or that and say that's not the way you hear it all the time and and um that's what i loved about ramdas and is is that it that was not that was not the teaching the teaching was oh no i'm afraid you have it's even worse than that. It's you're already there. Where you're at's perfect. How do you drop in?

You dropped in. You're in. The anxiety, the fear, the worry, the discursive thought path, whatever the thing is that he's talking about that we must tame, domesticate, put a collar on every single aspect of yourself and get it to sit and roll over. And then finally you can have a nice moment of peace this is not this

is though that is a path this this other path is more along the lines of oh no the universe is perfect as are you and where you're at right now is exactly where you need to be and when you fall off the path that's the path oh fuck that what are you saying that means actually the problem now becomes one of And when you fall off the path, that's the path. Oh, fuck that. What are you saying? That means actually the problem now becomes one of where we can't escape from love. We can't escape from perfection. We can't escape from the reality, which is that this is a perfectly harmonious universe and that we're part of it.

And if we weren't, then the whole motherfucker would be I guess imploding or something like that now we find ourselves in a really difficult situation which is you realize oh my god I always thought my attachment was to like the electric fence of my habituations or pain but then you realize actually the you're holding on to those things because you don't want to get sucked into an updraft of pure divine love because you're afraid you're going to dissolve into that and stop being you and so it becomes more of a letting go and attachment of self yeah and being in this moment here that's how you drop in you're in the fantasy that you that you get to drop in is what's causing a lot of the problems.

And this is what Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche talked about. It's like building an imaginary platform in the air and trying to climb on top of it. You're in. Confusion is a condition of enlightenment, meaning that you already have that part of yourself that recognizes what aspects of yourself are out of tune, misaligned or confused, that part of yourself that sees those things. And the reaction doesn't need to be one of sending those things to some cosmic gym and making them do abdominal exercises. But what Ram Dass advised, and I love it,

is look at it as though you're looking at a beautiful flower, the sum total of all the aspects of your incarnation and love it because that's what you already are and just love, love it, love it. And then through that, the things that some of the more stern gurus advocate or the result that some of them promise seems to naturally happen on its own and then suddenly you just even when shit sucks you're still feeling love even when the fucking traffic's bad even when the marriage is weird even when the baby's screaming and the dog shit in the fucking crates even when the like you know the all of it suddenly because the expectation stops being that there's going to be a time where this shit doesn't do that yeah you know the all of it suddenly because the expectation stops being that there's

going to be a time where this shit doesn't do that yeah you know and now we can love it as it is yeah you don't have to put makeup on it you know this is how this is a word in we dropped in and there's no way out that's fucking powerful that reconceptualizes a lot of what i was learning because there were some things that felt off as I was getting into that. It's almost like Anthony DeMello's book, Awareness. There's so much wisdom in it, but the way he communicates it is like it's so in your face. It's like, and you do this and you get jealous of that and this is all that. And it's like, I like to use I statements, you know, particularly.

Yeah. You know what I'm saying? It was with a lot of blame and judgment. At least do a wee, motherfucker. And he had so much. There was a lot of wisdom. Sorry, Anthony DeMello. I don't know you.

I'm sorry I called you a motherfucker. I think he's dead now. So it's okay. He's listening to this. But, you know, the way that it was written was through this lens of almost like a force, right? Have you read Charles Eisenstein, The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible? I had him on the podcast. I didn't read that.

He's fucking incredible. I love him. It's great because he cliff notes sacred. I think I listened to him on your podcast, actually. Brilliant, man. Dumb question, but yeah, brilliant. So he cliff notes sacred economics, cliff notes Ascendant of Humanity, and Climbing a New Story, and just pulls it all together in this.

And, you know, the new world that our hearts know is possible does not happen through the old narrative of force. Right. Right. And there's a lens, even in the Vedanta treaties of like, you know, taming the body, quieting like you have to, it's almost done in like all these checks need to, you need to check off all these boxes before you even practice meditation well yeah and it's like that by the way it's like if if you're applying that level of force to yourself you're gonna be applying it to

everybody else and nobody wants to feel that nobody like because here's the deal if it worked it would have worked there would be no people addicted to cigarettes because someone would have come up to them and said stop smoking it's bad for you and they would have stopped just like that it would work the force doesn't work it love works and nobody wants to hear that shit because it's like completely antithetical to a country if you live in the United States at least it's been at war for what 94 of our history to suddenly hear that our war-hungry uh country that that process it doesn't work it doesn't do anything except cause more problems and so yeah this this is the thing that always gets confused when people talk

about alistair crowley do as thou will shall be the whole of the law people stop with that but then they because they like to hear that because it sounds like some like badass dancing shit you know like i will do this and i will this and that i'm gonna then the next line of that is love is the law love under will you know and to me that means like love is make you if your will if once you connect the micro with a macro the you are connected to love and once you do that your will it's not going to be a thing where you're going to want to like force people into situations they don't want to be in make Make people be who they're not. And it's not that you're going to tolerate people either.

Like you're some enlightened wizard who's around the peasantry or some shit like that either. You know what I mean? It's that you're going to love them. You're going to love them enough that you're going to let them be who they are. Now, I wish I lived this way all the time. I don't. But anytime I find myself in a particularly uncomfortable situation with my fellow human beings, my child, my dogs, anybody, I don't know why I distinguish my child from my fellow human beings. He is a human.

You know, and I have, honestly, all I do i do is love i don't care what he does man but i've just noticed that through that when i really love like not bullshit love when i really just love what's happening love myself that's where the real change starts happening in me and then there's a natural reflection of that in the world but anytime i'm trying to do like some machiavellian bullshit like the 30 laws of power or any manipulative shit even if it's subtle and and kind of secret it's like it just doesn't seem to work out as well is when i just let the universe be as it is you know and and and love it this is what chogyam trampa rempache calls uh uh drop your agenda when you're out you know don't have an agenda when you're around people give up your

project that's what he said give up your project when you're what's someone else's project what are they up to help them with that whatever your project was give it up i love that it's like an easy easy way to reframe how to be of service to people yeah you know to all right yeah yeah and i am not good at it because i love playing my synthesizers and making my podcast and doing stand-up i love it but what a wonderful invitation because when you breathe your last breath you're gonna give up your project you're done it's done. So might as well practice now. You know, you know, it's a wonderful thing to be with somebody and know that they don't want to be anywhere else. You know? Yeah, it is. It is for sure. Well, even

with everything that you've got going on from a business standpoint, a personal exploration, the things that you love and that you're into, you already are of service as a father. You have to be. Yeah. Talk about that. Like the last time I was here, I think your son was a newborn. We were talking open relationship and different statuses and styles and things like that. But talk about how that's changed your life.

Oh my God, I'm done. I'm a hard boy i'm cooked i'm the opposite hard boy i can't you know it like he's such a sweet boy um you know he's a little over one now okay i wasn't sure i thought he was just under but yeah a little a little over one just starting to walk oh you know trouble oh i know it's really it's just really great though and and i'm lucky my wife is an incredible mom and she has created a space where i could do my art and do my podcast you know within reason like uh and she gives it's just wonderful so i get the experience of you know still getting to like do what i do and then also having this wonderful family not to say that we have a perfect relationship or anything marriage is a motherfucker it's tough difficult but it's worth it it's just hard um so that it's taught me a lot. The main thing it's taught me is that, um, in the same way earlier, we were

talking about, it's not what you expect. In fact, your expectation of the thing was keeping you away from seeing the thing. What I'm learning in a family situation and being responsible for my family and for my son, not just financially, but setting a good example, you know, as much as I can, is that this is the guru. Like, you know, this is my guru. This is me meeting Neem Karoli Baba. This is my contact with the guru and it definitely is not what i expected my guru to look like in this incarnation my expectation of the guru is more of like a dude in robes white beard white beard magic tricks make oranges appear in his hand it wasn't that i would suddenly have like a baby that just shattered my heart every time he smiles at me or that like i

it wasn't that i would be looking at video of my child laughing as we throw rocks into the fountain just feeling as though like i was watching like a million sunrises or something like that you know it wasn't that it's not how i predicted it and predicted it. And so that's what I've learned from it. It's like, oh, okay, this is it. This is what's, this is it. This is as good as it gets. This is it. And the more I sink into that,

the more beautiful it becomes. The more I entertain fantasies of, you know, taking some lonely trek through nepal to find a secret society that's gonna teach me telepathy well it becomes a little painful you know what i mean but this is surrender you know and you don't surrender all at once yeah you know you have to keep surrendering again and again and again what a wonderful thing to surrender to i mean i i i'm i'm sure you've never heard this before but i think my child is the most beautiful child that's ever existed never heard it once you hear him playing piano he's a genius you can hear it

beautiful yeah so it's given me everything you know it's given me everything. And whatever the growing pains of being a new dad are, it's worth it because I feel real now. This is an idea, connecting heaven and earth. Sometimes you can get a little too connected to heaven. Your feet come up off the ground a little bit. You need both. That's the idea. The human connects heaven and earth.

You don't want to be like floating around and you're like psychedelic new age balloon sort of fabricating in your mind. There's plenty of people there too though. Yeah. And they're fun to watch. You're like, hi, it's fun to watch them go by. You know, and they're cool.

They're like cartographers. They're like mapping out the landscape for us and stuff like that. And it's cool. I'm not passing judgment on them. But for for me having drifted on the balloon a little bit and looked down i've been like ha look at the breeders look at the breeders and their little families down below you know and having all these ideas about what it was to be a father that were completely wrong.

Now I understand my dad. Now I understand my mom. You know, now I understand their parents. You know, it's like given me a real connection to the earth, so. Yeah, it's an incredible perspective, Gibber. What a teacher. It really is. Massive teacher.

It is, yeah. Yeah, that first part of the 30 gram story with Christ consciousness, I witnessed what looked like a mountain. It's one of my first visions, but it was my soul or my son's soul. And I could see like all the lifetimes of wisdom embedded in his being. And he's four and a half now. I'm trying to say this without getting too choked up. But, you know, at each stage, it presents its own unique challenges. And it's been really hard figuring out how to discipline him

appropriately because of the way I was disciplined. So like when my wife had Bear, a lot of stuff came up with her mother because now she was a mother. And it happened right out of the way I was disciplined. So like when my wife had bear, a lot of stuff came up with her mother because now she was a mother and it happened right out of the jump, like a month into it. For me, a lot of stuff came up from with my father around the age of two and a half and three, because that's when I actually had to step into the role of guiding him and guiding him in a way that was not the way I was, that had happened to me, you know?

What happened to you? Just stern, you know, like no fists or anything like that. It was a reign of fear. Yeah, a lot of fear, a lot of fighting in my house, constant fighting in my house, constant screaming the opposite of nonviolent communication. And I had some, I mean, I'd get lifted off the ground by my hair kicked in the ass till I had my feet would land on a tailbone. You know, it was, it wasn't, it wasn't easy, you know, but, um, yeah, I've been reading a Selig's new book

realization. It's fantastic. And, uh, there was a part of me that had read enough and I was like, I'm full. I got it. And then we went to, you know, he was in Malibu at the last fit for service and he gave us an attunement with the guides. And that was the first time where I felt on no medicine, just dialed the fuck in. I'm in the upper room as he describes it, like just ultimate peace. And I was like, I gotta get his new book. And so I've been listening to it. And one of the things he says is,

as you call this in, have compassion for the small self. Because the small self will rear its head again in the last ditch efforts to stay alive. And you're not gonna squander that. The small self doesn't die. We're intertwined and braided with it as we're here in existence in this plane. it's never eliminated it's never fully dissolved but whatever your desires are from the small self you move into the upper room and then you operate from a new level of consciousness you call that christ consciousness whatever you whatever you want as the divine being

and your desires change in that of service in your remembrance of who you are and what you are. And I was downloading this and the other day, like, as I really felt the deepest connection, like when your son's old enough, watch the new Lion King with him, you will fucking cry like a little girl. Like it is, it's powerful, especially for fathers and sons. But I had so many of these great moments with my son and recently and been very proud of the way i've been handling him as he's you know a kid who has his own wants and needs yeah and uh i just fucking snapped while i was driving him to school he was slamming his his t up and down and i just stopped the car and i reached back and grabbed him and i said

knock it off and i yelled at him and i was like mortified i was so i was so upset with myself i didn't even talk to him the whole drive it's a long fucking drive it's 30 minutes oh man i didn't say a word and it was right before i came here you know and uh so i dropped him off at school i just gave him a hug and a kiss normally i stay and play with him in the schoolyard push him on the swing make sure he's happy make sure he feels comfortable and safe and then I go and it's all I thought about for a day you know and just really helped me to process that thankfully we had some some of the the teacher ketamine with a nice sound healing and I was able to really forgive myself and let go of that. But listening to this in the last day, driving all around LA from Selig really helped me put that in perspective.

Like have compassion for that small self when it rears its head. Cause you don't just get it. You're not just, I want enlightenment. Bam. I'm there, you know? Yeah.

And how's it going to help anything to grab the small self in a similar way? How's it going to help do the exact same thing that part of yourself more force yeah it's just it's not gonna work it's like ramdas talks about this many people talk about it it's like you can't be a perfect parent there's just no way there's too much that we have had injected into our our minds from our parents but i remember um at this show i did in denver man this guy came up to me we're talking he just started crying and he goes just remember you're not your dad you don't have to be your dad he was sobbing he's like i'm a good dad i'm not my dad you don't have to be your dad none of us and by

the way i want to be parts of my dad yeah but there's parts of my dad that i that my i don't think anybody would think like oh yeah hang on to that part because that wasn't really him that was just like the defense mechanisms he'd built up to deal with the fact that he had some trauma that he couldn't handle and so yeah man that's the the other thing is like i think one big difference between the kind of dad you are and the kind of dad that nobody wants to be is i don't know how much that kind of dad spent contemplating doing attunements trying to tune into like that and wondering like why did i do that that dad is like at the fucking bar getting hammered you know what i mean that's his ketamine attunement is like some whiskeys and then he's gonna come back and he's gonna finish

beating the child you know to really really teach him the lesson or maybe in the morning he'll do it or maybe he'll psychologically torture the baby by uh not giving him attention for a week or two or three or a month or maybe he'll torture the baby by being cruel to the baby's mom or something like that you know he's not going to think about it too much and if he does think about it's going to hurt so much he's going to try to pour booze on it yeah you know the the good news is we're at the very least open to the idea of growing evolving out of that modality of force violence power over the week victory for the strong whatever the that thing is that's all that's great that's the most you could that's all you need is that intention i think i mean again you can again, you can't spiritual bypass and think, well, I have the intention.

I'm just going to be an asshole for the rest of my life. But I think if just that intention alone brings in the Seligs, brings in the various teachers that we all are lucky enough, the books, the things, they just naturally start flowing in to the harbor of your life. You just have to open up the gates with that intention. That's what I've noticed. And God, my wonderful wife, I think there was a moment that she had with a baby. Where she was driving with a baby for an hour, he's screaming nonstop.

It's like you're in traffic, you've got shit to do. It's not what you would call a pleasant situation you know this is like and there are many of them yeah exactly and this is where it seems like a shaolin temple this is like the karate kid where he's like wax on wax off it's like the child is teaching us divine patience or is teaching us what it looks like when we like don't exercise divine patience because you see it in their eyes and you know this is what it's like who had a perfect parent you know i bet even jesus i bet jehovah at one point and whatever they ride around in heaven was like, shut the fuck up. I'll send you to earth again.

I'm going to make you do a second coming. If you don't shut up. And look what happened last time. Fuck, that was great, brother. Cool. Man, well, i definitely want to do this again i know you got you got a little one fucking incredible brother anytime man whenever you're in town let me know i'd love to hang out no matter what yeah amazing brother go get lunch or dinner or something yeah fuck yeah all right cool beautiful brother uh where can people find you online we'll link to all this in the show notes thanks Thanks. DuncanTrussell.com.

I'm doing, well, I don't know when this comes out, but probably. Okay, yeah. DuncanTrussell.com. All my dates are there and links to my podcast are there. Thank you so much for having me on. Thank you, brother. Beautiful. Cheers.

Thank you guys for tuning into the show today with my dude, Duncan Trussell. Be sure to check out me and Tosh on the gram again, and we'll link to that in the show notes as well and talk about that on the upcoming solo cast. Absolutely love this one. Duncan is such a phenomenal human being and somebody that I look up to and I've learned a lot from. I love him dearly.

I love you all. Take care, be safe, and enjoy life.