Kyle Kingsbury Podcast - #197 Dr Will Taegel

Episode Date: April 29, 2021

Dr Will Taegel is an absolutely bucketlist guest. He’s on my spirit counsel and I try to spend as much time around him as possible. I know I’ve mentioned him many times before and he’s finally on the podcast. I wanted to just let him grace us with as much wisdom as we could fit into our short time and he delivered BIG TIME. I’m sure we’ll be running it back, enjoy this in the meantime. Show Notes:   Walking WIth Bears - Will Taegel  Sponsors:   Sovereignty Head to https://sovereignty.co/kyle/ to grab my favorite CGN/ Nootropic. There is nothing like this product for energy and cognitive function! Get their new reformulated flagship product PURPOSE+. The greatest ayurvedic blend around. Use The codeword “KKP” at checkout for 20% off.   C60 Purple Power Fight inflammation and oxidative stress with C60. It’s 100% organic, made in the USA, and has proven efficacy by third party testing. Follow the link and use code word “KKP” at checkout for 15% off your first order. C60purplepower.com   Bioptimizers To get “Cognibiotics” an amazing combination of Nootropic AND gut health support, click the link below and use codeword “KINGSBU10” for an additional 10% off. cognibiotics.com/kingsbu   Lucy Get 20% off Lucy Nicotine Gum at lucy.co  using the Promo Code “KKP” at Checkout Connect with Kyle:   Instagram: @livingwiththekingsburys   Youtube: Kyle Kingbury Podcast  Kyles website: www.kingsbu.com  Like and subscribe to the podcast anywhere you can find podcasts. Leave a 5-star review and let me know what resonates or doesn’t.

All right, y'all, we have a very, very, very special guest today, Dr. Will Tagel, whom I have spoken about many times on this podcast in the past. He is the author of, I believe, eight different books. Walking with Bears, I would put in the top 10 of any books I've ever read. We discussed that briefly. We get into his background and we really talk about what is emerging new in one of the most brilliant and deeply spiritual and connected elders that I've ever had the pleasure of mentoring under and sitting with on this podcast. I know you guys are going to absolutely love this. Will is 81 years of brilliance and you really get that coming through in this podcast and I'm just

thrilled that I finally got the time to sit with him out at his place in Wimberley, Texas and took the deep dive with him and I will be sure to bring him back on the show when our schedules line up and the paths cross. So enjoy this one. There are many ways you can support this podcast. First and foremost, leave us a five-star rating. That way other people learn and hear about the show and also support our wonderful sponsors. This episode is brought to you by Sovereignty. Sovereignty has reformulated their old supplement Purpose to what's now called Purpose Plus. Purpose Plus is an Ayurvedic-inspired super formula that tackles daily energy and peak performance,

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my friend my teacher dr will tagle Dr. Will Tegel, it is so nice to sit with you again and finally get you on the podcast here. I'm glad to be with you, Kyle. I've spoken a number of times about one of your many books, Walking with Bears. walking with bears, it is an absolute treasure and is connected through beautiful language, many of the felt experiences that I've had that couldn't put to words. And I want to dive deep and be mindful of your time, but dive deep into your education, who you are, the world at large, what you've gleaned

from all of your many, many experiences. You are 81 or 89? I'm in my 81st trip around the sun. I love it. So we have much wisdom to extract in a short period of time. Yeah. One of the things that you spoke about in Walking with Bears that I think is hilarious and awesome at the same time is how some of the native elders would talk, not in linear time, but in these loops and cyclical time.

And you tell the stories through that book so beautifully with that way. And you mentioned before this podcast started, you kind of wanted to take us through a spiral that started right here in the now and descended back to the beginning and then brought us right back up to the now yeah good yeah yeah yeah i uh recently had a dream and in that dream state i transitioned into a trans-ordinary state And in that state, I saw Earth hurtling through space. And at first, I thought it was Earth as a spaceship, like Buckminster Fuller said. But I looked closer, It was an organism with movable shapes. And as I could feel the movement of the organism, it was going at an incredible speed. When I woke up, I actually looked it up and that earth does move in the solar system around the sun 67,000 miles an hour. And so that corresponded with my dream state. And as I look closely at this organism, I saw that it had embedded in it a guidance system.

And then I saw that the whole solar system itself was moving in an orbit, an elliptical orbit around the Milky Way. And it was going even faster than the Earth. And embedded in that solar system was another but related and nested guidance system. And then it went on. As these visions often do, I kept seeing nested guidance systems. And when I returned to a more ordinary state of consciousness, I was jolted. This wasn't a new idea to me. In fact, it was built on what you just said, all the different turns of the spiral of my life. But what was different was a deep and felt experience of the guidance system.

And I found myself saying to a person that very day, I said, either there is a guidance system or there isn't. Either this is a random happening or there's some movement in a particular direction placed there by a beloved creator who as a manifestation of energy. So then I began thinking about how the different ways that I have linked and we as humans link with this guidance system, because we have an internal guidance system that's quite elegant and complex, that is analogous to this larger guidance system so that I was seeing clearly and experiencing the earth actually has an immune guidance, intelligence, analogous and linked deeply with us. So again, that wasn't new, but the experience and seeing it and feeling it was very different.

And I'm going to say a little headline and then I'll spiral down. So over the last millennia, Mother Earth has had a strategy of linking us to this guidance system by inviting us in various ways to move out of human-dominated culture into that dimension of nature that is little influenced by humans. Dreams are an example of that. Psychedelics are an example of that. Vision questing has been one of her primary cross-cultural links with this guidance system.

So downloads come and they're pieced together in a mosaic in a variety of ways. So that's been her strategy. And it's been one that we'll talk about how I got linked with that. But in this dream, I saw she's shifting her strategy. She's transcending that. She's going to include it, but there's something much larger going on. And this is really important, I think, for us to see. If there's a major shift in the guidance system within Mother Earth, and we're a part of her cells, then the more awareness we have of this, the more we ourselves can evolve in our consciousness.

So here's the shift. She's been calling us out, like you just got back from Costa Rica, and I travel all over the world and eco journeys and so on. She calls us out so we can disengage from the dominance of our culture, the paradigm that we live in. But now, something different. The wild, I define the wild as that domain, that dimension of nature, little influenced by humans. She is bringing that into our houses. Think about that.

So you asked me how Judith and I did during this polar vortex freeze we had when civilizations grid in Texas went kaput. So I said to Judith any number of times, probably precipitated this dream, I said to her any number of times, the wild mother has come into our house. Here we are sitting. We can't even get out of the house. No emergency vehicle could come up here. Our solar panels were covered up with snow. All of the plans I had made for these upheavals in climate were centered in the south and

hurricanes, but I hadn't counted on this freeze coming. And I said to her time and again, the wild has come calling. And she didn't knock on our door. She just came right in, and here we sit with her. This is a very different strategy that she has undertaken to connect us with a form of consciousness needed at this moment for the evolution of our lives and of the planet. That's what I think. Okay, so I can go back to the beginning if you'd like.

Let's do that. This is awesome. My wheels are still spinning right now thinking about that. I've oftentimes thought about this upheaval with the shift in climate and with the books like The Six Extinction and things like that, how nature responds to that. And that resonates. There's a children's book. I think it's written by the same people that do Frog and Toad's Wild Adventures, but it's with the owl.

The old owl sits in and he's hanging out by the fireplace drinking his broth. And he sees there's a huge snowstorm outside. So he opens the door and invites Winter in. And Winter comes blowing in through his house and blows out the fire and freezes his pea soup. And it's not very nice. And he says, don't come back, and shoos the Winter out. But I think of that story as an inherent way

of if we can listen, we can integrate and co-evolve with nature and where we're at right now, as opposed to needing nature to literally kick open the door and say, pay attention to me. Yeah. Well, yes. Let's see how to put it. Let's just pick a figure. Let's say humans began to be upright about 4 million years ago. Could be 400 million, depending on how you look at the cycle of time, but a long time. And we have had protection from these larger, massive forces of nature that you and I are talking about only for about the last 150 or 200 years. And in this part of the world, only since 1968, that's when we got refrigerated air. Before that, we had to live with the force of heat coming into our house, and the only protection we had was running water over a fan called that particular kind of heating. And I had a friend that helped me start.

He was our Center for Creative Resources at Earth Tribe, and he was vice president of one of the largest oil companies. And on August afternoon, he called me and he said, I'm on my way home. It was 2 o'clock in the afternoon. I said, where are you going? He said, I'm going home. We closed down the whole skyscraper. And I was new to Houston at the time. I said, well, what's up with that?

And he said, look outside. I looked outside and there was this huge thunderstorm. I said, okay, I see it. He said, I'm going home to make love. We go home to make love in Houston when it's cool enough to make love. And so, just since 1968, we have refrigerated lovemaking. You see, we've distanced ourselves further and further away from these massive forces. So for, let's say, several million years, humans have had to live in the grasp of, like the owl, of the winter, in the grasp of the freeze, of the hurricane, of the wildfires. And until this last experience I had with the freeze, I didn't realize that there is a form of consciousness

that comes from being grasped in this massive force that I haven't been able to get any other way? What is the deep sense that happens in me when I... It's different when I go on a vision quest or some kind of meditation where I'm stepping into it. But when it comes to me and it's beyond my control, what wisdom do I distill from that? And I believe that's a form of wisdom that Mother Earth is wanting us to recover,

that we've lost. You've got a wonderful statement on your T-shirt today, fear is not a virtue. And there's a statement in the Old Testament, fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. I hate that. And it was one of the reasons, I'll get back to this later, but one of the reasons why I moved out beyond that tradition. But I'm thinking, and then I translated it, well, it's the awe of the mystery that's the beginning of wisdom.

But after these massive experiences, I'm thinking there's another piece of it, and that is the humility and vulnerability that comes to mix in to birth a wisdom that's uniquely suited for our day. And that's not a really popular thought to have as you're trucking down the road listening to a podcast. Hey, I need to get more vulnerable and find humility. This is not exactly going to sell very well. What you're speaking to is something, what comes up for me is thinking about Laird Hamilton's experiences with the water.

When you're on a 50-foot wave, there is the ultimate, and even the times where he'd go out surfing and he couldn't ride, like the ability to tune in and ask for permission and the reverence and respect that's necessary to engage with a power as great as the ocean. Yeah. But that is one piece of the whole. Yeah.

And I think what you're alluding to is the respect and reverence that we have forgotten for the all, for the nature that we're in. Yeah. And as with all things, I think the guidance system is telling us, you're going to have to experience this, and it's not all pleasant. In fact, it's quite unpleasant. Yeah. If I had guests on that have talked about, you know, in the ceremony of humanity, we're in a deep purge right now. Yeah.

Or a deep birthing process. And as a mom gives birth, it's beautiful, but there are very challenging and painful points in that process. Yeah, yes. My daughter says giving birth is like passing a basketball. So it's not exactly present. Okay, so let's descend down the spiral now and kind of get a flavor at least of how I've come to some of this dream in particular. So I grew up as a natural mystic on the Llano Estacado of northwest Texas out near New Mexico with large tribal influence. And as I began to awaken, the little town I grew up in had the only person that seemed to be able to even know anything about what I was talking about. I had some indigenous teachers, but they were migrant workers.

And so they weren't always present. And I needed someone to talk to. And Methodist minister kind of guided me into a Judeo-Christian context. And so my undergraduate work was in English literature and philosophy and psychology and so on. And then I did my first graduate work was in philosophy and theology. And that led me, kind of distanced me from my roots, my natural roots. And I got further away and I woke up one day and felt like I didn't know the wild inner world that was going on. And so I eventually found graduate work and therapy myself as a psychologist, an ecopsychologist,

and did a doctoral work in that direction. And then I practiced psychotherapy. And then I read. So then I came around the spiral. And when I turned around the theological, philosophical spiral, I was pretty certain about things. And then I ran into complexity inside. And that spun me into this next turn where I trained as a psychologist and began to explore my inner world. And then, to my great surprise, after a number of years,

I reached the end of that turn. I thought, well, my patients, my clients were saying, okay, we feel a little better, but what now? And I thought, I don't know. It's out beyond my training. And that's when I returned to the tribal indigenous perspective that had influenced me as a child. And I wrote Walking with Bears to tell the story of the journey of finding a mentor that felt authentic to me. There were many kind of false starts with that. I was at a summer conference call for the American Academy of Psychotherapists in New Mexico.

And we had the practice. This was a group you had to be elected to and so on. There's a lot of really great people in there. And we were pretty arrogant too. And so wherever we went, we went all over the United States to beautiful places, and we'd get a little local color to come in and entertain us. The important thing we did was all of our stuff, but we'd have like clogged dancers or whatever. So someone in New Mexico, we were at a place called Ghost Ranch, right next door to Georgia O'Keeffe's place.

And it was a great place near Abiquiu, New Mexico. And so they had engaged Bearheart to come speak at lunchtime to entertain us. A little local color sort of thing. Very patriarchal. Not disrespectful, but really not getting what that culture might have to say. So I was eating breakfast

and they knew of my interest. And by this time, I was exploring a lot anyway with different indigenous people. And so Daryl Dawson, the psychoanalyst who was kind of the chairperson, came to my table and said, Hey, the guy that's supposed to be here at noon showed up at sunrise this morning, and he's out there sitting under a tree. We don't know what to do. And he's really not talking to us.

So would you go out there and see what you can do? Okay. So I went out and just sat down beside him, didn't say anything, and we sat for quite some time. And eventually I said, are you Bear Hart? And he said, yes. And I said, you know, they're expecting you to speak at lunch. And he said, well, I'm here now.

And this is where I'm sitting. We were under a big cottonwood tree. He said, this is a good place. And so right away, I knew I had linked with a guidance system in a fresh way. That my journey with theology and philosophy and then becoming a scientist had all been links in a way, but this was something qualitatively different. I sensed that right away. You know how in a dream, you're dreaming

and you just dream along and it's about you and your issues, your mother, your father, whatever. And then all of a sudden, an archetypal piece of it will come forward. And even in your dream world, you say, oh, this is much bigger that's the way i felt and uh so about that time uh one of the uh key people came by and i was supposed to lead a seminar that's my morning sir you you're gonna go lead your seminar i said just tell them I'm staying here. And they asked Bearheart, I said, well, are you going to speak? He said, no. He said, anybody who wants to talk to me can come here under the tree. And he said, I'm sending out little filaments of light

and they'll connect with whoever needs to come. And that was a completely new notion to me. And I won't dwell on that too long, but before long, there were about 50 or so people lined up. And these are leading scientists, psychological scientists, psychiatrists, and so on of the United States. And here they were lined up, this simple man. And every one of them, Kyle, had some vulnerability. I'd known them for years, but they had some vulnerability that they had kept hidden from us that they were willing to bring to the feet of this man.

So we were there all day long until the sun went down. And when the sun went down, he patted me on the back and said, you didn't do too bad today. And I said, you know, I'd like to see where this takes us. So on the back of an old scrap of paper, he wrote his phone number, and that's how we got started. It lasted for a couple of three decades. So that was really, I realized over that period of time that, and eventually I got another doctorate in ecophysics but that was just

to clarify the deep connections I was discovering in this relationship that was growing and he was interesting after he died his wife Regina Waterspirit said said, you know, Bearheart never thought of you as his mentee. I said, well, I thought of him as a mentor. She said, no, he thought that you were exchanging wisdom. That's the kind of person he was.

And so from there, the two of us founded a spiritual community called the Earth Tribe. And that provided the soil, the matrix out of which this dream I told in the beginning came. I love it. I got water in my eyes as I just think about the, I'm actually not thinking about it. I'm feeling into moments like that that occur in our lives that are so powerful.

It's a clear delineation. You reference the dream when the archetype comes in or the symbology comes in that is so potent that even within the dream, you're like, holy shit, pay attention, this is it. And there's been several of those in my life. And as the awareness grows, I can pay attention to those more often. Jung would call those synchronicities,

but I think they're, in hindsight as we look, they clearly shift us and open us in a way that's beyond linear time or beyond a previous framework of how we viewed the world. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Well, one of the stories that I love is from the psychology piece and having studied Jung and understood so much of the psyche, and it's brilliant work, and I love Jung, some of the pitfalls and how that wasn't necessarily bringing people to complete healing in your initial work with bare heart.

And then with other elders, how, how they treated you initially was almost, you know, like, let's laugh at this little kid. You know, does that work?

Yeah. You know, talk about some of the key differences between what you learned in high level education, you know, the best of what we offer in the West, as opposed to what these elders were bringing forward in terms of the potentials of nature and how they did things differently.

Yeah. Well, one of my mentors, though I didn't ever meet him, was David Baum, the physicist. And David Baum describes in terms of physics how we live in a toroidal system. And from just for the moment, thinking about underneath there's a generative system. And according to him, this is not chaos. It appears as chaos, but it's really ferment. And out of the ferment then comes a particular form of consciousness that might be an automobile or a great insight or a theory of physics, or an insight into you and your mother.

But it comes out of that, and it proceeds around and comes, eventually loses its potence and disintegrates, dissipates. The great physicist, chemist, Ilya Prigogine, got the Nobel Prize for what he called dissipative structures. That is, these forms that emerge out of the cauldron come up, and eventually, all nations, all people, all things dissipate and move back in to the firmament. And so I bring up David Baum as an illustration of your question,

because he couldn't find any people in the world of physics that really understood what he was intuiting and proposing in the world of physics. And he really got depressed about that. It's a whole beautiful and disturbing story about how the United States pirated his research to help create the atomic bomb and so on. But toward the end of his life, he had a colleague by the name of David Peet. And David was over in Canada vacationing, and he connected with the Blackfoot tribe. And he saw that the language that they used was verb-based and not noun-based the way english is german whatever and so he sent a message to david bomb and he said you got to come over here i think these people understand you and so eventually he resisted, but eventually he came over and David Peet describes how he sat in the circle with the elders.

And they began drumming. And David Baum was a very reserved scientist. And David Peet talks about how he was kind of rigid and depressed. And before too long, his foot began to tap. And he began to move his body just a little bit as the drumming and the chanting began to grow. And then he explored with them their link with this guidance system. And he said, these people get me. They know what I'm talking about.

At last, I found someone. And that would describe me. As you know, in the book, Bearheart and I often disagreed. And we had fights and we'd get mad at each other and wouldn't talk for a little while. And then we'd come back together. And so it wasn't all just sweetness and light, but it was dynamic. And throughout it all, I knew not just Bearheart, but this perspective gets me and allows me. And it's dynamic and open. And another example of that is once I was on a vision quest with Bearheart, and we were out in the middle of the wilderness in southern Colorado.

And we had been in a sweat lodge. It was a sweat lodge that consisted mainly of wise and holy people, but a lot of young men like me at the time that thought we needed that hit. And so Bearheart had us in the sweat lodge for about five hours, and people were peeling out of there, and just a few of us left. I was lying there on the ground. So when I came out, when we went in, this was in May, when we went in, it was about 70 degrees, 4.30 or 5 in the afternoon. And when we came out five or six hours later, it was below freezing.

So I'm lying there next to the fire. In this particular case, we were nude. And I was steam pouring off of me and I was wondering how I was going to get up and go to my vision site. And Bearheart came over and he hadn't put on his clothes yet. So I looked down and all I saw was a big toenail

and he kicked me gently with that and he said, you okay? and he kicked me gently with that, and he said, you okay? And I just said, I guess so. And he said, go find your site. Well, that is not the kind of vision quest we work with because it was for a particular situation, but it was needed to get through my resistance. And that's what I'm talking about.

That's been Mother Earth's strategy and will continue to be a beautiful way of doing of of birthing a form of consciousness but time is wrapping in on itself now in terms of the earth story and we we can talk about the prophecies later but but this this is nearly nearly all the wisdom traditions, even the scientific wisdom tradition is saying, hey, we're in uncharted water here. And so as Mother Earth wraps into this strategy of reaching us and jolting us the way he jolted me with his big toenail is, I think, what we're about.

Yeah, I think it's having participated in sweats and a lot of warrior sweats. My first coach would take us through Tim's calls, which are a southern tradition, and it was all fighters. So he'd kick our ass pretty thoroughly in there, but not five hours. Yeah. And certainly not as the starting course before four days without food or water. Yeah, yeah. You know, that's a pretty high-level entry point when consider that the depths of a vision quest in and of itself

but that as an entry point for a sweat lodge in tandem is certainly that's not recommendable for anybody obviously that was the perfect scenario for you yeah it was good because i'm a slow learner and uh but we have found in this time space that when you step into this particular kind of space linear time really doesn't matter five hours or four days or whatever I've had in fact recently I've had people who because of the pandemic and various other reasons go go out for only four or five hours in linear time. And they step into this kairos moment, this eternal moment, and the visions are just as significant as otherwise. So I think part of what we're going to have to learn is,

what is it like to live in cyclic time? We're so dominated in our mainstream culture by the inner pusher, the inner clock keeper. I hardly even know how to live without being dominated by that part of myself. Recently, I started, I don't know if you've ever done this, but, oh, the last maybe six months or a year, I know a lot of your listeners are interested in health and food and so on. And so I have a wonderful garden and I'm eating out of that garden. And that garden really saved me during the freeze. You know, my spinach made it through this zero weather up here. What is up with spinach? Everything else died. Oh, I'll tell you what, I'm eating that spinach. But in recent times, I got the idea of not multitasking with my food.

So I eliminated conversation, any kind of device, and I sit and look down a canyon and chew my food until it becomes paste. That's hard to do. That takes time too. We don't want to give time to meals or anything else. Right. time and and uh i find myself taking really big spoonfuls you know uh trying to find shortcuts because and then i thought in in my psychology i talk about the inner council of selves s-e-l-v--S. So we have many little guys that live inside of us. The pusher, the critic, the lover, the warrior, the pleaser, and so on. And one day as I was chewing my food, I realized that most of my life, the self that has been eating my food is just as important as the food.

Just think about that for a minute. Who is the self that's actually putting the food in your mouth? For me, it's the pusher. Has been pretty much all my life. When I was in school, I would get up and I had to be at school at a certain time. And so I'm eating my breakfast, I'm looking at the clock. And then all the way through, I'm practicing psychology, psychotherapy. And okay, I've got to get from my house to my office, and I've got so much time.

And so what am I doing? The food is coming through my inner pusher. That is not good for digestion. That was me this morning right before this podcast. I was like, well, it's going to take me an hour to get to Wimberley and I got to cram in this delicious Lamborghese from Belcampo as fast as I can before I get out the door because I don't want to eat it in the car. It's funny psychology because I was like, well, if I eat in the car, I'm not paying attention to the food. So I thought if I rushed it, at least looked at it, that would be better than sitting in the car and doing it. Either way, it's not actually allowing that to take place in a calm and reverent way. It's just fitting it into my schedule, fitting this in before I go.

You're right. And I love social meals. I love fellowship when we take groups down to Teotihuacan and we eat with my Tall Tech brothers and sisters and the Mexica Aztecs. One of the highlights is eating this incredible food and having these incredible conversations. I'm seeing that that needs to be like the exception and the kind of the frosting on the cake. Most of the time for me, I think my body, my mind, my spirit would be greatly served better by just eating. And I invite your listeners just to try one experiment and to take one meal

and not have music on, don't do anything, but eat and look at some more natural area as you eat and see what that's like. Just do it one time and see what that's like. Just do it one time, see what it's like. I love that. Well, I do want to dive back into the vision quest, at least in part. One of the things that you point out, and I don't think it was your first. I believe your first was kind of a funny tale when you were younger with Oreo cookies and no elders.

Right. But it might have been that one you described with Bearheart where the hummingbirds came to you. Yeah. Can you dive into that and the mother tongue and nature's ability to communicate with us? Yeah. Yeah. So this is really a very different wisdom tradition, if you think about it. There's a wonderful lizard going down the pole.

You can't see him. He's right on the other side from you. Just as you brought up the mother tongue, here what is the lizard tells us about the primal origin of wisdom. And so back to the hummingbird. So it was that same time. This was a very advanced experience and and i i don't talk much about it because i don't want people to think they need to do this kind of thing because bear heart and i eventually saw this was really for experienced indigenous people that had this long-term experience, but I had to get my clothes on

and walk about a mile in the dark of night to find my vision site. And I was cold and near hypothermia. So I got there and I got in an old smelly sleeping bag that I hadn't checked out. And I was glad to be in it. And I began to regenerate and feel my body kind of come back to another equilibrium. And just somewhere in that state of consciousness, a hummingbird came and was right in front of me and just was there. And when it was right here on my ear, it sounded like a tornado in my first vision quest. But it was just tiny little hummingbird.

And the feeling that I had was similar to the one that I started this podcast with that I knew, I didn't know to express it like this, but I knew I was linking in with some kind of sacred guidance system and that my life from that point on would be on another trajectory. I wish we could get on the camera this lizard who's just to your left there. Oh, there he goes. So, yeah, and I want to bring up something here

because I don't want us to over-idealize the indigenous people. Because as I've experienced with my Meshika Aztec and Toltec friends over the decades, our human communities go in cycles. And so we're learning that the Toltec and the ancient people that preceded them at Teotihuacan, they built a civilization that was in many ways superior to Europe of the Renaissance. And just recently, the Harvard Research Project has deciphered their writing. Through these years, Western scientists said they really didn't the the mayas and the aztecs and their civilization they didn't write but they discovered yes it was very advanced in fact according to this research project the most the most elegant language on the planet today is japanese. I didn't know that. And they say this language was comparable to Japanese in terms of its elegance.

So it was very advanced. And yet, as their civilization itself was a dissipated form, And it came around, and as it got in a more destructuring phase, then there was human sacrifice. There were excesses. There were many of the issues that we have. And because we say, well, you have the indigenous people and you have the civilized people and haven't realized that the indigenous people, we've been through this cycle many, many, many times as we're discovering.

And we're just now getting to the point to be humble enough to look at ancient cultures as informative to who we are and uh so uh i went down that cubby hole there but rabbit hole but i want to say one of the things they did is in the latter part of their structure, the destructuring, the Aztecs viewed the hummingbird as a bird of war. But in its earlier phases, it was the bird of the great peacemaker. So if you follow the hummingbird, in some ways you can follow the course of the maturity of a civilization. And so that was my... And I began to see hey, this is a sensual experience. And I had been in the Judeo-Christian tradition

where it's a more transcendental experience. In fact, you're supposed to be a little suspicious of your sensuality. And I think it was Paul that said, you know, if you see a beautiful person and you have a sexual thought, rather than get involved in that, you should cut your eye out. A lot of blind people. Yeah, yeah, you don't want to, you're seeing their connection you have with the natural order is seen as a problem. Attachment is a source of suffering according to some traditions. And there's also the greater truth that it's in that very deep connection with the hummingbird that. I think it's in early in Mark,

the reference to Jesus's trip to the desert. Can you bring that up? I love it when you mention this. Well, I've sought to integrate my various turns on the spiral. And Mark is the oldest of the stories about Jesus, and just written about 15 years after he died, but that's a considerable time. But some of the stories about him were nearly 100 years later after he died.

And so this is to be taken really, the earlier the story, the more you have to pay attention to it. So Jesus came down from the mountains down into the desert where John the Baptist was. And John the Baptist was this shamanic figure who was running around in animal skins and eating grasshoppers. Grasshoppers, my honey. And they went down to the river and went down into the river and came out. And when Jesus came out,

there's this dove that came. And the dove led him into his quest, as I say. And so he sits in his circle, and there's this little passage there in the first chapter. They're not talking about anything else. They say the wild animals came to him and ministered to him. That was the seed. That was his hummingbird. That was the seed of, that was his hummingbird. That was the seed of his awakening.

It's amazing to me that we would overlook that. There's a whole school, I wrote about that in the 1980s, and I'm not a New Testament scholar, but there's a whole school of New Testament scholars now that are seeing that Jesus was very much in that tradition as opposed to other people of his era. Yeah, I'm surprised that is overlooked because, you know, similarly, the Buddha spent his proverbial 40 days under the Bodhi tree.

Yeah. Reconciling darkness. Yeah. And learning from nature. Yeah. Yeah. tree. Yeah. Reconciling darkness. Yeah. And learning from nature. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

And that's really different kind of wisdom tradition. I was at Abiquiu once and going to a meditation experience. And so they took me back to this little cell, and I was going to stay there for, I think it was two days or something, and they would slide the food under the table and under the door. And it was an absolutely incredible day. I came in this little dark room, and I know deprivation is good, and that's one link with the guidance system.

But after about an hour or so, I said, this is not for me. So I opened the door and walked out because it's two different linkages. And I believe, for me at least, the primal connection is where i have my consciousness blossom you know it's funny you you mentioned that the differentiation between that i've thought often about this you know i've come to you on many nature walks seeking your guidance and um in particular we walked uh with regards to my my uh the darkest experience I've ever gone through, which I've recently done a solo cast on with the Sonoran Desert Toad, 5-man MEO DMT. Yeah.

And one of the questions you had was, where were you? What was the environment, the container like? Yeah. Being indoors, it was nighttime instead of daytime. We were in a small room versus a big cathedral-like living room or something like that. Those were all factors, and they always are. Aubrey Marcus, my dear friend, had done a trip to the darkness

out in Germany, and he had a beautiful experience. But it was six days, no light whatsoever, like the old cave stuff. But I'm thinking about that, the difference between a dark room versus an actual cave you know as you you set off on your journey and crawl inside of a giant mountain which holds its own resonance and its own energy versus being in just a dark room yeah you know the difference there oh because it's a tuning device and and uh you get different channels to just get that that notion yeah maladoma patrice tomei talks about that and of water and spirit you know in his initiation you know climbing into the cave and coming out of the other door they are the other side

yeah well uh the ancient stories of the uh of theotihuacan, the pyramids, they told about two humans who went into a cave. And they went into this cave, and the cave, according to the stories, was a clover leaf with each little cave being in one of the ordinal directions. So for years, the archaeologists said, you know, well, that's a good story, but there's not any reference to that. And there was a thunderstorm about 30 years ago down there, and it washed out the bottom of the Py of the sun a little spot and they found this tunnel that went under the pyramid of the sun and led into the cave that's that's the heart of the whole vision of katz katz got like a polka uh uh and uh uh katz kl. And so I actually had the joy of going in that tunnel the way Tskotlipoka and Katsukadl did

and went and sat in the different caves that jutted out from that. And then the pyramid is on top of that. So if you think of, I'm using this as an example of a tuning device. So there's a lot of difference between being in a dark little cell and a deprivation tank. Yeah, to deprive yourself of your senses for a moment is good, but it opens another sense. And you have these tuning devices like the pyramids, and the cave itself is producing the pyramid, produce the vision that these two humans got. I say two humans because sometimes they're brothers,

sometimes they're lovers, sometimes they're heterosexual lovers, sometimes they're homosexual lovers. So we don't know, but they were closely connected. And out of this came a whole scientific revolution. Out of this tuning of this cave. But it's a very sensual thing. When I was in that cave, very sensual.

I can smell, I can feel the rock. The rocks themselves are alive and vivid in their ability. And I think it was Einstein who said, a rock is just light moving at a very slow pace. So it's a lot of difference in where you are as to your access to the guidance system that we talked about earlier. Yeah, the thing that's resonating with me right now

is the old adage from dennis mckenna and a lot of the great psychonauts whereas you know the religion gives you as um almost as a take my word for it versus in theogens and a lot of the practices we're talking about from vision quests to the cave the caves inside the pyramids as direct experience of the thing they're pointing towards. And the direct experience of that is sensual. It is visceral. It's through every cell of your knowing, every cell of your being.

And it's, I mean, the first time I sat with ayahuasca and could see and feel simultaneously the animistic nature of the world to see the soul and the the source in and in end of all things just blew me away like it's it's an unforgettable experience that that is inarguable in my mind it's now nothing's concrete but at the same time um that experience couldn't have been taught to me in a book no no you're right and and and this is we're talking about different channels and accesses to forms of consciousness so there are many different i mean the world grows out of of consciousness but every everything like the rock is a form of consciousness. It's a very dense form and different kind of consciousness at the level that we're talking about than what we have, but still has the same matrix. matrix and so when you tune into a particular way of approaching consciousness then whatever channel you're using you're going to be limited by that channel like if you go on a vision quest

that is going to give you a form of consciousness that is related to but different from ayahuasca. And ayahuasca is different from peyote and so on. I was thinking about a story, Quanah Parker, who's important in my life. So Quanah Parker grew up where I grew up. And so when he came on the reservation, he thought seriously about becoming a Methodist and that was the tradition that I went through. So the Methodist bishop came and said, well, we hear you want to become a Methodist

but they have certain things you need to do. Like he had eight wives. That's a challenge. He built a house that had eight bedrooms. This was a guy who came out of Stone Age gathering and within a few years

was being deeply connected to the president, Teddy Roosevelt. So a remarkable person. And I love him because of his ability to transition. And that's what we need right now. Anyway, he said to the Methodist bishop, well, I have some questions of you. He said, as far as I can tell, you sing about Jesus and you talk about Jesus and you read about Jesus. But in our teepees, we actually have Jesus sitting there with us and we can see him.

Do you have anything like that? And Connor Parker's oldest son, his name was White, became a Methodist minister. But Connor Parker said, no, I'm not going to do that because I want to have the direct connection with the actual living presence. And I think that's really a different channel. It's a different form of consciousness. So reading about, singing about, that's good. You get a form of consciousness there.

But this other form, once you've tasted of that, you see other things are footnotes. That's a great way of putting it. You studied from so many different people, both the greats in physics as well as psychology and understanding the psyche, as well as many different elders and cultures from a young age working with Toltec as migrants and your relationship with Quanah Parker and of course, Bearheart Williams and many others that I can't even begin to name, you've studied a lot about prophecy.

And we've spoken about this before on some of our walks with the Hopi prophecy. Can you unpack the Hopi prophecy and some of the other cultural prophecies from the Mayans to different teachings that you've gone under and how these correlate together in our time? Correlate is a good word. Very, very promising word. Well, a few headlines. The Hopi prophecies are actually an amalgam of visions of many tribes

because Whitefeather, a Hopi elder in the 1950s, late 40s and 50s, went on a journey around many, many, many tribes, even down into Teotihuacan, and he heard visions that he then melded with the Hopi prophecies. So this was before the book of prophecy was written. And so I was exposed to those before the archaeologists and different students began to coalesce those into a more readable form. So some of the headlines from that, and this is also over the years, I've listened to hundreds of visions from people besides my own. And I have in our tribe, we have a book that people have written down their visions. And sometimes I just read through those. And they all point toward this kind of situation.

So a civilization will come up out of what appears, as I said, as chaos, but is actually ferment. And it will flower and bloom and then lose its energetic connections and begin to dissipate. And according to the integrated prophecies that correspond and correlate with what I've seen myself, this has happened four or five times. And as you know, the paleogeology now has a standard understanding that Pangea has happened four times. So you've had the continents come together, move apart, come together, move apart four times. So we're in the fifth time of forming a supercontinent

according to paleogeology. And this corresponds, by the way, with these visions that we've had. There have been many, many swirls of civilization. Arnold Toynbee said 21, I believe it was. But according to these visions, there's only been four or five major forms that have emerged.

And now we are moving toward the fifth or sometimes called the sixth. And that's where a lot of the Mayan prophecies speak of 2000 and 2012 and so on. And most of these prophecies are really talking about a transition or a bridge time between dissolution and recreation. And not too far from here is a painting on a rock that I have that shows that we are at a division time where we can either go into oblivion or we can take another route and connect with the mainstream of evolution.

And the prophecies all point toward they have plants that when you reconnect, pictographs, and this is a recurring archetype, that when there's the reconnecting, the plants in the new world, the new era, become the focus. So in some ways you could say the visions say we've been through a mammal period and now we're moving into more of a plant oriented period so those are a few headlines i like that the the thing that i'm specifically thinking of is that painting i'm thinking of the i think it's um seven seven beings with their heads disconnected from their body on the top line that take that trajectory that zigzags out of the sacred hoop or off the planet or into oblivion. And I think four, so less than the majority with their heads connected to their body and their feet connected to the earth that travel on the straight path connected to the earth and usher in this next stage of human consciousness.

Yes, yes, yes. And it's very difficult for us to grasp the significance of this moment that we're in. Having lived through the 60s, it was the late 70s or 80s before I even began to see what I'd been through. And now I can see, wow, that was really a pivotal moment in the human story, the 60s. However, it's tiny compared to what we're going through now in my experience. This is like the 60s on steroids. I mean, we are in the midst of something that it's a privilege for us to be a part of it because it's so full of possibility and sacrifice.

If I would say something that, as we kind of come to the close here, that probably, again, wouldn't sell very well, and that is, in addition to the fact that we have to find a form of consciousness where we are tiny in the midst of this massive force that has us. Like during Hurricane Harvey, the wind blew up here. We were just at the edge of it, but the wind blew up here 40 miles an hour with rain, rain, rain for about four days.

It just sat there. And about the fourth day, I got out here near the tree, and I just put my head down to the ground, and I said, I don't know what to say. I just bow before the force. And I communicated with the hurricane. I said, could you give us a break here? And the hurricane said to me, hey, I'm really not in charge here. I'm just doing what I do. There's some bigger something here.

You'll have to go to what I'm calling now the guidance system. And yeah, so there's that form of knowledge and wisdom that is crucial. If we're connected through this channel of conscious compassion, of deep love, everything works together, correlates for good. And no matter how difficult it seems, and as you know, I've been through some pretty tough times with my wife. And it all works together to create larger forms of consciousness that can only be had through what we go through. And that's what I would leave with people. Thank you so much, Will. Yeah. Thank you.

Yeah. Thank you. Bye.