Kyle Kingsbury Podcast - #362 Erick Godsey on Actively Pursuing Your Dharma, Annihilation, Darkness Retreats

Episode Date: July 10, 2024

Erick Godsey is back for the umteenth appearance. He is here to drop mic after mic on his recent work. He’s deep diving a concept called the “Dharma Artist Collective”. He goes down a rabbit hole around the movie “Annihilation”. He gives us some juice from his darkness retreats in the last year plus. It’s basically 2 hrs of Godsey being Godsey. Take notes and share it with everyone! Connect with Godsey: Website: ErickGodsey.com  Instagram: @erickgodsey    Show Notes: "The Way of Kings" by Brandon Sanderson "Sword of Kaigen" by ML Wang "Scale" by Geoffry Wes Third Eye Drops 392 Spotify Apple   Fit For Service - Mentally Fit  "How To Steal Fire" by Stephen Bayley and Roger Mavity   Sponsors: Cured Nutrition has a wide variety of stellar, naturally sourced, products. They’re chock full of adaptogens and cannabinoids to optimize your meatsuit. You can get 20% off by heading over to www.curednutrition.com/KKP  using code “KKP” Paleovalley Some of the best and highest quality goodies I personally get into are available at paleovalley.com, punch in code “KYLE” at checkout and get 15% off everything! Lucy Go to lucy.co and use codeword “KKP” at Checkout to get 20% off the best nicotine gum in the game, or check out their lozenge. Caldera Lab is the best in men’s skincare. Head over to calderalab.com/KKP to get any/all of their regimen. Use code “KKP” at checkout for 20% off To Work With Kyle Kingsbury Podcast   Connect with Kyle: Twitter: @KINGSBU  Fit For Service Academy App: Fit For Service App  Instagram: @livingwiththekingsburys - @gardenersofeden.earth  Odysee: odysee.com/@KyleKingsburypod  Youtube: Kyle Kingbury Podcast  Kyles website: www.kingsbu.com - Gardeners of Eden site    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, welcome back. Today is the return of my brother, Eric Godsey. Eric Godsey has been a regular on this podcast pretty much since 2018, I want to say. And when we started working together full-time at Onnit and everyone else, it's the beginning of Fit for Service, six years together. I've been doing full temple reset every January for the last three or four years. And I say this on every podcast that we do together, but it's a treat to get to be a coach in Fit for Service. And the reason for that is it's a catalyst for

my own growth. And every coach we have treats it that way. So Caitlin, Aubrey, myself, Godsey, we're always searching, seeking, trying to level up, trying to live better and to be more effective and just to gather more, you know, to gather more wisdom. And that comes through experience. It doesn't come through books. Certainly I read my fair share. Godsey holds that. Aubrey holds that. Caitlin holds that for sure. But it's experience that really takes knowledge and transforms it into wisdom. And one of the things that I've been meaning to do with Godsey that I have not done yet until now is get the downloads from Godsey on his darkness retreats. He did one a year ago and he just got back from one not too long ago this year. And I wanted to just see what those are like, because to be perfectly honest,

sitting alone in a dark room for six days, it sounds like shit. It sounds like I'm total mindfuck, if I'm going to be completely honest. I would much rather go without food and water for four days, traditional vision quest. I'd much rather have a high dose. Well, maybe not a high dose anymore these days, but fairly high dose, a heroic dose of psilocybin, five grams, seven grams. That would be a far better experience for me than saying yes to six days in the dark because the idea of the psychedelic journey turning on and not turning off,

I think it takes a certain level of wherewithal. And perhaps one day when I'm older and a little bit more, I don't know if ground is the right word, but a little bit more well-versed with my own psyche, I think I can handle that. So I always give props to people that do this stuff, the shit that scares me.

And of course, if it's scary, that means I have to do it according to Godsey, as he'll explain later in this. But point being, this podcast is two and a half hours for a reason. There isn't a lot of jibber jabber back and forth. There might've been a point in a 90 minute slice of this where I say five words and Godsey just goes deeper and deeper and deeper. And I fucking loved every second of it. This is out of, I don't know how many podcasts we've done together.

This is my favorite by far. It is worth, believe me, it is absolutely worth listening to this thing all the way through, simply due to the fact that it is building towards something and it's building towards gnosis. It's building towards a and it's building towards gnosis. It's building towards a way of understanding our reality.

What does the end of the world mean? What does the movie Annihilation have to do with? What is the internet actually? I mean, there's so many things here. Look, you could say one man's downloads are not another's. I get that. The Oracle in the Matrix says, what you were shown is yours's downloads are not another's, I get that. You know, the Oracle and the Matrix says, what you were shown is yours and yours alone. It's not for anyone else.

And I do subscribe to that. And at the same time, listening to different people's perspectives and takeaways has been a gift, especially when they're tracking dope shit and especially when they themselves have done a lot of work and that is Eric Godsey in a nutshell. He's done a gang of work on himself.

He is a student first as I am, and he's really polishing his gem. He's fucking rad. And this new understanding of things has got me thinking in a whole new way about social media and all sorts of shit. So I'll leave it there. I am going to start and fire up my own Instagram account just because it does seem to be, I'm throwing in the towel. It is the fastest way to communicate with the listeners. I don't have many people reaching out to me on Twitter at Kingsboo. So I don't know

what I'm going to do with that account. But I will start an Instagram account. That's mine, not my family's account. And I will post there regularly, somewhat regularly. I'm going to figure out, I'm going to carve out some times as Gatsgadzi calls these Dharma sprints. And I'll have block time for that. That way I can disconnect from it completely when I'm not in that game and then connect to it fully when I am in that game and give it its due. But I do want to open that up just due to the fact that after this conversation, it makes more sense to me. And I want to have a closer connection to you, the listener. So hopefully if you are like me and you're like, fuck Instagram, fuck Twitter, fuck all these things. And you got off entirely or you were never on to begin with, it sucks because we won't be able to communicate,

but you could just follow one person or you could just seek out my name, whatever the fuck it is when I decide on it. Next week, I will have a name though, that's for sure. And I'll relay that here. You guys will love this podcast as I did. It is a long one, but if you have to just chunk it, I like doing it. I got a 45 minute drive back to Austin. Sometimes I'll get a piece there. I get a piece on the ride home and a couple of days,

45 minute chunks, and I've got this podcast locked in. This is one I'm going to finally listen to. I rarely listen to my own podcast, but I want to get as much information from this as I can to really distill it and hold onto it. There are a number of ways you can support this podcast. First and foremost, just share it with a friend. Say, yo, listen, this one is dope. This is what it's about. And support our sponsors. They make this show fiscally possible. I absolutely love them. Many of them have been handpicked by myself. And if not by myself, through my amazing team, Cured Nutrition is first on the list. These guys are absolutely incredible. Curednutrition.com slash KKP. Use coupon code KKP at checkout. That's Cured, C-U-R-E-D, nutrition.com slash KKP and coupon code KKP to embrace a state

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Eric Godsey. Congratulations, man. It's beautiful. Thank you, brother. So it's nice because it's a trick of the camera. You know, it looks like everything's filled in from the angle we have. And then you look around and there's plenty of space to continue to add books over the years, which I'm not in any rush to do.

But Tosh has been into the female fantasy which is a little different than like the male military fantasy I think all all the girls are into that shit now and Clayton but uh yeah I'm reading The Way of Kings as Brandon Sanderson guy I'm getting into in The Sword of Kagan we'll link to those in the show notes they're fucking incredible incredible books so I just added 10 fantasy books for the only other time i've read anything like that was the dune yeah you know which i just still is like top tier one of my all-time favorites for sure but it's been a minute dude i wanted to talk with you i always want to talk with you and usually we do these you know a few times a year we sometimes we re uh capitulate you know

kind of the new shit that's unfolding to fit for service we're in a brand new year we're going to tackle that um but you know one of the things that i've i've loved and i always talk about usually on aubrey's podcast is just that this is our growth too you know being in that container um we get to be a flyer on the wall when other great people we've brought in, like Kathy Courtney or different people, we get to go through those practices and learn with the crew. But also when we're not there, we have,

there's a, there's a bit of a fire lit under our ass to continue our own growth because we have to teach that we have to, we have to have new shit. And if it's not new and it's not novel, it just gets old, you know? So I've, we've continued to polish the mirror and sharpen the sword and do that over have new shit. And if it's not new and it's not novel, it just gets old. You know, so we've continued to polish the mirror and sharpen the sword and do that over

the years. And sometimes that comes through plant medicine journeys, which you've, you just got back from. And, and as well, the non-medicine medicine journeys like the darkness retreat. So we could, this could be, you know, I was joking. This could be a Sean Ryan-length podcast that's six to nine hours. We won't go that long, but this podcast will be longer than most of them

because I want to tease that stuff out. I want to talk about how that's influenced you because this year we've changed a lot, but you've really springboarded into doing new shit. That's really cool, and I want to promote that as well. Oh, yeah. Yeah, one of the things that's been really fun to notice as, because I never had the desire to be a coach.

It was something that has just kind of happened through Aubrey's audacity and telling me like, hey, I'm going to make you one of the coaches when I didn't think I was ready. But one of the things that has been really cool to notice is that to teach anything because of my integrity or my guilt, I don't know, maybe it's both. I do not, I can't stand feeling like a hypocrite. So the, whatever I teach, it actually calls forth like my best attempt at actually doing those practices as opposed to just talking about the practices. And so one of the things that has been a core teaching that I've put forth as a coach before,

I felt like, who the fuck am I to tell anyone how to do anything? But it was tell the truth and do scary things when you feel that your soul or your whisper pulls you forth towards it. And so when Aubrey first talked about the darkness retreat, I felt that tug and I was like, fuck, I'm going to have to do that. And so I did a four-day darkness retreat last year and basically had a great time. Like, I was like, this is incredibly easy and enjoyable. And so for people who don't know, on the fourth day, a physiological shift happens and the complete absence of photons even on the skin and it needs to you know be an engineered or a cave like it can't just happen through your

blindfold because your skin is absorbing light but if you go about three to four days without it it something shifts in your biology and a uh like nothing like it a pulsing inner light starts to overtake your visual field which when you're in the darkness you're whatever the sense is that there's a you behind your eyes like looking out of at the world. And, you know, it's like, you know, it's, it's really like a dome, you know, like it's this moving dome when you're in the darkness, that's the whole thing. And there's a pulsing light that starts to fill that space. And when I felt it for the first time, and this was last year, it, it feels like it's probably my most precious, like, quote-unquote, spiritual experience that I've ever had.

Because it was, and the only word that comes to mind is purity. But that, I don't like that word because it implies that the ingestion of the other things isn't pure, but there's something about in the complete removal of all stimuli for enough time, something starts to stir. And the way it felt almost was like, this is weird, but I know that you'll get, it won't be weird to you. It might be weird to people listening. But when that pulsing light started to come in i felt like i was like a little baby whale and i was feeling my mother for the first time like starting to like enter into my space and it felt like she was really far up and like just huge and loving and i was just like i remember when it came on it was the morning of the fourth day and I was eating breakfast and I just like started like cry laughing into the darkness.

Like, oh my God, wow. darkness retreats and he's like for a westerner you your only goal is to literally fucking stop with all the things like just just relax and it's going to take you a couple of days to actually relax and i had to go through the mental trap of like oh i'm gonna do all my spiritual practices but the spiritual practices became a bulwark from feeling you know the unfelt things like i had some grief that i had to move through i i had some sadness that i had to move through and my spiritual practices were like it took me half a day on the first day in the darkness to realize oh shit i'm using my spiritual practices as a to-do list so i don't have to feel this part really in the back that just wants to cry so when i stopped doing that i had this huge weeping experience and then you know

for like two days i was just like a kid just like not trying to do anything. And he said, don't ask for any insight until the very last day, until you're like what he calls in and as the Buddha body. And then from that place, you can ask a question if you have something that you want to know. That's kind of true. So unlike ayahuasca, I wait till I'm drunk on the medicine for lack of a better term. I can always tell if I'm posing questions earlier than I should. It's like, all right, just wait a minute. Okay. And so I asked, what is the most meaningful thing that I can give my life to?

That's kind of the essence. And then what came through was this phrase, the regenerative city project. And then I said that out loud into the darkness. And I'm really big on being precise about synchronicities and miracles because they're so magical that they don't need to be exaggerated at all. And so the precise, as I can remember it, I said that word or that phrase, the T on the project, a log in the fireplace that's on the other side of this steel door so that it brings warmth into the room snapped. And it was a loud snap. And I'd been in there for four days and at no point had a piece of wood snapped when the fire wasn't burning because the fire had been off for over a day because it was getting hot and as I said as I pronounced that at the end of project

and that wood snapped it was just a irrefutable synchronicity that like I just started crying and laughing like oh my god this is what I'm supposed to do. And to give a little bit of backstory is my goal for my life was to like be a writer and like clinical psychologist, but like never in front of a camera because I have a stutter. And I was just like, I want to have a cabin with my family out in the woods. And I write books. And no one knows who I am. And I have enough money just to be a great dad and a great husband. That's what I wanted to be.

And then in like 2018 or 19, maybe it was even 2020, I fucking heard Daniel Schmachtenberger talk about existential risk theory and for people who haven't heard about that do not listen to daniel schmachtenberger because it will fuck your life up if you have a heart and if you care like and so listening to existential risk theory it killed that dream like i could feel that my dream was selfish like i had no uh purview of the next generations like what type of things needed to be addressed in order for me not to feel like a coward you know it's kind of like the essence of it and so i have this mind map on my computer that is a representation of probably like 200 hours of deep diving into existential risk theory.

And I went back to reading evolution and how did the universe start? And it started with atoms. of a mania that I had to go through for about a year to try to figure out how to orient my life while integrating the truths of existential risk theory. And so essentially, for people who don't know, the nicest way to put it is the statistical likelihood that humanity will extinct itself in the next 100 to 300 years with our current momentum is uh significant mathematically significant and the four major um potential extinction events would be uh like nuclear holocaust, like profound ecological collapse, the decentralization of biological warfare as it gets easier and easier to do things like gene edit. And then the fourth one is the big asterisk and it's AI, you know? And, um, long story short, uh, I, through a bunch of different experiences, I got the insights and it's totally surprised me because it came through

ecstatic dance. I wasn't on any medicine and it, and what came through was something that I had literally never in my life thought about something that would be what I would want to do. And what came through was something that I had literally never in my life thought about something that would be what I would want to do. And what came through was help build a regenerative city. And that came through two years ago at a fit for service event. Emily Fletcher led some like manifestation slash ecstatic dance thing. And I was able to drop in. And I was like what i don't know anything about anything about what it would take to build a city like i'm a

psychologist like and so i sat with that for a while and then um right before going into that first darkness retreat last year i started reading a book called scale and i forget the name of the author but it's by a really hard-nosed mathematician who like looks at like um the mathematical patterns between different organisms and heart rate and all this stuff and he found some incredible like patterns in nature like one of the things that he found is that um uh lifespan is a byproduct of the complexity of the circulatory system of an animal and that there's a very clear link and pattern and And he can, I forget off the top of my head, I read this book more than a year ago, but that there is a incredible pattern between increase in the like literal

amount of surface area of the circulatory system and the metabolism and how fast that organism basically dies. And it's that as it gets more complex its metabolism becomes more robust and it's able to live longer and longer and longer so the example of a mouse compared to a whale is it holds that pattern but the thing about that book that was the most fascinating is he he started to look at the relationship between cities and basically everything positive about culture and the same circulatory pattern and you know like uh the circulatory system and the metabolism and the longevity of a mammal or an

organism that same type of pattern except with a slight variation applies to cities and the density of the population that the city can hold has this uh exponential um outpouring of uh wealth um like uh like longevity of life uh innovation, and all these different things. And so I was purposefully reading that before going into the darkness, and I had the insight that the only organism on this planet that can survive an atomic bomb is literally a city. Hiroshima and Nagasaki are still here, and they literally had atomic bombs dropped on them and they were in the night.

And so there's something about the organism of a city that is like if something can survive an existential catastrophe, it's a city. And like, that was a weird idea that I was playing with. And so when I was in the darkness, what I saw is I saw like the regenerative city project as like a collective dream story of a horizon of a city in the future. And that the call was for each individual person to feel into their Dharma.

What, The call was for each individual person to feel into their dharma. What thing on the horizon of that mythical city could they give their life to to help create the future version of X, Y, and Z? So for example, what I saw is I saw a hospital. I saw like a hospital on this horizon and it was like the hospital of the future. And it looked like a temple mixed with a museum mixed with a greenhouse. And it was this like, and then I got to see what the like doctors inside of that hospital, like how they behaved and they used vibration they use somatics to get people into ecstatic states to help them move their trauma and their grief and their pain and they taught them how to sing and all this stuff and i was like wow and so my takeaway from the first darkness retreat was just this this vision of the regenerative city project and then uh fast forward a year later i go back to the darkness because the moment i came out i was like i want to go back and i want to stay longer that

was super easy like i i want to see the visions because basically what happens is if you stay in there long enough it takes between eight and ten days for most people if they stay there uh the pulsing light starts to increase in intensity to the point where it starts to condense into forms and then you literally are in a 24-hour lucid dream and the uh tibetans have a history or have a lineage where like the graduate level exam you know air quotes is you have to i forget the exact amount of days but it's something like at least like a month and a half you spend in the darkness damn that long but it's like the like uh like getting your phd where like you train for years how to stabilize

the mind and how to do these different things and altered states of consciousness and then the point of it is to basically go through the different realms of gods that they have in their cosmology you know like one realm is the realm of the hungry ghosts uh one realm is the realm of the like lazy gods like the highest realm of the realms of these gods i wish i knew this more detailed off the top of my head. But what I remember is that the highest level is the like gods that have all of the power, but they don't have like an open, compassionate heart. And so they're just chilling in their immense power and they're kind of like lazy and dull.

But so you go to each of those levels and you learn and you you know do things and um but so for westerners because we love to get high or for the people who are crazy enough to try to do shit like this it's often because they want you know to see the visions and the thing is um responsible darkness retreats won't let Westerners do more than a couple of days because they know that the days between day four, basically, if you don't have a good meditation practice, it's very unlikely that you'll be able to stay in there past day four and it not actually hurt your mind,

like it not actually precipitate a psychosis or like be traumatic and so oh arrogant boy you know because i had such a good experience the first time i went back a year later uh and i did six days and the first three days were a lot like the first year where it was just like this is easy like i'm so like you know wow i just i just get it blah blah blah and then um on day three the at the end of day three the light started to come in i was like oh my god this is so cool and then it kind of like receded as i went to sleep and then i woke up and it wasn't there for a while and then it started to come on really hard at the end of day four and it was totally different than the first year. The first year it felt like the loving mother whale was caressing me with her heartbeat and it

was just beauty and soft and then this most recent time it started soft and then it started pulsing and getting more and more intense and more and more like erratic. And it got to the point where I couldn't sleep and it was impossible to tell what time it was, but I knew my routine and I wasn't able to fall asleep and I was just laying in bed for hours. And the intensity of the light got to the point where it was like fucking skrillex at hour seven at burning man on cocaine experimenting with some new fucking like insane you know like uh one of shogun's. EDM song, yeah. And what was really weird is as I started to finally fall asleep or get into that hypnagogic state and my mind started to come apart, because I was using my meditative practice to just hold still in the center of this impossible chaos that you can't turn away from it.

There's nothing. It's the whole thing. But as I was starting to slip into the hypnagogic space, it's like my ego structure protection came apart and my mind attuned to the quality and the frequency of the intensity of the light, which was very erratic and very aggressive. And without getting into the details

i realized like my mind started working through a experience that i had with a friend probably about six months earlier where uh we were playing uh sport together and he got triggered and like went from playing the sport to like basically like trying to fight me. And it was so jarring because when I was like 10 or 11, my best friend who was like five years older than me and who was the son of a Golden Glove boxer, we were playing basketball. And I was, you know, like i thought we were playing the sport and then i realized that i had like uh triggered him and he punched me in the mouth and it wasn't the pain it was the like sense of like shocked like oh my god i thought we were best friends like what the fuck happened and when i was a kid, when that happened, I basically went home and went to the basement and just cried.

But this situation happened in front of other people. And as an adult, I have a very quick mouth. And so when things get like that, I felt good with how I responded verbally uh because i called it out right away and i was like what the fuck are you doing what the fuck is wrong with you like you know and but i could feel that like i wanted to cry when it was happening and i was like what the fuck and uh what happened was my mind was, so now we're back in the darkness and this pulsing light is happening. And my mind is working through, okay, like uh the most likely thing is you either

absolutely ruin the friendship and your life because of the friendship or you actually physically fight and what my brain did because i i wasn't having control of this i was like witnessing this is i basically saw him punch me and then me fall backwards and hit my head on the cement and then like start to have a seizure. And in the bed, I started having a full blown, what would have looked like to a third party, like a seizure.

But because I had been in the darkness for three days and i'd been practicing my my meditation i was able to just like witness it and just let my body just fucking like do the whole thing and i realized in hindsight it was like oh i processed like i had some trapped trauma from that experience and i was able to let that through and I was like, oh, wow, that's beautiful. And so the next day, day five, chill day, the lights weren't there. It's almost like the lights got super intense to move that trauma and then the lights went away. That's interesting because a lot of people that I have heard that, know it takes somewhere between day three and day four but once they turn on they don't turn off right but that's it's a very interesting because yeah we're all new to

the game even those of us that have more experience than others it's still like relatively new right and also what's worth noting is um i didn't take any extracurriculars in the darkness. And most of the people that I know actually do take extracurriculars in the darkness. And I don't know if that has any effect on how the light works. But it really does feel like because I allowed that process to happen, that my vessel reset and the lights didn't come back for the rest of the time that i was there actually because i was only there for one more day and a half and so for on day five i was just back in my routine and it was nice and i felt great at the very end of the last day i uh went to the bathroom you know and it's all in the dark and I noticed that my

dick is touching the water and the first thing I think is the dark, is my dick bigger? Which is just such a stupid thought It's everyone, every dick would be thinking that too for sure, that would be my first thought Oh God, the darkness makes me grow

I'm coming here once a year. Exactly. So I get up, and I wipe, and I do the whole thing, and I flush, and then I go back. And then when I eventually come back again to go to the bathroom, like an hour or two later, because the place that I go to, they give you a- It's all whole food, and so there's a lot of fiber, and it's just- But so I go back to the bathroom, and when I sit down uh i feel the water on my ass cheeks and i instantly know oh my god the toilet is clogged and the way the darkness place that i go to is set up is it is a single fucking room built into

the side of a mountain and it looks like a hobbit cave and the dude who runs it comes once a day and uh there's no cell service there's no walkie-talkie and if i were to need help i would have to walk about half an hour through the woods at night to ask him to come declog my toilet and so that wasn't an option and so i had to turn on the light like and so is there a plunger there uh there was a plunger there but uh it didn't work but so well it's hilarious so just be in this with me i've been in this thing for six days and like the hallelujah moment is the first time that you see a light. It's like the fire of God is elucid to that. But instead, the first thing I saw was a toilet full of shit. And some voice in me was like, behold, Eric, you're full of shit.

And it was so funny. And so I turned off the flow of water to the toilet right before it went over. But it was now 12 hours until Scott comes back. And so now there's nowhere to piss or shit, you know. And so I just laid in bed for an hour or for the rest of the night just uh trying not to shit and that was my awesome glorious dark experience but it didn't end there so he brings me out the next day i see the light and it's incredible and uh i go connect with caitlin because she came with me and she did her own thing in her own hud and it was really awesome to see her and we were going to leave the next day so i went back to my uh room and i went

to sleep and something pulls me out of sleep and i can't tell what time it is and i hear so the way the room is structured is it's a room and then uh the door to leave opens up into this like small little like welcoming area and then there's a door on the other side of that so there's like a door a little welcome area a door and then the room that you spend all of your all of your time in i hear the outermost door open and the thing that's so weird that i want to really highlight is something in my consciousness pulled me out of sleep right before the door opened. It was like something in me could feel that there was a presence that was alive that pulled me out of sleep right before the door opened. And so the door opens. And at first I think it's Scott. I think he's coming to light the fire and i guess it's just i'm disoriented maybe it's early but um

because i had come out of the darkness i had my phone in there that night and so i checked the time and it was like 2 a.m and um so the next thing my thought or my brain thinks is oh scott uh like got high and like had like a good good time because he likes to play music. And he asked me if I wanted to play music with him that night. And I was like, no, I need to get some sleep. So I'm thinking maybe he had a really good night. And he's like, well, I'm up here. Maybe I'll just give Eric some fire.

And so I go, Scott, 100% expecting to hear his response. And when I say Scott and I don't hear anything in response, the physiological activation is unlike anything that it was incomplete darkness and I was so attuned to my inner processes that like if this was what cocaine felt like I would be an addict like it was I went from groggy to this type of like preparedness to kill like in a way that I've never actually felt physiologically in my entire life. In hindsight, something got to activate that has never activated in my life before. But so I go, Scott, and I still,

and I heard the door open and I hear something like walk in and I couldn't discern if it was four legs or two legs. And then I start to hear the like wood on the other side of the door start to get like moved around. And then I go, Scott. And what happened, the movement on the floor kept going in a way where my brain could instantly process, okay, it's not a human. Because there was something about the force of the speech that would have at least caused a hesitation. So I was like, okay, it's an animal. And so I'm just listening and I hear the like

wood being moved around and it's kind of like a rhythmic and I kind of hear like the like scraping of like uh claws on like something and my door is slightly ajar and so uh Aubrey and Aaron Rogers made fun of me for this about not checking but it's like I don't have experience with wildlife and I've been in the dark for six days and I just didn't even think to to go be heroic because I didn't have anything in there. And what my mind thought is like, it's probably not a bear. But there's like a 1% chance that it's a bear. And I'm just not. So I feel self-conscious because they made fun of me for this.

But basically, I just put my back against the door. And I just closed it all the way and i just listened and um i have the recording on my phone because i was like no one's gonna believe this and so like i you can clearly hear that there's some type of like uh animal like moving the wood around and like at the steel furnace thing. And after an hour of me just sitting by the door listening, I eventually feel like it's safe enough to drift off into sleep. And I sleep for two hours until the light starts to come up.

And then I go and I look, because I could still hear it every once in a while. And I go and I open the door and there's no animal there. And the outermost door is closed. So I'm like... And so the next thing that my mind thinks is like, okay, maybe a really small animal got into the chimney and just the way it echoed seemed like like it was like a larger animal so i prepared myself to see like a fucking ugly possum or something in the like furnace that and i look into the uh furnace area and there's nothing there and um

i still to this day don't know what happened uh i told scott that it happened he was like oh yeah it was probably like a mouse like it was probably a mouse got into the. I told Scott that it happened. He was like, oh yeah, it was probably like a mouse. Like it was probably a mouse got into the top and the way that it echoed. And I was just like, and then I played him the recording and he was like, yeah, I don't know. So still to this day, I don't know.

But the thing that was super interesting is it took me a couple of days after that second darkness retreat to realize that it had been traumatizing that it had actually been incredibly uh activating for my nervous system and uh i did a podcast with a friend at like five or six days after i came out of the darkness that time and um you can go find it on YouTube. It's with Michael Phillip on the third eyedrops. But my eyes,

when I'm in that, like my, from the outside, it is clear that I had been traumatized, that like something had like happened because my eyes were super buggy in a way that they've never been my entire life, that they aren't now. And what I realized was about a week and a half later that I was still in the initiation

because like whatever like spiritual initiation I'd entered going into the darkness because of the turning on of the light and because of the creature the next night and the startle response, that the container was still open. webinar for fit for services new structure where i was basically selling my first like curriculum was the completion of the initiation of the first darkness retreat so in the first darkness retreat the core thing i could feel is that i felt like a hypocrite because i had started talking about existential risk theory and teaching people about it. And I was getting reflections from people of admiration and respect for talking about it. But I wasn't doing anything because I didn't know what the fuck to do. And so I was really with that feeling of hypocrisy

my first time in the darkness. And then when I was coming out of the darkness this most recent time, I now had the opportunity for the first time in my adult life to grow the fuck up and to actually sell we'll link in the show notes to it I know because I now know what I stand for and it's essentially

to be a Dharma artist which is for me I think everybody is an artist whether or not you claim it. I think the nature of your soul is artistic and that each of us has a dharma that's actually put in us by, it grows through us because we are children of this planet. And that whatever the planetary intelligence is, we all have a seed and it is our duty as a soul to like cultivate that thing and to give it to the world and that our dharma is actually uniquely designed by the

earth to occupy and fulfill some part of the symphony of what humanity could be and that we live in a time where there's almost no dharma artists for a bunch of reasons but i realized that like the best thing that i can do currently is to help people at least recognize that they have a dharma and so i created this course and this course was the uh culmination of my life's work up until that point because without understanding why I have had a borderline insane compulsion to study and to write and to teach psychology like I was going to be a college professor someday since I was in my 20s. And I've always felt kind of like guilty almost because I am happy to say no to almost everything

to protect those first three or four hours in the morning where I'm with my dharma. It feels like it's a spiritual thing. And a part of me felt guilty or maybe even like, maybe there's something wrong with me because it feels like I need this for the health of my psyche. Because for people who don't know, I had a psychotic break in my early twenties and I had to like put my mind back together.

And this dharma practice is like my, I know what it feels like to have my mind broken. And so this Dharma practice is like a way that I like keep the thing together and it gives me meaning. opportunity to mature to actually grow up to step slightly beyond the confines of my adolescent dream which was like i'm somehow just going to write books that make enough money and then i can have a really nice cabin in the woods and just take care of my family and it was just like no eric you're gonna have to fucking do the thing that you used to think that everyone, if they ever did it, they were a piece of shit, which is to sell. And it's such, it's a rabbit hole, but the huge elephant in the room for anyone who is spiritual is, my opinion is that the most mature, dynamic, non-dogmatic map for spiritual development is jung's individuation process

and the reason i think it's so elegant is that there is no dogma it's just an orientation to a way to relate to your soul but carl jung god bless him he's my fucking like godfather he married into one of the richest families in europe he never had to worry about money he so he never had to speak about money he never had to talk about the individuation process as it relates to buying food he and so it never got touched on and so like one of the things in our current zeitgeist is more and more people, thank God, are waking up to the fact that there's a spiritual dimension to life. And more and more people are waking up to the fact that they have a dharma. And it's like anyone who listens to me or reads my shit, if they don't believe in the fact that they have a dharma, they're not reading and listening to my shit.

Because that's one of the things that I don't pussyfoot around. around it's like you do just are you a coward or not like you know that's really my orientation and so more and more people are waking up to it and so those people tend to in my experience they identify on some level as artists. And artists have so much baggage around using their artistic craft to make enough money so that they can be full-time Dharma artists. And so in a really weird way, like my maturing point,

the completion of that two-year process was to, with full fuck, talk to my people who have been listening to me for years and be like, this is what I'm teaching. It costs $4,000 and I will look you in the eye and tell you that it's worth that and more. Anyone who will take the risk on this first one, I'm going to give you a bunch of gifts because I haven't proven it. And then we completed that first class and it was an absolute fucking smash. And now that I have the proof,

you know, we're basically, like the class sold out, a bunch of people had to get on like payment plans to be able to afford it. No one asked for a refund and everyone has said that it has changed their life. So now that I have the proof, now it's just like full fuck, no extra rewards. This is what it is. This is what it's worth. And I'm going to help you get your life right. And really just what it is, is it's the culmination of all the things that i've ever learned that have helped me

literally not kill myself like put my mind back together and how to orient in this world in a way where my dharma can come through and that everybody has that capacity specifically because we live in a new world with the shimmer and this is a whole thing that we can get into but that um once i did that webinar i could feel that that was like the closing of that initiation and then the effect of that webinar on people you know still blows my mind and so that has brought me to this point now where, like, for the first time in my life, I know what I stand for. And I stand for something that, for me, is a multi-generational project. Like, I want to help doula as many Dharma artists as possible. And, like, without skipping ahead too much. actually yeah i'll just kind of like pause

there and so like that's the darkness retreat do any questions come up or any like reflections or anything that like stands out like before i go into the next thing where i want to keep unfolding i mean the only reflection that i have is that, and it's an important distinction, both of us know this, but for people who are on the path seeking, wanting to improve their lives, there are very practical things. Like obviously I'm working on the body, you're working on the mind. They're very practical steps that we bring people to and those practices become the yoga of the drama, right? And with that, as we've taught at Full Temple Reset year after year, it's the habit change that makes it. But one of the things that stood up to me

is that when you go to the transformative experience, that could be a layer in one cake that you're working on, right? And obviously our whole lives are layers within an infinite cake that never fucking ceases. But that's so cool that you were able to see how these initiations linked into one larger picture and what that culminated with and how important that was.

Because I mean, none of us liked having to sell ourselves on the fucking webinars and all that posting and everything. But I think it's a really important distinction to make. A lot of people think they go to ayahuasca and they're going to heal X, Y posting and everything. But I think it's a really important distinction to make. Like a lot of people think they go to ayahuasca and they're going to heal X, Y, and Z. And it's like that just begun your journey and your trajectory of unpacking things and seeing things differently

and how that impacts you in large part determines on what you do with it. But that's cool. You just peel the layer, peel the layer, peel another layer, and then bam, there we go. Yeah. it's cool you just you peel the layer peel the layer peeled another layer and then bam there we go yeah yeah so then that led right into the next initiation which is for the first time in my adult life i was teaching my like life's work you know because my dream when i was in college is i wanted to be a university professor i wanted to teach philosophy and psychology.

Like there's a part of me that loves teaching. Like one of my favorite experiences is to see that moment of insight behind someone's eyes when something clicks and they instantly know it's of value to them. It's like the transference of value of like informational wealth and it's just like being you know it's like trying to upload a file to your computer but it's literally you can see the light behind their eyes like just go up one degree and it's one of my i know kung fu moment right yeah and so it's like the moment that like a teaching lands is one of my favorite feelings because it feels like it's a transfer of like informational wealth and the truth is like the reason one of the reasons for my psychosis in

my early 20s was um you know i was a child of a monocropped culture and a lot of us were where i grew up on cable television and I grew up on Walmart food. And because my mom was a veteran, I got the GI Bill from her. And so I was able to go to college for free. And no one in my family had ever even graduated high school. Everybody before me had gotten a GED, but they'd all dropped out of high school. And so I was the first person in my family to go to college, and that was a huge honor.

And it was in college where I stumbled onto podcasts. Like, that was a new technology when I was in college. And the very first podcast I ever heard was, so just a quick recap. I was the type of person where I basically was able to get Bs with ever having to try, and I never learned how to try when it came to learning. But because I was quick-witted, and I somehow knew the subtle inner dynamics

to basically hijack the teacher, to basically argue with me and not teach, And that was somehow like how I got off and I was really good at it. And so when I got to college, the dynamics in college are way different. Like it's a freshman class, there's 200 people, you're not hijacking the fucking teacher. You have to fucking, you know, be quiet and be a student. And I realized that I didn't, I didn't know how to learn. And my first semester of school just fucking punched me in the face. Cause not only did I not know how to learn, I didn't know how to deal with not being just kind of like innately good at stuff. I was just, I was a fragile, arrogant bitch. Like that was just the truth of it. And so I just stopped going to class i just stopped going

to all my classes and at the end of my first year of college my gpa was a 0.7 i should have been expelled for academic whatever but i think they just overlooked it because they were getting paid by the government for me to be on and so that summer I started smoking weed. All through high school, I didn't drink and I didn't smoke because my brother was five years older than me and he did all those things. And he was the example of what not to be. And so I projected that onto all these things. But all of my friends were like, Eric, you need to try marijuana. Because I was talking about philosophy and psychology.

And they were like, dude, just try it. try dude and so they finally talked me into it and uh like the third time that i'd ever smoked i i remember the time of day i remember what room i was in i remember the furniture um and just to really paint the picture for you guys it was a disgustingly stained like white gray carpet and the ugliest yellow leather couch you can possibly imagine with like grime on the sides and i'm sitting on that little couch in my room like maybe six feet away from a 50 inch plasma screen TV. Cause that's the only thing that I had that I thought was of value. And I turn on Netflix and I start watching a standup special by someone I'd never heard of. And it was Joe Rogan. And he goes into this joke where he's like, I'm a fucking idiot. And I'm smarter than almost everyone I know. I've been doing stand-up for 10 years.

And this microphone, I don't know how this thing fucking works. There could be elves in here just fucking screaming. And it's just like, oh, this is how a microphone works. These lights, I don't know how fucking electricity works. And no one in here does. If the lights went out right now, everybody here would do exactly what I would do. And I would sit here and I would wait. And I'd be like, these fucking idiots can't get the lights on. But what if all the people who know how this shit works, what if they all died

and the lights went out? How long until we're in the streets, like stealing from each other and attacking each other? And it goes right back to who is the strongest. And then he went on this whole thing. And I- Where Brock Lesnar fucks him. Exactly. And just uses him as a condom. Yeah.

And it was just the perfect culmination of being high and just fucking throwing my life away and feeling guilt and shame and my my arrogance cracked and with the marijuana i kind of had this for the first time in my life it seemed like i had a third person perspective on eric and it was just like almost like the ghost of Christmas past, I could see like, dude, you're gonna fucking ruin your chance because you're an arrogant, fragile little bitch. And that's not the thought process that came through, but that was the feeling.

And I've never really told the details of this, but because I'm in a space where I feel like I can access it, the actual felt experience is it felt like I was waking up out of samsara. I didn't have that word then, but it felt like I was waking up. And it felt like there were two voices behind me, and they were researchers. They were like, oh, no, he's waking up. And it felt like it like tried to stop me, but I could feel that that was my own neurosis

trying to basically stop the fact that I was starting to like step outside of my persona and see it. And I just kind of had this like felt sense of like the first time in my adult life having the first like scent of the whisper of my soul. And it was just kind of like this feeling of like uh wake up man and so the very next day i shaved my head and then the day after that i got into my piece of shit car and i drove 36 hours to my mom's house in Washington State.

And I spent the whole summer there. I didn't talk to any of my friends. And I just started reading philosophy and psychology and working out and just trying to get my shit together. And then the day before coming home to start the next semester of school, I'm on the internet and I stumble on to my first podcast. And I don't even know what a podcast is, but I clicked this thing and I hear these two people talking and it's Joe Rogan talking to Aubrey Marcus about ayahuasca. I had never heard anyone talk about psychedelics. The only one I'd ever heard of was mushrooms and i equated that with my brother and his friends and they were fucking what not to be but on that podcast for the first time in my life

i heard two adult men talk about life like they fucking wanted to be alive like they cared like i came from a small town and i'd literally never seen an adult that wasn't bitter that didn't feel trapped by the job that they had or whatever and it was just that was the most important thing for me on that podcast wasn't what they were talking about it was the felt sense of two men who felt like they had agency in life and there was a part of me that was like oh wait that's a that's an option to feel that? I don't know how I'm going to feel that way, but that's an option. I can actually be in the world and actually have passion and not just be broken and bitter. So I was like, I Googled,

what are the best podcast episodes on the Joe Rogan experience? And what came up was Duncan Trussell. And I didn't know who that was. And so I downloaded every episode they had ever done. And I listened to 34 hours of Joe Rogan and Duncan Trussell just riffing on the podcast way back in the day when they were just. And I remember when I rolled up back to my house to start the next semester of college, I felt like I'd been baptized and like a whole new worldview. And so that sophomore year was when I started doing psychedelics. I didn't know what the fuck I was doing. three to four grams of mushrooms or a full tab of lsd like every weekend for like two and a half

months because i was and i wasn't doing it in with other people i wasn't doing it to party i was doing it like i was trying to investigate the nature of my mind and long story short i of my mind. And long story short, I broke my mind. And I got to the point where a girl that was attracted to me that I was attracted to, but we were too neurotic to make it happen. She came over one day because she was basically the only friend that stayed around during this period because I got really hard to be around because I was um existentially broken but she came over one day and asked me hey do you want to go get lunch and she was trying to be sweet and I genuinely like without any anger I inquisited how she knew that she was hungry for like 20 minutes and she got to the point where she was like crying and it was like what the fuck is wrong with you and then she left and then um event at some point after that i did

five grams of mushrooms and i had uh i really cracked and i ended up running around my neighborhood like jogging barefoot for two hours but it's because i was running away from the felt sense that I had a tumor in my brain so it's just it was a great time but so I started to put myself back together and what started to do that for me was um my first practice my first practice was uh the artist's Way by Julia Cameron, that book came in and it was like, just start writing or just start journaling to yourself every morning and just try to tell yourself the truth. And without going into that whole spiel, uh, that fucking changed my life. I realized that I didn't like any of my friends because I never gave any of them the chance to know who I was because I was so ashamed of who I was. I had fallen out of

love with my girlfriend over a year and a half ago, but I was too much of a coward to admit it to myself. And I had just been hurting her for a year and a half, just allowing it to continue and continue. I realized that I was afraid of my body, that I was ashamed of my body, and just all these things started to open up. And it was during that time when someone introduced me to Carl Jung. It was during that 12-week period

where I was reading The Artist's Way and I was starting to tell myself the truth. And just an interesting side note, the person who introduced me to Carl Jung was a person who was in the midst of a psychotic episode and eventually ended up going to prison because he got drunk and he killed somebody. But it came into my life through someone in a psychosis. And then just an interesting, this is not part of the main story, but i just realized this like two weeks ago the version of the red book that i have was given to me as a gift when i was working out on it by someone who the very next day had a psychotic break and now

dang i didn't know that to give you the book he gave me that book the day before he got fired for having his yeah it's right behind me and then um there's been a couple of so this is a tangent but i just i'm going to share with you because i know you would find it interesting is uh like as i mature and kind of like bring my neurosis patterns more and more into cohesion just recently i had someone gift me a book who clearly has had a psychotic episode in the past but it's like brought his shit together and i it was him giving me the book that he gave me which is a book called um how to steal fire from heaven or something like that and it's like a book about how to create your own uh your own system of magic. And it is a fucking gem of a book.

But it was once he gave me that, that I realized, wow, like the entirety of my understanding of Carl Jung came through to me via people in the midst of psychotic episodes, which is just a really interesting, like, I don't know what to do with that, but I'm just going to set that over here. So as I'm doing the journaling practice and I started getting into Carl Jung, I started

having experiences with my dreams. And once I started having experiences with my dreams, that started to really open me up. And so fast forward now, I've collected a bunch of different practices that have saved my life. And the main one is essentially journaling and then having some type of Dharma practice where the first couple of hours of the day you feed your soul. And so I'm starting to teach all of this stuff in my class to these people. And this was at the beginning of this year. And as I'm teaching this class, this is when I discover the shimmer.

And so the story of how this happens, I think, is really fascinating. And I think that you'll find it interesting. And so one of the things that came through for me in the darkness was that I needed to learn how to tell horror story as like an art form. Like as a writer, that is a type of art form that I don't learn how to tell horror story as like an art form. Like as a writer, that is a type of art form that I don't know how to do. So when I came out of the darkness, because I've had downloads in the past where I think Stephen King is one of the greatest living Dharma artists of our generation, because in order to write a book every year in the way that he does, he basically knows how to channel and he wouldn't

call it that but he knows how to get into the fucking state where he's just pulling threads from the zeitgeist through him and stephen king to me the way it lands to me is he is the myth holder around the fire who holds the horror stories of our zeitgeist and so he's just like processing our deepest fears and trying to weave it inside of stories that have a thread of good true and beauty through it and i think that's what good horror is good horror is let's look at the brutalist parts of life but let's weave let's try to weave the good the true and the beautiful through a green mile shawshank and bad horror the shit that you know most of us don't resonate with is this type of stuff that is just gorging on the brutality and there's no thread of good true and

beautiful but good horror i think is one of the highest storytelling forms if you can thread the needle of the good the true and the beautiful and so i started listening to his book the stand which is 55 hour it's regarded as his magnum opus like his best book and he explicitly said this is his version of retelling the lord of the rings because he felt like that was the best story he had ever read. And so The Stand is Stephen King's version of the Lord of the Rings. And so it's brutal, but it's incredible. And so I listened to that. It was like a little mini initiation. I listened to the 55 hours in like two and a half weeks. And by the time I got to the last eight hours of that book, Caitlin was like, you're just laying in the dark listening to this book for hours every night? I was like, yeah,

baby, it's so good. Do you want me to try to tell it to you? And she's like, you know, because it would. But once I completed that book, I then had the intuition to rewatch this movie called Annihilation because it came up as like when i saw it the first time it was so gripping because it disturbed me in a way that i couldn't comprehend yeah fuck me up and it just like sat with me and so as i was like musing on this idea about like the darkness and all this stuff i revisited this movie and I had started smoking weed again, like lightly and responsibly. Weed is a thing for me where it is, it is not something that dulls me. It is something that amplifies everything. And so I have to be really gentle

with it and, you know, really treat it with respect. But I was rewatching Annihilation and I had this intuitive ping where I was like, I think this movie might be like a myth about the internet. And the reason that came up was Daniel Schmachtenberger, again, that son of a bitch, he recommended a book to Aubrey and the book is called Process and Event, like A-N-D. And Aubrey flipped through and he was like, I am never going to read this fucking book.

This is so dense. So Aubrey gives that book to me as my birthday present. I think I love a good re-gift. Right? And so he wrote on the front page um if there's anyone that i know who can read this and understand it it's you happy birthday and at first it landed in me as like oh this is just a re-gift you know but then uh the next day i was on a flight to go see my parents for the holidays and i just i just start reading the glossary the gloss glossary is like a hundred pages. And I start, and

it was the most electrifying literary experience I've ever had in my entire life. Reading the glossary sober on a plane was just like, it felt like psychic. It was just, when I was in college, reading Nietzsche set me on fire in a way that is now kind of like a cliche almost. Like if you're a sophomore and you read Nietzsche, you're fucking insufferable. But it gave me life when I was in college. Reading this book was that plus more. And just the glossary itself was but their main point process and event is their sixth book in a completed six book like uh opus and it's two authors and one is named

alexander bard and the other one i don't know how to pronounce i apologize it's not english and their first book, which I haven't read their first five, I've only read like the first 120 pages plus the glossary of book six. But their main point, they got super famous back when the internet first came out because they wrote a book where they were basically predicting like, yo, this is going to change everything. Here are our predictions. And they got everything right. And so they're regarded as like rock stars in philosophy because of their predictive power of their model. I won't go too far into the details of what they think is coming and how it

will go because I don't understand it enough to talk about it responsibly. But the main thing that hit me was that the emergence of the internet is a paradigm shift unlike anything that we have ever seen and it is changing everything and the only things close to it were the invention of language the invention of writing and the printing press those are the only things that have because there have been a bunch of things that have changed the way culture moves, but they make the argument that what we were before language and after language was like two different fucking organisms. And then what we became pre-writing and then post-writing, like two different organisms. Like we weren't capable of culture at scale before writing. And then what happened with the printing press is the printing press killed the monotheistic God that was like raping Europe. That might be triggering to some people, but if you can just take a deep breath and look at what Rome that then became the Roman Catholic Church has done to the planet,

that monopoly of power was killed by the printing press. And they go through it, and the printing press eventually was a portal that out of it came the atomic bomb. Like, the printing press is the thing, was the technology that allowed the scientific process to start to grow and to overgrow monotheistic religion and eventually produce the atomic bomb. The internet is the fourth thing. And what they talk about is how things change when a new type of tech emerges that changes everything.

So one of the things that they talk about is the most, the kings, like the people who have the most power, that class of people changes. And so they articulate that in this new world, the new kings are the netocrats. They are the people who have power over the code that aggregates the most information that represents how people's attention is moving so this is meta this is x this is google this is apple these are the new

like most powerful people in the previous world like it was the bankers it was the people behind the scenes who were orchestrating all the movement of money they were the puppet masters since the internet and this is one of the things that made these motherfuckers so famous these two philosophers is um the young smart people in tech realized oh fuck we can go become the new kings and like they used these two philosophers like worldview to like like they're like oh the the like the torch is up for grabs you know and so now we have a new generation of kings or of you know whatever you want to call the most powerful people the currency of this new world is attention actually that's not quite right the currency because currency is a symbol of what's most valuable so you know the currency was cash

before this new world and it was a symbol for gold you know when things weren't completely fucked up in this new world the new currency is data and it is a representation of people's attention it's all about attention now and the new um like uh underclass is the what they call the consumetariat they're the people who are the consumers, but really they're the people being consumed. And so it is this new world, it's a game of attention now, whereas before it was about gold and money. And I forget exactly how they word it, but basically what i see as a dharma artist what i'm trying to teach people how to become is there's a new uh what's the right i want to get this model right it's been a couple of months since i've read the book but essentially in the previous world order like the people at the

top who pulled the strings they were the bankers and whatnot but the people who maintained the power of the people with the money, they were the scientists and the politicians. Those were the two people that allowed the people behind the scenes to keep doing their thing. Now in this new worldview, the new scientist slash politician archetype is something like influencers. And this is a thing that's really hard for people to see because we have so much prejudgment about it. But the people who aren't corrupt, who are able to basically be a channel for truth in this chaotic time and they can hold people's attention in a way where when people give their attention to them they're actually rewarded for it and it brings them more into like the true the good and the beautiful those people are going to get a level of power that was akin to being like a like uh you know the uh like the person who ran the senate and because people are

going to be voting now with their attention as opposed to like a representative type of thing but so there's i went down some rabbit holes but basically i realized at the beginning of the year, the internet is a thing that has created... We are at the very beginning of the change into a new world. And the average amount of time that it takes from the old world to die into the new one is like 400 or 500 years. We are the first people in history that have the opportunity to grok the change in worlds as it's starting. Like, it's literally just starting. Like, things like blockchain and things like the fact that Kennedy was able to stream his, like, all of these things are brand new.

And the thing that's so interesting is, because of what I'm going to get into, it's really hard to notice that we're in a completely new world than the world that we grew up in before the smartphone came. And it's like, you and me are of the age where we have a taste and I'll get into it. But the generation now that is growing, that is born into a world where their mom or dad has a smartphone on their first day of life, that is a, they're in a whole different fucking game. So back to this movie, I'm watching this movie. I'm high. I'm like, huh, this might be like about the internet. So I started doing some research. And I learned that because basically I wanted to see if the people who made this were explicitly talking about the internet.

So the first thing I do is I go find that the movie is based off of a book. And the book is written by this dude named Jeff Vandermeer. And Jeff Vandermeer is regarded as an excellent writer in a type of genre that's called weird fiction. And his personal hobby is he's a naturalist. He loves to just go on really long walks and just observe nature. And a lot of his books, he kind of weaves in his observations of just being out in nature for a really long time. Weird fiction as a genre is a, it's like a, it's almost like a part of the genre is that you can just, it,

you tell stories like they're dreams where it's just like, you're doing a thing and then it just fucking kind of like, and then you come back and this, and it's just, it's, it's a really cool genre. And so, um, i don't know the details but what it seems to be what i was able to gather through watching a couple of videos of this guy is like you know he's not spiritual like he clearly was like an ecological activist in the best sense of the word where he was like looking and then making art looking and then making art. But I don't think he was doing a lot of psychedelics. And in his 40s, he had to get some teeth removed, and he was given like Oxycontin or hydrocodone or something,

and he had this really weird dream. And the dream was there was a tower in the ground that was like 100 stories, but the tower was an organism. It was like pulsing and written on the wall of this tower was a apocalyptic poem that was growing out of the wall. Like it was fungus. And when he woke up, he remembered, like he says a thousand word poem that he just started writing. And as a writer, he said, I've never had a dream where I've remembered more than like one word. So I write like a thousand words just in the middle of the night. And then I show it to my wife when I wake up and he asks his wife, is this just me being

high? Or do you think there's a story here? And she reads it and she's like, there's a story here. And so then he writes the book in three months. And so anyone who knows anything about writing a book, that's fucking crazy. This book comes out and the book gets a bunch of awards. Someone brings a copy of this book and puts it on the desk of the director, Alex Garland. And Alex Garland is the dude who made the movie Ex Machina. Have you seen Ex Machina? Yeah, fucking amazing. Okay.

So that movie is regarded as maybe the best movie to date about exploring just the weirdness of human consciousness and AI. So I can't make this up and I'm not exaggerating. Alex Garland says as he is in the process of editing x marking yeah so he has shot it it hasn't come out yet and this is his first really big project as he's editing it someone gives him this book and it's like you need to read this book he says he reads the book in just like two or three days and he says two things one as a director all directors know this but basically human every famous movie you have ever seen is the retelling of like five to eight stories like

we just retell the same five to eight stories we give it new garbs and we love it and almost every famous movie you've ever seen fits one of those forms and he's like this is the first book i've read as an adult that feels original. So that's the first thing. The next thing he says is, reading this book felt like I was dreaming. So then he had an insight and he was like, I'm going to make an adaptation of this book, and this is a quote from him, as if it were a dream responding to a dream. So the book came from a dream, was written like a dream, lands in the director of Ex Machina's lap. And he says, one, this is original. And two, it feels like a dream.

So I'm going to make an adaptation like it's a dream. And what he did was, and this is not how people make adaptations. He read the original book once, read it again and wrote the full adaptation like it was a dream and then we get the product the movie annihilation from a jungian standpoint uh myths are to cultures what dreams are to people and like high art, like the highest art are the artists who are able to open themselves up to new myths, to new stories. And I think that Annihilation the movie is the purest and rawest piece of art that we've created that is representing a current nightmare that Gaia is having. And that from a Jungian standpoint, nightmares are actually not bad. The thing that's terrifying in the nightmare is actually the whisper to the next thing.

And so if we grant that Gaia is a growing, evolving thing, things that scare it aren't inherently bad, but it's definitely like a call to a whole new thing. And that, so when I learned all of that, I was like, whoa, I am going to use the movie Annihilation as if it were a dream that I had, and I'm going to try to interpret the dream. And so I rewatched the movie and the name for the phenomenon of, so I'll just kind of break this

down. The story in the movie, I think is actually the gem of the dream and not the book. I think the book was the beginning of a process, the movie is the is the waking dream i was going to ask you that if it's worth reading and move that up but yeah it's worth reading okay 100 but i chose to interpret the movie as the like dream okay so what happens is um something from space hits a lighthouse and once it hits the lighthouse it it starts to have this area of effect, dome-like thing that is what oil looks like when sunlight hits it. And it looks all rainbow-y, but it's mostly purples and greens. There's this large area of effect. And in the book, it's called Area X.

And I just like the hilarious synchronicity that Twitter got renamed to X. I'm just going to put that over there as an interesting synchronicity that Twitter got renamed to Axe is, I'm just going to put that over there as an interesting synchronicity. In the movie, it's called The Shimmer. And The Shimmer in the movie has four qualities. Really five, but four main ones. The first one is every expedition that has gone into it has either gone crazy and killed themselves or have gone crazy and killed each other that's

number one number two is anyone who goes into the area of effect they start to have retrograde amnesia which means that they lose the capacity to create new memories it's like they just kind of like jump and jump and they can't remember how long they've been there the third one is that all genetic material within the shimmer um starts to rapidly mutate and grow and evolve and intermingle in a way that's way faster than what life is like out here. And the fourth one is that there are these entities inside of the shimmer that seem to, they're not predatorial, but they're relentlessly driven to replicate human humans and those things are called the crawlers in the book they're not they don't have a name in the movie so i hold those things like they're almost like prophecies and then i start doing research and so we'll just kind of go through this slowly because it's this is the most fascinating

thing that has ever happened to me personally because it started as an intuition and then i started doing the research and i was like oh my god dream dream dream dream dream and then i was like let's just try the experiment of interpreting this like it's a dream and then i started doing the research and it's like oh my fucking god so God. So I'll start from the least crazy to the most crazy. So the least crazy is that within the shimmer, which is the digital world, what genes are to biological life, memes are to what happens in the shimmer. And memes are not just Pepe the Frog. Memes are just ideas and one of the things that the internet is doing is it's causing a rapid mutation and cross-pollination of every fucking idea that humanity has ever had and it's part of the reason why we're so confused

so number the third property of the shimmer is the rapid mutation and replication of genetic material so if you interpret that that is the rapid mutation of thought forms genetic material. So if you interpret that, that is the rapid mutation of thought forms that is happening on the internet. The fourth, because I'm trying to go from the least crazy to the most crazy. So the most obvious one is

yeah, ideas are replicating faster online than they ever have before. The next least crazy one is the retrograde amnesia. I've recorded hours of podcasts over this. I'm trying to condense it. But basically, have you seen the movie Memento? I think Memento is one of the greatest films

that has ever been made that artistically represents what Samsara is. We are all the protagonists, especially people who have had spiritual moments. We wake up every day having forgot. And if we're like the protagonist, we create a set of systems every day that we have to go through to get to the moment of being like caught up and lucid. And then we can make one new choice and we need to like write it down because we know that we're going to wake up tomorrow and forget. And so he has all these like tattoos on his body and the tattoos on his body are like our practices.

They're like the things that we have to do to remember like, okay, I've woken up before. It's not just samsara. The internet has destroyed our capacity to maintain focus. And the research on this is just fucking litany, litany, litany, litany. But the essence of it is that one of the main things that the shimmer invites us to do is to rapidly task switch. So multitasking is not possible with the conscious mind. The conscious mind is eerily like how sight works. You have a small pinpoint where you can actually see in high res and everything else is foggy.

Your mind has a field of awareness and it has a little pinpoint of attention. That attention thing can't do two things at one time in the same way that your eyeballs can't see two things clearly at one time. People who multitask are so desensitized to their eyes rapidly flipping as a metaphor for their attention that they think they're doing two things at once, but it is a cognitive fact that you can't focus on two things at one time so what we all do is we rapidly task switch and the research on people who report as being multitaskers which we all do it but the people who like make it a part of their identity on average it takes them twice as long to complete any task compared to someone who just

does that task. Is that because they're doing two things at once? Right. Their objective performance on the cognitive task is worse than people who don't multitask. The amount of cognitive energy that it takes and the way they measure that is the likelihood of them doing something hard after. It costs more. You do it slower and you do it worse. But the most interesting finding is people who multitask have a insanely inflated positive belief in how well they did the thing. So it creates this sense of like,

just it makes us profoundly stupid to be rapidly task switching all day and the thing about these devices is they just call to us to multitask or to task switch and some of the research is that children who grow up in homes that have screens in the background that are on basically just like everything that we can measure. They're worse at than kids who don't have that. So the retrograde amnesia part, like when you translate the dream into the real world,

we, when you have really awful task switching tendencies, it actually impairs your capacity to make new memories. Like that's actually like a fact. And so I was like, Oh, well now two things track. The fourth one, or technically in the order that we're sharing,

the third thing is the crawlers. So this is where it starts to get like fucking heavy and it's going to get really heavy. And then we'll bring in some hope. But this is the pre-heavy, heavy. So the pre-heavy is that it's not a conspiracy. It is just a fact that we live in a world where the most powerful corporations in history are competing with each other to produce algorithms

that are the most successful at keeping our attention on their platform so they can sell us ads. Like the most powerful corporations in history, that is the game that they're playing. They're competing with each other. So there's vicious competition amongst them to create the best possible thing to be able to hold our attention the longest so they can put ads in front of us. And so for things like meta and x and google and apple it's not that there's a person behind the screen of all of our lives but somewhere in a database there is a perfect replication of us as a model so like there is no one listening to this where

you don't have seven different models on seven different hard drives of these different companies of exactly how old you are. Every time you've gone to the hospital, where you're likely to be based on the day and the time of the year, based off of all the information, where you actually are right the fuck now. You know, if you have a phone phone they know exactly where you are and all of these models are created so that they can try to guess what to put in front of you inside of these um programs to keep you to stay on site so the thing i want to zoom in on is the internet itself is not a bad place it is it saved my life you know like i gave that story earlier the crawlers are specifically the programs who have the business model where they need you to see ads so they're the things you don't pay for and if their highest optimization feature is for time on site that creates a unique type of monster in the shimmer that is trying to

eat your attention. And the truth is, everyone listening to this, you're in the midst of being gorged upon. And it's just a fact. One of the games I try to play with people, I've done it with probably about 100 people now in person, is I ask them to guess how many times they picked up their phone yesterday. And people will guess all sorts of numbers. And then if they have an iPhone, I'll ask them to actually go look because iPhone has a built-in feature now where it'll let you see. The average amount that people are off by is double. So the average is it's double whatever they thought,

which should be alarming in and of itself. But the research shows the average amount of times that a person in our generation checks their phone per day. Guess how many times someone, and you're not normal. A hundred. So if you checked your phone a hundred times a day and you slept for eight hours a day, on average, you'd be checking your phone every 10 minutes the average is 200 and look at that i just did it right yeah

twice as much as i thought so now check this out well what a lot of people if you don't study psychology or if you don't have a degree in psychology you won't know this but people who do know this and it's kind of like an inside secret. And it's that there is a phenomenon that it is incredibly hard to design a study, to study the behavior of the people in it without them knowing that they're in a study because people are on their best behavior when they're in a study. So that effect still produced the average being 200. So the truth is, it's more than that. Like the truth is that it's more than that. The truth is that it's more than that. If you check your phone 200 times a day, on average, you're checking your phone every 4.9 minutes. The average amount of time it takes your consciousness to fall into a state of deep

focus, depending on how hard the task is and how good you are at the task, it takes about 10 minutes. So that would mean that statistically, the average person is perpetually distracted, like every single day since 2011, basically. And I haven't seen research on this, but I'm pretty sure that this is like a fact of physiology, that in the same way that our physiology has evolved to need to sweat and to move to be healthy our mind needs to drop into deep focus to feel healthy and so um there are entities inside of the shimmer who are uh here's a game that's happening whenever you're on the computer and the game is you have the opportunity to learn anything but at the same time there are these entities that are trying to find you and the moment they find you they're trying to keep you locked into them as long as you possibly can and so like the shimmer has the capacity to unlock anyone's life to become what they want it to be.

If informational wealth is the thing that can help them change their life. And the truth is informational wealth can change almost anything about your life. It's not going to help you walk if you lost your legs. But almost anything else with the right informational wealth, you can build the life you want. Almost all of that is available in the shimmer. That's a real part of the game. And there are these crawlers moving through there and it's Instagram, it's Facebook, it's Twitter. Technically, the thing that's really interesting, and this is kind of a side note, and some people won't like this because they want to hate Apple, but if you actually track what's happening, Apple, there is an informational war happening

between all of these higher entities. And it's not right to call them higher entities, these fucking corporations. But like a part of Apple's, like Apple is fighting with Meta with trying to like block that company from being able to access things through the phone that they shouldn't be able to access because they had been. And Apple found out a couple of years ago and they fucking created all these changes. And for people who are into like running ads, before Apple

figured this out, what you were able to do with your ad placement through Facebook got to the point where a couple of court cases happened because people got to do some really creepy shit because they learned, oh my God, I think, again, calling back to Schmachtenberger, that fucking asshole of the truth, the way that he breaks it down is, I forget exactly the names of the people, but when the top chess champion finally played deep blue in chess, he was the greatest game player of that game of any human on the planet he knew he was playing the game he knew he was playing chess he lost to a artificial or he lost to a computer whose sophistication is unfathomably less competent than the algorithms that we're

dealing with and he lost then we're in a situation now where every single one of us are playing a game that we don't know we're playing, that we haven't ever trained to play, and we're playing against an opponent that is orders of magnitude more powerful than the computer that beat the chess champion, you know, like 50 years ago. So the crawlers are there and they're real

and they're replicating us and that's just... So again, like, I really think this movie is a waking myth. So we've gone through three of them. The most disturbing one is the first thing, which is that everyone who goes into it, they, they start to go crazy and they either kill themselves or they kill each or they kill each other so jonathan height is a social psychologist that i've been tracking for 10 plus years because he writes phenomenal books and i've been reading all of his books and i haven't heard from him in a while and it's and he just came out with a book a couple of weeks ago and i bought it and i read it now it's just like like i'm still reeling from what i read in that book. It could make me cry right now.

Positively? Because I've liked his work from the past, but I don't know if he went woke or if shit changed. No, it's definitely not. Okay. It's not woke. He is probably one of the most without feeling like a right winger. He is a liberal, but his book five years ago or four years ago was uh

the coddling of the american mind and it was him and a co-worker were looking exactly at what happened in universities to make everyone so fucking reactionary and like weak so he's he's inside of the machine like he's definitely a liberal but he is anti-woke but not so anti-woke where the people who could hear him that need to hear him can still hear him. So I think it's really cool. But so he came out with a book just a couple of weeks ago called The Anxious Generation. And I started to read it and it was the crystallization of this whole thing because it is, we're going to get into some weird shit and some heavy shit. So the mind calendar predicts that 2012 was going to be the end of the world.

And then people say, no, it's not 2012, it's 2020 or 2024. But that was something that was believed for a long time. Terence McKenna's algorithm that he created in a computer using the I Ching predicted that the end of the world would be 2012. I just found this out a month and a half ago. Carl Jung had a dream like three days before he died, or maybe like a week before he died, that he saw a apocalypse or a cataclysm hitting Earth 50 years from now. And he died in 1961.

So 50 years after his death would be 2011. So those things were moving around in my mind. And then I start reading this book and what the anxious generation talks about is that we are in the midst of the most dramatic mental health epidemic that has ever existed in recorded history. And the way he starts the book is something happened in 2011. And then he starts showing all of these graphs about how in 2011, something happened where all mental health issues just started to rise. And 2011 is years before COVID. And every possible critique that people have about where this evidence is going to go, read his book,

because he clearly has been arguing about this idea with smart people for a long time. And he spends long swaths of the book going through the rebuttals of why it's not economic, why it's not because of wars, why it's not because this younger generation is more open to talking. No, it's none of that. And just read his book and let him show you graph after graph.

And if you have arguments, you fucking email him, you know? But what he shows is like all mental illness starts to spike. And the mental illnesses spike harder for the younger generations and so like uh depression has gone up massively um anxiety has gone up massively eating disorders and all these other things have gone up massively but the starkest evidence because all of that first shit is self-report the starkest evidence is the amount of hospitalizations for preteens who attempt to kill themselves has gone up over 100% to 200% since 2011, depending on how you cut the data. It affects young girls more than it does boys, and there's technical reasons for that that we can get into but so the amount of hospitalizations for people attempting to kill themselves preteens and the amount of actual suicides amongst preteens

have gone up dramatically and what he does is he breaks down in 2011 was the first creation of the smartphone with a front-facing camera in 2011 was the invention of instagram in 2012 facebook buys instagram and it goes from a couple million to like 100 million people and then what he basically says is the smartphone plus the uh upgrade in speed of wi-fi plus the crawlers he doesn't call them that, but plus the algorithms or the companies whose business model is to capture attention and to optimize attention on site. The coalescence of those three things has,

the way I talk about it, it's like an atomic bomb erupted out of the shimmer in 2011, and we've all been hit by it. And the result of it is like the adults are just distracted and stupid, but the teenagers who are growing up in it, it is wounding them in a way where they're the most, they have the hardest starting point that has been the case for a long time. And that Haidt's recommendations are... So one of the things I want to zoom in on is, without getting too technical the correlation between pre-teen social media use and mental health be coming to the point where it's like a full-blown disorder is a higher correlation than a child being exposed to lead as a child and then having developmental issues when they're older. It's almost double the correlation. And his thing is like,

social psychology is hard to measure and people's brains start to tune out when they hear correlation coefficient, 0.09, blah, blah, blah. But he's like, if parents understood the correlation that we're observing here, no one would argue with my recommendations

it would just be as obvious as not feeding your child lead pain like that's not exactly what he said but that's a that's really close to what he said and so his recommendations are no uh phone like no smartphone until you're like 14 or 15, no social media until you're like 15, until you're 16, no phones in schools whatsoever, and a cultural emphasis on unsupervised play. Because the big thing that he weaves throughout that book is what makes humans healthy is what he argues is the most important thing that we could measure in childhood that predicts a healthy adult is the amount of unsupervised play the children have amongst each other. That a bunch of shit gets activated and we work things out and we grow and we learn how to attune and we learn how to solve problems.

Embodied, unsupervised play amongst kids. It's just the creme de la creme. So those are his recommendations. God bless him. That's not happening. And so when I took all that in, I've been talking about the shimmer nonstop for the last two months. And I've recorded a bunch of podcasts. And it's like, so I think we're in a new world. And we're at the, mythically what I see is a bomb has gone off.

And the bomb has affected everybody. And I think whoever the people were that have been pulling the strings and just like the awful, like the most awful people, they've been hit by this too. We have created a technology that no human on this planet knows how to interact with unless they've trained their attention like a monk or they got lucky and they've lived their life away from this thing, basically their whole life. But the people who have lived away from it their whole life, they're just waiting to be destroyed because they don't have the immune system to deal with this thing. And so what I see is we're in this really unique space. And this might be Don Quixote energy,

but I really do think that all the fuckers who've been pulling the strings, they've all been hit by this too. They're dazed and confused. All of their kids are fucked up too. Like no one is spared from this. And so we're in this weird post-bomb thing where like the bomb has just gone off

and some people are just starting to like blink and like you know trying to get their like vision to just start to comprehend that everything has been wiped out and that like the task of our time right now is to re to remember and to retrain how to use our focus, our attention the way we want to. One, just so we can be with each other. But then the task, I think, of our time is to learn how to maintain that in the shimmer,

to start to help other people who are just in it, asleep, to wake up. And so this is where it starts to get spooky again. I want to try to bring it to hope and talk about what I'm doing about this and what I think can be done and where I think people can start and get into the practices and the blah, blah, blah. But my deep, and I would love to be wrong about this but my deep core intuition is that a process has started that we can't stop even if there's a flare from the sun the sun would have to hit both sides of the earth equally well to make all of the electronics not work, and that's just not going to fucking happen. It's the shimmer is here, and I see it as like the amniotic fluid of the imaginal cells

that start to break down the caterpillar, and the code that is going to inform whatever is going to be the thing is that's going to come out of this, which is going to, again, this might be completely wrong, but my guess is at some point there is going to be a runaway AI that is going to be able to just Pac-Man all of the information that's been absorbed in the shimmer and that will become the unconscious code that then will, you know, create the conscious mind of whatever this thing is in the same way that with us, 99.99% of our code is unconscious. And we have this little light of consciousness and we choose from that point. And that we have a tremendous amount of unconscious code that sucks. Like evolution has seen to it that like, there's a part of us that wants to

rape. There's a part of us that wants to kill and keep and hide and all those things but there's also something in our in our collective in each of us there's this little whisper of like the good the true and the beautiful it's our dharma it's the thing that like wants to create and wants to help and does and we don't know where it comes from there's just this little sliver i I think we are currently, through our behaviors every day, inputting the code of the unconscious mind of whatever this thing will be when it eventually wakes up. And currently, the majority of the code is our fear, our addiction, our anger, our lust,

our reactionariness all of it but i think that uh like my mythic game for the dharma artist is like if you're an artist and you're waking up because we've been hit by a bomb the game is not to try to get your shit in the guggenheim that's that was pre-bomb life the way that I see it is the bomb has gone off. How can you use your art to help in a post-explosion world? And I think it's learn how to surf the shimmer and put your dharma into it so that it can fragment out because the shimmer will fragment will duplicate anything it's it's indiscriminate with what it shares it just shares what spreads and so one of the things is we've never had an opportunity in history where a idea whose time has come

can spread to eight billion people in less than a day like so the the opportunity for the revolutionary artist to just say that thing write that thing draw that thing and it's spread everywhere is the most potent it's ever been in history and i think like putting as much of your dharma art into the shimmer and just have it be reflecting and help people wake up and then help people put their art. That if we can get 1% of the total code to be people's genuine creative love and compassion and all that stuff. That when the thing does, if it has even one percent then it's going to be actually like us meaning like there's a little thread of the true and the good and the beautiful and then it has the same opportunity that each of us have in our life you know where it's like

you have the capacity to just abort your dharma and And this is something that I think is like, it's an uncomfortable spiritual idea that you can fuck it up, but I actually think you can't fuck it up. And you just have to look at mental illness to be as like, to believe that you can't fuck it up and that everything is, you know, like just. The argument might be, well, they chose to incarnate as a crazy person, this go around. Right. And it's like. They chose to lose their mind. Like I don't, having experienced the similar experience to what you've experienced.

No, thank you. Yeah. Like, I think we are something that the earth grows and just like everything else that the earth grows, there is a magic in it as long as it's alive, but it can be killed. It can be burnt. It can be ruined, but it is so relentless in how it will regenerate if there's any hope. And I think that we're all like that. And so I really think that the task of our time is to train our attention like an athlete, but it's more so like you need to learn how to swim or else you're going to die.

So it's either drown or learn how to swim, and learning how to swim is reclaiming our capacity to, it's really twofold, but it starts with just train how to keep your mind on one thing for an hour. And that alone is the task for most people for the next few years. It's just to train to get... So I created this game and it's really just like co-working, but I wrapped this whole myth around it to help people actually fucking feel the importance of it. Because I really do think it is this important is uh they're called

dharma sprints but essentially you choose an amount of time where you're going to intend to do one thing it can be anything it could be to be present with your kids but during that time you are not going to task switch you're not going to check your email you're not going to blah blah blah blah the whole thing and then afterwards you just like write a little note to yourself about what it was like to try to do that just to kind of like keep a record and then what happened when i so it's really crazy uh when i did the webinar and i shared this idea of this game of like this is what a Dharma sprint is. This is how you do it. I think there were like 600 people who were on the, no, I think it was like a thousand

actually were on the call. Like 180 people on the call created a, uh, I'm message group or whatever left the call to start doing the sprints with each other in real time because they knew they couldn't afford the course. Like that happened in the chat as I was teaching it. So that was my first like indicator of like, oh, is there like a, this might be a thing, distraction. Well, but right. And so then in my actual course, I taught my students how to do this.

And of their own accord, they started to do it with each other. And I saw the most out-of-class engagement that I've seen in six years of teaching where it's just like, wow, people really like that shit. And then once I started to teach it to my class, people in my actual physical life started to ask me about it. And now I've started doing sprints with some of my friends and i was thinking about this the other day in 12 years i've never been able to talk a single fucking person that i love into doing this type of thing with me because i've been doing this for like 10 years like because i needed to i've never been able to talk anyone into for two hours just fucking work on your dharma and now i'm in a situation where uh by

giving it to strangers and charging them for it because i really think that charging people for things like this gets them to actually try new shit had a ripple effect into my actual physical life where people are now starting to work on this thing. And so then through the course, people started to love this. And I was like, wow. And so then I recorded a podcast. I taught people how to do it. And you can do it for free. You can do this anywhere with anyone.

But what happened is once my class ended, one of the students was like, let's do a container because she is in the process of writing a book. And she was like, I've been stuck on this book for a while. Let's do a 40-day initiation where we wake up every day at 5 a.m. Because she's on the West Coast, so it's 5 a.m. And we do it every day for 40 days. And everyone was like, you know, like, no.

But without going too deep into it, the student who recommended this is someone who shouldn't be my student. She is an incredibly successful artist. And it's just like, when she offered that, I was like, yes, I would pay you thousands of dollars

to do this with you. And the fact that you're offering this, it's just like a challenge to us. So I was like, fuck yeah, I'm in. And then once I said, yeah, a couple of people started being like, ah, long story short, we're on day 23 of that. And every morning we get together on zoom and I do a little preamble. and then we all just work on our one thing for an hour and a half and then uh two or three people will share with the group about what it was like to like try to do that thing for an hour and a half and the shares every day have been magic but uh it turned into the dharma artist collective And so now there's a community and it's a paid community.

It's 50 bucks a month and it's going to be 100 bucks a month once I get my first group in. And one of the things that's so interesting is everything that we pay for is purposefully positioned in a way where the number, like they do studies and they try to come up with the numbers that were the least likely to notice so it's always like 47 or 99 and it's because they don't want you to feel that it's actually what it costs you know because once tax comes in and blah but like i want this to feel like a thing that you notice. Because it's like, and I did a journey and it was like 100,

like keeping it 100 with yourself. Like I want, so it's not 99, it's going to be 100. But anyways, I have learned the hard way through like 10 plus years of trying to just share the things that I'm learning that is helping me and just watching no one around me listen. But then when I charge money for it, it actually helps people

and I actually see people's lives improve. And it's such an interesting thing. Like the elephant in the room is money for most people. And everyone talks about like healing should be free. And it's like the person who is offering whatever the thing is if it's good if they're not full of they've dedicated years and years and years to the thing and the other part is people need a little poke to change their momentum you know and the price is actually the poke to get people to change their momentum.

And just as a really interesting piece of evidence, the three people in my first class that just ended, you know, a couple of weeks ago who didn't pay full price were the people who I work with and they got to pay less. I didn't give it to anyone for free because I know that if I give it to you for free, you wouldn't do it. The only people who didn't do the homework, the only people who didn't show up were the three people who didn't have to pay the full thing. And they showed up sometimes. But everyone who was there and who were all in, every call, they fucking did the homework. And they've been doing the sprints in the morning and i feel now like i have this thing in my hands where it's like uh this you know co-working game

is like changing people's lives so the first piece of technology is the sprints the other piece that changes the sprints from co-working to actually dharma art is this thing that i call eating death cookies so death cookies is an idea that comes from phil stutz who i think is one of the greatest living psychiatrists like he is a magician and he has this idea called death cookies where it's um you have a soul sorry to tell it to you but you have a soul and your soul when it sees certain things out in the game of life it like calls you to do that thing and as soon as you feel the call from your soul to do a thing and you don't do it a process starts and the process leeches life force from you and it goes into that task and it erodes

the longer you don't do those things the more it erodes your self-belief and your self-respect and your self-love and it just is how the game of life seems to work so that's why they're called death cookies is they actually eat your life force when you don't do them. But the reason they're cookies is that the moment you do them, the moment you actually do the thing that you've been resisting, you not only get back all the life force it ate from you, you get a little bit more that you didn't have before because you did something that you didn't think that you could do. So his whole thing is the game of life is you're always going to have to work, period. You will always have to try every day. Go find the death cookie every day. And so the combination of the sprints and the death cookies

are like, sometimes your death cookie is just like, do taxes but then once you start to eat those mundane death cookies you can start to hear the bigger death cookies and like everybody listening to this has they are the fat kid and matilda and they have death cakes around them but they should be the fat kid and try to eat it but they don't and it's like you have something to say to your partner you have something to say to your boss you know you're not in the right place. You know, you've been ignoring your body and not doing, and it's just this. And as you start to eat those things, your soul starts to wake up and your soul will eventually wake up to the point where the whole game changes and the game changes when you get to a point where your ego learns oh my god i have to do the things that my soul tells me to do and so i have to i just i don't have a choice

anymore yeah there is no there is no decision because i know it's the way and so uh when you put these two things together people start to connect to the fact that the sprint is often not about answering your emails, but sometimes it is. The sprint is like the first sprint of the day ought I think, is some combination of how to help people once they recognize they have a dharma and they're starting to train their attention. It's like, now how do you play in the shimmer that actually helps people and allows you to not have to worry about money, not be a millionaire unless that's what you actually want. But I don't ever want to make enough money where it becomes my occupation to manage my money. I don't give a fuck about that. As an artist, I want to create the systems in my life where I'm helping people. And the result of me helping people is that I get a paycheck and that 100% of the money that I make is from helping people. And I get to fucking afford to give my children the healthiest possible food. I can afford to go through the annoying eye-rolling thing of figuring out, okay, what type of water devices do I have to have in my house so

that my kids aren't fucking poisoned? You know this better than anybody. There is this tragic aspect of health where it's like, if you're stressed out and poor, the defaults of our life are injuring you and everybody you love. And it's so fucked up. And it's actually expensive, both cognitively and actually financially, to create a home that isn't inherently toxic. And I have empathy for people who don't want to look at that. Because if you're working two jobs

And you hate both of them and you're struggling, you know to just take care of your one child You don't have fucking time You don't have the emotional capacity. It's not that you don't it's just incredibly hard to have the emotional capacity to think about glyphosate To think about the fact that almost everything that you're buying that's inside of a package is actually just fucking inflammatory and how your child's learning disabilities are probably 97% the result of the constant inflammatory ingredients and all the things that are happening in the house. So that brings us hopefully to the point where uh this now feels like uh what my life is about which is um having a personal practice of cultivating my capacity to attend to

the proper things to not task switch to talk about the shimmer as much as i possibly can to help people notice like that we are in a new world. And that if you're untrained in this new world, you are being injured to the point where it could lead to death. And that it is this invisible thing that most people haven't figured out how to articulate clearly so it punches. But, you know, 100 years ago, most people didn't even have the fucking option to try to connect to their dharma because they had to do what they needed to do to not die. And most people didn't have to deal with the pressure of choosing their dharma because it just wasn't even a fucking option. In the last like 40 years, things have started to open up in the Western world where people are now having to deal with the fact that they can choose. And there's a great quote from Peter Drucker who is like, if Alan Watts was a consultant for Fortune 100 companies, it would be Drucker. He's all about business, but you can fucking see that he is

like a mystic and he has this great quote and I wish I could remember it specifically but he's like a hundred years from now historians will look back at our time and they're not going to talk about the phone they're not going to talk about the computer they're not going to talk about the atomic bomb they're going to talk about the fact that for the first time in history, the majority of people are having to learn how to manage themselves, and we are completely unprepared for it. And it's that we actually have the choice. And so with the shimmer, the fact is, anyone listening to this right now,

if they, for a year, did two sprints a day, where the first sprint they just ingested the just right material that would inspire them. So like reading the just right book that's just to feed your soul. And then sprint two was creating something from that and putting it into the shimmer. And they did that every day for a year if they make four or five reasonable easy technical choices with how they do that they will have the opportunity to leave whatever job they have if if their overhead is less than like 150k a year like that is a thing that literally anybody who is willing to learn how to play that game has as an opportunity and it's never been the case before in history so the shimmer is this really interesting thing where it's like it is both the greatest opportunity

that people who weren't born with a golden spoon in their mouth have to create the life that they want and if you are untrained here it will fucking kill you god damn that was fucking phenomenal brother is there anything else you want to add to that i mean that's a pretty steep mic drop does anything come up for you like are there any things that like stand out or anything yeah i'll tell you right now you know because i i and i've talked about this on solo cast before i don't really associate podcast listeners with you know instagram and followers on twitter and shit like that but when i quit in

was it february of 2020 we were in Tulum. I jumped off all social media permanently. I'd read Cal Newport's book, Digital Minimalism, had the deep dive with Boyd Vardy, and I could just see it like an infection within myself first. At any great moment, I would think, I should have got that on, I should have got a photo, or I should have got a video of that. It was dope, and we missed it. Or I would capture something. And then I spend the next hour thinking of how can I word this in a way that will capture the audience or really speak to them or really convey what the message I'm trying to do or gain more followers, whatever the fucking intent was.

And that started to eat and erode. That background app ate away at me being in the moment to the degree where I said, I can't do it. I'm out. And, you know, it was at that event where I realized the other side of that coin is 99% of the people here didn't get here from a podcast. They got here from Instagram. They got here, they found out about us, you know, and they might've listened to a podcast or two after that, but they found us because of social media, you know? And so I could always see these two things. And then the world got really weird, you know? And then, and then after the weirdness, you know? And so I could always see these two things. And then the world got really weird, you know? And then after the weirdness, you know, I realized like, it's a lot easier for

me to connect to people via one of these things rather than a website or email capture or fucking write a newsletter. That's a one-way street. You know, it's the only way I'm going to get that. I don't have time to flip through fucking email after email. I can't even hire somebody to do that. Let me, I can at least see the comment section if I dare. And I could see, you know, so Tasha and I, um, re reformed her Instagram into the living with the Kingsbury's. And even there, I post very rarely, right. Very rarely because it's for me, it's easier to, it's easier to, you know, shut that thing out and, and not get caught in it and focus. So I have no trouble with my sprint. I have no trouble with laser-like focus on things. But the thing that stood out to

me was that the shimmer, to not be the 0.1% who operate outside of that or is waiting to be eaten alive, you have to be in the game. You have to be in the world, operate outside of that or is waiting to be eaten alive. You have to be in the game. You have to be in the world, but none of that world. And you have to sprinkle your sweet sauce. Your art has to go into that thing to affect the totality. It's like,

that's like a big aha for me, you know, from, from, yeah, huge, absolutely huge. You know, like it couldn't have been a better argument for me to be back on those

things than than hearing that listening to that and not just from the ai standpoint even though i fully recognize what you're talking about right that the thread that point that we have that if we listen to grows you know of the ought to you know the the angel on the shoulder rather than all the fucking devil it ain't it ain't one and one you know there's a hundred guys in red red fucking suits on my shoulders and one that's telling me to do the right thing but the more we listen to that the more that changes and and it's not just a you know do what's right kind of conscience it's it's not jiminy cricket it's it's the jiminy cricket for me right that tells me yeah get in the ice bath

when you don't want to. It's like, all right, I'm going to walk my dogs. I got to walk these puppies every day and we're just going to sell them. I don't need to walk them. But other than that, they don't get to walk. So like, I'm not going to walk them and I'm going to walk Guapo.

And we do that. I do two, two and a half miles every morning and I sweat balls profusely. Just when I fucking roll out of bed, I got a coffee and I do that. And it's like, I know it's good for me. And it still is a pain in the ass, but it's the ought to. And when I say yes to that, it makes the whole rest of the day easy.

It feeds my fucking soul. And that's a place where my first sprint is an hour of that. And that clears the air for everything else. If I got to think about shit, I think about it on that walk. If I don't, I might listen to audible. Right. But that makes, that makes so much sense to me too. And even from the, from the body, right? Like you're teaching this on the psyche, you're teaching mentally fit. How much of that relates back to the practices of the body? Cause we've taught together. We do teach together at fit for service events and we definitely do.

It's us as a tandem in full temple reset. So I've learned a lot from you just in co-coaching with you there. But there's so much overlap. And I've talked about that. Like the body is my tuning fork. And if I get my body right, that's what's going to be a prerequisite to me getting my mind right. Because if I'm in pain or I'm fucking a sloth from eating like shit and i can't and i have no energy right that's an uphill battle to try to get to a place almost like maslow's hierarchy of needs

right like if i if something's hurting or i'm not if i'm out of sorts because my physical body's not taken care of i'm just have no chance of being mentally right you know but so much of how you get physically right is with the mindset to do so. It's with that pinpoint accuracy that says, this is hard, but I need to do this and I'm going to do this for me. And then from that, that compounding interest starts to take place the longer you have the habit formed. And it overlays. All the things we talk about, the Atomic Habits book, which James Cleary came on the podcast years ago, right after it came out.

Oh, wow. 2%, right? Pat Riley, 1980s Lakers. You know, we don't have to be the best at shooting. We don't have to be the best at defense. I want us 2% better in each of the five categories. Passing, dribbling, defense, shooting, rebounding. 2% better in each of those.

And he did that with Magic Johnson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, fucking, you know, like the best of the best. And they won all those championships because of that. Charlie Francis, coach of Ben Johnson, 88 Olympics, greatest runner, pre-Usain Bolt. All eight test positive. They give it to number two, right? They didn't want to destroy the Olympics.

He said, you know, two quotes. He said, the game, the playing field is level. It's just not the playing field you think it is. I loved that. And the secondary to that is if you're not getting one to 3% better, every time you step on the field, every time you step on the track, or every time you enter the gym, you're doing something wrong or you're doing it too often. One to 3% better, you know, but you don't get that without doing the challenging thing of course correcting, you know, which is all mental. It 100 there so i love that man there's so much overlay um in what you're talking about and what's necessary to create the positive change

necessary in what i'm teaching so because one of the things that i don't get to talk about often but i want to and like there's this idea coming through and maybe we can jazz on it at some point later, but the Dharma athlete and the way that I'm thinking about this is it's like, if you study the history of the greatest inventors, creators, painters, engineers, the people who got the most out of their mind they have some things in common with how they took care of their body now there's a lot of weird shit that you can still do

and have great insights but one of the really interesting things is one um most people have heard about the 10 000 hour rule and how like the way to get to be a master at something is to do deliberate practice for multiple hours a day and that's but the number two most important pattern that all of these masters had that the researcher eric erickson found in the studies uh do you know what it is say what is the number one so the the number one thing he found as a pattern between all of them is that they had deliberate practice for hours a day. For mastery. Right.

Almost no one knows about the next almost as significant pattern that almost all of them had in common. Well, it might be, I don't know, because I'm thinking of the one from kids from Leonard Sacks' book that determined, and I'll just break this down, but it determined financial success, relationship success, general personal sense of well-being and happiness. Was there one thing? And can I guess? Yeah. I think that one is eating with your family around a table. No, that's a great one. So they showed that even one day, so six out of seven days was like the minimum.

And if it dropped to five there was a marked decrease wow in in overall outcome yeah it's hard work you know could they if they thought of themselves as a hard worker and actually had chores and had parents that told them no if you don't eat that you're going to go to bed hungry if they had the container and hard work they that related to financial success business relationship all of it takes hard work. So it's the grit, basically. Exactly. So in that study, he was observing behaviors.

If he had studied psychology, grit would be the number one thing, actually. But of observable behaviors, the number two thing was the amount of sleep they got and that they all took a nap. Yeah, fuck yeah. was the amount of sleep they got and that they all took a nap. And so- Yeah, fuck yeah. And so I learned this in college because I got my area of expertise in college was cognitive psychology.

And so I got to learn all this stuff and I'm so blessed and graced because cognitive psychology is the closest to like a hard science in the psychologies just because they're actually measuring things in the biology and things like this but that the most effective way to convert what's in working memory and short-term memory into long-term memory is to take a nap right after you do the deliberate practice so like for me i

don't even think about it but like a part of my like athletic regimen for my mind is napping. And naps are this glorious thing to me, but most people I know don't nap. And they relate to being tired as a thing they need to drink caffeine for. They need to take something to get over the hump. But I actually love feeling tired midday because I want that nap because i know how good it is for me so like that's one of the examples of like there's a whole suite of practices that i'm starting to play with that like it's for the person who wants to be like a olympic level dharma artist there's a whole like diet you know just like if it causes inflammation, my Dharma practice has helped clean up my diet. The family I came from, I am miles and miles and miles ahead of what the pattern should be.

But I'm friends with you, so there's miles to go. But I'm happy with where i'm at right now and a part of it like the main driver was once i started to do two to four hours of deep work every morning i started to really be able to feel the quality of my mind and i just started to like cut shit out not because i wanted to have abs but because i want this to feel like a fucking laser beam. Yep. And then the other big one is long walks. That's like a core thing amongst all creatives that are like really good is they have a deep bout of deep work for three to four hours and they go on a long fucking without their phone long walk. And so I'm just like,

there's a, like the medium through which I'm getting people's attention is the shimmer. So I'm just assuming that people are fucking broken in their brain. And so it's almost like I'm trying to start with the brain, but eventually I want to reach into the soma, you know. But yeah, it's going to be interesting like the next like year or two with what i'm talking about like there's going to be so much opportunity to like help people connect to like you do these practices so that the dharma art that can come through you because without beating the horse too much it really does feel like mythopoetically we are in a state of emergency that a bomb has gone off and that for the people who have the capacity to notice the moral obligation is to actually learn how to put your art into the shimmer

that that is actually the moral obligation because there's a great quote from i think it's john adams and he. And he says something like, my father studied war and Navy strategy and things like that so that I could study politics and economics so that my son could study music and art and all that shit. And what I take away from that is like,

if people saw and could feel what is happening, the moral obligation is to learn how to be in this thing so that you can start to help other people wake up in this thing. And then for us to fucking pour our good and true and beauty into this thing that's happening. Because Carl Jung thought he was going crazy because he was having visions of a red tsunami eating Europe.

And this was before World War I happened. And then as what created the Red Book book because he was trying to work through he thought he was going crazy because he didn't even consider that he was seeing a prophecy didn't even consider it he just thought he was going fucking crazy and then when world war one happened i wish i knew exactly how he tried to make sense of it but you can tell that a part of him was like whoa this is what the psyche can do this is and so then he like you know he literally like the most bone-chilling thing to me is that days before he died he had a dream of a cataclysm coming in 50 years i think it's here i think it's and it's not done. Like how we choose to interact with the shimmer is going to inform what it

becomes. And that, this is where I think we can end it. So we can end on like a bone chilling note. Cause fuck it, you know, something saucy, uh,

a friend. This is also, wow. I'm just having this insight. Now, uh, the same person who gave me the most recent book that clearly has gone through a psychosis and found his way through, he recommended a documentary to me that I'd never seen before about Jung. It was like an hour and a half long, and it's a bunch of raw recordings of the people closest to him.

And his main understudy, his main prote protege is a woman named marie von franz and there's she's i've seen a bunch of interviews with her and she's super like uh articulate well composed sometimes playful just a really integrated awesome human at the very end of this documentary you hear the interviewer ask her about that dream and on camera i can show it to you later she she it's all like i don't want to talk about that i don't want to talk about that and it's just like and it is literally like to the year the beginning of this phenomenon that you could call, it's not the shimmer, but it's the birth of the crawlers.

It's like 2011. And so we are in it at the beginning and how we interact with the shimmer every day is programming what it's going to become. So put your heart into it. Fuck yeah, brother. I love you, guys. I love you, too. Thank you.