Saturn Returns with Caggie - 8.1 Cosmic Journeys: Where Science meets Spirituality with Zach Bush

Episode Date: September 18, 2023

Today’s conversation is a thought-provoking one as we dive deep into the intersection of spirituality and science with renowned guest, Dr Zach Bush. Zach spent many years as a conventional doctor, specialising in internal medicine, endocrinology and hospice care. Disillusioned with the state of Western medicine, he began taking an integrative approach, studying the body’s microbiomes in relation to health, disease and food systems.  In this episode, Zach takes us on a journey that challenges conventional notions as he invites us to contemplate the strong connection between birth and death. He also delves into the concept of our infinite nature and challenges our limited perceptions of time and existence. Drawing from personal experiences, Dr. Bush shares his encounters with past relatives that highlight the infinite aspects of our being. He goes on to explain that acknowledging this infinite essence is how we can all become inspired to live with purpose and fully embrace the present moment.  You can find Zach on Instagram, Twitter and YouTube, or on his website and Farmer's Footprint. --- Follow or subscribe to "Saturn Returns" for future episodes, where we explore the transformative impact of Saturn's return with inspiring guests and thought-provoking discussions. Follow Caggie Dunlop on Instagram to stay updated on her personal journey and you can find Saturn Returns on Instagram, YouTube and TikTok.  Order the Saturn Returns Book. Join our community newsletter here.  Find all things Saturn Returns, offerings and more here.

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Saturn Returns with me, Kagi Dunlop. This is a podcast that aims to bring clarity during transitional times where there can be confusion and doubt. Today I am very excited to share with you this spectacular episode with the one and only Zach Bush. I have wanted to get Zach on this podcast forever. But fortunately, as fate would have it, one of my dear friends has been working with him. And so I asked her to put in a word. And he came over to the flat whilst he was visiting London. And, you know, he didn't disappoint. Zach is a very unique, exceptional character. Zach is a very unique, exceptional character.

He spent many years as a conventional doctor specializing in internal medicine, endocrinology, and hospice care. But he became a little bit disillusioned with the state of Western medicine and began taking his own approach, studying the body's microbiomes in relation to health, disease, and food systems. In this episode, Zach takes us on a spectacular journey. It's quite meditative, the way he speaks, and I have heard him talk before when he just kind of goes and flows on a subject, and he's so wise and knowledgeable that it's quite overwhelming at times. So I suggest listening a couple of times and we've actually had to break this conversation into two parts because there was

just so much wisdom in it. But he invites us to contemplate the strong connection between birth and death, this kind of cycle that is very, very much intertwined with Saturn Returns. It's a big theme of the Saturn Returns course, which is now available. This idea that actually we go through sort of multiple deaths and rebirths, and that's part of the cycle and season of life. And if we look at nature, we can see that reflected at us. He also delves into the concept of our infinite nature and challenges our limited perceptions of time and existence. It's very, very macro, but it's also dealing with a lot of personal issues. And he shares some of his extraordinary encounters with past relatives that highlight

the infinite aspects of our being. He goes on to explain that acknowledging this infinite essence is how we can all become inspired to live with purpose and fully embrace the present moment. And when he talked about purpose and presence, I just felt so lit up. And I think he has this ability to really command people with the way he talks. And, you know, there are a few people that I know that I'm aware of that I truly believe are going to change the world. And I think that Zach is doing that and he's going to continue to do it. So it's a real honor to have him on the show. And I hope that you enjoy this conversation as much as I enjoyed having it. Some of the themes that really stood out for me in this conversation that relates to the Saturn Returns course that we have launched

are these themes around death and rebirth. This is a very, very big Saturnian principle. And so in the course, we go through how to let go of past versions of self there is a fire ritual exercise and I think it's really important that we allow ourselves the space to grieve things to let things go I always sort of equate this to nature how nature works in seasons and we work in the same way as well we just have to kind of adjust that framework we also touch on internal family systems therapy in this part of the course and going through our upper limits there's a meditation around that so we can kind of reach that next destination point and stop holding ourselves back from the things that we wish to achieve and to realize

if this sounds interesting to you you can head to saturnreturns.co.uk and the course is available there to purchase and I hope you enjoy it I would love to hear your thoughts if you are doing the course currently I love hearing the feedback from you all and getting the testimonials. So yeah, I can't wait to see what you guys think. Zach, welcome to the Saturn Returns podcast. I'm so happy to have you here today. How are you? I'm so good and so glad to be with you. I'm thrilled to have the opportunity for the conversation and be with your audience. Well, thanks for coming because where are you based? You're based in, you just told me, Virginia. Planet Earth, yeah. Most of the time.

All over the place, yeah. I have a home in Virginia in the countryside there. It looks a lot like the British countryside, actually. And that has been my kind of home base for the last 20 years or so. My son and I, and with the help of much of my extended family, built a log home there in the woods on six acres of woods there. So it's a haven and a bit of my journey expressed there in architecture. So I designed that home and spent a lot of years, 10 years building that and honestly still kind of needing to do more building on that and not quite done. But it's one of those creative projects that's been a joy for me, but I'm not home anymore. I think I was home about 20 days last year. So I just travel a lot these days. My kids are growing up and it's

freed me up to be really in a state of freedom. I've changed my relationship to self pretty deeply over these last couple of years, which has increased my state of freedom further. And so I'm just really enjoying this, like being able to meet you and drop in and be completely present and then keep the wings flapping. Freedom sounds like something that you've talked about a lot. And I want to get into that and your sort of journey of self-discovery, but for the audience that doesn't know, would you be able to explain a little bit about who you are and what you do? Yeah. I mean, the public historically has kind of known me as a medical doctor. I was trained in Western medicine, but

before that I was going into engineering and then took a hard left turn when I decided to take a year off from my university program because of heartbreak. I had my first girlfriend and she was kind of cheating on me throughout the relationship. And so kind of this stuttering, increasing heartbreak that only at 18, 19 years old can you be this dramatic in life. But I was like so heartbroken by the whole thing. I was like, I need to take a year off and find myself. And so in a melodramatic fashion, decided to take that year off and went to the Philippines. So that's what brought you to the Philippines. It was heartbreak. I mean, we'll get into it, but that was a huge transformational kind of awakening. Yeah. And the heartbreak was too. I had a series of pretty inside the box,

very conservative Christian worldview on value systems and ethics growing up. I grew up in a little church. My dad was one of the elders in the church that I grew up in. We didn't have a pastor, so all the elders kind of shared the teaching there. And so it was a very academic or intellectual approach to spirituality and religion, I guess. But we studied, you know, each book of the Bible would take us a year to get through a single book because each verse was kind of broken down into the Hebrew or the Greek. And we'd study the etymology of the meaning and all this. And so I had this really inside the box belief of like, well, you just, you know, stay a virgin and you're married to God basically until you get married and then you have kids. And, you know, it was very super traditional, if you want to call it that, but very conservative worldview. And then met this girlfriend, had never had a girlfriend before,

for that reason. It's kind of undateable because I was waiting for angels to show up and show me my wife. And I was excruciatingly shy. I was, oh my gosh. To give you a sense of how invisible I was to the world at this point, I graduated high school in the same town I grew up in Boulder. So born and raised in Boulder, Colorado, all the way through public school, kindergarten through high school. And on the day of graduation, I'm getting off the stage with my diploma in my hand. And this young girl comes up and she's like, Hey, I'm Kelly. Who are you? I haven't met you before. I'm like, Kelly, we've been in together in school since kindergarten. Like we just graduated. You don't even know my name. Like I couldn't believe it.

Like my locker throughout high school was like five lockers down from her. I just like, that was like one of those moments in life where I was like, holy smokes, I'm like on a different dimension than all these other people around me. Like I'm just unseen. And so that was getting most of my high schooling. But in my senior year, I dropped in with a girlfriend for the first time and she was completely the opposite of me. And she was like hell bent to like break my Christianism and break my ethics and everything else. And so it wasn't just heartbreak. It was soul break really, because the journey with her was, took me on a journey of frailty and a journey into realizing how, how much I would compromise of myself and my value systems in pursuit of love. And so the,

the heartbreak of that relationship really wasn't like she didn't love me or things like that. Like how to do a deal with that a little bit, it was deeper of like oh my god I held these value systems and this relationship at any point in that I could have said this is not going to be like a forever situation she really doesn't respect me she doesn't and she's like I said kind of cheating on me throughout it so that that journey was really one of looking at a divorce from self, you know, was what occurred during that relationship. Because of the self-abandonment. Self-abandonment, the effort to please someone else, the effort to serve someone else over myself, you know, and try to feel accepted. All those things crept in in ways that I hadn't expressed

in my life before. I was, I had this little crew of friends that I'd grown up with and it was like me and five other guys. And we were all extraordinarily weird, quirky, nerdy people. I spent all my junior high and high school years under cars in the garages, working on vehicles and restoring classic cars. And so I was just like a greasy, you know, wrench turner kind of blue collar kid. And we loved it. We loved each other. We loved the journey of adventure building stuff. I was constantly building. I learned how to build houses. I learned how to build cars and learned how to do all that with that crew. We went through Boy Scouts together and we just were so tight. They still are some of my best friends today, half a century later. So it's like one of the best things that could have happened to a kid happened to me where I just had this really, really foundational

group of friends that were kind of unflappable. But the relationship kind of threw you off. And then this thing came along and pulled me off those friendships, pulled me off of, you know, all my attention turned to this thing because the world has showed me this model of you serve this more than anything else. If you're in partnership, that is your priority and you sacrifice everything for that. And I got to see what I sacrificed and I sacrificed, you know, communication and relationship to my parents and family because they didn't didn't approve of that situation. She didn't fit into their paradigm of a good, you know, person or girlfriend for me. And so it distanced me from my family, distancing me from my friends

because I was putting so much energy into that into that partnership belief system. And so that whole thing, even though it was a relationship that lasted probably 10 months, less than a year, it really just destroyed much of the fabric of what I had built in the years before that. But you were so young. Yeah, but really freaking earnest. Apparently. Ridiculously earnest this kid. so young yeah but really freaking earnest it takes most people about 30 or 40 years to go I think I've been self-abandoning I was absolutely that kid I was like so took it so seriously so it's so seriously that you took a year out. Oh, yeah. Went to the Philippines.

Because I needed to find myself again. And that was the realization of like, and it was actually in church one day after the breakup and everything else that I was like, if I compromised myself that much for that, then who am I? And I came home from church, ate lunch, maybe an hour after making this pronouncement to God that, you know, I'm going to dedicate a year of my life to finding myself or you just show me the path kind of thing. And the phone rings and it's an aunt of mine that I vaguely knew. And she was calling to talk to my dad or something. And I was the one to answer the phone. I was like, hey, what are you up to? And I said, well, I'm going to take a year off. And what do you want to do?

And I was like, well, I think vaguely I just want to be in service and maybe in service to a spiritual pursuit and all this. And she says, well, why don't you just come to the Philippines and birth babies? I'm running this international midwifery clinic and we need help all the time. And I was like, I don't know anything about any of the words you just said, but that sounds interesting. And it sounds like when you travel and she's like, oh, why don't you come and just live and stay in the Philippines for six months? So I'm like, all right. So I worked busting tires in a tire company, discount tire company for six months to make enough money to get over there and support myself through that journey and all that.

So that was my year 19 was kind of going on that journey and exploration over there and that was quite a aha moment for you and your whole awakening actually being seeing changed everything seeing people or children being born because I guess what's unique about you is you've had the experience of that and then a lot of experience at the end of life what does that kind of taught you about those were the bookends for sure so I my medical journey was long so when I decided I was going into medicine I came back switched out engineering went to pre-med pre-med is not a degree, so it's more of like a minor, but you declare pre-med than some sort of major. And I ended up with a Spanish literature major, so I studied Spanish literature

and medicine with the idea of initially that I'd be a nurse or something like that, because I didn't think I was a good student and hadn't been a good student historically. And about a year or so in, there was a new field emerging, which was the nurse practitioner and physician assistant programs. And that started opening up my mind of like, oh, I could do something a little bit more advanced degree. And all I knew about myself was good with my hands. I could build houses and cars and all that. And so I figured if I was going to go into medicine, I'd probably be using my hands. And so, so that was the idea. So I just went down the PA route for a period of time and to pay myself through college, I was working in

landscaping a lot and also in construction, but I was on a big landscaping job one day and a sprinkler main had broken at a golf course that my company was taking care of. And so we had dug this like 10 foot hole out of mud to get down to this sprinkler main. So I was literally like head to toe covered with mud with one of my best friends. He's a paramedic and working with the landscaping company. And we're talking about my future career. And he's like, you know, you should just do medical school because it's like only another year or something from your PA training and all that. And I was like, OK. That was like the extent of my information, my decision making.

What I didn't realize is I just signed up for 17 years of training in academic pursuits that I could not have imagined at the time. And so it was a very long journey into the MD world. I didn't get into medical school the first year that I applied. So I did a bunch of volunteer work and eventually got into medical school. And then medical school, like pretty much week one, I suddenly realized I was going to be good at this thing. Why? I'm a very visual learner or visual experiential mind. And on the first day at med school, I started gross anatomy and so started dissecting a human body.

And on that journey, realized, oh my gosh, I get this whole thing. And suddenly the biochemistry, cell biology, everything that I had struggled with in my undergrad pre-med stuff suddenly started to take three-dimensional shape instead of be this abstract stuff I was memorizing. I suddenly realized I was going to have a three-dimensional system that I could learn. And it immediately just changed everything. And I honored pretty much everything in medical school for four years. I just couldn't miss. It felt like I just got everything on a level I had never gotten anything before in some ways. And that was, that moment for you was when you were doing the sort of anatomy and seeing things. Why did that have such an effect, particularly?

I think it was similar to my journey with watching the first babies that I birthed. The first baby I birthed alone was in the back of a van in the Philippines. I was, it was like three o'clock in the morning and this woman had shown up on the doorstep of my aunt's house and the doorbell rang. Somebody rang the door and ran off and left this woman standing at the door hemorrhaging and she couldn't talk. She had been born with pretty significant brain injuries and cerebral palsy kind of stuff. And so she was pretty handicapped herself and probably didn't realize she was pregnant, didn't have much cognition, understand what was going on, but she was hemorrhaging in kind of a medium term pregnancy.

And so just put her in the van and my aunt was driving to a hospital. It was about a 30 minute drive away. And so I'm in the back with this woman, and I'm trying to change towels and control the hemorrhaging situation without any knowledge of really what to do. And then moments into the drive, this tiny little infant was born into my hands, and it was probably a two-pound little infant, tiny, tiny, tiny thing. The whole thing fit in the palm of my hand really and uh blue blue and kind of at night the flashing of street lights kind of coming through the windows of the van and

everything else and i'm just staring down at this little miracle of life and it suddenly takes a breath after a couple minutes assumed it was dead and it suddenly took a breath and so then i'm my aunt had been kind of talking me through it because I'm like freaking out in the back of this van in the first place. And so she was trying to do her best to talk me through it. And then it took a breath and I'm like, oh my gosh, it's alive, what do I do?

And she just very calmly was like, you know, just hold it, keep it warm. And so I'm holding this thing between my two hands and feeling a heartbeat through that tiny little frail body and it was beyond miraculous. It was the most, it was the closest I had come to touching source energy because there was so much energy in that tiny near lifeless little biology and we got to the hospital.

I'm sure it died a couple of days later, but it stayed alive long enough and maybe came into this world in part to change my life and change my sense of self because I couldn't look at myself anymore with the same sense of passiveness, I guess, after that moment, because I realized this is what I come from too. And so when I started gross anatomy, the woman's body that I was dissecting was in her 80s. And so you're seeing life on kind of both sides of the scale from that infant to this elder. And she was tiny, also a tiny little frail body and you know the first incisions that we were making into into that body pretty quickly got into the chest and torso and when you see a human heart for the first time it kind of does the same thing to you as seeing an infant

just like a sudden sense of source energy and just the miracle of a body. The heart's such an intricate, you know, cathedral of space. And the nuances of the muscle that creates that heart is really dauntingly miraculous. And so I think at that point, I understood that I would be not only understanding a three-dimensional structure, but it was a three-dimensional structure that held something infinite within it and was designed to hold the infinite.

And that, I believe, is kind of the journey that we're all on in this life. You can do it through medicine in kind of a very concrete fashion, but whatever background you have, whatever journey you put together, whatever relationships you call into your life, you are on a mission to discover the hallowed experience of being a biologic vessel that can hold the infinite and to hold the energy itself seems quite unique to you though from what i'm hearing that your spirituality and science are so interconnected and that those journeys were very intertwined from the beginning would that be fair to say they were very intertwined from the beginning but um they got beat out of me a bit during the next 10 years. In what way were they beaten out of you?

Well, it's a multifaceted approach that the current education system uses to drum out the miraculous of all of us. of all of us. You know, I think when we all start school, when we're four or five years old, we're so connected to the infinite nature of everything, which there's a whole universe happening around you that doesn't have to do with the biologic, you know, three-dimensional reality you're in. And I remember being a four-year-old child and I had these two imaginary friends and, you know, I was pretty isolated just because of my upbringing and everything else. And, uh, grew up in a pretty impoverished area and government housing and section eight kind of thing. And that other world was with me for probably until I was six, seven years old. And then it started to fade. And a lot of that fading, I think, comes because you're in school and being drilled into you and the whole metrics of success are in the three-dimensional

reality. And it's very quickly that it's not acceptable to talk about imaginary friends or, you know, any of this other kind of invisible world or realm or that is visible to you isn't acceptable to the world. Parents, in a very subtle way, beat that stuff out of you. Like, oh, well, that's cute when you're a kid, but, you know, that stuff's not real, you know. And so through our mistakes as parents and through our education system, we're very quickly taught to tune out that invisible realm that's perhaps more real than the reality we now find ourselves in. What has your journey been like to reconnect to that world?

Those are some brushstrokes that happened with that, the Philippines and then medical school as a whole. And then as I got into medical school, clinical rotations in the third and fourth year of medical school, you start doing clinical rotations for all the specialties. And I started to get exposed to death for the first time in my life at that point. And, um, years later, I would, my third subspecialty in medicine would be hospice care. And, and so it was interesting that I started in birth and then eventually over 17 year, you know, journey through academia, end up at hospice and end-of-life care because I was seeing the same miraculous stuff there. And it drew me in.

And I was first exposed to it in depth in the ICUs with people dying under very critical, acute, and chronic illness and all of that, and started to get to see death on a near daily basis in the ICU setting. And that started to, again, peel back the veil on the other side of, you know, this biologic life. And again, struck with just the irony that we put so much weight on the importance of, you know, a 70, 80 year journey, if we're lucky, in these bodies, thinking that that's what life is, when in fact there's so much evidence. If you've ever seen a child born and then imagine that child being

self-organized in the womb of a woman, that's the biggest miracle that we've ever witnessed in science, is that a single cell can suddenly proliferate into 70 trillion cells. 70 trillion is a number that's very hard to imagine. That's 70,000 billion. And so you get just this unbelievable complexity that then organizes itself in a three-dimensional environment into a body that's got 10 toes, 10 fingers, and this extraordinary heart that beats in the middle of all of it.

And so that can occur out of space, literally, because the womb is just a potential field. And each cell that comes out of that ovum, out of that egg, has no information into it as to what it's going to become. of that ovum, out of that egg, has no information into it as to what it's going to become. Every cell that develops is pluripotent. It can become a liver or a kidney or whatever it is. And it just happens to line up in a certain space where it says, oh, I'm supposed to be a kidney cell. But that message of I'm supposed to be a kidney cell isn't predetermined. It's something that it discovers in the three-dimensional development of movement and into this house this is diving into physics rather

than than biology at this point in the how but there's a grid of energy behind every living thing that holds the template of its three-dimensional form and that grid is held in the electromagnetic field, which is 99.999% of everything. This table right here or the chair I'm sitting on, 99.999% vacuum space. And you and me. What's that?

And you and me as well. Yeah, exactly. And so you're mostly vacuum space right now, and you were completely vacuum space before you started to self-organize a body. And so when you're vacuum space, you're not empty, you're actually extremely full. The densest thing in the universe is vacuum space that holds the electromagnetic field. And it's so much more dense than the physical expression of nature that it's mind-blowing. Again, these are numbers that you can't really wrap a human brain around. But if you were to take all of the physical matter

of the universe, so every star, every planet, every galaxy, and our estimate of number of galaxies in our universe just skyrocketed with the new James Webb telescope, we went from thinking maybe there was a couple billion to realizing there's at least two and a half trillion galaxies, each one having 10 billion stars, each one with so many, the scale of the universe. So you take all of that physical matter and you push it into one cubic centimeter. Current estimates are that that's a number with like a one with something around 86 zeros after it. It is a huge number. But if you then take one cubic centimeter of space that just has the electromagnetic field, it's vacuum, no physical structure in it, and it just has the electromagnetic field in there.

Compared to all of the physical structures in the universe, that's one to 86 zeros. That one cubic centimeter of space has one to the 94 zeros after it, density or gravitational force. And so vacuum is exponentially, by billions of fold, it is so much more dense than anything else when you consider its gravitational mass. much more dense than anything else when you consider its gravitational mass. And so it literally is the thing that allows physical structure to self-organize into a star or into a planet or into a human body. And so bizarrely, your template was a grid within the womb of your mother. And when biology started to express itself there and you start to see this proliferation of cells, they all know exactly where to go and what to become because it's writ in this electromagnetic field that says in this space, in this time, gravity bending moment of a human life coming together, this energy field is going to express human and it becomes human. And it's not even

written in the genetics, which is very bizarre because we think about 23 chromosomes from mom, 23 chromosomes from dad, we got 46 chromosomes and that must spell human. But it turns out that the human genome, the same genes just reorganized into 178 puzzle pieces and then put back together will form a pig. And so you can be pig or human depending on the electromagnetic field in which the genetics line up and which it will become. And so it's a very bizarre thing that the intention for life lies within the physical plane of physics rather than the biology. Biology self-organizes around it. And that might sound pretty esoteric and weird. And how could you possibly prove that?

And again, my medical career kind of gave me the opportunity to see both ends of the spectrum, which is, wow, that child, two pounds in my hand, formed spontaneously in the womb of his mother around some sort of very structured electromagnetic field. And then I got to start seeing death. And when you see death, it's very common that these people are letting go of the body. The heart stops. Brain activity stops. the person's dead. And then we do a whole bunch of chemical intervention and electrical intervention to restart that heart and get them back in the body. And when they come back

into the body, five minutes later, 10 minutes later, they'll tell you where they went and they'll tell you what they saw. They traveled world, or in many cases, they traveled through the cosmos during those few minutes, not tied to a human body. And the stories are magnificent. They're beautiful. They taught me many, many different possibilities of life in the cosmos. But the deepest mystery in it for me was at no point did they come back into that human body and let me know that there was some other identity. The whole time they were dead and gone from the body, they still had the same identity. They knew they were them.

They knew who they were. And they knew their relationships to other souls. And so the fact that we can carry our self-identity into a human body and then exit the human body with that identity unperturbed is just this incredible body of evidence of, oh my gosh, we are an infinite structure of energy. And at this moment, we decided to express human and we did that for a moment. And so that's been the love affair, I guess, that I've had for a lifetime now of just like falling in love with the fact that I'm here right now. And I just had a lovely couple hours on the trains getting back down here to London and watching the countryside going by and fell in love with the dog rose. Didn't know what a dog rose was until this morning. And I was with Jess Abbas with Farber's Footprint in the UK.

And I took a picture of this rose because it was blowing my mind. Not so much the rose, but the leaves behind it were so electric green. They're brand new leaves. And the contrast between this pinkish red rose with this technicolor green was so dumbfounding. And I took a picture of it and showed it to Jess over breakfast. And she's like, oh, yeah, that's a dog rose. And it was a striking moment because the beauty of that in a word called dog rose ties me back to my home in Virginia where one of my favorite trees is the dogwood.

On the subject of what you experienced when people were passing, going into whatever they were going next into, could you share one story? were going next into, could you share one story? Because you said that there were like so many stories of people having similar experiences of traveling through the cosmos and stuff like that, but was there any one particular one that stood out to you? The one that stands out in my mind the most is the most intricate and difficult long story to tell in some ways. So I hesitated to dive into that long story in some ways. But I'll try to share an abbreviated version of it maybe because it's very near and dear to my heart. I lost my dear grandmother who has been the closest relative to me in my lifetime. has been the closest relative to me in my lifetime.

She really, from an early age, really saw me for who I was and really encouraged me to be the biggest version of myself, which wasn't kind of the tenor of most of my experience through life. Most people that meet you or most family that we, quote unquote, come from, family that we quote unquote come from, I think as humans, we tend to be afraid of being bigger than our, than our role, you know, and being your fullest, biggest version of yourself is not a popular thing that you're encouraged into in this world. And we really are taught to fit in rather than be self. And she was really the opposite of that. And when I lost her, I felt like I'd really lost a huge role model in my life and lost the capacity to be visible to one of my dear family members and be seen. And within like two weeks of her passing, I was

backstage and about to walk on and give a talk. And I heard this woman's voice. And I was like, that sounds like my grandmother. And I look out around the corner and I thought it was my grandmother standing on stage. White hair and her haircut and everything else. I'm just kind of seeing her from behind. Was like all on all my grandmother. And I sat there in awe and then she happened to turn slightly so I could see her face. And I realized it wasn't my grandmother, but it was a beautiful elder woman. And she came off

stage after giving one of the most amazing talks I'd ever heard. She gave the most beautiful talk on bees and the role of the honeybee in human nature. And I was so dumbstruck by the talk, but I was more dumbstruck by like, this is like some sort of reincarnation my grandmother feels like. And so she came off stage and I gave her this big hug and said, I don't know who you are and you don't know who I am, but I think we're supposed to be together. And I'm going to go and find you after my talk. So I walked down the stage, gave my talk and the whole time thinking about her and get off stage and go find her at the back of the auditorium. We sat together for six hours in the back of that auditorium and talked for hours and then went out to dinner that night and ended up very quickly

kind of semi-adopting this woman as my new grandmother. And we spent eight years together and she just passed away about eight months ago. But she had the most incredible death experience and it happened when she was 58, not 86 or whatnot. And she died in a sweat lodge ceremony, in a Native American ceremony in the United States, down in the New Mexico area. Had a massive heart attack right at the end of a sweat lodge ceremony. She was getting out of the sweat lodge and suddenly had crushing chest pain and collapsed. And was pulseless. And the people around her tried to start CPR and all this. And eventually the EMS got there and the paramedics were doing start compressions, all this.

And pretty much declared her dead. you know, start compressions, all this, and pretty much declared her dead. And then the chief of the tribe that she was with walked into the situation and started blowing the eagle whistle in her face. And the eagle whistle in this ceremonial tradition is to orient the soul to return to the body or to find its next mission. And so he was blowing the eagle whistle in her face and she came slamming back in the body and heart start back up. And she really had very little repercussions from a very prolonged heart attack and pulseless state of being dead. And the journey that she had in those 10 minutes or so without a pulse and outside the body took her into the cosmos. And the experience on her

side was that she suddenly was falling off the planet. For one second, she was reaching for this little tree to balance herself. This young man was helping her, realizing that she was in some sort of acute distress. And then she collapsed and went blank. And next thing she felt and experienced was she's falling off the surface of the planet and her body suddenly turned in like into a flying vessel kind of thing and she's speeding through the cosmos and out of the galaxy out of the star system and galaxies are zipping by and and eventually gets you know through the speeding journey of the cosmos comes into some sort of star system and then two planets in front of her and comes in there's this kind of black void looking thing in the middle of one of the planets and she seems to be being pulled towards

that and gets pulled down in a bit of a vortex and now speeding towards the surface of this planet and is set down gently on this cliff side in this huge caves in front of her and it's green verdant jungle-like environment she's on this cliff side and this cave in front of her and it's green verdant jungle-like environment she's on this cliffside and this cave in front of her and she is standing there just taking in the beauty and awe-inspiring scene that she's in and her son walks out of the cave who had died a few years earlier in a tragic car accident and he had been like kind of the apple of her eye. They had been really spiritually close compared to, and really clicked hard. And his loss in her life was one of the unhealed wounds. And he comes walking out in physical form, knew exactly where he was, gave her a big hug.

She could smell his body odor and his essence. And he was just every bit the physical being that he had been in life with her. And he said, I'm so glad you've come. I invited you here so that you could see that I picked this path and I left on purpose and I'm here because this was my next opportunity. And I'm expressing myself here on this planet and I get to do what I love most, which is be a part of the creation of botanical life here. And so I'm helping hybridize plants and I'm working on creating a beautiful place and planet. And I want to just take you in and do tea ceremony.

And she had been a tea monger. She had created her own tea company, importing tea out of India. And so he takes her into the cave and the caves like her description of this goes on for hours because it was such an experience. But the short thing is the cave was covered in like some sort of glow worm or some sort of insect that's glowing. And it was like walking into a star field in this dark cave. And they walked down this passageway into this big kind of domed room that's in this cosmic expression of light.

And in the middle is a little fire burning and he's got this whole tea service laid out for her. And he serves her tea and they talk story and he's telling her all about the excitement that he has. And then they finished their tea ceremony and he's like, I'm so glad you came. I just wanted you to know that I was well. And, you know, I'm excited for your next chapter. She's like, I'm going to stay here. I don't want to leave. I've been missing you more than anything else in life.

And he's like, oh, no, you're not supposed to stay here. I just wanted you to come by and see that I'm doing well and that I'm thriving. And she's like, well, I don't want to leave. I don't want to leave. I haven't even recovered from my heartbreak of losing you once. I can't lose you again. And she's like trying to rationalize staying on this planet with this guy.

And he's walking her out. And then suddenly she's falling off that planet and back out into space. And she's traveling off the planet at a slower speed and then seems to come to a standstill. And her body starts getting super cold and she feels like she's going to freeze and die and just be frozen in space forever. And then the second planet comes into view and it starts exploding with these extraordinary crystalline fireworks. And as the planet comes nearer, she realized that it's not like sparks from fireworks, that is actually these crystalline bees. And each spark is another bee. And these bees start communicating with her telepathically or something. And they're explaining the role of bees among life forms throughout the cosmos

and specifically for humanity, why the bees are here and how they're helping us move into our full expression of love and sense of community and how to build community around the concept of love. And there's beautiful messaging from the bees. And then the planet suddenly is distancing itself and she's back out in black space and it's freezing cold and is in terror because she can't move now and she's like frozen and suspended in black space and doesn't know where or how to go from here and then she hears this distant sound and starts just putting her

entire intention to move to that sound because it was like the only thing that seemed relevant at that moment. And so she's moving towards that sound and then suddenly opens her eyes and the chief is blowing the eagle whistle in front of her face and she's back in the body again. And that was 58 years old. And within a couple of weeks, she was invited to do an art show that took her through Japan, which she had never been to. And she injured herself on the first day in Japan and ended up in the hands of a practitioner there in Japan that did a traditional methodology of acupuncture called Hoshindo, which is an ancient practice that predates the steel needle. And so before the needle, acupuncture was done with bee stingers. And so she was getting all this bee therapy

and hadn't put it together with her near-death experience at this point. And towards the end of the week of getting treatment, this woman told her, you know, I look forward to having you back. You'll be back in a few weeks, and you're going to begin a three-year journey of training of ho shindo. And she was like, I'm an artist. Like I'm not supposed to do this. And I was just like, no, you are, you are. And I was told 25 years ago that my last student would be from the United States and would carry Native American blood. And here you are, and you're my last student. And voice, her name was voice sterling jones voice went back to the u.s

thinking that she would never be back again and then within weeks like all the doors were closing all the doors were life pointing back to japan so near 60 years old she packs up and moves to japan and spends a few years and becomes the very first non-Japanese sensei of Hoshindo and carries bee energy in a way that few people have on this planet with so much information from the bees and constant communication with the bees. And so that's a dramatic afterlife journey that shows that our souls are being prepared all the time for the next chapter. And sometimes that's in the body.

Sometimes it's outside the body. Sometimes it's on this planet. Sometimes maybe it's off this planet. But that energy form that we were talking about that can express a human body in the womb of a woman is an energy field that cannot be destroyed. And it just moves through the cosmos, through this universe, seemingly on deep purpose and intention every moment it's organized. And the first law of thermodynamics and physics, one of the most proven scientific concepts we have is that energy cannot be destroyed or created.

It can only change form. or created. It can only change form. And so this is why you're here right now is because you chose this human physical form and the beauty that you hold within your physical vessel is an expression of a beauty that is probably beyond human comprehension that is held at that soul vibration level, that electromagnetic field that we would call a soul, is self-organizing not just a human body, but a cosmic journey that may last for eons, for all I know. And it keeps organizing physical experiences around it. Maybe you've been a star, maybe you've been a planet, maybe you've been a fish. I don't know what you've chosen to manifest, Maybe you've been a fish. I don't know what you've chosen to manifest.

But in some ways, it sounds like kind of the karmic reincarnation story. But I see that differently. I don't, reincarnation sounds like you're kind of stuck in some sort of path. And in the experiences of so many near-death experiences that I've seen and all that, it's much more freedom in it. The concept of reincarnation would suggest that planet Earth is like our zone. And I just think it's probably a lot bigger than that with 2.5 trillion cosmic destinations here in this, just at the galaxy level, let alone the planets within those things. I think it's unlikely that an energy field would stay put in one little tiny stardust spot called planet Earth. But you did mention that when people had this experience,

that they still had that same sense of identity. Would you be able to expand on what your sort of definition of that identity is and how that was experienced when it wasn't, or how it is experienced when it's not in the physical form because i think that's something people struggle with a lot today i agree i think we've been devastatingly divorced from the understanding or experience of self and that's something that i think you know again takes us into an esoteric possibility of the human journey here. But if we go back to that four-year-old self that I was, I was living in what many people as adults would consider a dream state in the sense that reality was extended beyond the physical plane,

and I could dream up anything, and it could be real. And when you're four years old, you can literally be a pirate. You can be an astronaut. You can be absolutely anything, second to second, and there's absolutely no doubt in your mind. And that's what an indigenous elder recently told me, the difference between dreams and realities, or the difference between your dreams and your reality that you're currently living in,

is that there is no doubt in your dreams. And that's a pretty cool realization. You think back to the dreams that you regularly have. You might have fear. You might have many different emotions. But that possibility of insecurity or, you know, unsureness. Something that's taught. It only occurs in the human brain, you know, in this three-dimensionality.

That's where we develop insecurity and a lack of self-trust. Do you think it's part of our path in this material realm to overcome those insecurities, to realize our purpose? Yeah. My concept of purpose has changed quite a bit in recent years. I was just told that it was something I needed to go find, you know. And the more that I've been in my own bodily journey here and the more I'm exposed to other people's journeys, realizing that purpose isn't something to be found or pursued. Purpose, if it has a reality to it, is simply to be present. And in being present,

you're aligning your biologic experience of a mind and a body and a heartbeat to this eternal energy force within you that we might call a soul or whatever it is, an electromagnetic field at least. And so when I am fully present and I can be distracted from present, I realize right now that I was distracted for a moment because I was living in a space of remembrance of voice and this dear grandmother force in my life and in just becoming present with you right now the room shifts my energy shifts my reality has to now bend itself around this situation which is I am here right now any relationships I've had in the past, any energetic experiences I had in the past can only distract me from right now. And when I do become present,

I believe I become much more obviously beautiful to you. And you become much more obviously beautiful to me. Because it's suddenly that moment of like crystallization where it's like, whoa, I forgot how real you are right there because you're sitting right there and you're on that chair and you're in this room and we're in London and this is our reality right now. And so as you become present, you become omnipresent, you become much more capable of taking in information from vast spaces around you. That's purpose. That's it. Because in that space, I can now drop into my core and sense if I'm supposed to do something next or just continue to sit here.

No emotion of my past is disrupting this moment right now. But if I sit here and allow my mind to wander even for a split second, I'll start remembering little traumas or frustrations or somebody hurt my feelings or I got afraid I was going to get on the wrong train on the way here or whatever it was. Those things can creep back in so quickly when we allow our presence to move from core to the human mind, to the human emotional field. And ultimately, I think that's what divorces ourselves from that original vibration, the original math thing that knit me together in the womb of my mother. That thing had no cancer in it. That thing had no autoimmune disease in it. That thing had no immune dysfunction in it. That thing had no depression. That thing had no anxiety. That thing was fully sure of self, fully aware of why it was picking this exact cosmic moment in the astrological field of all of the energy of the universe to manifest

in my mother's womb in 1973 in Boulder, Colorado at 1.54 PM in the afternoon. I picked that moment because I was so sure that this was my manifestation now so that I would live out a life that some people would call purpose or I might call purpose, whatever it is. Since that moment of cosmic birth in my mother's womb, I was layered with many, many emotions. and I started to remember emotions within my own epigenetics that I inherited from 40 generations before me, such that I would become a biologic expression of 40 generations of trauma, heartbreak, broken expectations, insecurities. expressing by age seven. We store human emotions in the body and 4,000 years of Chinese medicine has detailed out exactly what type of emotions is stored exactly in what part of the body.

Low back pain is among the number one complaints of Western civilization worldwide. If you become part of the Western economic model, low back pain is likely to occur in your life at some point because in that location, you store financial stress and fear of wellness or health of your immediate family. And so when you develop back pain, it's not because you twisted wrong, or you did this, or you herniated a disc. The disc herniated because of the disconnect from the original information of what that shape of disc and how it was going to balance itself within the time-gravity continuum of being a spine, whatever it was. And it got disconnected

from the information, therefore it dysfunctioned. And you now have back pain because you were holding an emotion in that space. And so for you and I to actually see each other, we would have to get into a discipline of being able to put a complete block on the entire epigenetic history of your human line and then come into coherence with the original math and trust that over the emotional state that we may have come into this conversation with. How do we do that? Practice.

It is discipline. It is practice, practice, practice coming into that. And all of us know what it feels like to be super present. A lot of us will get goosebumps if we're in one of those moments where we suddenly hear truth and it's like resonating with us. That's what it feels like to be coming from core. coming from your core self feels like that goose bumpy moment where it's just like every fiber in your body is on and and responding into a a note that's being struck in the universe you know at that moment and that's what makes for a potent conversation you know all the thousands of podcasts that i've been on it's striking that people will come back and tell me, oh my gosh, when you did

this podcast, you said this thing. And they'll say something to me that they heard from me that I have literally just never said, because they were tuned into an information stream that was them. And all that happened was I became so present in the conversation that I became a sounding board for their own truth. And they heard it, they thought, from me, but they were literally just, it was coming out of themselves because they were so present in that moment. Yeah. And so this is the gift that we have in community is we can not only strike a tone in a note, we can create a cathedral in which everybody's notes can start to harmonize. And that we create this vortex of energetic rise. And for that, we're here on this planet right now.

I believe there's a great expression of energy happening within the universe at this moment, at this unique, tiny little speck of reality that we call Earth, never before have there been so many energy centers focused in that tiny little speck. And we burn bright. The vibration within a human being is the brightest thing within our cosmos. And let me explain what that means or how we would conclude that. But a green leaf out here on these trees outside the window, that's full of chlorophyll. That makes it green. Chlorophyll captures sunlight and puts it into a battery of two carbon molecules that are the perfect battery

for energy in the universe. And so the double carbon bond stores solar energy or sunlight between two carbons that were constituents of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere just moments ago. So chlorophyll is taking CO2 and building into long chains of carbon that are called glucose or fatty acids, carbohydrates or fats to store light energy. Animal comes along, digest that chlorophyll, digest all the fatty acids and light energy with the glucose or whatnot. And then that courses into the bloodstream through delivery by the liver and then delivered out to every single human cell, for example. And then the human cells take in all of this potential light through glucose and fatty acids and still can't do anything with it. So they have to pass it to the mitochondria, which are tiny little bacteria that are directly related to the chlorophyll in the plant. And so the chlorophyll is a mitochondria inside a plant, our mitochondria

inside a human. And this mitochondria breaks the long carbon chain apart to release CO2, but in so doing releases all the sunlight. And so there's a new revelation going on in science right now that each human cell has about 200 mitochondria in it. Some cells like a neuron, which are really energy demanding, have 2000 mitochondria within every single cell. And so these are cells that are like, you know, half the circumference of a human hair and has 200 bacteria living in it. And those 200 bacteria are there just to release sunlight back into the system. And when you calculate how much light is released by these mitochondria that are literally cramming full every single cell of the human body, you realize that a cubic centimeter of that tissue or cubic centimeter of mitochondria releases about

10,000 times more light than a cubic centimeter of the sun produces. mitochondria releases about 10,000 times more light than a cubic centimeter of the sun produces. And so we're 10,000 times more efficient than a star at producing light energy by being alive. And so if you had the right eyes to see by, we would be the most blindingly bright thing in the cosmos perhaps right now. And for that, we've been a beacon of energies from around the cosmos, I believe. And there's a whole lot of attention being paid to this little speck in the universe right now because the vibrational capacity of our planet right now, because of the humanity, because of the amount of biology on this planet right now, makes us a tuning fork for the entire

universe perhaps. And so the feeling that we have right now of being human is determining the vibration of a chakra center within the universe. And so when we sit here and run around with 8 billion people in fear of a virus and in guilt and shame over not doing some intervention that we're told we should do to prevent the death of our people around us. And we adopt this fear, guilt, and shame paradigm as our dominant emotion. We just change the fabric of the universe. And that universe is now under great distress

because one of its epicenters is in such cognitive dissidence with its reality that it can't hold together much longer. And so we see the sixth extinction unfolding, not because of oil and gas industry, but because all life right now is being pushed to its brink on this planet with its connection to source. Because we have adopted an emotional paradigm that is separating ourselves from the original math

of being true, of being fully on. There's a couple of things that you've mentioned here that I want to dive into. But the thing about light that you were just discussing, it reminded me, I was listening to a podcast a few months ago and it was a man who had been in a plane crash. And he said that as it was sort of essentially being pulled apart and people around him were dying, that he could see the light coming out of them. And he said in his opinion of the experience, it was as if the light was their soul.

And he said that some people's light was brighter than others. And he felt that that was depending on how they'd lived their life, which is obviously a very different take on it rather than a more scientific one, a more spiritual one. But I don't know, I feel perhaps they're interconnected. I don't know, I feel perhaps they're interconnected. I hesitate to think that, you know, the human judgment on whether it was a good life or a bad life would correlate with the amount of light there. For the reason that the human belief of good and bad is one of the probably most unreal things that we hold on to. It is very unlikely there's good and bad things in the universe. And I would liken this a bit to my scientific expertise in the microbiome.

We now know that a human body is simply a vessel for millions of species to interact with a single neurologic system to create intelligence. Our intelligence comes from our biodiversity that the human anatomy is capable of holding. The human colon is now recognized to be the most complex ecosystem on the planet. And so this is the truth is that there is absolutely no good and bad bacteria within the microbiome. They all have a great sovereign purpose within the ecosystem of life. And for that, there'd be a human tendency to think that that light that I'm seeing at the end of life, which I do think he saw, I think he saw light spectrum being emitted from these people. I've heard stories like that before. One of the

places that I think this happens is in military conflict. My brother was over in Iraq during the conflict there 20 years back. And when you're in battle every day expecting to die, you get into these ecstatic states of existence. And it's very difficult for soldiers to come back into the mundane reality where their life isn't on the line every day because suddenly everything seems dim and gray and lifeless because they were seeing the light within every being around them. So there's the thought of like, well, maybe we're just like having camaraderie or whatever it is as we march into battle. No, you're in this energetically heightened state because the possibility of letting go of that body in the next few minutes is very real. And therefore you are extremely present.

That body in the next few minutes is very real. And therefore, you are extremely present. And so on that plane crash down, everybody knows these are the last few breaths they are going to take. And they become extremely present at that moment. And light starts emanating from them. But rather than imagining the brightness of the spectrum he was visibly seeing with his human eye, you have to realize that each soul has a different geometry to it that allows my biology to express different than your biology. And so I had a specific resonance structure that allowed me to form a body around it. And in that

resonance, I have different geometry. And so you can imagine this. And one of the visualizations or meditations that I love to teach is called the anatomy of the soul. And that anatomy of the soul is a long kind of journey up into your original math and into that experience of the geometry of self. And when I do that with a group of 30, I've done it in groups of 900 people or whatever. And when you're doing that with a group of 30, or I've done it in groups of 900 people or whatever, and when you're doing that with a group of people, everybody sees different shapes. And it's so beautiful to me that you can go experience your own geometry and then bring that back into your reality of being a body

and be like, this body is an expression of that complex geometry. And so what he was seeing at that moment was many different geometries that are going to interact with light phases in completely different ways. They're going to express different light. And so some of those that seem dim were likely in an ultraviolet field or simply expressing light energy and vibration in a different frequency than others. They differ in color, they differentiate maybe in the perception of

the amount of light, but that's only in the visible spectrum. And so I think every soul is expressing itself in a vibrational experience that would be a time-gravity kind of warp that would allow that energy field to exist. That energy field is going to be a different note, a different tone, a different color in every single iteration of life. Guys, I hope you're enjoying this incredible conversation with the one and only Zach Bush. As you can probably tell, I didn't have to say very much I just sort of listened and let him take the stage which suited me fine when you are in the presence of such a brilliant mind such as his some of the takeaways from the first half of this conversation was you know Zach is very unique in this intersection

between science and spirituality which you rarely see someone that's so knowledgeable about both fields but also sees them as one of the same and I believe that they are I think you know the cosmos is such a fascinating thing in the way that we understand it through a scientific viewpoint but also the more spiritual realms and I love how Zach manages to weave these two themes together so poetically and beautifully. If you enjoyed this episode, I would love it if you could write us a review on Apple Podcasts or subscribe to the show. Or if you want to hear more from us, sign up to our newsletter. The link is in the show notes. And we will be back for part two with Zach Bush next week. Thank you so much guys for listening. As always, remember you are not alone. And if you want to find out more about Saturn Returns,

we have launched our website, which has some offerings online, which I'm super, super excited about. So if you want to check those out, head to www.saturnreturns.co.uk people don't need to say www. anymore do they but I'm old school and I hope you enjoy the website and what we have to offer and I will see you guys or I will speak to you guys or you will hear from me next week and sending lots of love