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Tell us your a little of your story of how you became a monk and how how people in Nepal become monks in the Bon tradition. My name is Geshe Sonam and I born here in this area, this place. And when I was nine, almost to 10. And I'm the middle son of the my family. And in our culture, middle son and middle daughter becoming monks and nuns. So because of I'm middle son, so my parents sent me to study in India. It was we we don't have very good monastery here, but lots of practices going in the caves are there, but to education, you know, so uh my teacher took me to India and I go to school first to study science, math, and those and then after that I became a monk when I was 19.

Before from 10th, I was like a entertaining of monk, like a monklet. And then become a when I was 19, now I can make the my decision. So I choose a monk, you know, and then I become monk and after the school, I study 14 years for the Bon philosophy, practice, and all those things. So I was awarded called the Geshe degree, which is in West it's called the equivalent to the PhD on Bon philosophy. Can you share with people the history of Bon, how it became and has grown and flourished and and the relationship, how should the Westerners think about the relationship between the Bon tradition and Buddhism?

Yeah, so when we talk about the origin of Bon and Buddhist, right? So Bon origin originated around the uh nearby the Mount Kailash. You know, that's the origin place, you know, so there these days people are talking in Nepal place called the Humla, Humla. But there is a earlier time he used to talk about the Olmo Lungring. Where the Buddha Tönpa Sherab was born. He was also prince, you know, in that area. So that's the Himalayan region, you know, so where the science of Himalaya was started from the Bon, you know, and then of course everybody knows that Buddha Shakyamuni born in house in Lumbini and those plain area, you know, he been enlightened and achieved the Buddhahood, like that.

And then later, you know, but Bon was very flourish. And you know, after the Buddhist arrived to Himalaya, you know, and then Buddhist and Bon get a conflict, you know. I mean, you know, it's the not the religion too, you know, it's not like a Buddha's Buddha Shakyamuni and Tönpa Sherab fought, fought, right? But people don't understand the Dharma very deep, you know, and then people start to fight, you know, so there is also lot of how say conflict between Bon and Buddhist because of two different idea, right?

So but it wasn't like a ideas are totally opposite, you know. But that time actually it was different actually. Now it's look Bon and Buddhist are very same, but that time the Bon was more like a tantric and Dzogchen practitioner. It wasn't like a Sutric or there is some Sutric, but later when Buddhism introduced to the Himalaya and then um, Buddhist and Bon are very flexible. So, Bon took lot from Buddhist and Buddhist took lot from the Bon. So, that's how, uh, we are sharing so much.

It It's now many researcher trying to research and tell which is belongs to whom, but it's very hard to tell cuz it's too mixed up, you know. So, therefore, uh, you know, from the before the 7th century, 8th centuries, just everywhere, even like in Mustang, you know, but in the Tibet, central Tibet, in a 6th and 7th, 8th century, then Buddhist was start. But really flourish of the Buddhist was from the 10th century. You know, from 7th, 8th, 9th was very little, but really flourish in Himalaya was from 10th and 12th century.

And before that, all of the Bonpo's teachings were so been so much, uh, flourish here, so much alive, vibrant. And that's why if you see the Tibetan Buddhism, it's totally different than other Buddhist. You know, so therefore, we shared, you know. I think it's a good things to if there is a good knowledge, we have to share from the Buddhist. And if Bon has a good knowledge, Buddhist share that, you know. I think So, this is the how and politically then, uh, Bon was, uh, suppressed.

And then slowly slowly, uh, Buddhist become more flourish in Himalaya, you know. So, but still Bon never, how to say, end the his Bon's, uh, lineage, the teachings and technique. Everything from that time till now, everything is continued. And then, my teacher, like he exiled to the India, and they built a monastery and they give all this education. It was shocked by the how I say situation in their homeland. And then so that's how how we got all the knowledge of like a the philosophy, sciences, all of the Buddhism and Bon we learn.

Yeah, now it's a so much commonalities is because you know like a uh if we say talk with the Tibetan Buddhism then so much commonality. But if we talk the another Buddhism, then we are so different. Like Theravada Buddhism? Yeah, Theravada or like a Japanese Buddhist or other Buddhist are so different, you know, but Tibetan Buddhism we are really to so much common because we share too much to each other. You spent a lot of time in the West and teaching Westerners about the path and the tradition and spreading the Dharma and support.

Can you tell people a little bit about what you're trying to accomplish here to preserve the tradition? Yeah, I think you know like a as my teacher guidance, you know, like a when the communist come and then it was shocked to our the philosophy and teaching and technique that people like in the very difficult situation they survive. And this Dharma teaching been the core of the people to keep going, you know? And then when this came, it was shocked, you know? And then Lama say please and and then many Lamas felt, you know, this is the end of this teaching.

You know? And they work so hard, they train us, you know? And to me first, you know, in Bon in our Bon term, the Bon itself mean the truth or reality or fact or we can say nature. We if we we are saying that if you really know the true and fact and reality and then you know the Bon. If you are not know the truth and fact, you don't know the Bon. So Bon mean truth and reality and fact. You know? So therefore if I just assume into a in a word, you know, it's like that.

You know, but there are, you know, many skillful way, many technique according to the people, according to the, you know, Buddha Tsempo Sherab, our teacher been totally like a different style. Because it according to the people who follow them. Like that. So my core to contact with the our Western Dharma friend is how can we bring this technique, this teaching, this science, this, how to say, teaching to West? So also our Western Dharma friend also enjoy. You know, and one thing is that and another thing is that who knows where problem will.

If something happen bad things on East, maybe this teaching can be available in West. Or something happen in West, it will be survived in East. So my teacher is very open. You know, says to us, "This is the time to share." If we keep secret or something but it doesn't mean, you know, like you tell everybody. It's not like that, but we need to choose the serious people to serious teaching, you know, medium people, medium teaching, new people, new style of teaching, you know? So, but we try to preserve.

Doesn't matter where it is, whether it is in a west or east. We don't want to be sectering. We want this technique keep alive. So, that's the idea. So, that's why, you know, like in the west also, uh what I found with the our western Dharma friend, you know, in the science like psychologists are so good, you know, like it very close to our Dharma. And then science is too much in the materialism. And Dharma is quite moving forward to the uh superstitious, you know? So, I want to bring them in the balance two together.

So, that science can uh protect us going uh deviating in the house of superstitious. And Dharma can uh support to the science not deviating to the materialism. To come into a deeper in the practice. So, that's the what I'm looking, you know, like it. So, that's why I'm be with the all the Dharma friend in west to try to share. You know, I'm not you know, trying best to share with our Dharma friends. The west is slowly starting to wake up. Yes. So, it started with yoga and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi brought over transcendental meditation.

And then you had Yogananda bringing the kriyas. And then that began to be over the last 20 years become very popular. And now plant medicine and the shamanic work is coming to the west and people are doing peyote and ayahuasca and other medicines to have an experience of the spiritual realms and to escape the materialism and try to have an experience with reality on the other side. And there's emerging as part of that an awareness and fascination of the dark room meditation. And so, explain to what the Westerners the role of the dark room, how it became it was part of the tradition in Zukchen, and how Westerners should think about that as part of their practice.

Yeah, I think this is very important topic, you know, like a dark retreat is the one part of our own teaching, you know, like a many many, you know, centuries, you know, so many like a many centuries this yogis been doing in the cave totally dark, you know. Right now we got a electricity and so many different type of light. But earlier time it's very rare, you know, and then they have to spend mostly in the dark. So, and they try to find even within the dark how can they learn.

So, they don't relying on light or, you know, so much like that. So, because of that, you know, in a cave they don't have a kerosene or gas or to lightning the candle or like that. So, they their life is very simple, you know, so they need to find a way to learn the practice. So, they got a technique to how can you practice in a dark. So, that's the what how it start and then, you know, like it the main idea of dark retreat. Uh I don't know, like a maybe people has that experience or not.

You know, once I have when I was going to school, it was a totally dark night. I woke up in the middle of night. You know, and then I don't know where am I. Where is it, you know, because everything is dark. I can't see anything, right? So, this experience, you know, like it then I easily diluted. Because I don't know. I have no knowledge. I don't have a aware where am I? What it is? So, actually the Dharma teaching, the Bön teaching is trying to teach us how can I be conscious?

How can doesn't matter what situation, what condition. So, I can keep awake. I can keep conscious. You know, I keep aware what's happening. You know, so many people easily lose their awareness. In the in the dark. So, I'm preparing to the our Western Dharma friend. Come stay in the dark and just experience it. And see what it is look like. You know, maybe you might first time you don't get a really high realization. But you experience something and you will realize, "Wow, in a light I was totally conscious and aware of what's happening.

But in the dark, even I don't know what's the time. Is it daytime or nighttime? You know, so we dark retreat is a one such a technique to reach beyond the time. You know, beyond the light and how say dark. So, when we go to the dark dark retreat and slowly the vision comes, light comes inside. It's not external light. It's a inner light come up. So, there is a lot of like it to how say explore. It's a very spiritual deep exploration. So, I'm asking you guys to be come and you know, like it to so that once you feel it is really connected to you or really uh, resonate with you and then you go further because, uh, anything is when you are, uh, try to learn or spend your energy, now, first you need to trust.

If you don't trust or if you don't experience, if you don't experience, you don't trust. If you don't trust, you can't do that. You know, to build up the aspiration, admiration, and, uh, to build the trust, first we have to experience. So, therefore, I think dark retreat is a short time, and you can go beyond the time. And once you go beyond the time, what it look like? We never experience those, right? So, I think that's why and then future, we can become a, you know, in the dark if I can really conscious in a dark, which is very, uh, closer to the sleep yoga, and very closer to the dreaming, you know?

So, therefore, this all are the high teachings of the yogis in the cave. So, right now I'm talking from the Mustang, right? This area you can find a thousands of caves. These thousands of yogis been doing this. So, I'm welcome all of you. Uh, we are trying to be build a future dark retreat here to connect to the lineage and experience to go beyond the time. So, join with us. That's the what I can say, yeah. What's the minimum amount of time for a student to come and have the experience?

How many days? Yeah, I think in in the at the it depend on the how deep you are in the practice, you know? So, if you are quite new, better not so longer than three, four days. We don't want to be like a something happen or like a but if there is a benefit and always the coin is good part and bad part always go together, you know, so if we are not conscious and that can be problem, too. You know, if we are conscious, that could be very good for us to be keep more conscious, you know, like a as the many Yogananda talking about transcendental stage, right?

So, those all we can experience in dark if you are really advanced on dark. When a student from the West comes, will you get to teach them the Bon teachings and practices? Is it just observing the arising or should they bring their own practice and you support? How should they think about the practice? I think, you know, like a there are all sort of people, right? Some will come totally new, you know, and then they don't get it doesn't resonate them and they will go away.

Some come just totally new and then it resonate them and then they will follow, "Geshe-la, could you guide us? Doesn't matter which one is, just guide me. It's it's resonating me, right?" And then it's not a big different, you know, I I don't learn about the other tradition, what kind of dark retreat is, but according to the Buddhist and Bon, I don't think there's a big different, you know, so it's very close, you know, like a very same idea, same consciousness because we've been Tibetan Buddhism, specially, right?

We are so much share, we have so much commonality. So, I don't think we need to be worried about Buddhist dark retreat and Bon dark retreat, but others tradition like Hindus or Christian, that I can't tell because I have no knowledge about that. So, uh even anyone comes with their things, you know, and then you can we can share, you know, and then see what it is look like, what's you got, what it is. Uh so we after we how say talk each other, share each other, then there is a result come.

Then according to result we can do that. Right. Uh before go to dark at the night time, we have some practice. Close uh eye lid and we practice some. It's very close to that. So in in the Bon tradition, we have before go inside the dark, we practice those. So I really thinks that we should guide our master should guide that before go to the dark. So they have like a not such a very strange thing. They already know something closer. You know, and then when they get there, it's a really prepared.

And also the teaching, you know, like a any how say Dharma's teaching, if you you knows what you looking for. It's not like oh just pop up there and you enter there. It could be also, but best if you have some the kind of path. What I'm doing, what I'm looking for, where I'm getting. If you have that kind of plan, will be much better, I think. But sometime that could be all also hindrances, too. Not always like a good path, you know. So see, we can just try.

And how long after you're in the dark, you have these deep experiences, and then you have to come back into the light. How what's the reintegration process? How long, what's the practice to to bring it on side yourself so you can go back to the world? Yeah, if you stay three four days, it's not big big different because you are not experiencing beyond that time. It's not so long enough, right? And that's why in our tradition we do a 49 days. Because 49 days particular days has a very meaningful.

Because it has a time is a very connected to our mind. Because like a one our physically body when we are in a dark in a certain time then it produce a chemical in brain, in body. And that make different. But if we have a very short and then there is a not enough time to produce that how say chemical, right? And or to produce the hallucination. So some people are very, you know, open channel. They can produce chemical very fast. Some take long time to produce that chemical.

You know, so and then according to chemical or that hallucination will be different. So according to the experience that will be like a karmic tendency, like a tendency of beyond the time will also impact, you know. So how longer that much challenging in coming back, but not like a totally you something becoming like aliens or totally don't know where to go. But not like that because you you got more experience than the dark, you know. That one you have very strong what do you call the habitual.

It's easy to come back, you know. So it's it's one that big different unless if you already take care of your sight, you know, like a having things and food not immediately come out and go to the windy area. That's not good part, you know. maybe you can come with a light but with the goggle of and slowly slowly that dark can reduce and then come back to normal. So, those are important part. And with the monastics if a if a Westerner comes to do this experience, does the the monastery prepare special food for them that helps support their experience?

I think diet is you need a very good food because in a dark it took lot of energy because you don't get vitamins from the sun light, you know, and you becoming very weak, you know. So, diet is very important part. So, you know, like a monastery rather than monastery we need a special group. Like a special we kids in a moment and we are working now. We try to build a what you call like a group people that you know, like a we study we know stuff what kind of food it is needed, what kind of guidance it needed, what sickness could possible.

You know, so what kind of medication should be at the door, you know, like a so anything something is happening ready to cure them, right? And make sure that we don't harm. Our bone perspective is bone should be relieve the suffering. Not the cause of suffering actually, you know, so if we don't guide if we are not serious, it could be harm the people. So, then it goes to the opposite of Dharma, opposite of bone. So, therefore yes, I think monastery itself has a different food because they are not in dark, right?

But we need a group people so that according to the dark people, they we can provide them the food that they needed. There are a lot of stories about people healing their bodies in the dark, regrowing their spine or healing from sickness or other things. Are there specific practices in the Bon or the Buddhist tradition for healing in the dark? Yeah, I think you know, like a because in Bon teaching we says 70% of our mind is distracted by the eye. Sight, you know? And then in dark, sight is no use.

Right? So that means 70% is we wiped out. We come back to the silence. You know? So that will be cure a lot things because because of those 70% creating so much problem in our body, you know? So because of this 70% is arresting. According to that resting impact will be there. But there is no really particular sickness will be cured like that. But also, if you are not prepared enough but that can also create the sickness, too. So it depend, you know, like a even you are you never practice, but it depend how your mentality is stable.

If you are mentality is stable, you are more courage, you know, you are more impatient, maybe good for you, you know? But if you are really impatient you are struggling with inside thought or so much, maybe it could be cause problem. Though in the West there's so much stimulation. Your phone, your iPad, movies, cars, music. And then all of that goes away and there's just the breath and your awareness. It makes many Westerners afraid. Yes. How do they How do How do you teach them to not get bored and to make the most and adjust to this new experience with no with only no light?

That's the why, you know, we have a meditation practice. That keep them busy. So, meditation doesn't means like a you know, bring to the emptiness, you know, like a a void. Not like that. That's the one part, too. Because when we are too distracted, we need to bring to the a wait a waiting, right? Also. But many people thinks the meditation means that. Not only that. Actually, many people thinks meditation be bring the happiness. Also, yes, it do one part. But not everything. And many people thinks meditation bring calmness, also.

But these are the all integrand. There are so many integrations there. You know, so this part, when you learn something, when you are boring and, you know, like a many people when they get the What do you call that after certain age? They don't They got a How I say? No no job now, right? They so much time and they getting crazy. Until then, they've been so busy and distracted and now they are afraid what to do. So, that experience exactly come in dark, too. So, that's why if like you follow any kind of master, that guidance is before you go to the dark.

So, that you know, if something happen like this, what I need to do. How should I keep the busy myself? You know, but then that busyness will be slowly slowly reduced. We have to be very skillful for the Dharma. Dharma is not so easy path, you know, many people thinks Dharma is the best or very easy or, you know, and many people thinks if I go to this talk I will be tomorrow enlightened. Not like that. It takes long time, you know. So, therefore uh how to say, my point of this is that if any tradition you learning.

So, you prepared. If something in that situation that you ask to your teacher if something happened that situation, what I'm doing? And you prepare for that. And then you see how it is. Sometime we might succeed, sometime we might not or we can guide from the outside, you know. So, there are many things now we have a very good technology, science been very much make us to Dharma also so much easier, you know. Yeah. Last question. What can go wrong? Yeah, I think that's very important part, too.

Like you don't expect too much positive. Don't expect too much negative. Like a if we come with the middle not expecting too much uh how to say, positive and too much negative too much negative also make you suffer. If you you go to the too much positive like too much uh what you call, mm wishes. Like you all I will cure this problem, I will be a special guy or something and then you found ordinary, you know, and then you get you've been discouraged, right? So, don't be like a uh no hope and no uh scare.

No hope and no doubt. Just come to the balance of hope and doubt. And then come to the, you know, just you just came, come. You just come with open. As the signs. Okay. Let's see. Don't make any decision. Just come with no decision. And but it doesn't mean that you don't prepare. You prepare something. But you don't estimate the result. That means you don't expect negative. You don't expect the positive. But result will be one of those. You know, so if you don't expect you are more in present.

Once we are more in present, there's a less chances of problem. So therefore, um you can lose your eyesight, you know, like if you immediately open your, you know, no glass or dark glass and like that. Or sometime, you know, we become weak. And you don't if you don't feel the what do you appetite. And you can become a sick, too. But that's why, you know, like a don't be like a at a I don't like not a picky things. You follow the like a system, right?

Like a Okay, if teacher teacher think this is important for you, just consume it. Don't Don't become a picky. But I don't mean not at all. It's not in your hand something everything controlled by us also not right things. But everything controlled by you also wrong things. So just, you know, if you feel something going wrong, you don't know, better to ask. And take the advice. You know? Or if you knows that that's the good part, then you don't need to be necessarily keep asking. Move forward, you know?

Very flexible. You know? So, if we do that way, then we will can free from all the problems. You know? So, that's the why I want to, you know, like a you can get a sick also. You can get, you know, if you are not like a follow or learn before you go to the talk, you study first. And then I think everything will be okay. Yeah.

Of all of those different practices, the dark room meditation is the most potent transformational. Plant medicine layered on top provides a gateway to go experience on a short-term uncontrolled basis the reality of the underworld. So you know that they're real and it's not faith-based. And then the dark room and deep meditation teaches you to access those states under control and full consciousness. Because in the dark after 3 days your brain starts to produce DMT endogenously and it naturally opens the pineal gland and those gateways without any class 4 scheduled drugs without any vomiting without any of the rest of it in a totally natural way.

Ian Gardner is a serial entrepreneur, urban monk and founder of Arya, a company building dark room retreat centers around the globe. In this conversation, I en reveals why the Buddhists, Sufis, and Christians kept this practice hidden for thousands of years and why humanity is finally ready to receive it. In the past, historically, it was darker times and the secret teachings and the wisdom and the light and the truth was kept in the monasteries where it was safeguarded and protected and shielded because it was such dark times.

And those monastics were the the servants of the light, the keepers of the light. They held those traditions and they passed it down mouth to ear and sometimes a year before. But where we are now is all that wisdom from the monastery. All those secrets are coming from the sky to the street from the monastery to the marketplace. Before we get into this conversation, I want to ask you to join this amazing community of consciousness explorers. This whole idea of pursuing expanded consciousness and the boundaries of human potential while living a modern life is relatively new, which is why we interview revered masters, teachers, experts, and practitioners to help you on your own journey.

To stay up to date on the latest conversations, simply click subscribe below, and you'll be notified each time a new episode comes out. I am so grateful for all of your support and comments. I love reading them. Now, let's dive into this conversation. Ian, what's up, brother? Brother, just got over bronchitis after uh two weeks in the deeps of Mustang with the monks, the Buddhists and bun monks way out in at 13,000 ft. So, I'm just back in back in fighting action. Awesome. Awesome. Well, we're definitely curious to learn a little bit more about that trip in this conversation, but you know, I I I want to just start off by just sharing a little bit about um my admiration for you and then I want you to share a little bit about your background.

You know, I think there's a lot of people out there who are getting on a consciousness journey, waking up, and they're they're trying to figure out, okay, like how do I do this with genuine intent and like a level of seriousness and also thrive, thrive in the world, you know, like build companies, do cool stuff. And I honestly don't know of that many people who are holding both. and you're one of the people that I've identified who I mean I want to talk about your background but like you've been really serious on your path and you're also out there building companies and have had a lot of success and you know I think it's awesome man um I think it's incredible and I think we need more people that are you know devout householders if you will out there doing the thing showing people that this way of living can be done.

Yeah. I mean I've I I sort of uh have come to call myself an urban monk. Um because uh for a long time I wanted to be a monk. I went to India in 2001 to the Mahakuma in Laahabad with all the with all the with all the Hindus to go look for Babai and was going to go be a sadu. But um I think early in my career when I started having some success, I observed that whenever I had some material corporate success, the excitement and the and the energy and the happiness and the joy would last for a couple of days and then I'd start feeling like, oh, I'm not doing enough.

I got to work harder. that maybe that wasn't real or I was lucky or you know they didn't know what they were doing when they promoted me or or the rest of it or and then you know that sort of translated into the hot girlfriend or the the motorcycles or the cars or the right apartment or the right um or the right stamps in my passport or the right graduate degrees or what have you. And um eventually I was like I need to I just got this intuitive nudge.

I was like I need think I need to learn to meditate and start doing yoga. And it was when I was in business school at UCLA. And so I started doing BC cream yoga super intensely. Um, five or six days a week, two a day vegan. I was down to I'm 195 now. It's down to 150 pounds. And then I I took the uh I got initiated into Maharishi's transcendental meditation. And the first time I sat down and did that mantra, it was like and I was like, "Oh, I just come home.

This wow that's like it felt so good." I sat for 20 minutes. And over the course of that, that was the first step on the journey. And over the course of that journey, I realized that the happiness that I was looking for wasn't anywhere out here. It was in here. And the deeper I went in here, the happier I got out here. And so I kind of got addicted with it and eventually evolved my world view where for me personally, my metric for um how successful I feel my life has been.

I want to be successful in a couple different domains. I want to be successful professionally and financially. I want to be successful physically and taking care of myself. I want to be successful spiritually and my spiritual achievement and understanding and I want to be successful as a family man as a father. And so I systematically went through each of those different dimensions and very deliberately undertook efforts and work to further myself in each of those different directions to the point where I felt like I had a level of achievement and a quality of life and and success that that made me feel good and made me feel like I'd achieved what I'd wanted.

And so learning how to be a householder and how to do very deep, often very challenging, very disruptive inner work was was part of that journey. I love it, man. And I and I think I distinctly remember listening a conversation to you where, you know, this sounded like it might have been before you started studying mudra ashram, but you were like, "Okay, like I want to I want to just like stay up here with the masters in this in this realm and meditate all and they were like, "No, you're this isn't what your dharma is.

Like, you got to go out and and do stuff." And I'd love for you to share more about that. Yeah. I was um [clears throat] I had rented a beach, I had rented a cottage by the beach in Ocean Beach in San Diego. Um I was working on a path called ekenar which teaches a modality called soul travel where you it's a specific spiritual technique where you focus the attention in in the third eye and then you move it up through the crown chakra and up into the spiritual worlds in full awareness and then you can go to different temples and work with different teachers within that hierarchy and in those spiritual worlds.

And so I was managing this little cafe during the day because it was pretty low friction, low brain power. And then I was meditating six or eight hours a day com teaching from the masters within this hierarchy and writing books about it. And I I had a sixbook deal with Deepak Chopra's publisher and put one out and had the other ones in draft and working through it. And I had gotten within that path and tradition as far as I could go. I had hit the ceiling.

And so, but I still felt like there was more for me to do. And so, I went to the hierarchy that I was working with um and I said, "Look at I I want to go I want to go be a monk." Like, I want to just completely dedicate and focus myself to this. And they said, "No, no, you've done that. You don't get to do that in this life." That's the old model. Um the new model with where um the collective reality is and so the cycles of time is that in the past historically it was darker times and the secret teachings and the wisdom and the light and the truth was kept in the monasteries where it was safeguarded and protected and shielded because it was such dark times.

And though those monastics were the the servants of the light, the keepers of the light, they held those those traditions and they passed it down mouth to ear and and sometimes in written form. But where we are now is all that wisdom from the monastery, all those secrets are coming from the sky to the street, from the monastery to the marketplace. and where we are in this cycle of time, the journey, the journey that we are in collectively is incorporating and embodying those esoteric principles into everyday life and living.

[clears throat] And so their response to me was, "Your job is to go and live that as a truth, as an example, and help teach other professional westerners who have your type of white guy, MBA, tech bro, finance dude background." I can relate to like take all of that. I'm going to make as much money as I can and get the hottest wife that I can and the biggest house that I can and the fastest car that I can and translate that into an embodied spiritual living um for modern times.

And they said there are two teachers left on the planet that can help you with that journey. Um go find one that can teach you about this very very specific esoteric thing. And so I started searching um and I found I found mudrash in Los Angeles and reached out and explained what was going on and started up the path. So that was sort of how that journey. That's amazing. And you know I do want to highlight Mudra Asham which I actually been studying it partly inspired by you.

Um what appeals appeals to you so much about that path and I want to just give it a quick plug for anybody who might be curious about it. Well um you know the paths I think um we call down what we need collectively for the next st stage of our evolution collective right so you know in the dark ages um you know and and even earlier than that you had sort of Christianity that came in and with the uh you know the rules of conduct kind of provided a civilizing um civilizing effect for for some of the chaos of of those early times.

And so now we're at a stage where we're ready to move beyond that and we're calling in yoga, meditation, plant medicine, these eastern modalities. Um but each of those paths are closed in the sense that if you're a student of Buddhism, if you're a student of ekenar, if you're a student of Sufism or Islam or Judaism or pick your ism ism, if you have the inner awareness opened on that path, you can only see the tracks and landmarks that are contained within that path. So, it's like um if you think about the journey to liberation as climbing up the mountain, each path has its own ladder going up the mountain.

And if you're on an ism ladder, you can't see any of the other ladders that are to your left or right because it's a closed path. You're not initiated, if you're initiated on the ism path, you're not initiated on the other ism path, and you can't look in between. But the reality is is that there's, you know, 188 paths up the mountain that are active. And the unique thing about mudra ashram of all the ones that I've studied and evaluated is it's an open path. And what that means is that as you do the practices and techniques and you start to unfold and develop the awareness and go up, you can see all of the different paths up the mountain.

And mudrash culminates in the final stages called multiplane mastery where you develop a form on different paths so that you can minister and help people and bestow the light on different paths. So you could be a mudra ashram um high initiate and you could administer in the inner worlds to to Muslims to Christians to Jews to Sufis to Zen Buddhists to Tibetan Buddhists to Vadriana Buddhists to bun bun students to Sant students to ekinar students and so in a world where we are divided based on which path we're on and which create blinders and view everybody else as enemies Right?

If I'm Jewish, I'm the chosen son of God and everybody else isn't. If I'm Christian, there's one God and only one God and everybody else isn't. And pick your ism. This is a path that can unify and integrate all of the other paths in an experiential way where you're not just taking it on faith, but you can actually see the other paths and landmarks going up the mountain and see where people are and provide service to them to help liberate them and move them forward on the path.

I think you know that is something that makes this path unique among all os and I think also why it's been called forth in this time and place particularly in California to help to help integrate and connect all the other paths and reduce some of that friction as we all try to climb the mountain together. Yeah, I mean that's that's definitely something that was very compelling to me as I learned about it as well where it was like wow like you know the highest rung of TM is not necessarily the same as the highest rung of Renue of these other things.

It's like different roads, right? And and the notion that all potential potentialities would be accessible to you um from a single unified meta meta path, if you will. Like that was like whoa. Okay. This is this is interesting. I want to dig in here a little bit. Yeah. And it also has the most comprehensive um map of the continual consciousness of of any path. So it's not like it's not like Christianity where you go and you it's it's all faith-based, right? You're just hope praying and hoping and maybe you have some kind of experience.

This is completely experiential. So you can individually validate that you're making progress at each point. So you you do the technique, you move to the next point on the ladder. That point has these characteristics. You experience it personally and you go, "Oh, okay. That's for real. I experienced it." And within the contin of consciousness which are strung like pearls on a string within those are contained every state and state conceivable and experiencable by a human and a physical body. And so as you work your way through it you can experience the gamut of human realities that an embodied person can have and understand them in a very deep and and fundamental way which allows you when you're working in the world at large to tune into somebody and go, "Oh, okay.

That person is right here. this is their world view. They think this because this is the the reality of the place that they're in. And I can't expect them to be up here or or or down here because this is where they are. And it enables you to meet people where they are in the journey and have much more effective and compassionate communication. So let let's let's switch gears to what you're up to now with dark rooms. And you know maybe to frame this up but you mentioned that right now is like kind of a shift in what's happening in this in the cycle on this planet and that you know there's new there's new technologies that are being brought into our awareness.

I guess my question would be you know let like I'd be curious to hear your perspective on that cycle and then how did these dark rooms first get on your radar? Yeah. Well, most of the great traditions have a map of cycles of time, right? And you know, in the one that I think is probably the closest is the Hindu model of the Yugas. Um, the Buddhists have a model of time also, but in in my experience exploring that, I find it to be a little bit elongated and I think the Buddhists are or the Hindus are probably a little closer to to what's going on.

But in those models you have in the beginning of the cycle of time you start sort of basically at the top of the ladder and then the cycles take you down all the way to the bottom of the ladder which would be like the dark ages and then you cycle back up as you learn things. And the whole point is designed to take a soul through that journey of all different human experience so that you season the soul and it gets experience and it has creative expression and and and all the rest of that.

And so we've sort of come all the way down and now we're starting to come back up. And the culmination of that at the end of the last cycle is the transition collectively into an astral age. So right now we're in a physical age because we're in a world of duality. We have physical bodies. We live on a physical planet. But the astral realm is the next realm above this one and it's non-dual where literally you can think something or imagine it and it creates it as a reality which is a very powerful capability to have and if you if soul was not seasoned and matured [clears throat] that ability could be abused and be quite destructive.

Just like you don't give a teenager an F1 race car, you give them your old beat up Tahoe because you know that they're going to go bang around and drive over curbs and run into trees and do stupid And so the whole point of this arc of this journey is for Soul to get seasoned and gather wisdom so that by the end when it's done, you give them the F1 car and they go do race laps, they don't go wreck the thing. And so and so collectively we gather experience and knowledge and we move through that journey together.

And so now as we're starting to come back up and head back up towards the astral age, then we're looking collectively for more sophisticated tools, deeper understanding, greater wisdom, greater awareness, greater facility, and all the rest of that. Which is why you see in the west us we're calling in you know yoga and plant medicine and meditation and all the rest of that and of all of those different practices the dark room meditation is the most potent transformationally. So like if you go do yoga, you know, you can do broom or you can do venyasa or whatever you have you and it'll clear out the body and it'll restructure things and it'll help you get peaceful and yoga was designed to prepare the body for meditation.

So then you move into meditation and that helps you settle the mind and reduce the thoughts and learn to discipline your focus. But unless you are have an advanced practice, it doesn't necessarily enable you to realize those higher states which are in in the non-dual worlds. Plant medicine layered on top provides a gateway to go experience on a short-term uncontrolled basis the reality of the underworld. So you know that they're real and it's not faith-based. And then the dark room and deep meditation teaches you to access those states under control and full consciousness.

Because in the dark after three days your brain starts to produce DMT endogenously and it naturally opens the pineal gland and those gateways without any class 4 schedule drugs without any vomiting without any of the rest of it in a totally natural way. If you're not prepared for that it can be really weird and scary. But if you are prepared for that, it can rapidly accelerate your development. Which is why the Buddhists and the Sufis and the Christians have all kept it hidden in secret as part of the esoteric teachings for the last couple thousand years.

And so now as we swing through the bottom of the curve and we're calling in these more advanced techniques to integrate that wisdom from the sky down into the street from the monastery to the marketplace. This is one of those those core practices that is is my purpose and journey is to make that modality available to westerners in a safe way so they can receive the benefits without the risks of the downside of doing it properly. you know what what can someone expect who's maybe never heard of a dark room retreat before?

Like what is the actual experience like? Well, if you've never done any meditation or yoga or anything, you shouldn't go do a dark retreat. Um you just it's not a good idea. Um, but if you have a little bit of experience either with yoga or meditation or what have you, and if you've done work in your subconscious, like if you've done Byron Katie's work or pick your modality of trying to understand how the how the furniture is in the basement and rearranging it and and cleaning it out, then this is modality that can help for that.

And what happens is, so usually you want to start with like five days. So you go in on day one and you just relax, maybe get a massage, do some yoga, turn off all your digital devices, maybe read some spiritual material, go for a walk in the woods, just sit quietly. And then after dinner on day one, you turn off all the lights. So the room is completely dark and there's no light. There's no You can't cheat. There's no light. There's not like pin holes. It's black, black, black.

Like when you open your eyes and close your eyes, there's no difference. You can't tell any difference. And so you go to sleep that first night and then generally for the first 48 hours people just sleep because um 70% of um the stuff that goes on in our brain is through our visual cortex with stuff that we see. And when you turn that and and that stuff the input from your visual cortex overrides a lot of the other ner um um balancing functions in the body.

So visual cortex stimulation creates cortisol. It creates stress. It keeps us going. It keeps us amped up. And that prevents your body from sort of healing. That's why people in urban environments get stressed out and sick a lot. And so the first 40 hours you basically sleep [clears throat] and most of your biomarkers reset, your testosterone, estrogen, melatonin, all your biochemistry resets. And this is also when a lot of people see the starts of the beginning of spontaneous healing. Because in the absence of external stimulation, your body does what it's designed to do, which is to heal itself.

Like when you're sick and your doctor says just stay in bed and sleep. That's why he says that or she says that is because that's how your body heals. So then you go through sort of two days of sort of mostly sleeping. [snorts] And then on the third day, [clears throat and cough] you're kind of out of that. Your body's reset. You're energized. You're stabilized. You're balanced. And day three to day four is when your brain starts to produce DMT. And you can do it one of two ways.

You can just passively sit there and follow the breath and observe what the phenomenon that arises. This is just called, you know, passive observing. Or if you have a dedicated meditation practice, you can do your practice either on your own or with the support of your teacher or one of the teachers that you find through our platform. And so [clears throat] generally as part of that three, four, stage three and four, you will start to experience um light phenomenon and images which is um your awareness moving up out of the body and um through the inner senses, experiencing things that are going on in the spiritual worlds.

And it could be patterns of light, it could be like sort of kaleidoscope colors. It could be seeing your past lives. It could be viewing teachers. It could be seeing this the kundalini serpent coming up the column of light in the spine. It could be lots of different things. And some people also develop special uh spiritual powers called cities like the ability to see into your body. So you can see like your muscles, your tendons, your bones, your blood vessels and cells and things like that.

So it's highly individualistic depending on sort of how you're wired and what your dharma is and what you're working on. And so the day three, four, you stay in the dark. And then in day five, you generally uh turn on the lights and come out in the morning, have a cup of tea, listen to the sound of the birds, the wind in the trees, spend some time in nature. And then it takes about 24 hours to to come back into your body and and for that that aperture of your senses, which has gotten so broad, to narrow back down so that you can deal with normal physical life.

Like on my last one, I did five days. I came out in the morning. I was like, I'm a badass. I don't know how to meditate. I'm going to drive down the hill and get a cup of coffee. Oh no. I couldn't even turn the car off. I had to go back up to the cabin, put my keys away, ask them to bring me some tea, and to literally just sit there on the porch for five or six hours while reality reality adjusts. Let's talk about bringing your whole self to work.

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It's like his dark room experience. Um, but that was the first time I heard of it. And I knew people like saw colors and stuff, but I didn't realize about I didn't know that physical healing was a thing. And I also didn't know that the emergence of cities was the thing. Yeah. That's how Joe Despensza healed his spine in the [clears throat] dark and that's how he developed that protocol which he which I have I know other people who have used it. There's a guy in Hawaii called Miracle King who went in in a wheelchair.

He fell off a balcony, broke his spine, went in in a wheelchair, did Joe Despensza's technique, and walked out 40 days later. No Wow. That's so interesting. I I did not know Joe Despensza his dark room was how he healed himself. He kind of keeps that a little bit uh quiet relative to his meditations he's slinging. Um, wow, that's so cool. And you know, you guys are innovating on this space. And so like I'd be curious to hear like kind of like a comparison of like let's say 10 years ago somebody wanted to do this, what they had to what how they had to do it and now what you're bringing forth with the cry.

[snorts] Yeah. So I I I became fascinated with this after um studying the bun teachings and heard hearing it referenced in those teachings. And then I took the bun dark room teachings over COVID from a teacher in the Bay Area and and blacked out a room in my house and tried it for a couple of days because I was so fascinated with it and it was hugely impactful. decided I'm gonna I want to bring this to a broader audience because I'm at the point in my journey in my career where really what I'm looking for is global impact um on on consciousness and in going through it and coming to the conclusion that this was the single most powerful modality for unlocking and transforming consciousness.

I went to a couple of the mana mon man mon man mon man mon man mon man mon man mon man mon man mon man mon man monastics that I knew and I was like I said what do you think about taking this to a broader audience because it's been hidden and protected for years like they didn't they wouldn't even give the teachings if you weren't an advanced student and they also did the same thing they said it's time it's time to make this the time to make this available but the challenge with the dark room experience traditionally is that you were facilitated by a monk on property who gave you the teachings mouthto ear through the door every day and so you were necessarily limited by the number of monks and the number of rooms.

And so, you know, I'm a tech builder. I build scalable platforms. I'm like, that model does not scale. There's not enough monks and there's not enough rooms. And if you want to achieve global impact, you have to have people come have the experience, experience a change, go back to their community, have people notice that they've changed, get curious, ask them what they do, and then have them come in and have the same thing. Rinse and repeat. So you create a flywheel. So I went to a bunch of friends that run dark retreats and there's not that many.

There's today there's maybe 10 locations in the west for that you can go do this. Globally there's maybe 40 or 50 rooms where you can go do it. And I said I asked these people who are running these retreat centers. I said have you ever facilitated somebody on the phone in a different location? And they all said yeah no problem. Works just fine. I was like, "Okay, there's the unlock." So if I can build the rooms and I can build a technology system that allows a monk in Siberia or Nepal to facilitate a retreatment in Cambodia, Bali, Costa Rica, New York, Massachusetts, and Germany, then one monk can facilitate 50 people a week versus two if they have to be on site.

And so since I'm a tech builder historically and I've had some success with that uh what we put together is a in room audio enabled cloud connected um technology platform where we use we took sensors from the Israeli nursing home industry that are passive and hardwired into the room. So there's no Bluetooth and no white Wi-Fi. And we monitor movement, temperature, heart rate, heart rate variability, respiration, perspiration, a couple other things. So we know you're safe, right? So if you're [clears throat] the Israelis have developed algorithms so that they can see when anxiety is going up and you're escalating towards some sort of breakthrough break event.

So first and foremost, we can make sure monitor people. The AI can monitor all [clears throat] their vitals and we can make sure that they're safe, which was the first and first and foremost consideration. The second challenge when you're in the dark is that you receive lots of information because you're the mind is quieting. It opens the gateway to the higher dimensions, soul, higher aspect, and you start receiving communication and information that is quite profound. And for artists, it could be download on music or songs.

For writers, it could be writing ideas. For regular folks, it could be, you know, an understanding of reality. And to capture those, you either have to carry a handheld recorder with all the buttons blacked out with tape and make hope that you're pressing you remember which button it is. You're pressing the right button. The batteries aren't dead. You're remember it's recording and saving what you want and you're not leaving it on when you're done. Or you have to get out of bed. You have to feel your way through the room in the dark.

Find the desk. Find your pen. Find your notebook. Try to remember where you were on the page in the dark. Put your finger where you think the line is. remember what your download was and start writing it in real time which is a terrible experience for capturing your insights. So the second thing we built was an audio system where you say house take a voice note and you just start talking and you just talk stream you talk stream of consciousness it captures it and encrypts it and transcribes it.

It stores it in your folder and then when you're done you just go and you download and you can say house replay that voice note to make sure that you got it and and it was in there. So that's the second feature we built. And then the third feature we built is the remote facilitation. So we have a plat we have a we we built basically the app store for facilitators and teachers. So you sign up for the retreat, you pick your location, your time and then you pick your facilitator and then you have a pre-conult with your facilitator where they help you prepare and then while you're in the room if you're going through something and you need help, you say, "House, schedule a schedule an I need to talk to Scott.

schedule me an appointment. And the system knows when you're asleep and awake because we're monitoring all your vitals. And so it sends you a note. You get a note that says, "Hey, Ian's in his retreat. He needs to talk to you." It shows you my wake sleep schedule. You pick an hour that works for you and reserve it. And then at the appointed hour, it chimes me in the room. It goes ding. Ian, Scott's ready to talk. Would you like to talk to him now? I say yes.

It initiates connection. We have our conversation. It records it, transcribes it, encrypts it, stores it, all HIPPA compliant. And if you're a monk, a Russian Orthodox monk in Siberia and only speak Russian, or if you're a Buddhist monk in Lantang in Mustang and you only speak Nepali or Tibetan, it translate that conversation in real time for you. And we have a speaker system. We put 16 speakers in the room on the walls, on the roof, and on the floor. And we use a the motion tracking system to tell where you are in the room and the speaker system direct to direct the sound to where you are dynamically.

So it always feels like your teacher's one foot away from you no matter where you are in the room. So it's a highfidelity teacher experience that feels like reality even though your teacher could be 3,000 miles away in some monastery in the middle of nowhere. So that system which we've got applied for patent protection for also has a research layer. So there's a bunch of Raspberry Pi compute that is is connected to a HIPOC compliant timestamp so that you can do research studies in the room and synchronize the data fields from all those different inputs and do data collection for analysis and we've got a study we're baking with Harvard and IAS for launch that will be the first of its kind to document the physiological impact of being in the dark.

Wow. Yeah. That's what immediately where my mind went was like, has anybody studied this stuff? Um, and sounds like you guys are pioneering that. Now, this is Brian Johnson territory. It's never been it's never been studied evaluated in a clinical way. And what we're the platform we're building will enable us to do those studies and replicate those at scale um across the planet. And the goal is to build 2,000 rooms over the next 15. So, it's a 40x increase in the number of rooms over the next 15 years and have this modality available ideally like a yoga studio.

So, you'd have your in any town you'd have the doctor's office, the yoga studio, and the dark room. And those three would be the three pillars of your wellness regimen. Let's go. I'm I'm I'm here for that future. So, you know, I I imagine a lot of people hear like hear about this and they're like, man, like how do you pass the time? You know what I mean? like that that sounds like like really tough. Um what would be your response to that to that objection or resistance?

I mean sometimes it's boring. Like sometimes it's just boring. But that that's part of the journey, right? Because when you're bored, you have to learn to be with yourself. And when you're not distracted with, you know, happy thumbs and screens and whatever your distraction is, um, you're just with yourself. And then when you're just with yourself, your thoughts come up. And the thoughts are the roadmap to joy and freedom and happiness. So the thought comes up and you look at it, you say, "Where did that come from?

How do I feel about that? What's behind that? And then what's behind that? And then what's behind that? And then what's behind that? And then eventually you get down the metaphor I use. It's like kelp growing on the ocean floor, right? The ocean is sort of our subconscious um or our consciousness. And then the top of the ocean is where reality hits and then the kelp are all the threads of our subconscious and where they connect to the bedrock and the ocean floor. That's usually where your childhood trauma is, where all your stuff gets put together.

And [clears throat] so as the thought as you notice the kelp floating on the top of the ocean, that's the thought. And then you follow it down with successive questions about what's beneath it. And eventually you get to the root within your subconscious of where it was initiated. And then you can decide to keep it if it serves you or you can cut it loose and let the cup strand flow away. Or you can reprogram it so that instead of kelp it turns into something else.

And so that way you can you can proactively reconstruct your consciousness in a way that serves your highest purpose. But it can get boring. It can get especially if you don't have a practice that you're engaged in. But that's part of it. Right. Right. You know, one of the things that strikes me is psychedelics are such a dice roll. Like I've had a lot of incredible experiences and then last year I had a destabilizing experience, my first one. And I, you know, and I kind of like was like, I've done a lot of this like I'm good.

And then like, you know, I got my ass kicked and and I don't know if I'll ever do that again um to be honest. And it I wonder does that type of variability exist with dark rooms where people can you know potentially traumatize get traumatized or experience something that's like beyond their window of tolerance. Not beyond their window of tolerance. So the difference between the dark and psychedelics, you know, psilocybin or Iawaska or 5me or whatever DMT or whatever you're talking about, um, that's an uncontrolled experience.

So you're you're unlocking chemistry in the brain which blasts open the doorway to the inner worlds. Your awareness shoots up and out and you have no control over where you go. Like if you have a good shaman with you who who has uh a well-developed facility in the inner worlds, they can help sort of grab you and guide you. But satin setting is hugely important. And you ultimately though you can't you can't control where you go because it's not a natural process. It's a catalyzed process through the use of these intermediaries.

[clears throat] The dark is a natural process. So your body naturally and your spirit and your soul naturally don't give you more than you can handle. You may need guidance to contextualize it and understand it, but you don't receive things that are beyond your capability to manage and and go through because by definition your soul and your spirit won't give you that because that would be counterproductive. There's the whole point of incarnation is to have experience and learn and grow and an experience that you can't handle and takes you out of your body by definition is antithetical to the whole point.

So because it's a natural experience and if you have the right facilitator supporting you which we heavily screen and vet to have them on platform then you will have a you might have a challenging experience but you're not going to have like a psychotic break and and and a bad trip like you could potentially have with some of those other medicines. I'm also I mean that's very attractive to me. Um, I'm also very curious about the like integration of of afterwards. Like, you know, I think psychedelics are famous for being a window, right?

And then you think you're like, I'm God, like all this amazing stuff, then like two days later you're pissed at somebody running late. Um, and a lot of it wears off pretty quickly. Is it is it similar with the dark room peak experiences? is are more stabilized kind of integration. It's a longer tale for integration and it's more subtle. So, um what many people report is when they're in there, they're like, "Well, that not much didn't happen." Like, I didn't see, you know, dragons eating rainbows or, you know, talk to my dad, dead dad or grandfather, what have you.

But then when you talk to them a month, three months, six months later and they start slowly because it's a more natural process, what happens is the aperture opens up. You deal with stuff and work on it and then you come back out and the aperture closes back down and then your subconscious and your conscious will work to dribble those realizations and changes out slowly over time in a way that's manageable and you can integrate them and they're less disruptive and you can handle them and they're beneficial.

So it's not like Iawaska where like you go have this peak experience, you talk to mama, you come back, you quit your job, you leave your family, you get a van, you drive off to the Amazon and decide you're going to go be a shaman or something. doesn't that doesn't happen in the dark. In the dark, you have these these more cogent and more controlled experiences that have a long tail for integration and it unpacks it unpacks more gently over time. Yeah, that's that's awesome. Um, you know, have I know there's certain like I know like for example like the Kogis like they raise their children in the dark and I'm sure there's I'm sure there's other people that do that.

Like I'm curious like what you've learned about the cultures that like make this like an intentional part of their culture. Typically they do it for for the person in the community who has the role of being the connection to the gods or spirit or the other worlds. And the reason they do it with th those children who are selected to fulfill that role is that when you as a child goes through their early development and the mind starts initially the mind is not very well formed.

That's why you have this childlike innocence because like there's no story. It's just all pure perception and presence. And then over time the mind starts to form and you get those ruts and grooves and eventually that that aperture to the other worlds closes down as the mind starts to solidify because the purpose of the mind is to tell you that the spiritual worlds aren't real and you're crazy. That's that's its function. And so by keeping kids in the dark until the mind is developed, they can maintain that connection to the inner world so that and it stabiliz it so that when they come out and they rejoin the community as part of everyday life, they keep that connection to the inner worlds and they can play that that that functional role within society of the shaman or what have you.

Who's the who's a connection to the spirit worlds and guide the community through you know whatever it is what crops or or disputes or whatever it is as that's part of it. So there's a very rational reason for for why they do it, but it's generally only for those children who are designated either by birth or by whatever their selection process is to fulfill that role. Man, so fascinating. And is the meditative experience that you have inside of a dark room? Like is there like a more heightened level of perception or awareness relative to like, you know, just doing a drop in in your in your house?

Yeah. I mean, if you, you know, if you, if you get up at 6:00 in the morning and go try to sit for 20 minutes before you gota, you know, before the kids get up and you got to get them pack them lunch and take them off to school and go to the gym and everything else, you're thinking, okay, like, what do I got to do with the rest of my day? Oh, like, is my wife mad because I didn't take the garbage out yesterday? Oh, I got that parent teacher conference later.

I got the investor. Like, there's just all that that goes on that distracts from quieting the inner discussion. And in the dark, all that goes away because you don't have any of that stimulus. So you're only left with your breath and your thoughts. And in that environment, absent those distractions, after a couple of days for the muddy water to settle out and get clear, it makes your meditations much more powerful, much more profound, much more transformative. And whereas you might be able to make, you know, x amount of progress in any given day out in the household or life, in the dark, you might make 10 or 15 or 100x progress because you're so much more focused and potent with your practice.

What do you think it's going to take for this to go more mainstream? I mean, I think it's already going mainstream. You've got um Sky Caves Up in Oregon is a three-year weight list. Aubrey Marcus is doing it. It's athletes are doing it. entertains and business people are doing it. I think it's a question of awareness and access um and people learning about it. And so when we launch the rooms, we'll do start doing a podcast where we interview people pre and post and tell their stories.

And we'll also interview the monks who are the who are the tradition keepers of these practices. And we'll start to spread good information and broader awareness and also broader accessibility, right? because right now if you want to go do it, it takes a long time to be able to even have the opportunity. So expanded awareness of the practice, awareness of best practices and safety, better access, more facilitators. Um, and I think that will start bringing this to a much more to a much more mainstream audience.

And you know, this is a dumb practical question, but it's coming up for me like how does the food situation work? Do people do this fasted? Are they are they eating? Like is there is there like some special contraption that someone slides it under without any light coming in? Well, the interesting thing about being in the dark is your appetite falls off a cliff because you're literally mostly you're just either in bed or meditating, sitting in a chair or whatever. Some people do a little yoga.

But like I'm a three meals a day guy. Steak and eggs for breakfast, a bunch of protein, a little veg for lunch, a bunch of protein and veg for dinner, and popcorn with my kid if I watch a movie afterwards. In the dark after sort of day two, I have two hard-boiled eggs and an apple for breakfast, a little fruit and some nuts in the mid-afternoon, a cup of tea, and maybe a chicken breast and some veggies or half a chicken breast and some veggies for dinner.

like you just don't want to eat because your metabolic rate gets collapsed. So you can do um you can eat whatever you want. You can eat the temple food that that we we prescribe based on these monastic traditions that and based on local ingredients. There's a whole tonic and supplement menu. So if you want to do a flush or a clean or a fast, you can do that. Um doing any sort of recreational drugs or plant medicine in the dark is highly um is not suggested.

We highly discourage that. Uh, but there's a special door. It's a double-sided door. So, there's the outside door. There's an inner door, middle door, and then the inner door. And so, the food is delivered to the outside door and closed. And then from the inside, you open it and open the middle door and bring it in. And so, it maintains the dark and then you just get it delivered. And then we have built a special section inside the room with recessed cup holders and silverware holders and whatnot.

And so, you sit there and you eat it. And then you push it back through the window and then you get the next door when it comes. Wow. So freaking cool. So I imagine there's some people listening to this be like, "All right, this sounds pretty dope. I want to do it. I want to do it Arya style with the the speaker setup and the biomarker monitoring and you know monks on demand like what is the current status of uh Acrya and these type of particular experiences that you're creating?

Well, we've been in development on a number of sites for the last 18 months. So, we'll open the doors at our first location in Costa Rica. It's in the Diamonte Valley, which is the other side of the hill from Luvita at a place called Holos. And those rooms will come online in August. We'll open the reservation book at the beginning of May. And then we're building two rooms in upper Mustang with the Tibetan Buddhists um in Nepal. Those will come online in the third quarter. And then two rooms with the Bon Monastery in Nepal.

Those will come online in the first quarter of 27. and then two rooms in Bali in partnership with the yoga barn and new boot. Those first two rooms will come online in July of 27. And then we have locations in Cambodia, Germany, uh Massachusetts, Vermont, Connecticut, New York, and the in the Hudson Valley, California, Austin that'll come online in sort of the back half of 27 and beyond. So you can do we will launch we'll open the reservation book on our website beginning of May which is acryat.global and then you can book your reservation book your teacher book your location and then we will add locations as they become generally what we'll do is we'll add a location and open it for reservation six months before the rooms are going to open up and then that'll give people a chance to book and plan trip.

That's epic. Who are you partnering with in Austin to build one? We've got a couple of different sites that we're eval partners we're evaluating right now. We haven't locked into anything any one yet, but we're going through the we're going through the vetting process right now. Very cool. Very cool. Well, count me interested. Um and and you know, I just love what you're doing, man. It's it's really epic. And um obviously there's there's when these when these open up, people can book, but how else can people support you with this?

Um well if ever if if someone wants to participate financially um there is an investment opportunity if they want to if they want to uh buy equity in the company so that they can get exposure to the global portfolio. So the goal is to build 2,000 rooms around the globe over the next 10 or 15 years and that would enable our guests to sort of go to Costa Rica and have that protocol and visit and there and have that local experience and then go to Bali and have that local experience and then go to Nepal and have that local experience.

So, it's designed for sort of conscious adventurers and travelers. And eventually, I think it evolves into sort of like the Aman resorts for conscious travelers where you have these communities, these luxury high-end communities that are dedicated to deep consciousness practices that you can sort of go around the globe and experience different cultures. That's epic. Sounds way better than an all-inclusive in uh Cancun if you ask me. Long as you don't have kids with you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that was another thing that I was thinking in my head.

I was like, man, I got a budget uh when I can sneak away uh for a week or something. Um but seems like there it's totally worth it. It's worth it. And it's good for teenagers. We're actually um interesting. got to launch two rooms in San Diego at the youth homeless center uh to and put youth homeless kids through the dark room experience and train them to facilitate other teenagers of going through this modality because it's very powerful for teens who think they have ADHD or cell phone addiction or whatever.

And so we'll enable these homeless kids to go around the world at different locations and facilitate teenagers from those local geographies of having the dark room experience. It's going to be really cool. Can't wait to wait to launch it. That's epic, man. Well, Ian, this has been awesome. Um, you know, Arya Global is the website. If people want to follow you or stay in touch, what's the best way for them to do that? Just over the website's the best place to find me. Um, I'm on X.

Also, I'll put all the details in the in the show notes and people can track it down there. Awesome. Well, thanks Ian. Keep up the amazing work. And, you know, everyone listening, go check out a dark room retreat. I appreciate it. I appreciate it. Thanks for the time today. I need

I started looking around and I ended up getting initiated into Transcendental Meditation into TM and so I did the initiation I got connected to this woman in Beverly Hills who had initiated like Madonna and Lenny Krav it was totally an LA thing right you know she initiated all these fancy people and she gives me the Mantra I go back to my place I sit down I close my eyes I hit the mantra and I was like boom everything goes silent I go straight down to the

bottom of the well there's this immense Stillness and I just sit there in the Mantra sitting right in the third eye and I'm just spinning it and I can feel just the energy pouring down on me and so that sort of I was like oh I've been looking in all the wrong places that thing I've been looking for it's not out there and all that stuff it's right in here good shit's about to go down I'm feeling something in my spirit chops and Taps with Aaron

dellavedova Hello friends welcome back to chats and tats with me your host Aaron dellavedova a lot of you who know me probably also know that I have um a pretty extensive journey in philosophy and and I guess some people would call me a Seeker I've read a lot of spiritual books most of my um the stuff I lean on what I guess you would consider Eastern Buddhist Taoist but I've also experimented with a lot of different types of meditation throughout my life experimented with a number

of different uh plant medicines and and it's just something I find to be very very important it's something I can't seem to turn off as much as I try to turn away from it it always finds its way to creep back into my life and uh so I don't know at some point I just said screw it this is what I like to do so I keep trying to meet people and have conversations that are deep and meaningful especially with folks that are very involved with

you know spiritual paths and seeking spiritual knowledge and in that Journey I've met quite a few remarkable people one of those folks is here with me today he is a lot of things I mean he's a very successful businessman he's a father he's a husband he's but I think for me one of the most profound things I know about him is his path of spirituality it's more extreme than anyone I've ever met in my 51 years and when I say extreme I just mean maybe a

better word would be committed so this is a person that I I've grown a deep connection to we have done some meditation seminars together I've extensively tattooed him and through this all these different experiences we've become very very very good friends and I just thought it was appropriate to share him with you guys so with all that being said and without further Ado please welcome my guest today Ian Gardner hey Aaron thanks yeah I'm glad you're here you know it's been a long time it has

too long five years maybe at least and you're only an hour away I know it's embarrassing I blame it on you it's usually my fault Alex does that too and that's usually makes things peaceful so go ahead go ahead just you'll take that's a smart man well no it's just life is busy and I don't know it's it's funny when you know someone is there and you have access to them I know for me I tend to just not maybe give them the time they need

it's when you find out like oh my friend you know they're moving and suddenly you're having to order the house for dinner it's like why didn't I do that when before he was moving you know why do I only show up at that you know what I don't want to just be at the person's funeral like you know suddenly the just we should all make more time for each other but life is busy and we're all hyper connected I've never had so many friends you know

I mean my clothes in her Circle probably pretty small but my extended circle like the rest of us is hundreds and hundreds of people and I I actually do care and like so many of those folks but with the touch of a button they can text you and they can call you and suddenly you wake up in the morning and it's like there's just a lot of communication that happens in my world I'm sure in yours too but separate subject we went on we went on

off on that one on the last episode how to manage time and how to how to manage all of this connectivity that we're involved in nowadays good or bad but let me switch it back to how I introduced you you know back when we met um I might get some of these details a little bit wrong because it was probably 15 years ago I grew up Catholic you know saw a lot of hypocrisy in the Catholic religion obviously I mean obviously but I think we've all

heard some of the things that happen but you can't judge a religion by the folks that are in it but I was a young man I just thought [ __ ] this these people are hypocrites you know I've got these guys I go to church on the weekend they get drunk you know in the on Sunday after church and they're like this doesn't feel right so I just said I kind of went Anarchist really for me it was just [ __ ] everything go punk rock

burn it all down and then I I carried that through high school and then I got out of high school and joined the military and realized the Anarchy thing wasn't really working like there were ways to evolve myself in life that were more productive and then I started the seeking path and for me it was Buddhism I just found some books on Buddhism and I was like holy [ __ ] these guys out there yeah it made sense to me like just the simple laws of

Karma and now reincarnation I don't know I haven't I don't have memories of past lives separate stuff just the basic laws of karma um and also the biggest thing for me for going to you know Catholicism to Eastern religion was they allowed you direct access to God right you know I felt like and it probably is true that you know I guess you can correct people around but Christian religions kind of put a barrier there a gatekeeper I would call it the new version does yeah

the new version right we're not talking about agnostic or you know Dead Sea Scrolls and all that because I'm the hermetics went direct but the modern modern monks don't which was a form of control sure and then I but I didn't know that at the time I just thought all Christianity was they were just trying to create it for profits and control that's why they got a gatekeeper I'm the priest you're the person in church if you do what I say you might get into the

club and I didn't like that where the Buddhists came along and said no no you don't need anybody you could be all alone and connect to God it's inside you in some way to put it might be you are God you know which that was a you never said that around a Christian you are God you Blasphemous son of a [ __ ] but that was such a those are the two very wildly different ways to look at spirituality um I don't think what I'm talking

about right now is so crazy now that Buddhism and so many different spiritual paths are very in the now and everyone's trying them out and talking about it so maybe not so crazy to say now but the point is I got into reading these books and I I really became a Spiritual Secret not even knowing it at the time and then at some point I had an experience on dimethyltryptamine in which I ended up you know I had already been meditating but I never left my

body I never entered another realm I mean I had brief moments where I thought I was maybe feeling a presence or you know subtleties were occurring but nothing like my DMT experience in which I was Thrust out of my body I was an orb of light with 360 degree Vision I was thrust into an actual reality it was a temple giant almost like a Saint Petersburg type Temple but it was made of light and a vibration and there were entities in there made of pure white

light not Angels just just uh they were humanoid in shape but they were just made of light they didn't have eyeballs with just a and they were walking around like they were doing their daily business and someone them knew me and spoke to me and that whole thing just shattered everything for me and I remember telling you about it and you kind of very calmly said oh yeah you know what do you think I where do you think I'm doing with all my meditation that these

are these do exist Aaron totally normal totally normal and I've never seen anyone say that before I was like what you're like oh yeah you can learn to do you can access the this place exists it's a matter of meditation and training to learn how to access these places and you should come to a meditation seminar with me I met this man George Boyd right last name Boyd and we'll get into I'm gonna let you talk a lot here in a second but at the time

you had been flying around the world seeking out various monks and gurus and swamis and and for the finding silence project and I'll let you explain more about what that what that is for you but I'm I'm thinking man this this guy's got some experience he's flown all over the planet meeting people that you have to hike into a mountain you know that don't even take you know visitors and and you had told me Aaron I'm telling you as a man who's done that this man

George Boyd is the real deal he's a actual enlightened Soul ascended Soul came here with only one purpose to spread Spiritual Awakening to others that's you know some of us come here learning he's not here to learn he's here to teach he's the real deal and I was like no [ __ ] well if anyone's gonna tell me that I would probably tell most people they're full of [ __ ] but from you it meant a lot and so I did that of course A lot

of people do say that well it's you you mean you got to understand for the common dude who just goes to work every week and you're telling them things like that they're like huh but I'll tell you I might have thought that too if I hadn't seen what I saw on DMT because yeah to me I had to see it this this other dimension and and I do believe it truly exists my access to that without plant medicine isn't just isn't there and it's probably because

I haven't taken the time like you have to really work at it it's like anything right you got to work at it you want big muscles you got to go to the gym that's right exactly but there's that's my story and that's how we got involved at a deeper level with uh meditation and in spiritual discussions and you've of course shared your your books with me and we'll get into some of the books you've written and some of the manuscripts you share with me very exciting

stuff but having said all that why don't you take us through that journey I mean from the we don't have to go from birth but the point in your life where I know you you were going through some troubling times which led you to becoming spiritual seeker and then once you did that the different steps in that Journey that have brought to you where you are today sure that's a big layup so uh a little bit at a time so I wasn't really inspired by much

when I was in my teens or even in college my dad was kind of a hard ass most of my teams was spent trying to avoid his wrath went to school to be a doctor uh ended up not going down that path and doing some other stuff instead but was pre-med got out got my first job and my old college roommate gave me this book called The Way of the spiritual Warrior by Dan Millman and he's like here you might like this just kind of casually

hand it to me and I read that and that just turned on a whole bunch of lights for me because we had been raised Methodist and my parents would dutifully take me to church every Sunday and my dad would teach Sunday school and we'd do the plays and I was The Little Drummer Boy and the whole kit but we didn't really talk about what it actually meant it was like a social custom that you did because you were part of the fabric of the community and

that's just what you went and did and for the first time Dan talks about this other world in such a real live way that really affected me really deeply and in my 20s my 20s were a bit of a rocky real Rocky ride for me I was sort of manic depressive and I get on these big highs and do all this work and then some nights I'd come home from my job and I'd pour a scotch and turn off the lights and listen to Wagner and

just kind of sit into the deep of it and so I was searching for this purpose and this meaning and this happiness but a happiness that wasn't ephemeral a happiness that if I got the promotion or if I got the hot chick or if I got the motorcycle or the car or the clothes or the apartment or the corner office all those things provided a lift but they always dissipated very quickly thereafter and in the back of my mind our spirit or Soul whatever I was

like there has to be something there has to be a place or a way of being that endure where happiness endures and is unshakable and so I chased all these things in the outside world that I thought would make me happy and I got I was a millionaire by the time I was 30 and I had a fancy car and I had the house and I had the girl that was the model and like the whole all the things that you know if you grow up

on MTV and and have Instagram or any of that back then but all the shiny magazines you're like oh that'll make me happy ooh that'll make me happy and they did make me happy for a few minutes but ultimately they didn't and so when I was 27 I needed a I felt called to take my life in a different direction but I didn't really know what that meant and so I decided to go to business school because I was in the professional world and that's sort

of a professionally acceptable way to take a few years off and so I went to UCLA I did my master's degree and when I was there I was like I got this inner inner nudge I was like I gotta learn how to do yoga and I'd grown up in New York and in the South you know going to the gym and yoga was like the furthest thing from any of my reality and so I I went to through a friend of mine I went to a

Bikram Yoga class in Beverly Hills back when Bikram was still teaching and it was the studio on the second floor above a furniture shop on Wilshire and it had these ugly salmon carpets with these white lines you go stand on and it was about 110 degrees and he was up there in his little bikini all oiled up with his hair up in a bun and I'm like what the hell am I doing here this is like as far from Charlotte North Carolina as you can get

in the first class I almost passed out like I drank like two gallons of water and a sweat pouring down me my legs my whole body was shaking but when I got out of that I was like oh this is what I've been looking for like this is and so I did it and I got deep into it I was doing two a day classes five or six days a week I was vegan I lost 30 pounds I was down to 160 pounds in retrospect what

I realized was happening is I was breaking my body down all the way down to its Essential Elements so that I could be open and build it back up and so on the back of that after I had gone through some of that then the nudge was like okay you learn how to meditate and so I started looking around and I ended up getting initiated into Transcendental Meditation into TM and so I did the initiation I got connected to this woman in Beverly Hills who had

initiated like Madonna and Lenny Krav it was totally an LA thing right you know she initiated all these fancy people and she gives me the Mantra I go back to my place I sit down I close my eyes I hit the mantra I was like boom everything goes silent I go straight down to the bottom of the well there's this immense Stillness and I just sit there in the Mantra sitting right in the third eye and I'm just spinning it and I can feel just the

energy pouring down on me and so that sort of I was like oh I've been looking in all the wrong places that thing I've been looking for it's not out there and all that stuff it's right in here I was like okay [ __ ] now I got it so I'm going down that rabbit hole and I was like how far can this go how far does this path go and so I did TM I started I read yogananda's book autobiography you got on the Shelf

it's like classic in the pantheon Babaji the whole kit and so I went to the srf temple and I started getting the creas I started doing the Creos at home and and I just started in my sort of professional life business school and all that kind of started to fade into the background a little bit and so I spent those two years riding my motorcycle up to Big Sur and reading and meditating and writing and at the end of that I viewed the world in a

completely different way so I I moved to San Diego and threw some friends there I got connected to Deepak chopra's crowd and Ken Wilbur's crowd and I started spending a bunch of time in that Circle and so I had read about this Festival in India called the kumela and the kumila is uh where all the Hindus gather every 12 years at one of these three holy sites and the sadhus come out of the caves the sadhus is the Indian term for for a monk wandering monk

usually they're covered in Ash and either naked or in a loin cloth and they come down out of the jungles and out of the caves and out of the mountains and they gather at one of these three holy places for a 30-day Festival and I heard about that and I was like oh [ __ ] I got to get there like I'm gonna go find Babaji straight out of autobiography of a yogi and so I was living in La Jolla at the time I quit my

job I sold all my [ __ ] I put a few things in storage and I found a guy from Beverly Hills who was a monk in was a sadhu in India and I got myself an invitation the no soul and uh flew to India to the Camella and when I got there I found out this wasn't just the kumaila this was the mahakumbela so the kumails every 12 years this was the 12th cycle of the every 12 years so this was every 144 years it

wasn't going to happen again in our lifetime wow and so I go there and I'm part of his camp and and I would go down in the morning at 4am with all these naked sadhus covered in Ash for initiation with the elephants and the tridents and we'd go down and you'd bathe in the ganga and there'd be dead bodies floating by and then you'd come back and they'd be smoking Chillum and marijuana and they'd be chanting and giving discourse and everything else and so I went

I went looking for Babaji because I was going to go be a monk and not come back I was like I'm done this is it and I didn't find him he didn't show up for me it wasn't my path in this lifetime it was an echo of past lifetimes a remembrance that I needed to recapitulate so I came back to San Diego started working again and I heard about this guy who was a breatharian Who lit who taught and lived up in the Redwoods outside of

San Jose at a place called The Heart Mass center guy's name is Doc Childer and through that sort of community I was part of they would go up and sit and he does something called camp where you go up and you sit in the in the redwoods in an old barn and you just sit there and you talk about metaphysical [ __ ] till three four five six in the morning and and he's a he used to be a breatharian so no food just living on

water in Prana he had managed to learn the practices to do that and he was he was fully illumined and completely he's one of he and George are the only two people I've ever met that are completely in Integrity all the time and never vary and when I was hanging out with a Deepak crowd like in the Ken Wilbur crowd I met and where I worked at esselland for a couple of years in Big Sur and I met a bunch of the folks who are sort

of luminaries in these fields and as soon as the mic was off a lot of these people become totally different completely different than what you see in the books or on the shows or during the seminars and these two guys uh Doc and George were always completely in Integrity in alignment and I'd never experienced that before so I started sitting with Doc and we had a bunch of us we'd go up there and through that I met a guy who was can I pause you for

a second yeah yeah a breath Aryan it sounds fantastic well I I mean I I didn't even know what it was so you just explained it so it's somebody that just drinks water and doesn't eat food well there's some Prada meaning the energy that's sort of the the universe is made of yeah the the practice involves getting taking the energy from the Sun and transmuting it into energy that can sustain the body but you have to drink water because otherwise you get dehydrated you die but

you don't need any food and it's a gradual like you start with you start with like vegetarian and then you there's a progression towards it there's a physical progression where you gradually wean your body off of solid foods just to water but there's also a and more importantly there's a spiritual progression where you learn how to and he would go walking in the to back fields in North Carolina and absorb the sunlight but you have to learn how to take that energy and transmute it into

the etheric body in a way that you can sustain your physical form and so if you don't have someone to teach you the esoteric aspect of it you can't do it just on the physical aspect of it makes sense yeah so people do it this guy did it people do it and they do it there's people that do it in different parts of the world today but it's a very specific spiritual practice that has a physical manifestation of that practice sorry I just I got you

off track continue so I met somebody who was studying on this path called eckankar which is a path that a guy named Paul twitchell reopened in the 50s and it's based on the uh the spiritual technique is called Soul travel and so you do the spiritual practices and what it does is you teaches you to you go close your eyes you go into meditation you focus on the third eye and you project your awareness up out of your body and into these different spiritual planes where

the reality that you experienced on DMT exists as normal and functional as this plane of the physical reality is except it's just at a higher vibrational level and so by utilizing the techniques the spiritual tools in this path you can learn to go within and shift your attention to different plants there's 10 different planes of awareness where we have a soul and a body and a complete existence on each of those planes but in our normal waking awareness because we are shut down generally it takes

a drug like DMT or a spiritual meditation practice to access those we're just not aware of what's going on it shows up as like intuitions or hunches or my gut says this or my heart says this or something like that is that what's happening when we dream anything are we kind of floating it around these different dimensions well there's different types of Dreams some of this the body the soul leaving the body or the attention leaving the body and going up in the astral and having

fantastic that's where the world of creativity is so like as those great the great artists in history have a conscious connection to the astral where they bring that information down and they manifest it in the physical okay and so you can dream and go there but you can also have spiritual dreams where you go and study at these temples of learning on different planes of reality there's gonna be lots of different experiences with it and so I for me this was a practice that immediately resonated

for me and so I spent three years just going completely down the rabbit hole on that path I read every book written by every student I went to all the seminars I did all the workshops it felt like I was plugged into an electrical socket because there was so much spiritual power coming through my body some days I would get up like I couldn't even barely tie my shoes because it was just like and so I like when one of my friends were would go out

they'd be partying and you know doing all this crazy stuff on Friday and Saturday night I'd be at home reading spiritual books and meditating and like watching these worlds open and unfold in front of me and just like trying to not have my head explode and figure out what's going on and so it was so intense I ended up getting a job just managing a cafe on the beach in Pacific Beach during the day because I just couldn't do much more than that and so I

would go and I would manage the breakfast shift in the lunch shift and I'd come home and I would meditate for six or eight hours a day and what I I would what I would do is I would go into these spiritual Realms and I would connect and find these teachers of different traditions and I would ask them questions and they would give me answers and I learned to do it while I was conscious and I would take dictation and so I would go talk to

Jesus and the 12 disciples and I would talk to Merlin and King Arthur and I would talk to Muhammad and I would talk to the Buddha and these big spiritual luminaries and I would just do a q a with them and so I wrote I ended up writing five books about my my journey in those worlds I had a five book deal with Deepak chopra's publisher the first one came out did pretty well and it was about Jesus and the 12 disciples and churches started to

build study groups around these books and people started having miraculous experiences and I wasn't like I wasn't involved I was writing meditating but my publisher would come to me and like show me these testimonials of people who had had these experiences reading the book because when you write a physical book I'm just the conduit but the energy of the book Is Anchored on the place in the spiritual worlds where that knowledge or truth originates and it would come through me into the paper and so when

you read the word on the paper and focus on it and merge with it you actually are connecting to that place in the inner worlds and that energy from that place is coming through those words and into you and people were we're having all these spontaneous Awakenings and things like that healing like all kinds of just crazy experiences and I was kind of like I was in the cave mostly because my my publisher was Sheltering me because I was continuing to write and I was working

in a bunch of my books that I wrote were about my Journeys on the eckankar path with the the the group of the Masters on that path they're called the order of the varagi varagi and Sanskrit means detached means Detachment from worldly concerns and so I started writing about my experiences with them there was a uh a guy within that tradition who was sort of guiding me because I was like I didn't know what the hell was going on I was having all these crazy experiences

I had no context to them whatsoever except for some of the books like yogananda's book that I'd read and so he was kind of mentoring me and helping me like make sense of this craziness and so I started to write these books about my experiences and they started to get into the econ community and the leadership found out and they contacted me and they said you can't do that you've only been doing this work for three years and you can't talk about that stuff and write

about that stuff and I was like I mean it's happening to me like what do you mean I thought this was a path of love where we're like where you and So eventually it got to the point where they were like like no you can't I'm like it's just happened it's my truth I have to be I have to be in Integrity with my truth and so they excommunicated they uh they sent me the blue letter and they said you're not allowed to affiliate or talk

or write or anything else I got kicked out and then the guy that had been sort of helping me through this started a new and offshoot of eckankar A New Path called the way of Truth Eternal that was based on my books and my writings and so then it got really weird and um the African Community really attached to the works because they found a lot of a lot of value in them and were having experiences with them but people would start coming up to me

and they were asking for past life readings and healings and all this stuff and like you know they come up and they touch your feet and like that and it got super weird to me well yeah suddenly you're like some kind of idol that you didn't expect that to come here that wasn't your intention no not at all and suddenly it's happening and you're like whoa yeah and my and the guy that I was working with was really into it he wanted to be a teacher

so I gave him all my books I assigned the copyrights to him and I wrote the Bible for this path and the sacraments and the study lessons and the whole kit I gave it all to him I said go do it and I said I'm going back I'm going back to the cave and so I went to these inner teachers that I was working with and I said I want to go be a monk and they said no not this time the world doesn't need more

monks it's got plenty of those that's the old model what your job is is to take all this stuff all this knowledge from these inner planes in the sky and bring it to the street where people need it I was like come on like that monk thing sounds really good like are you sure like yeah and they said these are the things you need to go and learn more about and they give me a very specific list of esoteric topics they said there's two teachers on

the planet who can teach you this go find one and start doing it and at this point I was living in PB I had a 1987 Land Cruiser with 250 000 miles and that was really it like nothing else besides my student loan debt and so I went I started searching after some search I found this guy named George Boyd who's living in Venice who had opened a new path called the bridge path he talked about these topics on his website and so I emailed him

I sent him a couple of the books I said this was going on for me like am I crazy or and he wrote me back he's like no here's what's happening for you come on I'll help you out and so uh that was like 13 or 14 years ago and so he has opened A New Path that's similar to other path Buddhism or Islam or Christianity or Jainism or you know whatever and uh what he has built by opening this new path is he has created

a map and in his model Consciousness exists on a continuum so we're here in our physical waking state of awareness in the physical world and at the very highest is a place called such a denanda everything that's in between you can think about as a string with pearls on and each Pearl he calls it a nodal Point embedded in each nodal point is a different state of awareness and as you unfold your Consciousness as you bring down the light burn Karma and allow yourself to access

those higher places you can focus on each Pearl and successively go through each one in the entirety of Human Experience will unfold before you everything that is possible within a physical form I was like ah you're [ __ ] me that's a bunch of horseshit and I didn't blame for years for probably six or seven years I thought he was full of [ __ ] but something behind my in the back of my head was like you've looked at a lot of other stuff because I'd

gone to Myanmar and I'd sat with a taravada Buddhists and the monasteries there for months I had gone to Siberia and I sat with the Russian Orthodox monks I found a monk who was way up high in the mountains who you could only get to by seven days on a horse at the base of this mountain he was a hermetic Christian I sat with the Buddhists from Mongolia who would come into Russia and build monasteries I I went to a monastery where they had a Buddhist

monk who had seen the rise of stalinism coming and had dug a hole in the ground built a box gotten into the box went into samadhi and had given his disciples the instructions to unearth him and bring him back on a specific date and I went to his Monastery and they had Unearthed him a few years before and there he was in a glass box full Lotus kind of desiccated and leathery looking and on this day I just happened to show up on the day when

they allowed people to come in and you could go in and I sat from me to you and I sat there I went into meditation and I could see that guy alive inside that body in the spirit who had been buried underground for 40 years and so I'm like there's some like the this physical world is like just like nothing compared to the reality of what exists and so George's path is completely experiential he doesn't ask you to take anything on faith he says if you

do this you will eventually have this you'll come to this place and when you have this experience it'll look like this and you can go and do it yourself and so I would do it I go there and I go and then I would unpack the point and it would be what he described and I was like wow like I don't have to trust somebody there's no intercessionary there's no clergy that says no I'll do it for you it's you going Point by point and so

the only limit on how you can unfold is your willingness to expend effort and so I spend my 30s basically working and meditating and so and along the way I got married I had a baby I got divorced I was a single dad for 10 years recently I got remarried had another baby so I got a 14 year old girl and I got a 18 month old son I started a couple companies sold one took one public have done business all over the world and so

now I've sort of at the end of this 25-year journey and along the way people are going you need to teach you need to teach you need to teach and I'd look at all these you know spiritual teacher influencers you know doing Ayahuasca and in La there's a shaman on every you can like go online and get your Shaman training and oh no I'm a shaman let's go do Ayahuasca together they're like okay come on like but I always I never wanted to go do that

because I felt like I was not complete and it didn't feel like to me that that would be being in Integrity to go to someone and say here's my knowledge it may help you when I didn't feel like I'd made it as far as I thought was required and so now I've been doing this for 25 years and I have realized over that time I've sort of surveyed almost everything that's out there I've completed the majority of George's work and so it feels like now and

my professional career is you know I've worked with the most powerful and you know successful people in my Field's electric vehicles and clean technology in my field and so the next step is like how do I take that journey into inner silence because all the answers that I had hoped were out here I had found in and I see people and Society people I work with professionally or my children or people in the community all scrabbling and striving like like like mice in a maze chasing

after that little piece of cheese and it's like that's not where it's at that's it's here but it's not like oh yeah it's here let's close my eyes it's like there's a way to get there the next part of my journey I think is is trying to be of service and help people to help people to find that that is exactly what I was hoping you would deliver um and I know most of that there's some highlights in there that are new to me or maybe

I forgot a couple of them but that's exactly it that's why I wanted to have you on today because the idea that you can practice meditation to the point where you leave this reality and meet with others and learn from those teachers that are in these other dimensions I think for most people it's just it sounds crazy like no way you know but and I would have maybe said the same thing until my DMT experience and of course I think you would agree that was just

a flash you know by you know whatever that taste it's a taste and it changed I don't know what it does to make that happen but it did and I and it was so incredibly real to this day I can see it and feel it and that's what made me think well I I do think there are other dimensions and I just popped into one and so whenever then what the things you were saying I got more I was listening and I'm still listening and uh

yeah I guess I have my own levels of regret with some of the choices I've made up until this point in my life like I'm very proud of my career I'm very proud of my creative the things I've created with my art on my family and my beautiful kids and my wife and my businesses and all the great folks I've pulled together and there's so much I don't want to say that I I'm not happy with my life but I and I'm not done yet but

I didn't lean in as hard to this as you have and perhaps I will maybe that's my next chapter but you've been my inspiration right because I mean I'm nobody special like the only difference between me and anybody else is just where I put my attention and how much effort I put in there's nothing unique about me that I did that what somebody else can't do but you have tattooed you call you're the guru tattoo right the reason I came to you to start getting Inked

because I was super nervous and scared about it and I was like the guy's shop is called Guru he's a grown-up he's got a wife and kids and but you had you turned on all your artists to Consciousness and you got them all through the network but definitely had quite a few who've come and hung out with me enough you know they're reading books they probably would have read and and you spread that to all your clients so you've had a much bigger impact than I

have because I've been stuck in the cave and you've been actually out here doing it yeah well you're you're not done I think this next move you're about to make is gonna be the big one but thank you for the compliment and perhaps you know maybe that's a destiny I don't know if that's the right word perhaps I'm right where I need to be but um yeah I don't know I I know I could have I could and I still May um put more time into

this I would love to be able to get to these levels of consciousness without Ayahuasca or GMT or these other you know plant medicines and you know on that note you know a lot of people who are going to be listening to this show I I think this is pretty extreme I mean I think you represent kind of the furthest edge of where people can take meditation at least in my and I've done my own fair share of talking to people that meditate they're very serious

and I've met a few what you might call gurus in my life and and I don't know anyone who's put the amount of time that you've put into this and I know they're out there I just haven't met them and I think having said that most of the people listening show are probably in that same boat you know and you know there's is there's is this spiritual awakening Revolution something happening in culture right now with Ayahuasca you know Burning Man and suddenly people are talking about

taking macro doses of mushrooms under a full moon with with clear intention and I mean none of this was even happening 20 years ago if you ate mushrooms it was to party and see weird [ __ ] you know people don't talk about them like that anymore and like you said uh and a lot of it and of course whenever an expansion like that happens you get a lot of charlatans and a lot of [ __ ] but let's take the charlatans and bullshitters out of

there I mean I think is truth in these plant medicines and and I know that your heart drove you towards doing it I guess we could call it the old-fashioned way like meditating putting the time and really focusing your attention inwardly practicing the art of finding Stillness these things are not to accomplish that is it takes time it's time even my short journey in meditation like on the stents where I would go six months not even daily like four days a week you know as the

months would go on I could suddenly be alone in silence for longer and longer periods of time and I think to get places like you've gone it's going to take years like you've told the story years and years and years however in culture today we I don't know how to put it like we're all on phones we've you know there's it's a very busy world out there and I do wonder when these met plant medicine seem to just just drop onto the scene I mean I've

had people tell me from the Ayahuasca community that no real shamans that they mother Ayahuasca sent a simultane because they take the Ayahuasca with their participants and so they're all down there in South America this is like 15 18 years ago and they simultaneously start getting her saying take this to the west and they I mean that phenomenon did occur so I kind of wondered about that your opinion to that how it does seem to be something that might serve the West in their short attention

span type thing to just inject them with at least it opens a doorway because I don't I don't know and that's the other thing I will before you speak on this is I first thought it was like maybe the the solution like oh Ayahuasca and DMT are showing up in the west we've got powerful CEOs of companies politicians are doing these things this is going to be it man give it a couple years Whole World's Gonna Change Utopia is on the way boys and girls let's

go and and and it didn't happen that way and you know when even when I look at my friends that have gone deeply down some of those have done you know Ayahuasca 40 50 times I've yet to meet anyone who I think it's brought them I don't know pure Enlightenment or any of that it just seems to me now looking back on it like it seems to just open a doorway and then once the doors open the work you've done seems to be the next step

the returning to it is just redundant and that's just where the opinion I have of it after being around it and in the community Unity of people that are using those types of things for this law I'm not saying it'll hurt you I don't think it does I don't really know many people have been hurt by it but is it going to get you to the place you're describing I don't I don't believe it does but but having said my little speech what is your take

on that this is this plant medicine Awakening in the west I mean the medicine has been part of human culture since the beginning right but these class uh and plants have Consciousness too this this Consciousness is sort of it's our it's our remembrance right it's our Gateway and so as the as the Western mind has matured and the mental body has fully matured then we're ready to continue our spiritual Evolution to to where now we're in a physical level of Consciousness The Next Step would be

the astral level of Consciousness and so we would as a as a collective Consciousness raise our vibration until we don't have physical bodies anymore and we exist on that astral plane which is where we go in our dreams and we're iOS where Ayahuasca and all these plant medicines take us and so they are catalysts they're gateways they're keys of remembrance and so they're they're really designed to enable us in our physical Consciousness to be reminded that there is and to taste what is out there as

to motivate us to look within and to do that to do that inner work and the problem is I don't know if it's a problem but people can get caught in this Loop where like oh that's it and so the 50 60 70 80 times versus using it selectively as a therapeutic to untangle a specifically naughty issue you're dealing with or as a motivator for the other work but with you and I took when I was running my first electric vehicle company I took my executive

team out into the desert in New Mexico and we sat with a shaman and we outed Ayahuasca together as the whole c-suite from this EV company and it was a powerful and transformative experience but the medicine sin is asking to be brought to where it is needed and where the world is in need of healing and is ready for it and if you think about all of the different cultures and states and governments on the planet the one that is the most violent in warlike is

ours this is where we make the most weapons we kill the most people we incarcerate the most people we are the most broken culture in America I love being in America I'm a patriot I love California I love America Freedom Independence democracy but beneath that the shadow side of that is this violence and so the medicine is finding its way to where it is needed to help with the healing and it's California is a high vibration place it usually starts here sometimes it starts on the

east coast up in the Northeast but then it what happens here spreads out to other parts of the country and so this General Nation now that is going to experience plant medicine and having these experiences other worlds and this healing as they grow and continue in their Journey they will gather more power in the systems of government and commerce that run our society and that Consciousness that they are learning to embody those frequencies like tuning forks will start to resonate outward and begin to help heal

and so there's a lot of talk about cultural misappropriation and this is the the shamans and you shouldn't be stealing it and and there is an element you do need to give credit where credit is due but the medicine is asking to be brought here to where it is needed and so it is an Awakening in combination with yoga and meditation everything it's all linked to this Rising vibration to help us heal and move to a higher place I agree I agree that's that's exactly not

only how I feel about it but also just anecdotally I've seen it happen I've seen that happen with individual individual friends that I guess sort of lack of a better word were or like much like United States in uh 1950s you know I mean you know perfectly acceptable to come on home and if dinner was late might need to give the old lady a good slap across the face the neighbor wouldn't even judge you for it you know like yeah well she should learn to make

dinner on time you know that's how [ __ ] up or how our dads disciplined us or how our dads my dad was pretty he's Stern but he he from that gen he was pretty kind but yes many fathers we can go down that point is that's only from 50s till now and so there's an incredible amount of change there towards empathy compassion and cooperation and things you know and that's why when people say the world's so [ __ ] up I kind of always refer

to that tiny chunk of time like man just the 50s it's so close like you could scream out you know blasphemy at people that weren't your race and probably be high-fived by the dude next to you you did that today the whole room would just stop and be like what the f did that guy just say probably kick you know so we've made tremendous progress and I do think the needle is going in the right direction and I agree with you that and again back to

my individual friends I've had guys that have worked with me here who are who kind of were of that vibration and then through plant medicine not through deep levels of meditation they're not that way anymore now whether or not they'll continue that path in their lifetime to take it to the levels you have I don't know but even if it stopped there that's a huge jump so yes I do agree plant medicines are showing up probably right on time at the right location to crack that

door open for some some of those people will walk through that doorway and continue some at the very least they've at least peeped in when someone brings up stuff like you're talking about you're not just some crazy guy it's like you know that's the thing I bet you if if all these people hadn't done DMT in Ayahuasca and peyote rituals all different things the West has been doing in the last 20 well really more years but heavily for the last 15 years there would be more

much more people being like the dude's nuts but there's no once you've taken that stuff and seen what you've seen a guy like you didn't seem so crazy anymore so yeah these things all work together right and we need people going deep and we need people at least acknowledging it that there are other ways to consciously exist to interact with our spirit and with each other on this planet so I agree with what you said when you look at Evolution things tend to change relatively slowly

but in the eye of time it isn't that slow I mean we view things from our lifetime say you're lucky enough to live to be a hundred years you know you want to see I want to see this whole world be enlightened and living like the days of Atlantis in my lifetime and it might and I don't want to ever give up hope but why do you want to see that why do you think that's good well good question well for me I have a really

hard time knowing there are so many people suffering that's what bothers me you know like my life can be great and I can have the best day of my life and swimming in my pool with my kids and me and the wife go out for date night and then I eat a beautiful meal and drink a great bottle of wine and but there's always a part of me that just Whispers in my ear like good for you dude but so many people are suffering and and

I believe that suffering can be easily eradicated with just human cooperation and our lust for collectively our lust for material possessions and the things that you talked about in the beginning that never really satisfied you is so strong in human still to this day the majority of humans to this day that that corruption perpetuates itself and and so I I guess that's a selfish thing to say because I'm saying I want it for my own peace but there's just a part of me that feels like

I am that I feel connected I feel like I am part of everything I mean I have that might sound crazy to some people but I've had experiences that make lead me to believe that's true yeah I'm looking at You Through The Eyes of Aaron but I don't believe I'm 100 Aaron I think I'm you and so when I see the world suffering I see myself like there's parts of me that are being treated unfairly and so I'd like to see that go away that would

be my my main reason let me offer you a different take on it okay so it gets down I think to your fundamental belief about why all this exists why is there a physical Earth why are there people why do we have emotions why do some things feel good and some things feel bad and one of the conclusions that I've come to over this journey of the different things that I've seen of experience is that Earth is a school and souls come down and take human

bodies to go to school to learn makes sense and one of the interesting things about the way humans are created is that when everything's good they kind of just enjoy it but when they suffer then they start to look deeper and peer within and so I was at a I was in an event in Japan can the other day with a bunch of people and and there was a similar conversation I you know I'm this was a person who teaches like Tantra and other things and

they're like I want to alleviate all the suffering on the planet I was like really how come well because I wanted us but without that suffering if all you did was feel good and were happy and making love to your wife and playing your children and having wine and a nice meal would you ever go really deeply work on developing yourself most people don't most people look for answers because they're in pain and so if you could have abstract above it and go why does pain

exist well maybe because otherwise people wouldn't go look and so while I agree we want to end suffering I think the at least for me the way that I address that Dynamic is I want to make the knowledge and tools available to people who are suffering so they can fix themselves teach a man to fish I mean a couple things you said there I do agree with you and I've had those same thoughts I mean one would be everything is fine as it is I do

believe in some weird way there's that's true I say it lightly because there are people that are suffering acutely in such ways that you sound callous sure to say something like that it hurts bad but I and I don't know if that's true I just I have there's part of me that just it must be a system in place the thing that made this whole universe obviously was very intelligent and I don't think it would create mistakes so I have to assume even the worst tragedies

somehow fit into some longer story of into maybe if I could look at it all from a million year perspective I would click and I'd be like oh I totally I was all everything was fine the whole time so it's like the acute now moments it can seem you know atrocious yeah when it's right there right there happening Is No Escape right but then you know you have to ask yourself you know little things like well if perhaps reincarnation is actually true then we come back

and we do this possibly thousands of times that particular Soul that's going through that particular horrific event is going through that horrific event to learn a specific thing to drive them inward to or maybe that's a payback of karma of some kind so you could extrapolate these things to to make that okay and I yeah I I guess more as you said that I was like I kind of agree with that too it's a slippery slope I mean I deeply I have been to the bottom

of suffering in the depths of my 20s in the darkness I know how much that pain feels and when I see someone I have deep empathy for what they are going through and I also know that within them is the power to resolve their own suffering each person has the power to resolve their own suffering if they choose to look and seek and apply the effort and the dedication now there's some types of karma where like you just did really something shitty in a past life

and you just got to pay and then you just got to get through it like that's just how it is it's called Uh there's a special kind of karma that uh that that is but for most people the suffering they experience in life is usually oftentimes is self-imposed but there is almost always a way out of that if they choose to seek that and apply themselves and go let's go search for it well put I I would agree with you you know as you were speaking

it got me to thinking with all the different paths you've been a part of what are some common threads okay so one one big topic would be reincarnation do all the paths that you found to be truthful and real and reincarnation seems to be a consistent that that's what's going on we we you know we we die our soul goes to another plane we choose to come back as you said for to burning burn off Karma or to learn or to be of service to a

certain cause that's what's happening right yep the only and I believe it and you'll probably tell me this is true even even if you go into Christianity that is the Core Essence of Christianity before it got manipulated am I right about that yep so really they're yeah they all share that in common so that's what we're doing so the way to think that in my experience there is a one of the low frequency bands of Consciousness is that which is characterized by fundamentalism and fundamentalists who

believe in the literal word of whatever scripture it is that they follow generally don't believe in reincarnation because they're just so crystallized at that low level they're just they're not capable of it it's like expecting the kindergartner to understand theoretical physics like it's just that's and that's not bad that's just where they are if you drive from San Diego to New York you gotta go through Los Angeles doesn't make San Diego better good it's just where you start and that's perfectly good but the soul is

like it's like if you think of yourself as the soul then your think of your body as the car and in your life you've probably had five or ten different cars and each time you buy a different one and you have a different experience in that car and sometimes it's a red one or a silver one or a white one or a sports car or an off-roader or whatever and your soul uses bodies like cars to go have experiences on its journey and if you go

and if you look at the the esoteric teachings of every path that I've ever encountered including Christianity if you read the teachings of the desert fathers from the early days of Christianity the letters that they when they meditated and prayed in the caves in the desert and wrote to each other they are very clearly talking about reincarnation every single religion when you get to the true esoteric teachings and you have an experience of Realms beyond the physical it is self-evident that the soul exists Beyond time

and space and has multiple experiences in the Physical Realm to learn and grow and be of service and that reincarnation is as vanilla as you know Diet Coke there's just nothing special about it yeah and I will add that if your goal is to control a population removing reincarnation from the teaching is a is a good way too right because if they're you know if you've got that reincarnation thing floating around it's hard harder to motivate people to do what you tell them to do you

tell them they got one life this is it they're listening they're like all right what do I got to do follow my rules or else yeah and this is it you got one um but it also creates a a crazy level of sadness when you believe in that model because then when the when the baby dies or the you know you just like that was it that that one only got this this way is you can find peace with some of the tragedies of this existence

much more quickly with with that well understanding brings peace right understanding right understanding the truth so then this is getting a little weird but the universe is so big but I mean infinite possibly we typically reincarnate on Earth because and I would I would I would assume it has to do with almost like tribes you you kind of choose to go back to a tribal area that you're familiar with because I mean I would assume there's life all over the universe and reincarnation happening everywhere and

souls coming in and out of existence you know God how big it is right so that would that would is that why we reincarnate like if you if I could remember all of my past lives most likely they were all Earthly lies I I wasn't on some other planet million light years from here and then back to here where does that occur too I think there's different schools of thought in my experience as you go through the Journey and you you go to different parts of

the Continuum your Vista changes right if you're standing in San Diego on the beach and looking at the ocean you have one view of how the world of what reality is if you go up in a spaceship and you're up in the space station and you look down on Earth you describe reality from a very different perspective right because you're looking at it from a different place and so as you do these as you do the meditation and as you open yourself you're able to see

your perspective goes to higher and higher places and your your view and your perspective changes on what reality is comprised of and if you get high enough then you can see our universe and within our universe there's all these stars and around all these stars are all these planets and on all these planets and in all these Stars within our universe are this infinite not infinite but this this huge variety of different forms of life and within those forms of life there are paths for unfoldment

relevant to those forms of life and and that's in our universe and if you rise up above it even further there are trillions of universes with billions of stars with trillions of planets and life forms and different paths that come and tunnel up through the different layers of reality if you get home so as souls are created in my experience they do sort of tend to form cohorts within a cycle of time or a particular part of reality and then they they tend to journey together

as they go through that but that after you go through that cycle of time in that Journey you may be off to different corners of a different galaxy or whatever gosh that's that's psychedelic think about this this side it's just the scope of it right it's it makes you realize how silly all this yeah stuff is that we get so worked up about right right so true man that's crazy you gotta laugh about it a little bit you do no it's funny too on on almost

every deep psychoactive Journey I've taken one of the messages they always give me is to laugh more they're like you're way too serious man but you gotta live here you got I got a wife I got an ex-wife I got two kids I got more bills to pay I got a car I gotta like I'm getting older I gotta try to stay in shape so you know my wife thinks I'm cute and I gotta like you got all this stuff this is real it's here we

live this life and we exist timelessly all out there as well at the same time you know when I was a little kid I don't know I can always remember doing this I used to lay in bed at night not every night and I would try to imagine nothing like I was just fascinated that there's anything like what why is there something and I would I guess it was type of meditation I would slowly try to think of nothing like they imagine it like trying to

imagine that nothing ever existed no trillions of galaxies no stars no planets no people just I would just see white and it would terrify me I would every and I kept doing it like I almost like the terrifying feeling and then I would oh man that's [ __ ] scary like and then that got me into like and then you know I guess maybe you do know the answer but I don't know who has the answer to this but why is there something what started something

that is such a [ __ ] weird thing man where did something come from why why not nothing that's the big question that's a god question I don't have the answer to that this exists why did I just work with what we got yeah no I think I mean in my experience there's some things that you just don't get the answer to well you have a physical body yeah you just don't like maybe somebody else has got the answer but I know that if you go

to like the most immediate thing that people typically encounter in the inner worlds when they shut their eyes they go into the darkness and they encounter the light is the soul which appears as a glowing ball of white light and when you when that awakens within you your eyes are shut and all of a sudden with your eyes shut it's blinding bright white light and that's because typically you have moved up and encountered the soul but in this physical Incarnation where there's 10 or so planes

of reality you have a soul on each plane of reality to technically have 10 souls and you have a body on each plane of reality each of those bodies runs independently but you there's like a Master Soul on the top That season coordinates all of those and so so the journey is to to reintegrate all of those into one in a conscious experience so that you're conscious of all that going on well you know there's a lot of talk um about ancient history changing on the

planet right now all the new discoveries that are being made uh Atlantis and all these weird pyramids and now they're re-dating them and they're kind of like I mean I believe there's a lot of things I've watched and read that there was Advanced civilizations on planet Earth I know the exact timeline fifty thousand hundred thousand hundred fifty thousand years ago that somehow either left or got obliterated by a comet who knows but you know when they find these these perfectly you know straight cut lines and

stone in uh Granite we could barely do today with laser beams I mean there's just piles and piles and piles of evidence proving that some kind of advanced civilization is existed on Earth do you think that those civilizations went through a similar cycle that we're going through like they went through you know the point where they integrated into higher level of Consciousness and then when I'm often there they go after that and now we're another cycle of that and we're just finding their leftovers laying around

buried under the oceans and under the dirt I mean they're billions of years old I think it's a good point unlikely that we're the first folks who have been here to do this um you know how many in what form and how long ago I don't know I haven't really appeared at that I think that at least for me the I'm I don't think that big in that Dimension it's like a more immediate experience like I'm here I have a body there's a reason why I'm

here what is it and what am I gonna do about it and whether that I think that probably is true that there was other things other races other that happened over the course of human history as the crust has recycled itself and the classroom got renewed for the next group of students that were coming through that needed a fresh perspective I'm sure that that probably happened but to me that falls into I've always had a a screen on knowledge that was sort of how I decided

where I was going to place my attention and that was like the big so what question like if you knew that the lemuria was true or Atlantis was true how does that impact your experience of coming here and doing the Pod and tatting folks and taking care of your kids and like how does that actually affect you and for me the so what is how do I get to the top of the mountain in the time that I have and make the most of it and

so that's sort of where I've filtered and Screen I agree with you there is that that what does it matter I mean you're here now and you have these tools and these resources and what am I going to do with them but I do think that that question would be Paradigm shifting for the planet though I mean you got a lot of people that are they're guiding star for existence is based on our current history books and the denial of pre these things is you know

which shake up Paradigm which I kind of get up I get up on on shake-ups you know and controversy and I and I love it you know but um I just wanted to hear your take on that people out there that are just starting the the path meaning they're they're curious they they want to know more about spirituality they want to know more about their own soul the different levels of consciousness I mean you've been doing this work for uh 20 plus years hard and uh

any words of advice for those young Seekers out there or any traps to avoid it might save them time or anything like that you know what I've found is that each person at this moment in time with their own Consciousness and their own body is the is the result of countless lives that have come before that are that are Blended together in this Kaleidoscope to create this Mosaic of who you are now and and that the energy of those past lives and those patterns of your

experiences exist in different proportions in how you have been put together and shown up today and so the result of that most often is that there are some spiritual paths or technologies that resonate or are more harmonic for you than others like I'm not really drawn to Judaism I'm not really a drawn to Islam I'm not I'm sort of drawn to Christianity but I'm drawn to the thing the soul travel some of these other things and so the most effective way that I have found to

to get on the path in a way that doesn't just sort of deal with the level the personality but actually moves you forward and transforms your and reshapes your Consciousness is to sort of sample a little bit of everything and what I have observed is that when you find the path that right is right for you you'll touch that page or hear that talk or meet that monk or that person or that teacher or ended a click and you'll be like it's aha it's like ah

okay that's my thing and then the mind immediately because the mind doesn't want you to the mind's job is to keep you separated from truth and mine will go no that [ __ ] ain't real and so the trick is to to to recognize what the mind is doing which is its job and its function and why it exists and to develop the discipline and Independence and courage to go deep and see where it takes you and then do it until it no longer serves you

and you'll know you'll feel like okay I've I've come to the end on this one and then see where to go next but but keep follow your intuition and your soul tries to talk through you via intuition and it comes as these little Whispers listen to that and trust it and go explore and see see where you land because invariably your soul will guide you to where you are supposed to be to help you return home see man it's [ __ ] like that it's why

I love you so much that's a great answer see that's it's it's you say things like that and I just anyone listening right now that might think a lot of this is a little crazy I've spent 30 years sifting through [ __ ] artists as a tattooer you know I mean not everybody but I mean I I've got a pretty good meter and I've never seen a moment out of you that didn't feel completely honest and sincere and I think that answer exemplifies that because you

could have easily said oh yeah I can tell you we should do here's my website and here's where you donate the money and you know what I mean like there's two people in the spiritual Realms I think have always been too quick to tell you oh yeah it's this way what should I do come to me that's I'll tell you exactly what to come to me and well you didn't say that at all you said don't don't come to me or any of the paths I've

mentioned here please don't come to me but also you know I think you're right you got to find out what resonates with you and especially in a spiritual context you know and and and for me I think I'm younger I haven't spent as much time doing these things but it's always been at least for now Buddhism yeah great advice perfectly nailed it nailed it if it's interesting if you look at it from the if you look at the paths from the interview they're like parallel lines

going up and you've got you've got Islam here and parallel to that is Christianity in parallel to that is Judaism and parallel to that is zeroasterism and Jainism and Hinduism and all the isms and and as you absorb into the parts of those the the Revelation that often comes is that it's a similar wine but it goes into the bottle that can be that is culturally relevant to the group of people in the geography and time and place that are in need of it and so

that it could be uh Underneath It All the Same truth but it's cloaked in a way that the people at that time and place and culture can connect with it so that they can follow the thread right no it makes it makes perfect sense I mean if you in a more just straightforward way if you take somebody who grew up in the Middle East and try to plop them into a Buddhist Monastery can can Buddhism get you to the top of the the rainbow yeah so

could um Islam but and he's going to relate right and they so there's these different paths that are meant for these different cultures and and then there's the weird one where you could be born possibly a white Anglo-Saxon male but your last 20 lies were spent as a as a child as a man living in China so for whatever reason you just find you need to fly to China and get back to that right that system that doesn't mean it doesn't necessarily mean where you were

oh you were born in the South you've got to be a Baptist you know I mean you might be been born in the South and you're not connecting with with that type of Christian religion and you find yourself drawn to the Middle East to become Islam you see people do that too and it's probably for the reason that you said earlier which is the Incarnation and maybe many many lives you spent working your path from a different perspective yeah that makes total sense but they all

are parallel and they all end at the same location they're just different ways to to get there well different ladder I mean different ones go to different places so they're not not all pets are created equal some take you you know some letters have ten rungs some have 20 some have 50 some have a hundred but they're all designed it's like that game where kids called Shoots and Ladders where you kind of you know you go up the ladder and it gets you to this one

place and then you gotta go and you go around and you get to another ladder and it goes up this way and you kind of go around like Percival and in the story of Percival like it's the journey is very is not always super linear but it's designed to allow you to go and then experience and then go and then experience and and eventually over time through the Journey find her way to the top but the the kind of the irony of it is that like

you have all these like Islam and Christianity that are sort of at odds with one another or these other religions that are odds with one another all these people who are Islam in this life might be Christian in the next life or Buddhist in the next life or the man who is oppressive to women in his community might be a woman in the next life and so it's kind of once you can sort of get up above it you see the sort of the Ridiculousness of

a lot of the things that we fight about in in our daily lives it's a good system if everyone truly believed in that system we don't we'd sure be a lot more careful about how we treated one another you know when you start believing in karma like I do and reincarnation like I do yeah I think about that stuff heck I'm even are you vegetarian I'm not I worry about that I'm not a vegetarian either and I worried a little not I mean just this whole

Karma thing like well I'm a part of a system that really creates a lot of um unneeded pain and suffering for other forms of life but each of those forms of life is here for us to fulfill its purpose yeah sometimes its purpose is to provide sustenance right like I would I've done 10-day Retreats at different places like in met you know a lot of monsters a lot of them in Aztec Traditions have a vegetarian tenant that that is essential to being part of the journey

but then you go to Mongolia and you sit with the Buddhists in Mongolia and if you're a Buddhist monk in Mongolia and you grew up in Mongolia there aren't any vegetables all you eat is meat right and those guys are completing the journey so of being a vegetarian is a prerequisite to whatever higher state of consciousness you attain to and the guys over there are still doing it and eating meat does that really is that really true so I've experimented with both I think for some

people being a vegetarian totally works for them for some people it doesn't for me it doesn't but I think it's a personal decision I don't think there's a there's an absolute rule that says You must do this I kind of agree with you on that and I've thought the same thing how is it we have seemingly extremely enlightened people who eat like you said Buddhist monks in Mongolia then and they're not vegetarian but I just thought I'd ask your opinion of that like if there if

you would have said nope you're eating meat you're developing Karma you just have to pay back later oh [ __ ] well it's how you eat it right being conscious about right having gratitude for the sacrifice of the sustenance but it's I find it works a little bit differently so there are all these rules that people make about oh you should fast and you should be vegetarian and you should do cleanses and you should do notes caffeine or no alcohol or whatever but Yogananda used to

tell his students do whatever you want but do the krias and do the work and what he meant by that is as you cultivate yourself internally and as you remove the density and darkness the things that you are attracted to consuming will change as you change and so as you move higher through the Spheres up the ladder alcohol or caffeine or whatever it is just won't feel good anymore and you naturally Falls away it just Falls away you don't have to try to avoid it it

becomes incompatible and you choose to avoid it because you have changed and I think that is if you do the inner work the outer World becomes a reflection of your inner journey and those things may stay or they may go and they may come back later down the road but it's it's a it's a reflection of your inner process versus having to adhere to some strict rule that somebody on a Pulpit or on a mat or on a cushion or in a book set that makes

perfect sense your your desires and Cravings are a result of what's Happening inside not you change your desires and Cravings to change what's happening on the inside right that makes perfect sense well buddy a week ago I could I'm kind of bummed that I haven't made more time to hang out with you dude I I think I'm gonna I think it's perfect I'm feeling I'm gonna meditate tonight it's been a while like I'm feeling like a exchange happening between us and and I'm just glad you're

here stoked we had this time together I'm gonna switch it up a little bit because we can't go all day unfortunately I mean I guess we could but we both have things we got to do later so tattoos that's where our journey began um let's talk about that for a second I've done two full sleeves on you um I think we started the first one 15 you said 15 years ago I think I was 38 yeah so 15 years ago and we've been I don't know

the exact schedule but over the last 15 years we did a little here a little there a little that side little that side now you ended up with these two two full sleeves by me which is our connection and bond thank God for tattooing because I don't know if we'd even have met each other one for that yeah probably not that art form but we've had a lot of fun tattooing and of course every time we hunt we hang out and tattoo basically we do this

for except it's four or five hours you know and I just those memories of us doing this um I'll cherish them forever but they were also really transformative for me you know guiding me in these different directions I've taken myself spiritually was from those hours we spent together but on that note we are gonna do another tattoo today because it's kind of the show chats and tats and we don't always do a tattoo and I asked you hey you want to do a little something on

the show and you said I do and I believe we're gonna do a golden dolphin we are just tell us a little bit about why why you're gonna get a golden dolphin yeah so yeah we started I decided to do the sleeves when I was 38. um I'm 51 and I also asked yeah almost 15 years and um I wanted initially to do the full sleeves with the back which we talked about and the right side for me is the feminine so you've got the goddess

the mother the baby you've got the golden fishes from Buddhism you've got the Russian Orthodox cross from my time in Siberia and then the left side for me was the masculine so you got millarepa the great Tibetan Sage sitting on the deerskin with the monastery in the Himalayas in the mountains and then it crosses the is the dragon which is him fighting this is symbolic of him taming the mind and as I've arrived at this point in my journey and I now have a wife an

ex-wife a daughter and a son um I realized that unconsciously what we were creating was also the constellation of my family and so you have my daughter here this guy who is the little baby you have my my ex-wife the original mother you have me the urban monk sitting on the mat my son's name is dragon and so you've got the dragon up on the chest and so my new wife um Alexandra my brother gave me the nickname The Golden Mojo and I was in my

early 20s he thought it was funny and it kind of just stuck and so we call my son the Golden Dragon and we call Skye the golden leopard and so my wife is she's sort of long and smooth and golden and lean we call her the golden dolphin and so I really wanted to to do something to honor our relationship and she's had a huge huge impact on my life super healing and multiple levels and it's just created a beautiful container for us to go and

explore and enjoy the world and so it's really to honor her I wanted to do a golden dolphin and at the reflective of who she is I love that I love that story and it is funny that our tattoos were half premonition right Guru the guru brings the future under the onto the skin on the guru but I will say that it has happened a lot I can't tell you how many times I've I'll meet with people for a consultation I try to be very present

with people when I'm with them I try to shut down my thinking and just listen you know you know it's pretty pretty superficial most of the time they want this they want that and I just take some notes and then I usually like a couple weeks or three weeks where I call I call it meditation I I always feel like my brain is working on things without me doing it I I talk to it that way well he's like hey subconscious I've got a sleeve to

draw in three weeks I need to be meaningful and badass and I just go back to you know making dinner with my wife and then it comes time to draw things and then little Inspirations just pop out like I don't know man I'm gonna I think this would look cool and that would look cool and then I bring it to the person they're like how did you know my grandfather it'd be some imagery I've drawn in there and it happens so many times and I don't

like saying it because I feel like I'm trying to tell people that I'm like at this magic power and I don't think I do I think I'm a regular guy that somehow when you tune into another person tune in to another person and and it's happened so many times that it doesn't surprise me anymore when people tell me things like it is it power it's a city it's a special power you know I guess I guess it's like Jordan being good at basketball it's like yeah

well thank you for that compliment I love the story of how we kind of pre-tattooed your family and life in some way as it was happening before some of it already happened and today kind of finishes that Circle which is super dope sounds great foreign welcome back everybody the golden dolphin has arrived in a minute landed on your shoulder blade so that was cool that was cool I mean especially hearing the story earlier about how the tattoos we previously done represent all the significant people in

your family and full circle as always with us we plopped that last one on you today and it was funny when I was tattooing you there because it's been a few years and you've gotten a lot of like nipples in yours chest and under boob and those are gnarly areas and you sat through all those mini long sessions five six hour sessions we've done together many and now it's been five years and you even said like whoa I forgot how much this is Prickly yeah it

is it is I went through the same thing recently because you asked me because you're like when's the last time you got tattooed and like actually recently and I got the first one in a minute in a few years three years maybe on my foot kind of the foot ankles Zone and it was the same for me man I was kind of cold sweat broke out I was like [ __ ] I'm getting old yeah look I could be getting a massage right now what am

I doing here yeah they people say they hurt more when you get older I don't believe that to be true because I've had it's in you know what it is it's enthusiasm enthusiasm can get you through a lot and when you're getting your first tattoos you're so enthusiastic that enthusiasm just you brush off that pain and you get all and you get a lot of tattoos and they just don't carry the same amount of fire that those first ones do that lack of enthusiasm you just

you get you're willing to be a little more with that pain and be like [ __ ] this is what I've noticed yeah and you know there's more drugs involved when you get older that half bottle of Advil certainly helps to go down a little easier so doing a cold turkey after five or six years out of the chair it's a little prickly yeah yeah but you know it's for a good cause and yeah and you didn't tap out you look strong you held it together

yeah the numbness set in yeah well that was cool buddy I'm glad we got to do this and I got got to do one more tattoo on you maybe it won't be the last but if it is I think it was an appropriate last tattoo we'll see oh man before we close out I mean it's such a cool story what you've done with your life so unique and so rare at least in the in my circles I don't know anyone has done the amount of work

you've done especially in regards to meditation and all the different things you've achieved and it's it's cool to see it all kind of coming full circle into this moment where it's just been your development a lot of this has been your development and now it seems like you have some plans to hourly focus and bring this stuff to others tell everybody a little bit about that yeah I've had a um in all of my explorations of these different paths and these different traditions and the practices

and how they've done things over the years you know you hear a lot about these monks that would go and sit in the caves and meditate and at some level I think that was about just the Solitude and the quiet and being away from distraction but at another level it's I'm finding it's it's also about the darkness and that in the darkness like when you shut your eyes there's Darkness but in the physical Darkness it has a transformative effect and particularly uh like in the bun

tradition and in the Buddhist tradition they would sometimes go for seven or eight weeks in complete darkness with a set of practices that you do every week that are designed to in a predictable way unfold your awareness to different levels and so they um they build these special houses these special Huts to do it in that has circulation and that has these these special doors to pass food through so light doesn't come in and then every morning the the master teacher would come and check in

on you and hear about your experience and what each week they would give you a new a new exercise to do for your meditation for that week and you're in complete darkness so there's no light and and you would do your practice your body would adapt this sort of Rhythm without seeing the light but what happens is in the absence of the stimuli from your visual senses your other senses become much more sensitive and your pineal gland starts to produce more DMT because you're not receiving

visual information and that naturally produced DMT ends up opening those channels to the higher gateways and so I've been fascinated with this for a long time I wanted to go do it I found the place that does it in the U.S and they are sold out until December of 2024. and so I decided I'm just going to do it myself so I've got 10 acres in Upstate New York right on Cayuga Lake just outside of Cornell University and I'm going to build a dark Meditation Retreat

Center where if you're in New York or you're in Boston or even if you're in California you can go and you can come and they're built into the hillside kind of like Hobbit holes and you go in and it's completely dark and you can meditate for three five seven ten days three weeks 10 weeks however long you want to do it and so we're we're going through the permitting process right now we'll hopefully break ground and and get out of constructions and the launch in the

summer of Summer of 24 and then the idea is to create a place where Seekers can go and have these in a supported way have these transformative focused intense meditation experiences and then we'll we'll do one in California and then the idea is to to take all of this experience and knowledge over the last couple of Decades of doing this and build a network of these meditation sanctuaries around the globe where where people can go and continue their practice wow I didn't I didn't understand the

dark aspect and that is going to be the the defining difference between the centers you're building and other places each one that it's it's very much focused on giving the people the ability to have that dark experience that's right yeah well it does make sense I mean it makes a whole lot of sense just on a very surface level right if you think about how much of our Consciousness is occupied by what we see you know I mean I would guess probably 90 I mean you

open your eyes and there's just airplanes and cars and people I mean you're only left with a little bit behind there that it can be can light up and become active that does make sense I didn't know that why they would go out in decays why so many gurus you'd cut you'd find them in caves right that's right and that's interesting that it increases the yeah because the the pineal gland I've done a bit of research on that does produce dimethyltryptamine and if you weren't looking

and using your visual cortex it would uptake that production that's cool it also sounds a little scary I bet you for a lot of people that sounds a little scary yeah I think it's you it's also you're also separated from it it's not just sight you're alone you're alone it's those things happen to face yourself yeah yeah I don't know why if that's giving you guys the eb-jeebies like me you probably need to do it yeah you know what I mean oh intense work well yeah

I have a uh my assistant Brittany works with me very metaphysical very spiritual woman very cool person I'm very blessed to have her part of the show she gosh I wish I knew the name went to a very intense meditation facility East County you might know this place it's uh you don't you meditate 10 hours a day and I don't think you're you speak there's no speaking Yeah that's right no obviously no phones and you don't talk every morning starts off with a lecture from the

guide and then 10 hours a day I mean they walk around and keep your your back I guess it's very painful the first three days because you yeah yeah and she did she just got back from that and said she's done a lot of things including a ton of Ayahuasca and other different metaphysical experiments and meditations and she's like that was the most powerful thing she's ever done bar none by far period and uh I've really had the ability to talk to deeper about it I

haven't seen her she went on another trip but it reminds me of what you're talking talking about except also light being removed and being alone she was at least in a room with other other people around yeah I think not Han has a center that's in East County and you can go and do vipashna there for seven to ten days and you literally the the passion is the practice of sitting and observing the thoughts and so as You observe the thoughts eventually the mind is like

a computer that's running a complex program and you cycle through the CPUs and eventually you end the program and the computer becomes rests because it's completed it's it's computations and the mind will eventually be rest because it's completed its processing and then that allows you to pull in the other side and for the normal person it doesn't do a lot of this practice how many days does it take typically for somebody for that computer to kind of stop or slow down to a significant measure I

think for most folks it's probably around three three or four days like in the absence of that stimuli how disciplined you are with not checking your cell phone or you know sneaking a conversation and really just being present with where you are some people like some people get it on an airplane if they just don't talk on the plane the mind will come and they'll drop in and the ethers are much thinner up there in the air 30 000 feet so you can connect much more

easily but down on the ground here most people it seems to be three or four days it's interesting so the actual atmosphere plays an effect on this is that why a lot of monks and stuff go to high altitudes possibly it's the atmosphere and it's also because where there's lots of people that create the mental field becomes there's a lot of static like there's a lot of like like all the radio stations in a big city right you know but there's lots of people and even

if you go the difference between San Diego and Los Angeles once you cross Newport you can feel Los Angeles field because it's all these people and all this stuff going on in San Diego is just much more cleaner and a much easier frequency because there's less chaos and there's less stuff going on that makes sense wow you got me thinking about a lot of new stuff today that's cool this is fun this is fun well awesome stuff dude thank you so much maybe tell people like

you want to tell people where to find you or is there some websites they should be paying attention to or anything like that yeah you can uh we'll put the links uh post the links for folks but the Instagram is at the finding silence project okay and the website for the dark Retreats is uh acrya.global a-c-r-a-y-a dot Global sign up there very cool well I wish you the best on this new adventure I have a suspicion I'm gonna be in a dark room soon damn it

save the mad at the king's sweet for you I keep saying hey Universe if you want me to do something just send me the open the doors and then here you can hear you was hoping was going to be somebody that was going to invite me for you know I don't know three weeks in Cabo or something but nope you come I have to sit in a room with myself for 10 days thanks I'm sure it will be powerful and I I think I have to

do that at least once at least I can say I did it you know well very cool wish you the best of luck on all of it I know I'll be right there paying attention the whole time I know our paths will cross again soon I look forward to that thank you for everything you've shared with us today and until next time my friend it was a great conversation thanks brother yeah it was all right my man all right that's it for today everybody thank you

for tuning in every Wednesday new episodes dropping keep those comments coming keep those subscriptions coming I want to be doing this in a year from now I need your support I appreciate your support thank you very much so with that being said we'll see on the next one peace out