How many people are stuck in the throes of their trauma, or quagmired in some Western medical drama? Too many for any compassionate soul to bear. Dr. Dan Engle MD is one of those compassionate souls who has dedicated his life to the art of healing through full spectrum, soul centered medicine. While his background is as a clinical psychiatrist, he has found himself walking the deep shamanic wisdom traditions and now carries a medicine bag more robust than any person I have ever encountered. Over the last dozen years we have supported each other in traversing the most interesting territories of the heart and soul, and unequivocally this conversation was our finest. In giving us a glimpse of the inspiring future of medicine, Dan shares exactly how trauma is being healed with MDMA assisted psychotherapy. He also offers his powerful perspective on taking radical responsibility for our lives, and illuminates some blind spots in both psychiatry and spiritual communities. If you want to dive deeper, check out his new book, A Dose Of Hope.

Connect with Dr. Dan Engle MD

Websites | https://drdanengle.com/ThankYouLife.orgFullSpectrumMedicine.com

AUBREY: Dr. Dan Engel! Here we are.

DAN: Once again, brother.

AUBREY: Once again. Well, so what was it, 12, 13 years ago when I found you in that dusty little clay hut in Sedona healing from doing way too much ayahuasca out in the jungle?

DAN: Yeah, yeah. After we had started having a great conversation, you asked me if I wanted to get on a podcast. I asked you, "What's a podcast?" And you said, "Wow, you've been out here a long time." First time I've ever known about a podcast, what was even happening in the outer world.

AUBREY: What a propitious moment that was, where I met you and Anahata and Porangui and really opened me up to so many different paths. Obviously, I had already been on the psychedelic medicine path, which is one of the things that we connected on. There are so many other modalities and ways of thinking; from breathwork, to ecstatic dance, to so much that's just a regular part of my life, all came from, and key allies, like yourself and everyone I mentioned, all came from that moment. 

DAN: And Sedona too? That was your first time out in Sedona.

AUBREY: Yeah. Drew me out to Sedona. By the second time I went to Sedona, I was like, "I got to get a place out here." Now it's my medicine. 

DAN: Amen, brother. 

AUBREY: I know. Not bad. Now here we are. Lived a lot of life, done a lot of things.

DAN: 100%. For me too, to know you and to meet you then. Because I was just very content with building a hut. The hut was rebuilding me after coming out of the jungle for a year. Didn't have any real vision about coming back out into the world and what that was going to look like. Our meeting and then the unfolding that happened for each of us through that connection, precious.

AUBREY: It was the first time I met an MD who had an equally proficient amount of experience and information in psychedelic medicine and also holistic medicine. You were a real unicorn at that time and still are in many ways, especially because you've just continued to advance your understanding of all of those fields. Back then, that was, holy shit; this is the future of medicine. I still think you represent this future archetype of medicine where, cool, do what you need to do to get an MD because there's some important tools that are in the toolbox when you can make prescriptions and they have their place and they have their purpose. But they're severely limited when it comes to a real holistic understanding of human thriving.

DAN: Yeah, amen. You're describing the sacred place at the table for all the medical paradigms, all the medical interventions. After I broke my neck, I didn't go see my homeopath or my herbalist--

AUBREY: Your acupuncturist would not have been able to fucking--

DAN: Not at that moment. After I was stabilized, halo screwed into skull, okay, then hook me up with needles.

AUBREY: I don't need a very thin needle. I'm going to need a screw that's putting something into my head cranium.

DAN: That allopathic approach: triage, emergency-care medicine, how do we stabilize a crisis situation, how do we use pharmaceuticals in the right way to arrest symptoms that are in that redlined crisis mode, stabilize fractures, really hold the human hardware system together while the energy body is catching up, and many of the associated interventional therapeutics that really help restore accelerated trajectory for healing. The body will heal itself as long as you stabilize it, give it the right conditions. There are things that accelerate and heal that and make it even more robust and ready.

AUBREY: This is the thing that I think whenever you get almost evangelical with your belief system, where you think that the only way is the way that you do it. This doesn't just happen in medicine. It can happen in fitness. It can happen in diet. Love Paul Saladino; think he's great. His whole carnivore thing, a lot of respect. I think he makes a lot of sense. Of course, Mikhaila Peterson, people have had great benefits from moving to this dietary style. Alright, man, but you gotta open your eyes to there's some other possibilities here that could be useful for other different situations, from a keto situation to a vegan situation to just a balanced high lifeforce energy diet situation. It's not just the only thing. I think it's great, it's fine to be a specialist but I don't think it's the time of now. The time of now is actually being a polymath, finding the best of all of the different fields and then having the broadest toolset and also being able to draw connections from each type. Same thing with fitness. When I came in and founded Onnit. There was CrossFit. There was regular gym-lifting, and Olympic-lifting and then there were strictly kettlebells. Everybody was like, "Our way is the only way." And we're like, "No, how about all of it? How about a little bit of everything?" Because that's the way athletes were really training anyways, when you really looked at it. Top performers are also doing exactly what we're talking about. Both of us; you, from a medical, more clinical side, but me from the spiritual and optimization side; working with literally the best athletes and best performers in the world, it's always a little bit of everything that's creating the best outcomes.

DAN: It's been certainly a path for me, to walk through these different dogmas. I think even when you and I met, I was raw vegan and had been for five years. That was the prelude for me going down to the jungle, just cleaning, cleaning, cleaning, clarifying the channel, opening up the vessel, so to speak. My first diet with chiric sanango was just volumes of information coming through but I was also dogmatic against allopathic medicine. So when--

AUBREY: It's like rebelling against your dad.

DAN: Yeah, I had to do that. I had to take it all the way to the other extreme, because once I found or was graced with the opportunity to experience ayahuasca, I learned more about myself in one weekend than I had in one decade of psychiatry training. I was inspired and I was pissed. 

AUBREY: I bet.

DAN: We had just bastardized, as a psychiatric medical field, we'd bastardized all these sacred plant medicine technologies. It was the first time that I felt hope in the future of mental health care, if we could be chacaruna, bridges, of the allopathic field with the traditional medicine field. I bounced over to the dogma against allopaths, allopathic medicine, so to speak. When I couldn't quite hold that third week of my chiric sanango diet, and the channel was so open, and I hadn't slept for three weeks, I was just downloading volumes of information, so to speak on integrative psychiatry and medicine at large. I blew a circuit. My immune system shut down, got septic and I wouldn't take antibiotics. I came back and tried to figure it out, like my rationale was, "Okay, I'm septic. If this was 100 years ago, pre-penicillin, what would I do?"

AUBREY: And your body's like, "You'd die, stupid!"

DAN: I was on that threshold so I found mega doses of colloidal silver, honey pack poultices, some herbal therapies that help me get back on the healing trajectory. Then I was able to go back down to the jungle, finish up that chiric diet--

AUBREY: So you actually moved through that portal without ever using antibiotics?

DAN: Yeah.

AUBREY: You fought your way through it?

DAN: Yeah.

AUBREY: That's bold.

DAN: Yeah. It was probably a little reckless in the past. I mean like with past–

AUBREY: You, reckless, Dan? No, you don't push the edges at all. 

DAN: It's good to know how far we can go.

AUBREY: Dr Conservative.

DAN: I think Terence McKenna describes the definition of a shaman, and I would not categorize myself with that. The definition of the shaman is the one in the community that goes to the edge of the known, jumps off into the abyss, has an experience, comes back and tells everybody what happened. There has been that just inclination to see what's on the other side of the known. 15 years ago, when I started this path of ayahuasca apprenticeship and learning about these different medicine technologies, there wasn't much of a script. I don't think I would have wanted to follow anybody else's script anyway. I think it's good to get different comparatives like Richard Evans Schultes's experiences in the deep Amazon if you watch that documentary "Embracing the Serpent".

AUBREY: Oh yeah, it's good. 

DAN: It's so good and you just see the first exploration of the deep medicine process, where she comes from or where the medicines come from. There's something really sacred about being able to work with the lineage holders of those ways like El Dragon, recently with our time in Soltara.

AUBREY: And also to be careful. You got cursed. This is something that I don't like to talk too much about because I think there's also, of course, as we know, when the mind gets an idea, you can start believing all kinds of things. The belief in those things can create a reality in which you actually believe that you're cursed. Then you need some external help to actually relieve you of this condition. However, I've seen it. I saw it with Whitney and I've told that story many times and you experienced it as well, where there are shamans who you would call sorcerers, or brujos, which is the male version of a witch, but not a witch in the awesome way that we sometimes use the word these days.

DAN: Not Glinda, the good witch. 

AUBREY: No, no, exactly. You experienced some dark medicine. Explain what that was doing. This is just a general caveat: Be mindful. There's those that are looking to heal you and those that are looking to eat you. It's just like the jungle. You don't even have to apply your own morality and say they're bad or good. Is the Jaguar bad or good? Well, it depends on if you're a fucking tapir. If you're a tapir, that's bad. Tapir is a little anteater, a little animal that digs around for ants. A jaguar's a fucking menace. It's a villain but if you're another cool jaguar, it might be like, "Ooh, sexy."

DAN: That's hot. It's all perspective at that point. Some of the teachers or those that come into our lives to be reflections of our own power, and our own integrity, and our own value system, sometimes those medicine teachings come in really uncomfortable ways. I went down really naive. I was coming out of 25 years of schooling, up through college, med school, residency, fellowships. In that Western-orientation education, we apply for a position, particularly med school, residency and fellowships. You apply for a position and you try to let the governing board or the admissions council, you want them to know why you're going to be the best applicant. It's like an extraction, we could maybe think of that as a self-promotion model and I had that. I wasn't aware that I had that, but I still had that as my orientation to ayahuasca apprenticeship. When I went down, I first studied with the guy who's largely regarded as the king of the hill in ayahuasca shamanism in the Shipibo lineage. I went to study with him. I had heard amazing things. I'm high as a kite and I'm looking for a teacher, I'm looking for a mentor along these paths and I'm willing to go all in. In the midst of a ceremony, I had premeditated this exchange although I didn't know how it's going to unfold. I made a little mesa and I'm super high in aya space, and it's in the middle of the ceremony and I crawl over it to his little mat. My broken Spanish, and I'm trying to English-translate, essentially, "I would like to be your student." But the way it came out is, “Tu eres mi maestro” , "You're my teacher." He goes, "Huh?" And I repeated, “Tu eres mi maestro”. He goes, "Huh?" I presented my little mesa and proceeded to go back to my mat and then I was there for my first diet. I was there for a month and then he ignored me for the rest of the month that I was there. There were a lot of other things and it was clear that there wasn't the right connection. It was only months later, once I found a different teacher... There were a whole lot of things that led me to leave that original place and not study more fully with the original guy. But it was only months later that I realized just the audacity and my privilege to walk into a sacred space that had been held for lineage and years and years of an unbroken line of ayahuasca shamanism, for me to walk in and demand that this guy be my teacher. I could tell, in retrospect, how that came off. I was reading Wade Davis's book, "One River" at the time when it dawned on me. Wade Davis talks about the colonization that happened when the white man went down into the Amazon as an extractive orientation towards the ownership of natural resources. First, it was for rubber. You see that in "Embracing the Serpent", just the atrocities. First, it was for rubber, then it was for oil and now it's for ayahuasca. I was just continuing that extractive mindset, as opposed to saying, "Wow, I really appreciate how you orchestrate the field; I would love to learn from you. Would you accept me and have me as a student?" Totally different orientation. The Chokes and the blockages and that Brujudio that happened as a result, may have been related to now that I had placed this little mesa together, I had said, "You're my teacher." There's something when somebody's holding a diet, it's like the elder holding the fire for somebody on the vision quest on the mountain.

AUBREY: For those people who are wondering about a diet, it's also called the Dieta. It's where you're in deep spiritual contact with, sometimes, a psychoactive plant, sometimes a non-psychoactive plant. Doesn't even necessarily need to be a plant, but you spend every waking minute, as much as you can of the day, isolating yourself and focusing your thoughts and your consciousness to interact with that plant or that energy that you're looking for, to bring that energy home inside your energetic field. This is a technology they use, which they learn Ikaros, they learn how to use the medicine of whatever they've been in contact with, their Dieta, and then offer that as part of their medicine bag]. So when we reference diet, just for people who don't know, that's what we're talking about. We're not talking about raw vegans or anything like that, although it is a pretty restrictive food diet that you go on, just to stay really clear.

DAN: Yeah, good description, beautiful description of the dieta. When we slow our metabolic system, our psychological system, our energetic system down to the pace of nature, then we can make more direct communion with the natural world and listen to the teachings, the medicine, and receive the medicine of the particular plant that we're dieting. In that process, I have this extractive orientation, I present something that is my own sacred objects to this person and demand that he be my teacher, well, there can be just like Yoda says to Luke Skywalker, there's the Light Side of The Force, and then there's the Dark Side of the Force. There are those that will take advantage of somebody like me, in a naive position, so that if I'm making an energetic connection with somebody who's holding my diet, that person also has ownership of my diet, can actually harvest the energy that I'm receiving through the plants for his own medicine basket. It's like a siphoning off of the energetic body--

AUBREY: Vampiric.

DAN: It's a bit vampiric. I didn't realize that that was in place for years.

AUBREY: So how it manifested just, I was actually even drinking ayahuasca with you while that was still in place. You actually would not be able to actually interact with the light of the medicine sometimes for the majority of the lights, the candles would be lit back in the maloca and you're like, "Yep, nothing yet. It'll come later. Maybe 3:00, 4:00, or 5:00 a.m. or something like that, I'll get a little taste of it." But in this framework, and I know this sounds crazy. Obviously, understand that this, Dr Dan Engle is a medical doctor and a psychiatrist here. Understand that we're not prone to this woo-woo nonsense unless we've actually felt it and experienced it. In this experience, what is for sure is that you had that block. What we surmise, although we haven't experienced this directly, is that that energy, this is what the lore of ayahuasca explains, is that energy can be harvested. Unutilized surplus energy and experience of all the light that can come from the medicine can be actually harvested non-locally through the interconnected field by the person who placed the blockage.

DAN: I wasn't conscious that this blockage was there. I was conscious that after this exchange happened, to your point, I didn't have any visual experiences in the medicine space. If they came, they were mild and if they came, they were well after the ceremony even closed. This was happening for years. Then I just happened to be at the Temple of the Way of Light. Donald, a mutual friend, he and I stopped by the Belen Market, and picked up some mapachos. I had never worked with Toy, which is also datura or angel's trumpet, and it's a pretty powerful medicine. But there's a draw to working with it and it was rolled in tobacco leaf. That night, I had a mapacho with Toy. And it will imbue this very lucid dream state. In that dream, that night; the first night we got to the temple; Don Howard came to me in the dream time, had never seen him in dreams before. Clear as day, looks straight at me and says, "You have a blockage. It's from one of your old teachers, and you need to take care of that while you're here," and then bounced out of the dream. It was that clear and direct and it was notable. So the next morning, I mentioned this to Matthew who runs The Temple of the Way of Light. I mentioned to him the dream time. He goes to Don Francisco who was their head shaman. We were going to sit that night. So he had let Don Francisco know that there may need to be some extra work, potentially, to support me. So Don Francisco, in the middle of that night ceremony, he comes around as they do. They will work the circle and you receive Ikaros from each of the facilitators. Don Francisco lays into this Ikaro and it's really beautiful. It builds in intensity, builds in cadence, builds in strength, builds in power and I can feel like I'm a bit of a pressure cooker and the energy's building, like something's building. It wasn't a purge, but it was like the energy just started rising and vibrating through but it was a bit of a stuckness. Then he lays in. I'm really high, so maybe I was biased, but it seemed to be one of the more long strong Ikaros I had experienced. Then, all of a sudden, it reaches this crescendo and something lets go. All of a sudden, the entire visual landscape opened up in ways that it hadn't since my earliest days, years before, the fractal beauty of what we know that fractal landscape can look like. I just felt whole and free and light and inspired and in awe and reverent, also what the heck just happened? From that ceremony forward, to this day, the visual landscape is available to me again. That next morning, in our harvest circle, I wanted to know, "Don Francisco, what the heck just happened?" I knew that my Spanish wasn't going to communicate. Matthew was the translator and Don Francisco essentially said that when he was singing to me, the Ikaro wouldn't penetrate. He was looking around, and you know you kinda get these energy eyes, you can see the energetic field, the auric field, however we choose to language it. There's certain trees, like Lupuna Blanca, will offer that kind of energetic, almost X-ray vision. He could see the energy was like a steel plate, like a manhole cover, over my heart space, the frontal body of my energetic field. The way he described is he put spiritual dynamite underneath this manhole. When he was singing in, he was layering more and more around it, and then it came to a threshold and it just exploded. He was able to remove that choke or that blockage. One of the energetic forces of that Ikaro was Jesús Christo, was Jesus. I didn't know that Don Francisco had dieted the Bible for six months. So you can diet plants and you can also diet the sacred texts, just receiving energy and information. It's like rising above that fourth plane astral shenanigan into the fifth plane, unconditional love, which, energetically, the fifth plane might trump the fourth. I'd worked with dozens and dozens of other teachers and facilitators, between the first teacher and Don Francisco, and none of them were able to either see it, or maybe I wasn't ready. With that release, it really helped me appreciate that first teacher for me and everything that had happened between then, and working and sitting with Don Francisco, that was all for me. That was for me. Much of that time, and I was also in a year of a suicidal depression right before I met you, when I moved back from the jungle. That was a hard reintegration because I couldn't deal with society, just the way we live and our culture so fast. All of that was a recognition because that whole time, that five-year-process of what that was for me, was the consistent prayer. In my meditation, and all my prayers up to that point, I know I'll trust my power to come back when it's anchored in four aspects. Those became my hands and my feet, how I walk in the world, humility, integrity, reverence and gratitude. Humility, integrity, reverence and gratitude. That became the medicine wheel of stepping back into power and knowing how to use that in a good way. That first teacher, for me, was my best teacher in understanding that the shamanic path is a power path; it's not a spiritual path. It's up to us to imbue our power in the world with spiritual virtues and values so that we're actually here to be givers not takers, usually in a Daniel Quinn, "Ishmael" reference; are we here to support a harmonious society, are we here to leave things better than when we found them, kind of approach. It was a total reframe, for me, of moving from, I don't think in those years I was necessarily working from a victim mentality. But in retrospect, it did certainly help me move from the experience, like life is happening to me, life is happening for me and I can be a participant, and then a student, and then a teacher of the path. It was this progressive process. In my experience, even the hardest lessons that we don't understand why they're happening, and we just want to curse whoever we project is responsible for it, life is still happening for us. We don't know the soul-level orientation towards our life mastery oftentimes, until retrospect, when we can see that the worst thing that has happened to us, oftentimes, is actually the best thing and when our traumas become our allies, now we essentially become invincible.

AUBREY: This is the classic stoic approach. The obstacle is the way. That challenging thing becomes the diamond grind stone that's forging the sword of our soul. This is the thing that supports us in that way. It's interesting. It requires us to believe that for it to be true, actually. That's the funny part about the world is we look at these things like well, is that true? Is it happening for you or to you? Well, it depends on what you believe. Whatever you believe is right, that classic wisdom. Whatever you believe, you're correct. That's how powerful belief is totally, ultimately. It's been beautiful to watch you and learn from you, and also contribute and be your ally in every different way as we've navigated these waters together. There's not a lot of people that I know that are willing, like myself, to go to the edge and go, "Okay, what's over the edge?" We talked about this recently. We shared some ceremony space recently. I was in a particularly deep journey that was taking me all the way through the realms of hell, to see if I could see the light that was hidden in the crevices and in the shadows, to see if I could see the divine, all the way through. The guiding line was nobody knows how better than God, God, the ubiquitous presence, the omnipresence and omnipotence of all things, that capital L, Love, the substrate of the universe itself, of course, that knows the darkness better than anything. 

DAN: It would have to.

AUBREY: It would have to. It would have to. I understood, okay, nobody knows hell better than God. Well, if I'm trying to walk the divine path and embrace our own inner divinity, which by the way, I have to say, anybody who's getting tripped about exploring their own divinity, it's cool. Explore it, recognise the divine in yourself. You're going to get really fucked up the moment that you think that you have some part of the divine that's different than anybody else. Do not fall victim to that trap where you say, "I've got something divine and you don't." As soon as you do that, you're fucking lost. You're going into a dead end ego trap, and that's very fucking dangerous. So just throwing that caveat out there. But encouraging everybody--

DAN: That’s like righteousness.

AUBREY: It is. It's the biggest problem. Not the biggest, but it's a very big problem when you start to measure and quantify your own divinity and then judge that in ratio with another. You've lost the whole point of the divine that infuses everything. But anyways, that being said, as I've tried to walk the path to understand my own portion of this divinity that we all share. I'm really keen on taking the path wherever the path wants to lead. It's been leading me into exploration of the deepest, darkest shadows and the deep points of how deeply you can look into the darkness, into the abyss. I remember I actually went to my own room and I have my own shamanic toolkit that I've cultivated over 23 years. I have a special rock and I have a special quiver of rapé, and I have my cinnamon that I have dieted in the way that we've talked where I've forged connection, I have my rose oil from another plant that I've dieted, I have special beads that represent my dear allies in this 3D world and beyond. But I went into the room with none of it and I went into this. And you shared a very interesting story, which I think is worth sharing, about this journey into descent into the darkness and actually going naked and the importance of that. I could have gone out and got that, but I was already in the shit of it. There were moments where I would get really, actually kinda scared. When I would get scared, it felt like my fear was justified. Again, that what you believe, you're right.

DAN: Is true.

AUBREY: When I was scared, I was like, "Yeah, this is dangerous." And then I was like, "I have total faith." Then I was like, "Everything was cool." I was working with that and it was bringing me through the portals of disgust, this idea that which you are disgusted of, you're unable to see the light within it, you're unable to see the divine that's within that thing that disgusts you. So it's showing me the most horrifically disgusting things, unbelievable. Sometimes I just had to chuckle at just the pure creativity of the horror that was appearing in my visions and making it through that. There was this feeling, and I felt really good since the result. Always, I think, you can tell something by the aftertaste also. It's such a good telling of whether it was a fruitful journey or not, what's the aftertaste? How do you feel? Do you feel more alive? Do you feel more in love? But it brought me through. I remember us talking and you were asking, you were talking to me like, "Do you feel like you have enough support? I'm always here as a true ally to the end," as a brother that you are. I was like, "Yeah, I feel good. I know it's intense." There was this feeling that if you could make it through that darkness portal, you could actually connect the loop of polarity, polarity being of a pole. Imagine it like a stick. That's how we usually imagine it: dark on one side, light on the other side. In actuality, I think those things bend into a circle. If you can run the lap where you can see the light and the dark through everything, and then run the lap and then make that a spiral, it feels really interesting and also a somewhat treacherous path. You have to be mindful. I also got some hits on the quote from Nietzsche, which is, I'm paraphrasing, but it's “be mindful of staring into the abyss lest the abyss stare back into you.”

DAN: Amen. 

AUBREY: I was like, "Okay, be mindful." Then I was at a certain point where the abyss was staring back at me and then I was like, "Well, now what?" Lest the abyss stare back at you. I'm like, "Okay, now what? Here we are. Here we are."

DAN: And we're going to have a conversation. 

AUBREY: Yeah, exactly. So it was a cool experience. Of course, I was really grateful to have you and so much family there coming out of it. You shared a story that was, I think, really potent about the synchronicities that happen when you're listening and in these journeys. There was a myth about a goddess who ascended to the underworld. Why don't you share that story because I thought that was cool when I came out of there.

DAN: Well, I want to also just recognise your path and your journey. It takes a lot of courage and willingness to go that deep into the darkness, because it is a deep rabbit hole and it will bring up, by design, all of our greatest fears and our attachments. We can get lost there. It does take mindfulness, it takes courage. It takes massive faith, the ability to believe in something without evidence. Whatever it is that we believe is true becomes true. I want to recognise that for you, in that warrior spirit to see what's here. There is an adversarial energy that is anti-life. That's the natural polarity of the pro-life energy, the creative force in the universe. There's a Light Side of the Force, the Dark Side of the Force. "Star Wars", it was just this epic orientation of the nature of reality. It takes a lot of willingness to come face to face with the anti-life energetic, which we might call the adversary or the opposition.

AUBREY: Yeah. Where it gets really intense, of course, is you have to see what is within you. We love externalizing the darkness. This demon over here, this darkness that's outside everywhere else but when you actually peer in, where it gets scary is what it's showing you is a mirror. I had this download about this where this understanding of Lucifer as the light-bringer, it's always this strange language. The light-bringer? What does that even mean? This is the embodiment of anti-life, of darkness, of all of this? What the understanding was, it was I'm just a mirror that is showing you the darkness that's within you, the latent possibility of all of that darkness; doesn't mean that you're expressing it. It's within the full spectrum, as the full spectrum, entire polarity beings of the entire loop of all of creation, all of consciousness, all is mind, the universe is mental, the sum total of the conscious minds in the universe is one, all of this wisdom. It's like the light-bringer is actually bringing you a mirror so that you can see the darkness that's within you. That's where you get the flinch because you're like, "Uh-uh, uh-uh, it ain't me. No way. No way." But it's there as well as all the light. All the light, all the dark.

DAN: We have the seed of creation within us and the full spectrum, I love that term full spectrum, Full Spectrum Medicine; this is full-spectrum consciousness. We have the opportunity to enter the gate at whichever shade of gray between those two polar opposites. One of those hermetic principles on polarity, the opposites are the same; they just have different degrees. So this consciousness differs in degree. The willingness to go in and honor that and see it within ourselves and become right with that, become clear with that. We could enter the dark path, so to speak, whatever that means, distort it. It essentially just means illusion or separate from consciousness. At the end of the day, it is the adversary, it is that darkness, that is the actual honing of our light. The only thing that can really cement and deepen the strength of our faith is our doubt. The only thing that can really strengthen and empower our greatness is the opposition. To become right with that and still to know how to find our way out, because that darkness, that energetic thread goes down into countless unfolding opportunities to come into our great fear of annihilation. The myth of Inanna, when she ventures into the underworld, she systematically takes off all of her armor, her sword, her shield, all of her clothes, she ventures into the darkness, eventually becomes annihilated, and then eventually becomes resurrected, to come back. It's such this powerful myth. It's easy to glamorize it to an extent too like, "Oh, wow, that sounds amazing. I'd love to have a hero's journey!" Well, if you're wanting to have a hero's journey, then you don't really know what it's about, because your ego is going to get annihilated. 

AUBREY: The annihilation is real.

DAN: It's real.

AUBREY: That's the thing. 

DAN: And the ego doesn't know the difference between annihilation and transformation because it experiences them as the same. We go through this annihilating process, so that we can deprogram all of the ego constructs that we were imbued with trans-generationally, collectively, in our inception, and how we were reared. We have to systematically get deprogrammed of all of those things to come back into our inherent nature. That process is absolutely annihilating. It's completely disorienting. It's not a linear path, it's highly uncomfortable, and it's highly inconvenient. So in our culture, we don't really have a time or space for that. That's part of the shadow side of psychiatry. We have reduced psychiatry in the mind to neurochemical profiles of twisting these little widgets in pharmaceutical medicine to expect that this is going to take care of the underlying symptoms, which might be the fact that we are products of a society that's a bit off the rails.

AUBREY: Shit. Even saying underlying symptoms is actually not necessarily what the field is doing. They're actually looking at clinical diagnoses of a disease in the DSM, which is a bunch of dudes around a table going like, "Is this a disease? No, what do you think Bob?" Bob's like, "I think it's a disease. What do we get for it?" "I don't know. Let's put some Pharma’s behind it and let's figure it out." It's a disease state, almost. It's this idea that you're treating a disease rather than, okay, here's some symptoms. Let's look at the symptoms, let's see the source of the symptoms. It just feels like we're so focused on disease classification. It's not even like, "What's actually fucking happening here? What's going on in your life? How's your body? What's your diet? What's going on? What are you feeling?" It's a disease state, rubber stamp this and then there's a solution that'll fit that rubber stamp, except it's not working. We're just getting sicker and sicker and sicker.

DAN: With all the fancy pharmaceuticals. We have no better outcomes than 100 years ago. If you look at schizophrenia as being like the bad boy, the ultimate disease presentation of mental health in our culture today, schizophrenia, our outcome measures today are no better than they were 100 years ago before all the fancy pharmaceuticals, when actually at that time, we tried the best that we could do to keep people safe, and then put them into work, hands in the dirt, come back to nature, come back to some degree of reconnection. Schizophrenia and that darkness of feeling lost is the penultimate experience, psychically, of disconnection, disconnection from ourselves, from one another, from known reality. But what is really happening at the deeper level of the psyche or we might even say soul, that's actually working on behalf of that person's evolved process of their own personal development and their own personal mastery. If we think about the known universe or multiverse, everything is on an evolutionary trajectory, why would our consciousness not be on an evolutionary trajectory? Why would not our soul, the experience of consciousness before and after a body, also not have an evolutionary trajectory? Then we get into these philosophical orientations to what soul-centered medicine looks like? What is the appreciation for a particular blueprint that we might come in with? Yes, we have historical experience, we might call that karma. We have the current experience, we might call that persona. Tiplets born into a family, they're all very unique, because they all have their own unique soul; they have their own unique persona. Then we come in with what we're here to do with our sacred gift; we might call that dharma. These are aspects of the soul. We can start to appreciate the fact that there might be something happening evolutionarily where there might be the trajectory of certain soul imprints to attain a certain developmental arc of learning and growth towards self mastery, where the arc of the soul's longevity might just include one lifetime as a day, so to speak, in a given lifehood, These trajectory experiences where we're constantly evolving our experience of unity and the ability to see both light and dark, as above so within, another hermetic principle, that it all exists within us.

AUBREY: In the law of correspondence.

DAN: In the law of correspondence.

AUBREY: And with that, it doesn't mean that we don't get to decide what we learn. There's so many ways to learn. Our soul's like, "How do you want to learn? Which way do you want to go? Pain teacher? Great. We got loads of that. Trauma teacher. Perfect. Love teacher? Joy teacher? Laughter teacher? Great. Have at it." How do we want to learn in this life? But also, you can't do it wrong from a learning perspective. Now, of course, you can hurt people, which is where that's where you have to be mindful. The only hard rule to the game of how you can really do it wrong is malice, is buying into the delusion and distortion of separation of believing that that person you're hurting is not you or that person you're cheating is not you living a different life, that distortion. It's a way to learn from that grandest, highest purview perspective, but it also fucks with other people's ability to have the sovereign choice of how they learn. As long as you respect those boundaries, you can't really do it wrong. It's just how you want to do it. This is one thing that I've seen in relationships with some of the most spiritually-brilliant and deep and potent people that I've ever known, they'll be in a relationship that just is not really serving them from my perspective and they'll acknowledge the ways that it's not serving them but they'll be like, "This is my teacher. I'm learning through being starved of this type of affection. I'm learning through not being met intellectually or spiritually and then working every day on my forgiveness and unconditionality of love as I get continued to affront after affront." I'm like, "Well, I can't argue with you. From a philosophical standpoint, you're right. However, there's lots of other awesome ways to learn where you're like, 'Fuck, I love you so much. That was amazing.'" You can learn through a different path. We can learn from anything and in those situations where we don't have a choice, then acceptance is the requisite choice. Of course, accept it. But also claim your ability to choose how you want to learn as much as you can, so it's both. It's that paradoxical thing, everything is a teacher, but also choose your teacher, just like your original story.

DAN: Right before I met you, I was just coming out of a dark time right after I moved back from the jungle. I was in a dark moment, passively suicidal. The darkness was overwhelming. I didn't know this Choke was in place and this blockage. It was also integration. I was dis-identified with who I had been and I was not yet who I was going to become, very much the liminal space, this underworld process. I was graced, I still don't know how. One day Viktor Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning" book showed up on my little altar in my little tent. I still don't know how it got there. I read that at just the right time. To your point, Viktor Frankl found himself in this horrendous experience, didn't have control over the situation, in a concentration camp in Auschwitz, and had already written his treatise on logotherapy, meaning oriented therapy. At that point, it was essentially Freud and Jung, having these two primary psychological orientations to therapy. This was the third. Then he got the laboratory experience of it, which was the concentration camp. He saw that through that process, those that were able to live through it, found meaning in it and not only acceptance, but also meaning.

The summary statement, the summary quote in that book that, for me, has always been, the treatise for my life since then and now, moving forward, the last of the great human freedoms is the ability to choose one's attitude in any given circumstance. To know that he lived that, it wasn't just some philosophical diatribe, he lived it. I knew that we all are made of the same stuff. At that moment, he had set a bar. Now my excuses for feeling petty about my current situation just seemed trivial. It was an inspired recognition. He became one of my teachers, no longer in a body. He did through that book. Many others have written similar kinds of treatise on our ability to choose our attitude and our experience and find meaning in it. So for me, the three maxims of living are, number one, love is our blueprint, number two, choice is our power and number three, life is our school. For those three, if I just try those on in any kind of orientation, come back to the fact that love is the blueprint of creation and we're always just a little net-positive against the adversary otherwise, this whole thing wouldn't continue. Thankfully, we keep propagating.

AUBREY: Just to bracket a little piece, I think one of the reasons why we're net positive is the adversary requires distortion. It literally requires distortion. There is destruction, which is a necessary part of creation, which is not distortion.

DAN: Death and decay.

AUBREY: Of course, the explosion of a star, all of that. That's not distortion, that's just existence. But the adversary is the anti-life energies, the thing that tries to tear down that which is being built and that which is beautiful; not because it needs to be torn down, but because it just wants to, it requires the distortion, the delusion, that we are not all interconnected. It requires the delusion of separation. So if your entire platform is built upon a fundamental lie, you're always going to be a little bit behind a platform that's built on a fundamental truth, which is that everything is connected. That's why all of the stories say the good always wins. Why does the good always win? Well, it's got a platform that's built on truth, whereas the other ones got a faulty platform; it requires distortion. That distortion can be illuminated at any point in time and then, all of a sudden, it's like, "Oh, shit! What have I been doing all this time being the adversary? I fucked it up." Whereas with the truth, of course, you can become distorted. But the truth is a solid platform, a solid pillar, which is why I think it does win in the end, which is why I have a lot of confidence, actually, in the way that the world is going. Sure, there's lots of distortion here, but distortion is vulnerable. The truth is it might be hard to find sometimes, it might be forgotten or lost or discarded, but it's stable. It's solid and it's always there. You look deep enough, you're going to find it.

DAN: Yeah, amen. Well said. It's that constant orientation to finding our faith, orienting towards this radically-empowered position, that life is happening for me, not to me and then evolving that trajectory into life is happening for me, life is happening with me and then life is happening as me. We, each, are the center of our own universes. We look deep inside the quantum reality of the known universe, the universe is expanding from every position simultaneously. Wow!

When I first heard that... Joseph Selbie wrote a really good book called "The Physics of God." That little pearl just stood out. Wow, how can the universe be expanding from every point simultaneously? That means, literally, we are each the point of expansion of the known universe in this inception. Now, if that can become a basis of my new philosophy, and my new way of living, then it's easier to accept my power, and also my responsibility, to your point; how am I living my life? To what degree of harmony? To what degree of service? To what degree of connection? Can I accept each of those adversarial experiences as also a teacher? Can I experience each of those shadow positions that I might externally point to and say, "You're wrong." Can I also turn that dark mirror and look at it within myself, inside myself? And then it becomes this really powerful process of becoming completely responsible for our own lives and ideally, having this radical faith that ultimately, we're winning the game so to speak, like we've won the grand test or the big war. There's still battles to fight, there will still be adversaries and challenges because we're still in a body and yet, I don't want to get numb to the role that I have to play my own small yet important role on the grand chessboard. I've just had a flash of you and I play three-dimensional chess that one day for sure. Literally, that was a three-dimensional chess game. Can I accept and own the responsibility for my life to live it to the best of my ability in a good way, to have faith that what is moving through me at any given moment is actually in service to my greatest opportunity, my greatest becoming, my greatest evolution, and ultimately, my greatest mastery. It's hard to continue to hold that, particularly in the culture that we live in, because it's so fast-paced. It's so aggressive in many ways. It's like the neurologic onset of the click rates and the speed of our technology. Our nervous systems have not caught up to the speed of our technology. At times, it can feel really overwhelming and--

AUBREY: Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and god-like technology is the way I've heard it described. 

DAN: Nice! Say that to me again. 

AUBREY: Paleolithic emotions. Medieval institutions. And god-like technology.

DAN: Wow! Right.

AUBREY: That's the spot we're in right now. 

DAN: That's such a soup. 

AUBREY: Yep, and as they said in that, what’s that movie with George Clooney that's about "Odyssey". Fucking, you know which movie I'm talking about? It's George Clooney and the Soggy Bottom Boys.

DAN: Oh, yeah. "O Brother, Where Art Thou?"

AUBREY: "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" He's up in the fucking window and they're shooting guns at him. And he's going, "Oh, we're in a fix. Damn, we're in a tight spot. Hang on, we're in a tight spot." We're in a tight spot.

DAN: Yeah, we're in a tight spot. What a glorious place to be and also what a dynamic time in human history. So that we also don't become numb to the degree of travesty and mass shootings. We become normalized to that. I think of Krishnamurti. He's constantly in the back of my ear. It's no degree of health to be well adjusted to a sick society. We don't want to become numb to the atrocities that are happening. How do we feel it all and still be buoyant and still choose our attitude?

AUBREY: It's almost like you have to do it is like an empathy ceremony, put a ceremonial context around it, where I'm going in to feel all of it now and feel it, connect with it, grieve it. This is what I've found to be really productive is like, go in because it's important to feel it all, we have to, but we also can't carry it with us just like we can't carry our mushroom vision with us in day to day life. It'd be overwhelming or that you can't bring an ayahuasca ceremony. You gotta go into the ceremony, feel it all, be in a place where you allow yourself to fully feel it, open your heart to the maximum to feel the pain and then allow yourself, give yourself the permission to close it back. I think people don't trust themselves that if they open the gate that they'll be able to close it, or they just don't want to open the gate because it's uncomfortable to feel it. It's important because that's the motivation that causes us to want to change things. If we don't feel it, we're not going to have any desire to actually change it. It'd be like, alright, whatever this thing happened. Let me just worry about my next paycheck or whatever the thing is that I'm worried about. And then we're not going to have the hot-blooded passionate desire to change. We gotta connect, we have to. I think finding that skill to put it in a place where we can go in all the way and feel all of it, connect with all of it, and then trust ourselves that we can put that back in, wrap that back up and say, that was my ceremony where I could feel the pain of the world or I could feel the pain of those who've experienced this thing. I can't carry that with me, otherwise it'll pull me down within it and I won't be able to exist.

DAN: Yeah. Such is the dance, coming in and out, getting in touch with the degree of the suffering in the world and using that as fuel and motivation to do our work versus fuel and motivation to feel like well, what's it all about anyway? Why should I even care? Such is the dance?

AUBREY: One of the things that my own foray into the darkness has really shown me and I'm not meaning that literally, I did do, obviously, a darkness retreat, which was literal darkness but I'm using that in the metaphor being that the distortion, the hell realms, and being asked to see myself in the mirror, when I looked through all of these hell realms. And like there's something about all of us, all of our identities, we all want to be the good guy, or the good girl. We all want to be inherently good. There's this obsession with being inherently good. I remember the first time I was disposed of this identity predisposition was the second time I sat with Maestro Orlando, the dragon, and his giant dragon with a head the size of a gigantic building, it was a gray dragon made of smoke, comes straight down and looks over me and just looks at me and goes, "You want power?" And I go, "Yeah". I thought that was pretty honest of me. At that point, I don't know. Is this the right answer? Is he going to fuck me up? And then the dragon goes, "Why?" And I go, "To help people," the classic power-for, power for good things. And the dragon goes, "Are you sure?" Then I, without even any will, I jump on his back; it just happened. I just jump on his back and he brings me through this entire scan of my life of all the times that I've used power for my own benefit, or power over or power in these ways. I was, “Damn, I guess I want power, not only for good, but also for me,” to ball out at a fucking club or whatever, whatever the thing that was showing me was. I don't even remember what it was showing me. It was that first moment of recognising that, okay, here's some aspect of myself that isn't all good, isn't all saintly. It was super important to realize that. I think, in this journey, instead of trying to constantly scramble to pretend that we're all good, to understand that we're very complicated, multifaceted beings and to see that we have this dark capacity. For example, one of the pathways that it showed me is, we despise the idea of sadistic pleasure, which is the pleasure in somebody else's pain, right? That's the epitome of what we would call an evil action, pleasure in somebody else's pain. Now, imagine that you're watching a movie, and there's a villain and the villain is massacring villages of kids and babies and they fuck with a main character, and they kill his daughter and his family, he's the most despicable villain. He gets finally captured by the hero, and they bring him in and then they go, and they say, "And your death will not be slow," and everybody in the audience is like, "Yay! Give it to him. Pull his fingernails out." What the fuck is that? That's pleasure in somebody else's pain, except we've gone through the journey where we feel like that fucker deserves it. So even something simple like that is to understand we're capable of pleasure in someone else's pain and throughout history, always, there's just been a slippery slope of scapegoating, that is justified some other access to sadistic pleasure. Just like the movie justified it in our mind, when the hero says, "And when your death won't be quick," we're like, "Fuck, yeah!" Well, what if it was the Jews that are tearing down our society? Or what if it was the witches that are in league with Satan? Let's burn them or let's torture them. It's happened a billion times where those things have been justified and then sadistic pleasure has been unleashed. But to see that and to see that as a capable human trait, obviously, we don't have the ability to be scapegoated to that degree although certainly, we've seen some crazy shit in the past few years. But to recognise that and recognise and see those tendrils of the ability to be dark or evil within the self, it may be scary to look at that. But then it's actually so empowering to say, Yeah, I see that and I am going to choose my I Am. My I Am that I am is going to choose that I am not that and I am going to choose something else. Even though all of this is available, I am going to choose this.

DAN: Choices are power.

AUBREY: That's so much more badass than being like, "I just came out of the womb." Good. I'm all good and that's me, the good guy. That's just what I am. I'm just a good guy. No, you're not. You can be and you can choose that but it's so much more powerful when you're choosing it in full knowledge. It's like what Jordan Peterson says, you want somebody, particularly talking about the masculine, but you want somebody who knows that they're a monster, and has it under control, and chooses how they show up in the world. You want someone that embraces that level of their power, and then chooses to be good. That's what you really want.

DAN: That's what makes it more trustworthy.

AUBREY: For sure. 

DAN: Because, otherwise, those shadow expressions, they can grab the bull by the horns. You don't even see it coming.

DAN: It's like this shadow aspect of spirituality and thinking that we've transcended and it's all love and light. That's part of it. 

AUBREY: Half of it.

DAN: I appreciate what you're saying around feeling at all. It reminds me that my initial entry into ayahuasca. It was a prayer in a sweat lodge. I was going through a separation that would eventually become a divorce and I couldn't feel anything. I was just stone cold. Our mediator said, "What do you want out of this?" I was like, "I don't want anything. I just want out. I'm complete." It just devastated my partner. I knew that degree of coldness, I didn't want to live the rest of my life like that. I just happened to find myself in a sweat lodge two weeks later, and I made a really concerted prayer, "Please, please help me open up my heart. I'm really cut off from my grief. I can only feel a tinge of anger." But I wouldn't really even let that surface. A buddy of mine in that sweat lodge who actually took me to the lodge; we had just gotten to know each other's friends, who's now one of my best friends, Andy Swanson, up in Portland; he said to me, "I think you might be interested in a medicine called ayahuasca." I found myself six weeks later in that ceremony. Sure enough, that one first entry I still remember like it was yesterday. That first century into aya, I knew that was going to be a new trajectory for my life. I did not know that the answer for that prayer was going to be a nine-year odyssey; and still to this day too, a large degree; but a nine-year odyssey of uncovering all the trauma that had shut my heart off in the first place. That whole answer to that prayer, which was just like the drudgery of going through trauma work didn't sound or feel like it was the answer to a prayer because I thought opening my heart was going to be love and yet I was uncovering all this trauma. Also appreciating eventually what you just said, which is the opening of our heart means that we feel all of it. We're not just selective, we're feeling love. If we're opening our heart, that means we're going to feel all of it, the sadness, betrayal, the rejection, humiliation, the abandonment, all the core wounds of the soul and the magnitude of the collective experience of trauma and pain and separation. So we get to feel it all. And then we get to self-select on what it is that we want to cultivate more of, kindness, generosity, the metabolism of all of our trauma to eventually get to forgiveness, compassion, healing and restoration. We can't just jump to love and forgiveness without metabolizing the pain of the underlying trauma in the first place. Otherwise, we're just bypassing, which is a big shadow aspect of a lot of spiritual circles right now. Yes, it is love and light. That's only a sliver. It's only part of it. Can we avail ourselves of feeling at all?

AUBREY: There's this there's also a sticky little trap of defining yourself as other than, as separate then all the darkness, well, then, of course, what do you do? You fight the darkness. It really locks you in this battle, where you're in constant battle. I've seen this as well, where we're the light warriors. We're the fucking light warriors, and we're out here attacking darkness. Well, you're just going to call darkness to you. It's an endless fucking pit. Let me assure you, there's plenty to go.

DAN: It will never go away. The adversary will always be there.

AUBREY: It can't. It just can't go away. There's myths that actually help point that way. One of the ones that I recently thought of was the “Fifth Element”, which is obviously a story that you can mythologize, of course. There's this embodiment of absolute evil. And they say, what do we do? We're like, "Well, let's launch our torpedoes into it." And they launch torpedoes into it and it just gets bigger. And then what do we do about that? More torpedoes. Then it just gets even fucking bigger. Of course, you can't explode the darkness, with violence, with tools of violence, and make it go away. It's just going to get bigger.

DAN: You can't vanquish darkness with darkness.

AUBREY: No. It's not the way it works. But you can alchemize it by applying the highest level of love, which is seeing, actually. They didn't do a great job of depicting this because it looked like when Leeloo actually slayed the darkness, it looked like she slayed it by this beam of light. It was a super-powered laser that destroyed it. When really, what that would have been is her loving that darkness too and then the sparks of love that were hidden in the broken vessel and distortion of that darkness came alive and the darkness realized that it was no longer, the distortion was dispelled by the love that actually saw that Christ-like love that said, "I see God in you too." That's what unconditional love does and then the thing would have evolved. That really would have been a better way to do it but I think, for our psyches, we needed to destroy still. We're very locked in this idea and "Avatar", same thing. Love that fucking movie, but ultimately, the animals and Eywa destroying all of the machines and the men is not the way that that story is told best. There's a book that you turn me on to, "The Fifth Sacred Thing", which actually tells the myth and tells the story in a way that's like a guide star for our world.

DAN: Yeah, can we see that darkness and say you too have a sacred place at the table and stay with that, and stay with that, and stay with that. And then that story, that's the big schizophrenic moment where the agent of that darkness can't handle it, eventually.

AUBREY: So in this story, there's the Southlands, which is a dystopia. Let's imagine our world on steroids where they breed people just to be prostitutes and children and--

DAN: And warriors.

AUBREY: Or warriors.

DAN: The men are just the warriors and the women are just objects.

AUBREY: There's others that are like sadistic vessels that the wealthy people use. Imagine all of everything if it just went to its most absurd and insane trajectory, where paedophilia and all of these things were normalized and brought into and everybody who was wealthy had access to it and it this whole very deeply dark and everything was bellicose and war and the soldiers were bred to be mindless and just kill and they interact with a classic utopian society of community and ritual and support and magic, really beautiful and it's a clash between both of them. As the soldiers come up, the Northlands and make a decision, a difficult decision that was debated hotly even still, like we should fight them, but like we can't fight them, it won't work. Eventually the elders, the older women in the tribe, basically in the community, we have to invite them for a seat at the table. So they come in with all their guns, and then everybody in a unified voice is like you have a seat at the table. The battle turns, it's a great book. It is a spoiler that I'm going to give but it's important to illustrate this point, because most of y'all won't read this book. I think one of the soldiers, they don't even have names, they've been dehumanized to the point--

DAN: 0157.

AUBREY: I think it's 059, because 59, I think, is his name. Might not be that number, but whatever, you get the idea. 59, he gets aggravated and he just starts shooting people, shoots a woman in the head, shoots a child in the head. Every time somebody else takes the place of that person who is standing, and says, "You have a seat at the table. You have a seat at the table." Shoots another one, "You have a seat at the table. You have a seat at the table." That breaks his psyche. That's the moment where he can no longer hold the distortion anymore. Then he was the big, rough and tough bully badass in the army and then when he lays down his gun, everybody looks at him like, "Oh, shit." The tide of battle turns by causing all of the military to defect to the other side. They're like, "Fuck this, we're done." It's such a potent, potent story that we don't see told very often. We still are locked in the you win by killing all the opposition. I don't know.

DAN: It's the most empowered experience that I've had in a narrative, in a storyline to show the power of our transformation when we keep coming to the adversary with love, and faith, and a recognition that we hold a position that is unwavering, whether it might be my, recently, I went through a process where I realized my integrity is not for sale, my compassion is paramount. The more complete story that you're describing in "The Fifth Sacred Thing" is like our exalted position, to become that which we know is possible. We might also describe it as that's the inflection point that when we can hold that position, against all odds and all evidence to say that, "Okay, if I was that person in front of 059, and saying, 'You too have a place at the table,' can I take that position from absolute faith, that in that moment, if my life too is in service to this transformative experience. She, Starhawk, in that book, describes the full potency and potential of the transformative experience. If I'm just one agent of that transformative experience for the other, then I know that I'm serving my role. I also have to become right with my death.

AUBREY: What that requires is a bodhisattva level of compassion and an awareness. It's no easy task and it's not applicable to every situation. You have a crazy person break into your house looking to kill you? In my book, defend yourself. It's not a concerted collective effort. It's an individual attack. Every rose has a right to have a thorn. You know what I mean. It's not saying no matter what, turn the other cheek. Well, sometimes fucking smack back. Establish a boundary. But from a collective, universal understanding of how to deal with the darkness, I think it's universally accurate. It's just specifically, occasionally, we have to make a different choice and then other choices are justified. It's definitely worth meditating and I can't recommend that book more. Also, so many fucking amazing things in there like the love temples that ultimately rehabilitate the soldiers who had been indoctrinated in this other way and helping them reconnect to the nature of the divine feminine. Beautiful scenes. We actually went over a recent scene of that where he's getting bathed, 059 is getting bathed and turned on. It's the most erotic thing where he's being fed figs or whatever it is.

DAN: He's blindfolded.

AUBREY: Blindfolded, can't see anything and there's this goddess that's attending to him and he starts to get hard and engorged and full of lust. Everything he knows about lust is to then penetrate and then ravish that thing that he's lustful for and objectify it to a certain degree by saying that you are the vessel of my pleasure, not a divinely embodied portal, whatever other language you want to use. He pulls the blindfold off, and it's an old crone, an old crone. He's like, "Holy shit. I felt all this Eros, all this erotic energy and I cannot objectify you, because you are a crone." It just recalibrates everything. It reminds me of another story I heard from Matias de Stefano about, I think it was Sumeria, there was an old culture that he remembers. When the soldiers or the warriors would go off to war, they would have to stop outside of the city and outside of the where they were returning and go to the love temples where, in Matias's words, they would have the war fucked out of them. They would have the war fucked out of them. You've been through some horrible violent shit. Now we need to, basically, and he used the word fuck but it's like cleanse you through lovemaking and eroticism and reconnection with your divine nature through interaction with the divine nature of the goddesses that are present there, priestesses.

DAN: A return to love.

AUBREY: A return to love, return to Eros.

DAN: Wow.

AUBREY: So many things that we've forgotten in this world. One thing I want to definitely get to is you mentioned trauma and traumas, like a universal experience to some degree, it just varies in degree, not in ubiquity and one of the really promising things that's come online is MDMA-assisted psychotherapy. This is a big deal.

DAN: It's a big deal. 

AUBREY: It's a fucking big deal.

DAN: Yeah. Thankfully, we've been graced with the privilege to heal. I think about many of our ancestors, our parents, grandparents, great grandparents, et cetera who didn't have many of these tools of consciousness and healing. That's what I think about the medicine path in general whether they're classic psychedelics or MDMA as an empathogen, Iboga as an oneirogen, all these different aspects of catalysts for--

AUBREY: Oneirogen?

DAN: Yeah, Iboga's classically described as an oneirogen.

AUBREY: What does that mean?

DAN: Which means a dream-inducing medicine. In the experience of Iboga, it's very much a dreamlike state where you oftentimes have the experience of coming to the threshold, contact with ancestors, contact with lineage. I hadn't really thought about it before. What's that movie? "Black Panther" when he receives that soma and he crosses over and he goes on to have a conversation with his dad, very much, that's an oneirogenic process.

AUBREY: It's funny because, as I've talked about on here, I've gotten a lot of incredibly powerful growth, spiritual growth and understanding from the combination of ketamine and cannabis, which prescribed the ketamine and, of course, thankfully, cannabis has, at least, been decriminalized here in Austin, which is great. I remember one day, I had taken an Iboga microdose along with it. I was like, "Something's different." It was actually strong, I was fasting that day so the microdose was a little bit peppier than usual. I was like, "Something is different." I forgot that I took it. Was like, "Something's fucking different in here. Something's different." Then I go straight to a scene that looks like "Black Panther", and it's like, "Yes!" It was just this African culture that was there and there's this old shaman, warrior shaman. He's like, "That's right. I've been here the whole time. You forgot about me, but I've been here the whole time!" I was like, "Whoa. Yeah, you're right. I'm sorry. I forgot." He's like, "That's right. You always forget, forget that we been here the whole time." So it was, in the micro and also the macro, like, "Oh yeah, you're our ancestors." If we go back far enough, you're the cradle of Civilization. This is where we all came from. We can forget that. We can forget that that culture has been here the whole time and we can all trace our roots all the way back. Iboga, in that oneirogen classic way, was connecting me with that warrior shaman that was giving me a stern lesson of, "Don't you forget, son!" He's pounding his chest, "I've been here the whole time." I was like, deep bow. I was like fucking deep bow. I was like, "All right."

DAN: Beautiful description of that oneirogenic process and coming back into contact with our ancestor, talking about the cradle of civilization, all of our collective ancestors. Iboga has that really unique fractal that consistently offers people. That's why, oftentimes, it's described as a crossroads medicine, crossing the threshold of consciousness, over the ark of experience, towards our ancestors. You might call that, like in the medicine wheel, the North Gate. It also has this fascinating experience of being able to cleanse our physiology and our neuro receptors to the extent that many of the clients that we would see down at crossroads, who may have been addicted to heroin or pain medications, opiates for decades would go through one treatment and through that one treatment, would be cleansed of that addiction, with no craving, and no withdrawal on the other side. There's no other medicine that quite does that on the planet like Iboga. All these medicines have their own unique fractal of potentiality and how they unlock these unique gates of our own consciousness. Cannabis will do that uniquely. Ketamine will do that uniquely, MDMA, LSD, San Pedro, 5-MeO, all these different keys to unlocking these unique gates because we're all in these multi-faceted, complex iterations of consciousness. As it relates to trauma and bringing it back to that, MDMA and this privilege to heal, oftentimes, we experience in the midst of an MDMA-supported therapy session. What I mean by that is there's ways to use medicines recreationally, and there's ways to use them therapeutically. I've heard many stories of friends, family clients, and others who have gone through an MDMA-supported process and have had the literal experience of they are working with a molecule that they had never been in contact with before.

AUBREY: Even if they've done it a myriad times. I've had that experience. I’ve had that experience.

DAN: Recreationally. Oh, wow, recreational, here.

AUBREY: My first MDMA experience, I was in Australia with my girlfriend at the time when I was 21, an amazing experience, very heart-opening, opened up a lot of empathy and a lot of understanding. It was great. But I was out at the clubs and we're doing things. I think I ended up deciding to eat a rose flower or something like that.

DAN: Very erotic. 

AUBREY: It was like, "Oh, yeah. Look at this! Everything bursting with life. It smells so good!" She's like, "Gee, you might want to chill out a little bit and calm yourself." Then 15 years later, I'm 35 or something like that, I get led through a proper MDMA-assisted psychotherapy session, with the blindfold. All of that energy that was pointed outward, pointed inward to the heart. A totally different thing.

DAN: Totally different. Coming into contact with how MDMA works... You'd be hard pressed to construct a better molecule for trauma-recovery work, because of how MDMA works in the system. It softens the fear center. It accelerates our frontal capacity, our witness perspective. It solidifies, even more actively, the areas of the brain between memory and the story or the narrative of a particular experience so we have a more full memory of a particular trauma with better witness and less fear. So now we can see it more completely. Oftentimes, what's happening with people with PTSD, whether it's classic PTSD, like soldiers on the battlefield who are in an experience where they almost die or they come into contact with just atrocious violence, witnessed or experienced first-person and then to go through this recovery process that the psyche is trying to work through but it's stuck at the trauma, at the point at which it was so overwhelming that the psyche couldn't take it, so it walled it off. But the psyche is always trying to work towards resolution. The resolution of that is the nightmares and the flashbacks, and the constant re-experiencing of it, which keeps the nervous system in sympathetic overdrive, fight or flight, keeps the psyche in that fear response of feeling overwhelmed, but it can't quite get to resolution. So you have something like MDMA, and in that therapeutic process, the internal orientation, heart expansion, oxytocin, less fear, greater memory, better witness, now you can see the whole thing and not only the whole experience of that one traumatic event, but also the associated potential reasons that that happened, more compassion for the perpetrator, more compassion for my position in it, more understanding of all the causative factors that led to it in the first place so now I can work towards healing the trauma itself and working towards integrating that for full resolution, forgiveness, integration, healing, and becoming a more complete whole self because that traumatized part has now been rescued, and brought home. The protective, archetypal imprint that's been holding that trauma at bay because it was too overwhelming, it was going to annihilate me if I came fully in touch with it, that protective archetype can relax. Knowing that that traumatized part comes home, I can actually, in my more full, complete, mature consciousness, oftentimes supported with a therapist who's helped me work through it because I'm not just doing that on my own, and I think MAPS has this well. The therapeutic process, it's working towards resolution, the MDMA is just allowing it to happen more actively. It's not the medicine that's doing the work. It's the therapeutic relationship and the arc of processing it that's actually doing the work. The medicine just allows it to be more available. In that perfect neurochemical interpersonal process, now we have the opportunity to bring that trauma home. The reason I call it the privilege to heal, is our ancestors, parents, grandparents, great grandparents, et cetera didn't have the opportunity to work with these tools to heal their own trauma and that trauma has been learned and propagated generationally.

AUBREY: Passed along.

DAN: Passed along just like a learned behavior will be passed along. All animals have learned behavior passed along. That's what helps us continue to evolve. So we've also inherited all of these trauma patterns that now we have the opportunity and the privilege to heal. So it may not have started with us but it's still ours, with the opportunity to be made right and made whole, and then liberate the future generations from not having to carry my own unmet needs, my own trauma; that future generations can just be who they're magically-imbued and embodied to be and, hopefully, collectively help us re-trajectorize this floating water rock into a more sustainable trajectory.

AUBREY: What is the mechanism that allows people to, I mean it sounds like a very much of a protective mechanism but so many people who've experienced trauma are unaware of their trauma, particularly sexual trauma or trauma that happened in your childhood. I know so many people through this medicine path have uncovered deep, particularly sexual trauma, but not always sexual when they were younger. It's interesting, it's interesting. I've seen it so many times, both with men and women. Don't think that this is just a female thing. It's not, it's absolutely not. It's so powerful that even myself, I'm like, "Wait, I'm all good here, right?" 

DAN: What else don’t I know?

AUBREY: Yeah. There's some fucking shit happenning that I'm not remembering. They literally will go from no recollection to, sometimes, a thread to sometimes the veil is lifted, and all of a sudden they can see all of it.

DAN: Yeah, a full trauma-recovery process. Spontaneous. There was an unknown exactly. It was so well defended that it became completely out of the awareness of consciousness. It's a survival mechanism of the ego. We're built to survive. The ego is built to survive. When we come into contact with something that feels overwhelming and annihilating, life-threatening, it can feel so overwhelming to our psychic structure, especially when we're little beings and we're just the sponges of our environmental exposure. To have something that feels so antithetical to our sense of safety, and wholeness and wellness of life, particularly if that trauma became, at that moment, the recognition that the person that I was entrusting the most with my life, maybe mom, dad, or caregivers, or the priest, or whoever, my association may have been like that person's quote-unquote God or the supreme being or the supreme force, environmentally in my life, if that person is now the the bearer of my trauma, especially as a little being, we tend to think that we are the result in the cause of that. We're very egocentric as little people. And many of us are egocentric as old people too.

AUBREY: Yeah, never grow out of that phase.

DAN: Ideally, we become more and more oriented towards moving from the me, mine and the I to the us, the we and the all. It becomes less about us, but the way our psyche and nervous systems develop in those early stages, we are very egocentric. When it becomes so overwhelming that the supreme being in my life is now the bearer of such trauma, it can overload the circuit to blow a fuse. Then at that point, it becomes walled off. The protective mechanism of the ego comes in and puts that memory on the backburner, way in the closet, in the recesses of the subconscious to be buried, to eventually, ideally, become made whole again. But until we're given the safe space to do that, with the medicines that allow the fear mechanism to significantly ratchet down in the midst of a safe, connected environment, and interpersonal process of radical support, radical love, radical availability, the therapist in that moment becomes the external auxiliary orientation to self compassion, just imbuing compassion where I might not be able to access it on my own because, oftentimes, those trauma, those deeply-seated traumatic experiences have a lot of shame and guilt associated with them. So when that gets to be brought home, and then met with love, ideally, in the context of a therapist who knows that trauma-recovery process, then it gets to rewrite that entire narrative towards more of a truth moment. Don Howard would describe the medicine paths, and the medicines themselves as clarigens. In that moment, we see the clarity of truth and how that trauma became to be and how we were just a part of this whole thing playing out. Now that that exiled part, now we're talking more about parts work or internal family systems work. That's the predominant psychotherapeutic orientation towards MDMA-supported psychotherapy, at least in the MAPS trials, like Michael and Annie Mithoefer in those first phase one, phase two trials, the success rates were so good. They are so good in that therapeutic role and they're so good particularly with that internal family systems, which is parts work, we bring all the parts home, give them the talking stick and the microphone so that they can speak the traumatic experience into awareness, be validated from their own position, the rescuer parts of ourselves, just trying to keep us safe, the traumatized parts trying to figure out what the freak is happening here, the sense of overwhelm, the sense of shame, especially if it's sexual abuse, when we're really young, then there's this perverse pleasure that we're also feeling shame about, so confusing...

AUBREY: I was able to sit in a really well-conducted ceremony. Of course, these are underground at this point so not disclosing any details of that; it wasn't with you. If anybody's wondering if I'm giving cryptic notes to sitting in on one of your ceremonies, did not, was not you. I was sitting in and there was a young woman who had experienced a lot of sexual abuse from her father. There was, of course, an immense amount of rage, so much rage that the rage would almost cause her to shut down. So there's both rage and shut down. She was alternating between rage and being shut down and immobilized in that paralyzation, the freeze impulse and then the rage impulse. As she worked through that, she was really masterfully handled through that whole process and allowed to give voice to all of the different feelings and all of the things that she was expressing. She eventually got to a place where she felt like she had to share something. And she's like, "I'm so ashamed of this. It's like I'm trembling to even share it." But when she would masturbate in her adult life, she would sometimes think of her father. That fucked with their psyche so deeply because somehow the wires got crossed of pleasure and abuse and all of this. The shame was actually keeping her trapped in a lot of that. The facilitators were masterful at not even flinching at that level of shame and normalizing it and being like, "Yes. All of this is possible and normal. There's nothing to be ashamed about." You can see this just weight, just peeling off. It was beautiful, it was just tears just flowing like wow, that was possible.

DAN: That's such a good description of the weight peeling off. That's what trauma is. It's a psychic weight.

AUBREY: And the energetic cost of holding up these walls, walling off aspects of your psyche and memory. Then what's happening, the festering that's happening behind the walls is one thing, but then also the energy required to keep a force field up, a force field impenetrable to our own recollection and perception, that's a lot of weight. So fatigue is another thing that you see in people who have these kinds of things like, "Why am I always tired? My diet's good. I'm working out. Why am I always tired?" Well, you're tired because there could be many reasons, of course, and I don't want to be reductionist, but part of it is you're powering a force field and whatever else is going on, dealing with whatever other wounds that are going on behind that, but you're powering a force field. That's a cost.

DAN: Yes, energetic costs. It's constantly running. It's like a programme that's constantly running in the background that's just chewing away our full lifeforce psychic experience.

AUBREY: You talk about this, in this book, "A Dose of Hope." It's a good name. It's a good name because a lot of the trials that MAPS has run on MDMA-assisted psychotherapy, particularly for veterans and first responders, the inclusion criteria for most people in the trial, they might have expanded it, but at least when I was following it was treatment-resistant PTSD or trauma, meaning they've gotten a battery of different pharmaceuticals. 10, 12, however many it was, and whatever other treatments that were available that were not MDMA, all failed. Normally, you wouldn't run a trial with people where everything else had failed. That's not how the pharmaceuticals run things. But MAPS was not that type of organization. They wanted to show that we're helping people that nothing else can help which is, I think, also why they've gotten the FDA Fast Track status and gotten so much support, bipartisan support, from everybody being, "Well, fuck, you're helping people in way that nobody's been able to help before." It's really powerful, and it is hope for the hopeless.

DAN: Yeah, amen. Yeah, thank you for that recognition. I didn't expect to be in this position. I had been working with aya for eight years, underground work, still apprenticing. You and I were doing documentaries down south. What precipitated me coming on to the radar, so to speak, was my oldest sister's suicide and her warrior spirit and heart that tried everything to to rectify this deep PTSD that she had from her own childhood sexual abuse. We share the same father, and we grew up in different households, and in her mom's household, a family friend, or maybe a family member in that household, I don't remember exactly because I wasn't connected with her family at all, her mom's side at all, had perpetrated this year's long sexual abuse. She tried to anesthetize that with alcohol, and she had battled major depression and alcoholism, all as a consequence of this PTSD and pharmaceuticals, antidepressants, talk therapy, journaling, all that standard of care. This is way back when we weren't speaking so much about psychedelic therapy for trauma or at least I didn't know about it. This is nine, 10 years ago now. When she died, I realized I can't just play from the sidelines anymore. That was really my call to action to be in an education advocacy position. Then I started exploring other medicines. First got me into Ibogaine because she had such an experience with alcoholism. I wanted to understand the chief best medicine for addiction recovery, Iboga or Ibogaine, its primary alkaloid. Explored that deeply, and then went into MDMA therapy, wanted to explore that deeply, understand the research. That eventually led to ketamine, explored that deeply and wanted to understand its role for depression recovery as well as traumatic brain injury recovery, because ketamine is also very good for neuro-inflammation related to brain injury. So I started exploring all these different medicines, and then realizing there's still so much to do in the education advocacy arena. I wanted to be able to give people a dose of hope, to know that there are medicines available, we're doing our best to fast track them to legal therapeutic use at scale. Unfortunately, we still have brothers and sisters that are dying daily, because these medicines aren't yet available. We wanted to put the storyline into an average person going through MDMA-supported therapy, to walk the reader through the process and also to shine a light on this more contemporary appreciation for trauma, which is complex PTSD, which is classic PTSD, war experience, veterans on the battlefield complex PTSD, more adverse childhood experiences over time of early neglect, maybe not so direct, sexual overt abuse, but more abuses of omission, versus the abuses of commission. These adverse childhood experiences, over time, set up the same psychic structures and neurologic imprints that classic PTSD will do. I wanted to demystify a little bit of the psychedelic psychotherapy so we could show it in a storyline so as to offer a bit of hope to those that are really desperate and feel like there's nothing that's going to be helpful to let them know that there are tools, and we're doing our best. We still have a ways to go. Our nonprofit, Thank You Life is oriented towards that as well, as a psychedelic therapy funding stream to support people into medicine work that wouldn't be able to afford it on their own. At this point, when MAPS are able to push through MDMA therapy towards legal federal status, it's still going to be $10,000 to $15,000 per person per treatment series because of the three-medicine sessions with two therapists and 12 psychotherapy sessions around those, it's a lot of out-of-pocket expense. And at that price point, we're pricing out 95% of the population. Maybe some of us have gone through the medical experiences and come back to wholeness and said, "Yes, thank you life. Thank you for my life," can I pay it forward so that somebody else can have that same experience and come back to wholeness too?

AUBREY: What would you say, there's going to be people listening, and I know they'll reach out because whenever I talk about it, they do and they say, "My brother just got back from service in Afghanistan. He's really struggling." Or my father or my sister, or maybe myself or whatever. They're looking for something to do now. Life, they're in a waking hell. It's hard because I know what they can do, but they can't yet. It's not available. It's tough. It's tough to know that. I know what's there. There's no place I can recommend you to go. Yeah, we were a deep family and I know the Underground Railroad but I can't put that out online. That's not the way it works, it just doesn't work that way. It's not safe, there's a lot of people taking big risks, offering this and making this available now. Of course, they could just try to take the medicine that they find from a dealer and figure it out, and maybe that'd be productive but it's dangerous waters to try and unpack the trauma on your own without the guidance. It's not only just one therapist, it's two. It's a masculine and the feminine there, it's a particular way of mastery that really allows these positive outcomes so you can't even really recommend that. So what do you do? What do we do in this situation for people listening are like, "Alright, cool, this is going to be legal, hopefully, within two years." I just read something from MAPS that Rick had put out in saying, "Looks like we're about two years out now." But that's a long time to be in hell.

DAN: It's a long time.

AUBREY: It's a long time. So what do you recommend, when the Underground Railroad option isn't available and you're saying someone really needs help and support right now.

DAN: It's such a good question. Thank you for asking the question. Thank you for putting me on the spot with the question because it's an important one. I think about the prelude of this question, which has been our conversation up to this point, how do we find faith through the process? How do we find connection and community through the process? Oftentimes, in the midst of trauma, playing in the background, we get stuck in isolation, and blame and shame. Being able to connect, to support the normalization of that process is key, is coming home to connection, having faith that this process is important. It is a path, it's one of the hardest paths to walk, trauma recovery, which is very much related to addictionology and orientation. We have such a high degree of addiction in our society. And Gabor Maté, I think he's really right when he says it's not the addiction that's the problem, the addiction is just a solution to the underlying pain--

AUBREY: An attempt to solve the problem.

DAN: So let's not ask why the addiction, let's ask why the pain. Then to bring that into connection, he has a process that he's been unfolding called ‘Compassionate Inquiry’, which is the opportunity to connect around the pain and give it voice, have enough of the associated practices that bring us some degree of buoyance and love and optimism and faith and be surrounded by people that lift us up. Be really conscious of how we speak to ourselves. If I'm using language that continues to put me into this subjugated place of disconnection from my power, it's totally understandable, especially if I'm having the experience of trauma. It's like we're being our own internal coach. What would our future selves tell our current selves if we were going through an addiction recovery process or a trauma recovery process? What are the different ways that we can find inspiration and levity? For me, it was reading Viktor Frankl's work and understanding that he went through trauma that I will never know and many of us won't ever know, and he was able to find meaning in it. So to know that there's a possibility for me, even though I might not be yet on the threshold of its full healing, I can still be on the pathway of my own recovery, by anchoring to the best of my ability some degree of faith in the process, that help is here, community is here, my own reclamation of my power is here, how can I access it? How can I come into contact with it even if it's just for a brief moment? What are those aspects that bring me a little bit of levity in the dark storm, a little bit of inspiration when it feels like I've lost all hope? That's what I wanted the book, at least, to be, is just a little bit of a hope and then an orientation, ideally, to connect people with like-minded, like-hearted experiences of going through their own trauma-recovery process and having an elder and somebody to go to whether it's a therapist, or a counsel or a collective of a fellowship that has an elder present, that can help us reconnect to our feelings, move those feelings, find aspects and avenues to discharge that emotion, like Bessel van der Kolk says in "The Body Keeps the Score", can we move it through? Can we find breathwork? Stan Grof, he moved from LSD, when that became illegal, to breathwork. That's a powerful tool for a therapeutic process, a cathartic process. Can we find ways to express it, to continue to allow the stuck energetic to find its avenue; this is going to sound a little cliche; but to the light? That dense heavy energy; can we find that avenue to the light? I can't not say that if my sister was alive right now and MDMA was not legal that I would not do my best to help her find avenues for treatment. And if that meant the underground community, I would use every tool in my toolkit and every available avenue for healing available. To your point, how do we do that? Those are dicey waters. It's like if somebody has been starving in the desert, and I offer them water, first and foremost, I'm going to offer them little sips of water, so that they can rehydrate. If I offer them a gallon of water to reconstitute, that's actually going to do more damage than good. So we're finding that sweet spot of having the opportunity to normalize the conversation of what trauma is and how much we are all experiencing some degree of trauma, whether it's our own or the collective. How do we have these kinds of conversations and touch points with other people and find the ways that are called for each of us to, at least, start chipping away at it, become curious, become available and if somebody is, I really appreciate you contacting the depth of a person's pain when you receive that email. I've received those emails. Sonia has received some of those and she comes back to me in tears and she's like, "How do we help this person?" Okay, well, let's do our best. I'm still a firm believer that the trajectory of our evolution in consciousness has these superhero sign-up moments that just feel atrociously heavy, and weighted and burdened. It can feel overwhelming to the point that we want to give up and I've been there myself. If we can make a prayer, and we can really ask, very much, I need help right now. Send me something, please, whether it's a vision, an inspirated thought, a connection with another. For me, it was Viktor Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning" that just graced my altar. But it was because I made that prayer. I very much believe in the power of our prayer, and the power of our intention. I know many people have been suffering for a long time in prayer, and they're going to hear this and say, "I've been doing that. What else do you have?" My hope is that our conversation can just be another one of those answers that we know that we have available tools. And in the long trajectory of us healing the entire propaganda of anti-drug, your war on drug political motivations, even showing in the recent Netflix series, "How to Change Your Mind", we're still rehabilitating that as a culture. We're all experiencing the downstream karma and negative imprinting of that propaganda. So unfortunately, we're trying to rehabilitate 30 years of lost time in psychedelic research, and rehabilitating the political landscape. It's very much why I appreciate you doing the work that you do in championing the cause and sending out this message to humanity to have the right use of medicine work. The fact that, two, the medicines aren't here to fix us. They're here to just show us our truth, which is already the inherent wholeness that lives deep within. We do need these catalysts for consciousness to spark that flame of remembering. It can feel really overwhelming when we don't have that catalyst immediately available. So that was a roundabout way of saying, please, if you're listening, and you're finding yourself in the darkness, may this conversation be just one little moment of optimism and hope and stay in the prayer, stay in the prayer.

AUBREY: And a lesson about prayers from Yeshua: pray as if it has already been done. You can get stuck in a trap of praying from a position that reinforces your lack, reinforces the opposite of what you are. Like, "I'm so broken, I need help." That is the different way to pray. It's not actually the prayer that actually creates it, which acknowledges what is true, of course. You don't need to bypass it, but so it would be, "I am broken and I'm going to get help. And thank you, universe. Thank you life for the help that is coming that has not yet arrived." Changing your prayers in that way, I think, is going to make your prayer so much more powerful. Then just to summarize that, a very beautiful way that you phrase everything, one community, find people that you can talk to, breathwork is legal, available, and something that's extraordinarily powerful. Ketamine therapy's coming online as well. That's a possibility and a potentiality. I remember, I think it was Rick Doblin himself, who said that it's not as effective as MDMA and treating these things, but it gives you enough space as a dissociative, gives you enough space, that you can actually start to work with some of these things, if you have a good therapist. You can start to work with some of these things without feeling the pain and fear and panic that it can bring up. So that's another option. And, most importantly, just keep the faith that the Allies Gandalf is coming on the hill, with the shining staff, and the Orcs may look like they're going to overrun the keep, but just hang on. You can make it just a little bit longer. All the tools will be available. Again, it's such a beautiful, philanthropic endeavor, your Thank You Life nonprofit that you're in the process of formulating. But also, hopefully, the government gets some sense and our insurance companies get some sense, and this is covered by basic insurance, just like getting a 12-pharmaceutical prescription that you're on for the rest of your life is covered by pharmaceutical care. If you really actually want to talk about caring people and actually ending this weight of debt that we continue to build in all of these different systems, how much we're spending on medicine that's not working, hopefully, even the insurance companies themselves will be like, "Alright, well, this works out better for us in the long run, rather than paying," I don't know, whatever, "$1,000 every month for all these Pharmas. We could actually cure people in three sessions." It's actually better for us from a business perspective and from a national perspective to actually fund these from insurance. I know MAPS is working hard on that as well. We have to democratize healing, fundamentally. It can't just be for a few. It has to be for everybody because we're all in this together and anything else is bullshit.

DAN: Amen.

AUBREY: Amen. I love you brother. To the end, hermano.

DAN: Till the end, brother. Always a pleasure.

AUBREY: Yeah, absolutely. Anywhere else, you're finally posting on Instagram. Took me like fucking eight years of nagging you but you finally got an Instagram that's doing stuff. I see little quotes come up, good things. Good job.

DAN: I'm still a recovering Luddite.

AUBREY: It's @drdanengle, right? 

DAN: Yeah.

AUBREY: Any other websites or anything you want to point out to people?

DAN: Yeah, thankyoulife.org. As mentioned, Full Spectrum Medicine is our psychedelic education integration platform. There are a few other things brewing but those are the two big ones right now.

AUBREY: Cool. And "A Dose of Hope" available on Amazon and probably other places. But right on.

DAN: Yeah, brother.

AUBREY: Love you, brother.

DAN: Love you too, man.

AUBREY: See you, everybody. Bye-bye.