In one of the top 3 most powerful podcasts I have ever been a part of, Dr. John Churchill breaks down the mystical Tibetan Buddhist psychotechnology that holds the codes to awaken the spiritual warrior in us all. Holding a doctorate in psychology, John is also deeply steeped in psycho-spiritual development, Integral Theory, contemplative studies, Western Esotericism, and has spent over 30 years training in the Indo-Tibetan Mahayana buddhist lineage. We discuss a wide array of topics, including spiritual practices focused on trait development, how “Empire” has amassed control, what it means to be a spiritual warrior, and how all of this plays in the new story of the emergent world.Connect with Dr. John Churchillhttps://www.karunamandala.org/https://samadhiintegral.com/

AUBREY: So we were just speaking right before we clapped ourselves in here about something that I think was very interesting. It goes into the deeper conversation that we're going to get to, but it's the interplay between empire and ancient wisdom traditions, and how there's been this perpetual conflict and it's somewhat in the shadow of our psyche. We're not quite aware of the depth at which it's at play. And so if you wanted to kind of retrace a little of the steps that we're taking, talking about this process.

DR JOHN: So we were talking about how one of the things that an individual needs to do in order to heal if you go into therapy, is you need to be able to remember what's happened to you. Because if you don't remember what's happened to you, you can integrate it. And that's true personally, but it's also true culturally. So our culture of Western civilization, if you will, which had a deeply rich, initial tree and indigenous tradition, was slowly wiped out by the forces of empire over a period of a few thousand years. We lost access to the plant wisdom. We lost access to initiatory processes that the Romans shut down. They shut down the Dionysian mysteries, and the Eleusinian mysteries, right? They infiltrated Christianity, which was an attempt at the time, to be a universalizing center.

AUBREY: And also to quell the conflict and disruption at the time of Constantine, when he made that declaration, a lot of the slave classes had adopted Christianity and were threatening to further disrupt this structure, this hierarchical structure. He says, "All right, what do we do? Well go right into it." No more crucifying them. No more throwing them to the lions. That's not working anymore. And you have to assume that if you thought that it would work, he would have just kept on doing the same thing. It wasn't this great, spiritual revelation of the power of the teachings of Yeshua. 

DR JOHN: God no.

AUBREY: He was born and bred in an empire. And this was an empire move.

DR JOHN: Empire shut down the access to the feminine. Burned many of the women to steak and our indigenous medicine traditions were then lost. If we think about where we would be today, if our alchemical traditions were kept alive... You probably know that the majority of Isaac Newton's work was alchemical. These great minds of Western civilization, many of them were continuing this work, hidden in the back room, knowing that they couldn't bring it out into the public.

AUBREY: What do you mean by Isaac Newton having a foundation of alchemical work? 

DR JOHN: Most people don't know the majority of Isaac Newton's work was on spiritual alchemy. The papers were hidden by his family. I think books only came out in the last decade on this guy who was actually involved in alchemy and spiritual transformation. Mathematics and Physics were the outer dimension of that. The Western tradition. Geometry, right. If you entered Plato's Academy you had to study geometry. Geometry had its basis as metaphor for the sacred. So whether it's geometry, whether it's mathematics, all of these different dimensions of the academy that had a sacred basis were slowly taken over and whitewashed, if you will.

AUBREY: And also people were driven into specialization because of industrial and economic drivers, which is the form under which Empire has taken hold. Empire now, it's less about conquering new lands, all lands have been conquered. Although Russia is trying to bring back the old down and dirty way, it seems like right now, but besides that, for the most part, empire and conquest is off the table again, not probably because people don't want to, you just can't do that anymore. So they've had to conquer in other ways, buy up all of the resources of a country, control them economically, control your own people economically. So conquest has just shifted the weapons and the tactics and the strategies to capitalist empire.

DR JOHN: It's defined what's okay in every field. So in my field, psychology, there's a pretty conventional assumption about what are the bands of psychology, it's the same thing with medicine. We have alternative medicine beyond the academy but we've been really limited as a culture, in terms of access to our own mystery traditions, our own wisdom, tradition.

AUBREY: And that's part of what got us into this conversation as well, is I was talking about time I spent in Epidaurus, in Greece, which was the healing center of antiquity, of that world at the time. Their process was to treat the psyche first through a variety of different, really actually accessing placebo effects in many ways. If somebody was having some particularly challenging experience or some kind illness that they diagnosed, they would play deeply interesting psychological tricks, like they would take non-venomous snakes, because people believed in the healing power of snake venom, that's where snake oil salesmen and all of this kind of comes in, they believed in the power of snake venom, and snake venom does have certain powers, most of its poisonous. However, they had this belief at the time, and it was a universal belief that was kind of part of the culture, so they would have non-venomous snakes actually bite the people and they would tell them that they had a special venom that could heal their ailment. They would go through this initiatory experience of a snake biting you, which is fucking terrifying.

DR JOHN: It was all psychosomatic.

AUBREY: All psychosomatic. That was step one, and then they would bring them to the theater, where they would go through catharsis, where they would actually experience the emotional gamut of processing emotions that they hadn't allowed themselves to feel. Now, they didn't have the technology of shamanic breathwork, some of the things that we have to get through into catharsis, but they did it through theater. And then they would go to cold plunge therapy, treating the nervous system and then darkness therapy, giving them rest.

DR JOHN: These are all the things that we're doing. 

AUBREY: And then finally, finally, and when we say we, it's still a small portion. 

DR JOHN: Yeah, it's small, but it's still a we.

AUBREY: It's still a we. It's still a we. And then finally, they would bring out the scalpels or bring out whatever actual allopathic medicines that they had and treatments that they had at the time. But that was always the progression. It was the psyche first, then the emotional body, then the nervous system. And then, finally, they would apply the treatments. Of course, Empire has flipped that on its head because you get paid, primarily, for the pharmaceutical or the surgical intervention first, right and so now we've actually lost this ancient wisdom and said all of that was just bullshit. But then there's other people starting to bring that back like, Joe Dispenza, starting to work with the placebo effect, say, let's not discount this in every clinical trial. Let's actually use this. How about that? It's the mind healing the body. Magic.

DR JOHN: In the tradition that I've been trained in, which is Indo-Tibetan Buddhist tradition, right imagination is a vital part of that because your brain doesn't know the difference between what you imagine to be real and what's real. We now know that. If you put us in an MRI machine and you hold up a red apple, and you say, hey, imagine this to be green, even though you're seeing it as red, the brain will show green. We know this works for us and against us who are against us. It works against us because that's what projection is all about. If I can't see you for who you really are, and I'm projecting something onto you, what I'm experiencing isn't reality. It's my own imagination.

AUBREY: And you're often doing it for some hidden advantage that you have, which is the desire to create distance from the other person. So if you project some villainy on to your buddy or your ex partner or something like that, it allows you the distance like, I didn't want to be with them anyways. That person. That evil person? So yes, it's actually counterproductive. It actually prevents healing. But we're doing subtle things for our advantage all the time, using the same technology of imagination and projection. 

DR JOHN: We can look into these various types of practices but if you see these Tibetan practices, which involve what they call deities, which are essentially visual forms that you're identifying yourself as an archetypal form. But essentially, what they're designed to do is activate the archetypal structure of your own psyche. We all need an ideal structure on which our psyche can grow. And our self image, for most of us, is usually somewhat based on developmental trauma. So no matter whenever we are using our imaginations, and we look at who we are, it tends to be a limited version of who we are. So one of the ways that human beings suffer and the unique thing about the Buddhist tradition is it looks at the spiritual journey a lot through suffering, like where does human suffering arise and one of the places that we suffer is who we imagine ourselves to be and what we imagine the world to be. So there's a whole corpus of practice around optimizing the imagination to begin to create a psychological structure that we can grow into.

AUBREY: Yeah, I think this is definitely one of the things that we suffer from because, all right, we have a model of Jesus. What would Jesus do? We put it on our fucking bracelets. Well, what this ends up leading to is a whole host of shaman spiritual bypasses.

DR JOHN: Is that what he would do?

AUBREY: Well said. Well said. 

DR JOHN: So what the Buddhist tradition said is you have got to take that literally. If literally, you realize that you were the Christ, and you literally, this is what the bodhisattva vow is about, so you take on that responsibility. So if you were to literally take that responsibility on as your path, and then act as if that was true, knowing, of course, and this is the skillful piece that makes a difference between a psychotic and a spiritual practitioner, knowing, of course, that it's a structure, but it's a structure that then demands that you live up to it fully, in everything that we do. God, imagine if people were really applying that, what would Jesus do.

AUBREY: Well, I think part of the problem is that we've downloaded a very incomplete picture of what would Jesus do. There's not a lot of real understanding. Either it's been redacted from the records or it's been, I mean, a lot of what's resurfaced is ideas about some very deep tantric practices between Jesus and Mary. I don't know if that's fucking true, but it makes a lot of sense to me. Certainly has facilitated more of the Christ being able to move through me when I've been able to tap into that. That part's been redacted so, all right, well, that makes it a little bit more difficult to try and use that as a model. And also just the day to day things. Was he fucking with his disciples every once in a while, cracking some jokes, cutting it up, playing a prank, being a normal human? We can't actually imagine ourselves because that figure has been so dehumanized from all of the human fabric and fiber that we're trying to model ourselves after something that wasn't real.

DR JOHN: Well, that's part of the problem. I think we mentioned this earlier when we were talking, what are the models that we have, what does mastery look like? Does it look like someone who's completely left the world and is it above it? Or is it actually the opposite? Is it really about love, deep embracing of the world and being as fully engaged in the world as we possibly can be and that, that these spiritual practices, help facilitate us doing that, facilitate us being able to see one another and connect with one another? It's interesting because that split is the Western split between matter and spirit.

AUBREY: Another big problem. 

DR JOHN: It's so dualistic. Rather than a rainbow, if you will, of grades, of layers, of realms, of dimensions, it's spirits over here, matter's here and there's no relationship to it.

AUBREY: Up is good, down is bad.

DR JOHN: Or down is good and up is bad. That would be nice.

AUBREY: Which many would then then have all kinds of biases about. That's the Luciferian path and then all of these heretical dogmas start to come in and start to fuck with the psyche. But it's a, yes, there needs to be a reunion of spirit and matter, because that's the truth. And I think this is a key thing that we were also talking about is first values, first principles. Truth of the cosmos, whether it's the Tao or whether it's Shekhinah or whatever the models are of depth Buddhism, and then actually, yes, you can embrace them through the flavor of whatever path you go. But actually, they're all pointing to the same fundamental truths. To illuminate those so that we're all actually understanding the game in the same way, seems absolutely necessary and I know this is your thesis, and I believe it as well, absolutely necessary to actually address this existential crisis that we're steamrolling into.

DR JOHN: Right. Right. There's a deep structure of the human psyche. And we know that's true of development from a Western perspective. And it's also true development from these esoteric and mystical traditions. And we are at a point where that just becomes a single developmental journey. And that even the term spiritual doesn't quite talk to the fact that we're talking about what it means to unfold as a human being. Every tradition, there are certain developmental processes that everybody goes through. And that goes through nearly every single tradition. The more that we can understand that deep structure, the more we can stay true to what's human and not get lost in the paraphernalia of a tradition. That's all too easy, whether it's Christian or Jewish or Buddhist, to get lost in the trinkets. 

AUBREY: Accoutrement. 

DR JOHN: That's right.

AUBREY: You mentioned spiritual. And also the problem with spirituality is it's been also left as separate, kept aside, kept in isolation, kept in this exile box of this is spiritual, this is profane. That leads to all sorts of spiritual materialism and all sorts of ways in which you actually start to divide the world into further pieces, which then causes the pieces to be at war with each other even further. I've said this before, but I had another recent experience of it where obviously, I get invited to a lot of, quote, spiritual circles.

DR JOHN: Poor you.

AUBREY: For real. It's some of my least favorite experiences because I sense the fraudulence of that experience. So I'll find myself in the back. I'll find that one, buddy or that one person that we can crack jokes with.

DR JOHN: He's usually in the back row.

AUBREY: In the back row and we can crack jokes and sometimes we get shushed because someone's doing their fucking 14th invocation of some other fucking, and all that's great and there's a place for it and it's not like before ceremony I won't open up the seven directions or things like that. I do deeply appreciate it, but it can easily get overdone and wrapped up in itself. And then I'll have experience like I did recently. I was just out in Tampa. I watched Aaron Rodgers and the Packers play Tom Brady and the Bucs. Great game. Went out there. Also Tampa is known to have the finest strip clubs in the country. That's their reputation. So we decided, alright, let's check it out. Let's see what's going on. I went there with my wife and our friends. That place was more like a church and more spiritual than any place. Now, this is not universal for strip clubs. I will tell you that. But from the person who met us at the door, an ex MMA fighter who had followed me for a long time was just unbelievably overwhelmed and excited to see me, to every host, to every waitress, to every dancer that we met. The energy, yeah, there was some trauma under the surface there, but they actually knew it and they were actually just loving and kind and excited and freely expressed through that. It was a more spiritual experience, truthfully, than most of the time I've spent in a lot of these other spiritual places. And I think in order to see that you have to go beyond the bias of a well, this is a spiritual thing and this is not. It's everywhere, it's interfused in everything. And when you have the eye for it, when you have the palate for it, like, oh, here we are. Shekinah's here. God is here. Whatever your name is. The Christ is here. That's where things get to be really beautiful to me.

DR JOHN: That's right. I mean, that's the real possibility that we have of a sacred world. The world that we're wanting to build, I don't know if we want to get rid of the strip clubs.

AUBREY: Evolve them.

DR JOHN: But what I mean by that is that the sacred manifests itself through every single kind of flower that there is, every single kind of plant, from the meek to the extravagant, this is all part of the path. This is the problem with, as a Buddhist teacher, a lot of people have an idea of what Buddhist psychology is or what the path is because they see a lot of monks and it all looks very serious.

AUBREY: Of course, and look, you go to Thailand, and this is a bias that I'm in here. I went to Thailand, and I was with my partner at the time, who was Caitlyn, and many people know Caitlyn, she's been on the podcast, and we went up, saffron robes, the whole deal, I believe that was the color in wherever we were in Samui. But whatever, they had a color, I'm pretty sure it was saffron, could have been orange. I was giving a monetary exchange for some kind of trinket thing that had a Buddha carving and sandstone or something like that. And she went to do the same and they backed off because they couldn't touch her hand. She couldn't give them money or anything, it was like what? What is wrong with you, guys? This doesn't make any fucking sense to me.

DR JOHN: My friend, and I think you know the work of Ken Wilber? One of the things, in his work, when he looks at levels of development, it's important to understand that a psychotechnology can be developed at a certain point of time, with a very small percentage of people actually being able to, well, usually, it's a very small percentage of people who have the capacity to design a path. So it's one thing to be able to have the intelligence and the level of development to design it. But it's another thing then, for the people who can teach that, because you don't actually have to be as developed in order to teach it. So part of the research that we've done in terms of developmental research indicates that most of the spiritual teachers that you see out there, developmentally, don't actually scale very high on development. Usually the ego structure is pretty conventional. And this is where it gets very confusing for people because on one hand, maybe this teacher is teaching psychotechnology meditative practices that are really potent or serving really potent ayahuasca medicine. And within a very specialized realm have this amazing capacity. And yet, if you ask them about day to day relationships, or issues around psychology and therapy, they have no clue. This is one of the insights of modernity, if you will, is that there are actual levels of ego development? The kind of spirituality that we're interested in isn't just about state development. It's about trait development. And trait development means that it actually changes our ego structure. It isn't just, I sit here, I go into a meditative state, and I come back and I'm the same person. The structure of the ego needs to transform. And we know it goes through a number of stages of growth. And that a practice that transforms the ego, as well as giving access to these states is what we're interested in.

AUBREY: Yeah, I think it's on the plant medicine path, so you can shift your state by taking medicine. You're going to do it. It's going to be successful.

DR JOHN: Whether you like it or not.

AUBREY: It's  going to happen. But the emphasis on integration is all about trait development. It's about like, alright, as my friend Chris Williamson will say, "Does it grow corn?" Okay, great. You've had apotheosis. You merged with the oneness of all beings? Now what? What does that change about your life? I recently had a podcast where the virtue of plant medicines was challenged. Ultimately, the rebuttal was you shall know a tree by its fruits. For me, I know, the fruits that have evolved my traits dramatically, dramatically, my kindness, my compassion, my ability to connect with people, self acceptance, self love, I could go down the whole list. I do not accept this critique as if it's only about temporary state development. This can also lead to trait development. However, it doesn't mean that it always will. You have to apply it and you have to integrate it. And it sounds like that's what you're talking about as well.

DR JOHN: Yeah, that's right. Well, if we look at the Buddhist contemplative path, which is one I know the most, typically the first way that we would, the first learning, the first contemplative process, it's called the nine stages of staying. And this is really about developing an integrated psyche that is stable and calm and integrated. And that has the capacity for peak performance, joy, happiness, integration, and equanimity. That kind of practice is pretty universal. All the traditions have some variant of this kind of calm-staying practice, because it's a contemplative practice that brings the psyche together, helps us become more concentrated, directly. Who doesn't want to be able to be more integrated and scattered? That's pretty universal learning and it has nothing to do with being an ascetic. As William James put it, the great American psychologist, the training and the education of the attention would be an education par excellence. So much suffering. I mean, I mentioned suffering that comes from a lack of a kind of integrated self image. But so much human suffering right now comes from distractibility and an attentional system that goes all over the place.

AUBREY: And it is starving. I've been with plenty of parties. Cocaine is not my not my drug of choice, but you see somebody who's taken a few sniffs of coke, and then they're searching for it the whole night. You see that, and then perhaps I'm on psilocybin or something like that and I'm looking at it at depth and seeing underneath it. I'm like, "Wow! This is a wild thing." But you can also see the same thing that people searching for dopamine in their other ways, whether it's the validation of their social media posts doing well, or some comment or the pleasure of telling about yourself, all of these little pleasures that people are seeking so rapidly, and afraid of the homeostasis of staying, ultimately, and you can start to like peer behind the veil of what's happening even in yourself.

DR JOHN: In a universal system, the first thing that we need to master is dopamine. One of the ways I look at the path is, first, either you're going to get dopamine through checking your cell phone or you're going to learn how to develop a state of engaged peak performance that keeps that system online. And that's the first thing that we would train is the ability to stay energized and stay engaged, which is true if you're a professional footballer or a brain surgeon. In fact, access to the peak of every field necessitates the ability to master that. And then if you keep continuing along that path, then the next thing is can you ease up on that throttle? You got to throttle in to get the juice going. You and I, we got the juice going now. Now the question is, can we ease up a little bit and begin to let the mind stay by itself? In contemplative practice, the beginning involves learning how to throttle in, so that the mind is, whether you're following a mantra or following the breath, and then learning to ease up and come out of that. And once you get enough dopamine, then you can switch to the serotonin systems. And then you can begin to use happiness and joy as a way of getting the mind to stay.

AUBREY: Whenever you start to look at the codification of this is basic human operating system technology. And, as William James alluded to, what are we doing in school? Why are we not learning how to breathe and learning mantra practice, learning how to focus. Even some of the, another area, which I think is a part of this, and I don't know where Vipassana fits into this practice, and I haven't done it, but I know it would be really helpful, mostly because I can find myself slipping into being, no offense to whores of all varieties, but a comfort whore. Really, if I find myself mildly uncomfortable, I will find a solution to that discomfort. A little bit tired? There's a solution. There's some caffeine or there's some nicotine. Almost just averse to discomfort, unless I'm deep into my cold plunge practices or some other meditative practices where I'm actually actively working on it, but so easily weeks will go by, and actually I had this revelation today. Burning Man was not interested in enduring any discomfort at all. It was the most pleasurable experience. I did a fucking phenomenal job of enjoying the fuck out of Burning Man. No regrets there. But it was a pleasure parade. It was all pleasure all the time, and I used whatever substances necessary to maintain pleasure all the time. Had its integration and the things that came up afterwards, whatever. But then I never really got back into my practices. I still have and I've been traveling a little bit.

DR JOHN: The challenge, of course, is the momentum. So what you're describing is, the first insight is the insight into cause and effect. In the Buddhist tradition, there's levels of insight. So what is the insight into cause and effect? Well, it's the insight that if you do things with your body, and your mind, a momentum builds up. And then you begin to recognise now this thing is going. And you're like, shit, I used to sit on my cushion or sit on my little stool and so meditation, but actually, the momentum is moving such that it's difficult to even slow down the nervous system because what happens is when you do that, you then begin to come into relationship with the reactivity, which is what the Buddha called dukkha. Dukkha basically translates as reactivity, which is basically our developmental trauma. Whatever, in the background, we're doing to avoid what's going on here that has a reactivity to it, because we're avoiding the present moment. So the beginning of the path is developing that exposure therapy, if you will, to the present moment, which is why mindfulness--

AUBREY: Even when the present moment is a little bit uncomfortable.

DR JOHN: Even when it's not uncomfortable. And I'm sure, actually, I can't imagine that any of the wisdom that you learned from medicine, I don't imagine any of that came without actually moving towards a discomfort. The whole thing was about it.

AUBREY: That's what you aim for. And that is like, alright, here's something to go. Let's go.

DR JOHN: Even when it's bad. 

AUBREY: The darkest. There was, at least, a two-month period where every journey, every experience I had was actually taking me into deeper levels of disgust and horror, over and over. And actually, I just accelerated the amount of ceremonial access I had, because I was like I got to get to the end of this thing. I got to keep going. It was harrowing. The journey was harrowing. I told some of this story on my podcast with Dr. Dan Engle. But I knew that I had to get through and since then, it's been pleasurable. For me, that's been more consistent, that I'm always willing to face that in the astral body. But what I'll also find, like today, so just the quick anecdote from today, is I finished my Fit For Service call, it went a little late. We had some more questions, didn't feel like I could cut people off, knew that we had this podcast coming. I still wasn't ready. I actually took the call in my pajamas. And so I finish, I'm like, "Shit, I gotta get going." Our hot water takes probably like a minute to heat up. I was like, "Fuck it. There's a cold shower." But it's been so long since I've been in the cold that I got in there and I'm like... And normally, cold showers for me, it's like nothing. And it was only because of the time pressure that I actually forced myself and then finally I got used to it. And I had the recognition, wow, I walked up a frozen mountain with Wim Hof and cracked the ice and it stayed underneath the water, fully submerged for two and a half minutes and in there for 10 minutes and now look at me being a shivering little wimp in this one little mildly cold shower, and how quickly I had adapted to a new set of physical pleasure. It was this really eye-opening moment of alright, get back... In my way, that's like get back to your fucking cushion, bro.

DR JOHN: That's right. That's the wisdom of cause and effect. You're getting how that works. The next thing is what they call the lamrim, or the graduated path, which is like, if that's true, then there's little steps, little causes that go all the way up. It was worked out by these contemplative scientists, because once you get it going, it isn't that difficult. I'm up there in cold Boulder, Colorado, cracking the ice. My son, Bodhi is out there sitting in the cold tub. This is the same thing with the mind. That's the beauty of Buddhist contemplative science. First is to understand that it is a science. So it's technical because it involves various very subtle shifts in metacognition. But that can take you all the way, actually quite quickly if you use cause and effect. If you're haphazard or if the teacher isn't really clear with the instructions, it can be more than two, three decades, you get nowhere. On the other hand, if the instructions are really clean, you can achieve, in a week, what some people can take decades to achieve.

AUBREY: If you could go through the link of cause and effect, that could be a productive way to progress using the cause and effect path.

DR JOHN: This is one example of one path, one contemplative path. So the first thing is the stabilizing of the mind. If we want to look any deeper into our experience, if our mind is all over the place, we're not going to be able to do that. Let's say we're sitting down, and the first thing that we're going to sit down with is we're going to feel the sensations of our body. So we start with the sensations of the body. And then we introduce the breath. And then we're learning to develop an intensity of engagement because in order to stay with something, and I'm sure that you've learnt this in your work, and your friend Aaron, I'm sure knows this, you got to be on it. So first, you have to be willing to sit down and then the next stage is practicing being on it, which is basically the dopamine piece. And you can take your supplements if you need to, to facilitate that. Once you can throttle in and you can stay, then you're learning to ease up on that throttle. And what happens is the mind begins to stay by itself. Once you get the mind to be able to stay by itself, now we can do now we can do insight practice. So what's inside practice? Well, it's understood in Buddhist psychology that the cause of suffering is due to fusion, confusion, when the field of awareness, this unbounded openness, that's our true spirit right here, right now, becomes fused with the attentional system. We can notice this right now, even in our visual field, right? So awareness is perceiving the whole room right now. We have peripheral vision, but that peripheral vision is being recognised by awareness. And then we got our attentional system that is locking on. Most people are fused with the attentional system. A very, very simple level, right now, as we're gazing at each other, how we look at each other is who is looking at each other. So when we start letting in more information to come from that peripheral vision, there's 11 million bytes of information flowing in through that whole field. There's 22 bytes of information flowing through your attentional system. So most people are going through their day like this. They go from one thing to the next thing, to the next thing, to the next thing. So much of the shift that you've experienced in your life, even if you didn't recognize it, was about learning to perceive that field. You know what I'm talking about because you're doing it right now. And actually, that you recognise that you are in that field so you can get the factory settings of survival, fuse awareness to that attentional system. Trauma, like what the fuck is going on here? The source of suffering comes from that fusion with the attentional field. And the attention is at the center, it's the central mechanism of the self structure. You and I maintain our sense of self through what we attend to. Does that make sense?

AUBREY: Yeah. 

DR JOHN: So we attend to a certain narrative, and that's what we're attending to. We attend to certain sensations, oh, I don't like those ones. I like those ones.

AUBREY: Would another way to describe this be our personal story? And I don't say this in the postmodern kind of denigration of story, but that we are a plotline that's moving. We can get too narrowly focused on the story that's already been written, rather than the story that we are capable of currently writing.

DR JOHN: There's a story. That's part of it. There's also the somatic element, meaning our ego structures tend to inhabit our bodies based on what Wilheimer called body armor, a character structure? So there's even certain sensations right now that you might let in because, "Oh yeah, that's part of who I am," and other sensations where you're like, "I'm not letting that in because that's not..." So--

AUBREY: Almost like Huxley's cognitive filtering mechanism. It's a somatic filtering mechanism. 

DR JOHN: So we've got a somatic filtering system, we've got a narrative filtering system. You've got an affective one. But all of that is based on that little cursor that you move around, like, what are you going to click and open up? It's all based on the attentional system.nSo it's why they say in the Zen tradition, "The deepest ego structure is the witness." So people have often talked about the witness as the witness consciousness being a high state, it's true, but it's also actually pure attention is also pure ego. So anyway--

AUBREY: Wow, and is that because that attention is perspectival?

DR JOHN: Yeah but it's because you get fused to it. It's the fusion to the attentional system that causes the whole cascade of suffering, including in that cascade of suffering is losing all those higher dimensions of being. It all comes from the fusion with the attentional system. So that's the top-down perspective.

AUBREY: One of the ways that the plant-medicine path has been so illuminating is it breaks these bonds of fusion. 

DR JOHN: That's exactly what it does.

AUBREY: It's so wild to me. One of the medicines that I engage with is 5-MeO-DMT five Bufo. In that experience, it's pure apotheosis, really. For me, this is my own experience, but I have the same experience every time. It is not varied from the same experience. It's the all of everything, all at once and I'm experiencing it all. And it's all the pain, all the joy, all the laughter, all the ecstasy, and it's just God. And every time I do it, I go, "Oh, I forgot again. I forgot again."

DR JOHN: So what you're describing Aubrey is the recognition of wholeness. There is metacognitive training so that you don't forget. But the mechanism that you're describing there is that if wholeness and this is where the beauty of the world comes back in, because that understanding of the sacredness is not about an abstraction, it's about the fullness of experience. And what happens when you take plant medicine is it floods your experience, and it breaks open that filter so that you stop perceiving holistically, holographically. Aside from whatever else it does, in terms of what material that you might bring up, it breaks open the awe. One of the ways they described that a realized consciousness operates is the profound innocence of an infant that's walked into a temple for the first time. That sense of wonder, it's a way of understanding how to get your mind, your mind can operate like that without any medicine.

AUBREY: That would be that fucking dream because I just mentioned Burning Man was the most pleasurable experience of my life. I have a consistent kind of practice medicine. And I have my Ayahuasca retreats and things I go to more sparingly, but a more consistent practice is the utilization of ketamine in cannabis. It springs me, with my participation into a state where I can perceive the world with awe and wonder. Well Burning Man is a playground of available awe and wonder, but I went there three years. I may be touched a little bit of “Oh, that's a cool piece of art; look at that, this thing lights up.” Well, I missed it. Honestly, I missed it. I missed Burning Man. I didn't get it. I had a couple of big parties. I had some cool experiences. It was wild. It was fun. I had some good laughs. But I missed it. I missed the point. But with the help of my own dedicated prayer, and these medicines, I was able to maintain, again, support it. I was able to maintain a level of awe and wonder where I was going around giddy at every new little surprise that I've found like, "Oh my god! This is unbelievable. Do you guys see this?" And I was laughing and joking. It was an infectious feeling. And, of course, many of us found ourselves in that state as well, because that kind of consciousness gets infective. And, of course, other people would sometimes lead the dance in that way as well. But to imagine living like that, without having to rely on the medicines. Whoa! What a fucking paradise. What a kingdom of heaven!

DR JOHN: That's what we're interested in. Let's continue the journey I was describing.

AUBREY: Yeah, please. 

DR JOHN: So once the mind is relatively stable, you can use meditative practices for that, but you can also use energetic practices. Breath practices, because once you have a certain amount of energy, as you well know, the mind just starts to settle down. That's when the journey of insight practice begins. It's important to understand that in Buddhist psychotech, there are three main revolutions of technology, just like how technology, you go from the Industrial Age to the Information Age, Buddhist Tech has evolved through different cycles. You want to know I'm going to be speaking more from the latest tech perspective, which is the Vajrayana perspective, the third turning, and then perhaps, this next coming fourth turning. So there is the insight practice you're looking into, to see how this fusion that appears to be apparent, is actually just an illusion. So the first insight practices are, for instance, to look into the apparent boundaries of the body. Your experience of your body is formatted by your self-image. So if you actually have a concentrated mind, and you start exploring the boundaries, what happens is you begin to realize that, actually, you can feel beyond your body. It's quite difficult to do. You're deconstructing the bodily experience, and you're beginning to feel like there's a field around you. And I'm sure you've had experiences like that. Once we do that, then we can even look into the structure of the self itself, this narrative structure. So insight practice is like a search. It's a deconstructive search because you're searching for something that actually ,under the weight of investigation, you're not going to find. You know, based on the little physics that you know, quantum physics and what have you, that actually, there can't be a boundary of the body, because if you go deep enough, it's just going to expand into the field around you. That, we call the view. That would be true of everything. So let's start with the self structure like Aubrey and John. It's like Gollum. You know what I'm saying?

AUBREY: Yeah, of course.

DR JOHN: So, if you can work with your precious, and then in a meditative state, you start looking for where you can find the precious, what will happen, of course, is because the precious is held together by the attentional system, it's not actually a sustained structure. It's like the coagulation of inflammation. The people who take Coumadin, because their blood is all like, gooped up. Part of mental suffering is because the information of our sense of experience gets gooped up so much so that you start taking Aubrey to be serious, or John to be like, “I'm going to fucking defend him.”

AUBREY: And he's entitled.

DR JOHN: Absolutely. It's mine. 

AUBREY: How dare the world not give me the obeisance that this being deserves. How dare you is always what the ego shouts. 

DR JOHN: Yes. That's right. So when you search into the body, and you search into the self structure, very quickly, it reveals it is unfindable. And what that then allows you to do is to affirm that there's a level of awareness that is operating that's beyond that structure, that's always already right here. So that's the first structure that we want to look into. The next structure has got to do with duality. 

AUBREY: Does this map to the fourth turnings, as we talked about getting to that or is that different?

DR JOHN: So the first turning is, in a very simplified way, from the Indo-Tibetan perspective, is like reactivity. So coming into the present moment and having a real relationship with your reactivity, so that you're no longer moving away from it, but you're moving towards it, which is what you described as the momentum that's so difficult. What helps with that is perspectives that come from these later teachings, which is like if I said to you that that runaway train, that that momentum wasn't just you, it was the runaway train that is destroying the civilization, if you were able to recognise how holographically and this goes back to the personal being like the universal, so this is the Christ--

AUBREY: Atman is Brahman

DR JOHN: This is the Christ view. So Christ would be like actually, this agitation I'm feeling, this momentum is what's burning down the Amazon forest. When we begin to have a relationship with our own interior experience holographically and we take the responsibility, then sitting down will mean more to you than if it was just for you. So this is what they call the Mahāyāna frame, which is, the first turning, the frame was very much about individual practice, individual reactivity. And then the Mahāyāna, Maya means great, the great vehicle, which is a universal vehicle. Great meanings. You see it in Christians or Jews or Hindus, anybody who gets to a place of practice where they realize it's about all of us, that's the Mahāyāna. So the Mahāyāna is about recognising--

AUBREY: And that's the second turning?

DR JOHN: That's the second turning. So that happened about 400 years after the Buddha passed away. This was when practice was no longer ascetic, it was about, hey, if we can see, this is inseparable from the field and if that's true, it changes the motivation for why you would practice. And frankly, it makes it much easier. Because for some of us, it's easier to do things to help others than ourselves, if we realized it actually all depended upon you, Aubrey, you'd be sitting down with because you'd recognise that momentum is like chain-sawing. You know what I'm saying?

AUBREY: Sure.

DR JOHN: So that second turning is about understanding emptiness. So emptiness is this understanding that everything is constructed, that the body is constructed, that the self is constructed. And that actually, if you penetrate deep into the construction, what you find is the fundamental openness of reality. So what's interesting is that teaching, it sounds very masculine. In India, this was presented as a teaching of the goddess, the philosophical teachings of emptiness of Śūnyatā, the teachings of Prajñāpāramitā, which was the Indian version of Sophia. So when we talk about Philosophia, the love of wisdom, Sophia here means the wisdom of appreciating that actually, every structure is actually fundamentally open to the whole of reality. And that fundamentally changed the spiritual-

AUBREY: And open to be fucked open to an even deeper reality by all of the cosmos.

DR JOHN: That's right, exactly. That actually, it was a radical change because it changed spiritual practice to be a recognition that we could go deep into spirit through the world. That if the world, if Sophia is open, if actually the body's boundaries, if you penetrate deep enough, there is no boundary, then the invitation is fuck, man, get as deep as you possibly can into your experience. Because it's in the depth of experience that it's actually open as opposed to earlier models where I'm going to remove myself. So that practice of emptiness, that is a uniquely Buddhist insight. It's like a contemplative insight, we're going to go deep and penetrate into experience, not go up, but essentially go in. And that leads to the fundamental openness of everything. So that would include, for instance, in our direct experience, you then apply that as a contemplative practice, so it becomes an injunction to to apply. And if you apply these injunctions, they become realizations, which means they get wired into your brain. So, for instance, one of the ways that we suffer is that we, you and I, our habitual mode of operating is we feel like there's a boundary between the two of us in our sense perception. But if we actually examine right now, as we're looking at each other, where does the outside world end? And where does awareness behind the eye begin? And you start searching that apparent boundary? 

AUBREY: It gets weird, in a cool way.

DR JOHN: It gets weird, right? In a cool way. 

AUBREY: Because we just did it, that's why you laughed because we did it for like two seconds and it was already starting to get weird.

DR JOHN: So what do you notice when you look for the boundary?

AUBREY: You start to see yourself looking back at you and it becomes fractal in this way. It's like, well, this goes on forever. It's you looking at me looking at you looking at me. 

DR JOHN: There's no inside, there's no outside. That realization if I work at it, it becomes a permanent trait. So there's no inside, there's no outside. And then if you also open up the width at the same time, you're swallowing it all, but it's not even out there. You can immediately notice how that shifts your basis of operation like who you think yourself to be. It washes the self structure out. And if we do that auditorily as well. And this is always strange, because where does the outside world that we're listening to end and inside begin? With your right ear. Well, there's the sound of my right ear. And I go in but where does that stop? So where does that right side become the left side? Where does left become right? What you begin to experience is the fundamental openness of your experience, that's always right here.

AUBREY: The world of vibration.

DR JOHN: So that kind of practice is done, which actually isn't very difficult. If it's pointed out the right way, it isn't very difficult, mainly because it's the way things are. So this is the important thing is that there's a misnomer around contemplative practice that it takes, Mary Oliver, the poet said it's like crawling on your hands and knees through the desert whipping yourself. You're going to have to go into some cave--

AUBREY: 30 years.

DR JOHN: 30 years. But actually, what Buddhists contemplative psychology says is, actually, it's already like that. It's already fundamentally open. 

AUBREY: It's remembering instead of learning something.

DR JOHN: It's remembering. That's a very different kind of learning because you can't fail. It's already like that. It's already fundamentally open. Those kinds of practices, that's what we call the second turning, the mahayana. And when that gets stabilized, which it will, developmentally, it shifts you to, well, that open wondrous state that you were mentioning, if that becomes a permanent trait, which, a year or two, three years of practice, it can become a permanent trait. Now, you are at a different developmental level as the difference between a five-year-old and an adult. We're talking a real shift in structure, a real shift in your operating system. Now, what's super curious, or what's super interesting about what happens now is how the mind can function once it operates at that level because it isn't just about that fundamental field. If you've shifted your basis of operation, then the mind is now liberated from being held onto. So it's not your mind anymore. I mean it operates within you but it's more like cloud based computing.

AUBREY: Well, look, I have a very mildly painful and very real experience with this because I endeavored to write a book called "Master Your Mind, Master Your Life". And ultimately, after three failed attempts that each reached 50,000 words, I realised, what the fuck am I trying to do? It doesn't ever end. And then I read the "Kybalion" and the first principle was: All is mind, the universe is mental. And I was like, "Son of a bitch. I could have just read that a little bit earlier, and I could have changed the title of my book." It just saved me a lot. But I'm glad I pursued it, trying to find the boundary of the thing and the thing that could master the thing that was bound and it was futile. I was like, "Okay." So now I have a vastly different understanding of the mind and so when I hear somebody, used to hear somebody talking about non-attachment to your thoughts, allow the thoughts to come in as you would allow a leaf to cross through a river and let them pass with love. Ram Dass is great at poetically describing this. It's helpful actually in that, but it's not helpful until you actually understand the nature of the mind that contains the potentiality at the very least, for all thoughts, and all all things and it's just what you're tuned into. It's like a receiver.

DR JOHN: This is halfway up the ladder now. This level of mind we're talking about is halfway up the ladder.

AUBREY: Amazing. I made it to 12.

DR JOHN: But the truth is, if humanity was able to shift developmentally to that level, that would be enough to change the planet. You've obviously experienced intuitive insight in your life and in your work? Things just come out of nowhere. And you've also probably also experienced significant synchronicities. The operating system of that level of mind that is liberated from being fused to thought, it becomes, what we call in the Buddhist tradition, direct valid non-conceptual cognition, which means it becomes pure mainlined intuition. You're not storing anything on your laptop anymore. You got a straight intuitive direct knowing into the interconnected field.

AUBREY: Interestingly, at Burning Man, when I was springing myself with my own psychotechnology, psychedelic psychotechnology, I would spring myself into that, and I was so tuned into the frequency of synchronicity, that unbelievably magical things were happening regularly. And then if I slipped off it, I could feel that I was off it. I was out of the field and we would find ourselves riding to the trash fence or going--

DR JOHN: We've all had that on the trip. Suddenly, it's like, "Why am I here?"

AUBREY: Okay, let's get back. Let's get back to openness for this. It was unbelievable, the synchronicities that would happen. We got to go back to the RV and I met this pro basketball player that just happened to be needing to go to the bathroom at this time, but set an intention to find me on the playa, and I'm riding to my RV, he goes, "Does anybody know where the restroom is?" I'm fucking going in here, you want to do this? And he goes, "Aubrey Marcus?" 80,000 people there and out of the blue, I was like, "We got to go back to the RV. You need to go to the bathrooms?" He's like, "No, we got to go back."

DR JOHN: The third turning of the wheel is when that magic, as that realization becomes stabilized, then the recognition of your realization is based on your activity, on basically, what kind of magic are you able to manifest? That's the applicability. So the applicability of that change of consciousness is its ability to be able to manifest as part of a whole. So when you stabilize, which you will, stabilize that realization, that realization stabilizes as long as the motivation is also towards serving the whole. So there's a motivational piece there as well, which is the ethical dimension.

AUBREY: And which is something that people try to bypass in their manifestation practices, whether it's through sex magic, or whether it's through whatever practice, they're taking a lower base level of motivation. I want to get rich for this thing. And they're trying to manifest the magic of a level of consciousness that actually aligns your motivations with the motivations of the cosmos, in a conversation. In the Kabbalist lineage practice, they call it birur, the practice of clarifying your desire so that you actually form an identical desire with your desire merging with the cosmos, not your desire being effaced and only serving the cosmos, but your desire participating in the field of Desire with a capital D.

DR JOHN: In the fourth turning, if you will, there's a recognition that the planet is a single organism, a single intelligence. It is in the process of attempting to give birth to a new civilization. And that process that you and I are participating in, what you're doing with your work is part of putting those various pieces in place to make that happen. That's happening at a planetary level with a huge intelligence that's integrating and holding everything at once. And to the extent that we're able to keep that field open, you're able to start dancing with a whole and then dancing with the evolutionary desire. So the planetary logos itself, the sacred has a desire. We call that evolution. The Shekhinah, the Shakti, the evolutionary drive of reality, wants to go somewhere. Our personal, deepest purpose, and I don't mean purpose in just an altruistic way, but what's deepest in our guts, in Aubrey and John's guts is actually the coding for that. By individuating, as much as you possibly can, by becoming who you are as a unique individual as deeply as you possibly can, actually, paradoxically, is also in service of that greater intelligence, if you're able to hold both at the same time? The tantric path is like, are you able to maintain, like the wings of an eagle wide open, that wide open view, and penetrate as deeply as we can into human intimacy and relationship and have both of those two happening at the same time? As you know, that's when the magic happens.

AUBREY: In Gafni's work, what I've encountered is, and we talked about this briefly, is the teachings of the unique self. It's very much in alignment with that, is actually clarifying your desire and understanding your unique self and understanding that the divine Shekinah desires you to actually open up to the fullness of who you are. And that is participating in the evolution of God itself. There's more God to come and it's you actually stepping into your uniqueness, which is also interconnected, with the everything

DR JOHN: In the old Buddhism, we would have an initiatory ceremony, and we would have crowned you and anointed you. The Anointed One is what Christ, Messiah means an anointed one. We would have an initiation ceremony and you'd be initiated as a messiah, as all the other messiahs, sitting in the circle of messiahs, which would mean that now, what you are saying, that evolution is up to you. 

AUBREY: Because you are both lowercase you and uppercase You.

DR JOHN: And both

AUBREY: Both at the same.

DR JOHN: Exactly.

AUBREY: And your unique perspective, and this is, I think another great teaching of this lineage is that when you're in that state, it's your right to be able to rewrite the Torah. Because what was codified for a different time and a different person in a different place, no longer has to be applicable for this time, this place when you're in ontic identity with the divine and yourself, you then get to rewrite the Torah and that's the very nature of the messianic consciousness, which is flip those tables over, they no longer apply, they don't make sense anymore. So now let's step into a new consciousness because as I'm in connection with the divine. However, for empire, that's a fucking problem.

DR JOHN: That was always a problem for the empire and exactly. First thing, if you put that pressure on the psyche, if you've had a good training, if you have good teachers, and then you have that initiation, that you can handle the pressure, because now you're putting, that's what makes a diamond is pressure. So the Vajrayana, the diamond path and I'm sure brother Gafni has his own version of that is about applying then,existential pressure to create that diamond in a single lifetime, which means taking the responsibility of that free chain within our body minds, as being, oh my god, that's connected to everything. Then these traditions were all about revolution. The Tibetan Buddhist Academy was about generating heroic altruists. The mythology of the fourth turning, it's like the mythology of Shambhala of the Return of the Rainbow Warriors, so to speak. And the fact that all of this psycho-technology is to help facilitate a revolution of consciousness and creativity and love.

AUBREY: And the willingness to bring in, to evoke the warrior ethos. I mean, oftentimes we think of warriors with swords, and that is one model of warrior actually going to war. But you talk about some of the great warriors of all time, think of Quảng Đức sitting and having gasoline poured around him in his contemplation and in his practice and in his, whatever state that he arrived at, and then lighting himself on fire, and just staying there and not wailing and not saying anything. That's a Rainbow Warrior on a level. And if, really connect to that, it's just like, whoa. That's another that's another fucking level. With no hope, no hope for self-survival, I make a stand here and I make a stand because it matters because my story includes my death. And that's another piece that Gafni just mentioned recently. Wen your story includes your death, and also transcends your death

DR JOHN: Fuck yeah, we're going forwards. We're going all the way, baby. 

AUBREY: I'm participating in the evolution that goes beyond this simple life.

DR JOHN: In the planetary dharma tradition that I teach, there's what we call father tantras and mother tantras for those of us who've got daddy issues and mommy issues. So the mother tantra is, well, you love the mother tantra. So the mother tantra is about basically the transformation of desire, if you fully embrace and transform desire, desire opens into that openness. So the mother tantra practices are about sexuality, plant medicine, massage therapy, everything that helps us deeply embody and then by embodying, actually, paradoxically, transcend because we're so open. We are so fluid, we're so able to just let everything move that there's nothing, there's no grab. In my mind, that's the sacred village. That's where I want to live, man. But then the village needs to be protected by the father. The father principle. So the father principle is about the transmutation of aversion, which is basically the transmutation of the flight mechanism. Essentially, it's about the transmutation of fear, and the transmutation of the trauma of war, and the trauma of violence, and of death. One of my favorite tantric deities of the Father clause is called Death Destroyer, Yamantaka. These are practices, through evocative practice, through envisionment practice. So you're envisioning yourself to essentially be like a demonic being. So first, this is done from the basis of operation of being the fundamental field. So we're the fundamental field right now and our heart is like the sun, fully motivated for that universal compassion. This is like industrial strength, shadow work, because we're not talking about dredging up a little bit of shadow. We want to go all the way fucking down to that dinosaur that exists in the back of our brains. And if you can penetrate that deep, there's a huge amount of vitality that can be transmuted. All that fear can be transmuted into aliveness. And that aliveness is what creates the clarity of the mind. When aliveness is transmuted into consciousness it becomes clarity. So the mother tantras are open to fundamental openness. The father tantras transmute fear into clarity. That clarity is what becomes the intelligence and it also; because however deep you and I are willing to go, and tell me if this is true, in your experience; into recognising our own darkness, suddenly, we start seeing it out there in the world, meaning the father tantra helps you see the structure of empire and how deep that goes into, most people are actually unconsciously scared of seeing the matrix.

AUBREY: And also particularly scared, seeing that darkness itself. And that's where it gets real scary because we all want to be good, we all want to be St. Michael or St. George, some Archangel, all good all the time–

DR JOHN: This is hell's angels practice.

AUBREY: We don't recognise that however you go in the polarity towards that angelic form, there's also your opposite polarity that exists within you. I had a really precious moment of seeing that because I've become very aware of the capability of my light in that way. The medicine path showed me myself as a monster, as well. And it was not just any little, oh that's a cute little demon that likes to fuck or likes to eat naughty foods or something like that. No, it was a black hole with teeth. It was like a giant black hole with teeth that just wanted to devour everything and destroy, and it wanted to. And I was like, "Oh, man, that's me too? Damn it?" But then in embracing that, it was like, oh, there was a new freedom and actually a choice for goodness rather than an innate I just am good. No, no, no, it was a choice. It was like, "No, yeah, I could also be this monster with teeth." But what the world needs, tapping into the field, what the world needs is not the devouring monster of teeth, at least right now, it needs this other thing.

DR JOHN: So yes. And what we do in the father tantras is that in order to integrate, you need a symbol. A symbol is what facilitates integration. The ultimate symbol is the self. This goes back to the self image. Once you've recognised the fundamental openness of the fields, you begin to realize now that you can be creative, This is what we call creation stage meditation. So creativity would mean, okay, if I'm the fundamental field, I can now manifest in my self image any way that I want to. So when you see the very wrathful deities in Tibetan-Buddhism, these are symbolic representations of if you were to completely integrate your demonic being into a Buddha, what does that look like? So you have a symbol that integrates the darkest fucking badass, deepest, darkest parts of the psyche, with the angelic, and those are fused together as a symbol. So then when you're in meditation, you can learn to generate that huge energy, because the darkness has the power. So you're able to generate that huge potency that comes from the darkness with a heart that is full of universal compassion and a mind that is completely fundamentally open to reality. And that's when you get some serious juice. And that's the juice that the rebellion needs because if you're  going to go against Empire. What Empire, very skillfully, did is if I tell you what's sacred, if I tell you what's healthy, if I tell you what's valuable, if I just tell you those things, I've captured you without even having to capture you. What Empire did was cut power away from wisdom and compassion. We think of wisdom and compassion, spirituality and over here is power left in the darkness, which is where Empire gets to experience the potency of the spiritual dimensions of power, which is particularly like the magical dimensions. And then over here, we have the light chasers who actually, because they are never going to have enough power, they aren't threatening. But when you do the father tantra you're going to bring those together. And that's where you get Jesus in the fucking temple, kicking over the the tables and like, we're going to all need that.

AUBREY: And the lineage word, which is the sacred audacity. That's when you know you're in divine accord, and you do what is necessary in that moment. And it's oftentimes messianic or revolutionary, as you said, but you're filled with that knowing that this is right and I know that this is right. It's not because I'm angry. It's because it's right. That fills you with a holy fire that's different than anything else.

DR JOHN: That's the Kundalini fire. So within Buddhist contemplative tech, once you've stabilized that Bodhisattva mind, then you can unleash, then essentially, you've built an alchemical container that's safe. That's why maybe when you look from the outside of Buddhism, you see monks, because what you're seeing is the outer container of a tradition. If a tradition is like a nuclear reactor, you're not going to see the dancing naked ḍākinīs from the outside. You're not going to realize that His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, when he's doing his color chakra visualizations, he's visualizing this huge sexual orgy happening. Why? Because he's generating vast amounts of energy.

AUBREY: Generating fuck.

DR JOHN: Because you need fuck to penetrate reality with how deep does your fuck penetrate into reality? One thing is to have the insight and the compassion but it also needs the full power of the dinosaur. So from the outside, with any mystery tradition, just like with Hindus, often you'll see Ganesha, Ganesha was the symbol of the mysteries, and it was said because if you were like, "Look at this funny thing, whatever, elephant god," that's a joke. It's a way of keeping people out who probably shouldn't be there. But if you penetrate into the mandala which is like a nuclear reactor, and you go deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper, the depth of that nuclear reactor you find the full power and potency and passion of what it means to be a human being. But, of course, that's also what's caused a huge amount of suffering on this planet. In order to be like a fully passionate human being, it actually takes an initiatory journey because if you're a fully passionate adolescent, which I'm sure you and I were both, it was a mess! There is a learning process to be able to harness and sublimate those energies.

AUBREY: I was fortunate that, you know, my mother and grandmother, were such loving beings that at least the mother tantra was clean for me. That actually kept me in contact with the morals, the ethics of eros and ethics--

DR JOHN: And your joy.

AUBREY: And joy. All of that was intact. Now, the father tantra was confusing. It was confusing. It was beautiful in many ways, but it was tricky. It was tricky. So a lot of the work has been trying to navigate how to find that in right a chord and merge both of those as well. What you said about symbols, I think, is also really, really valuable. Again, Burning Man being recent, I was given a new playa name and the playa name was perfect as a good name should be and it was Dragonheart. It symbolized to me exactly this, all of the ferocity of the dragon, all of the infinite ferocity, the teeth, the fire, the scales, the wings, think of everything of a dragon, but then heart, real heart, not just like the dragon having a beating thing, that moves blood. No. Heart, real heart, like Christ, that level of heart and both. And that symbol to me was alright. And so I dressed like Dragonheart, I acted like Dragonheart, I lived and there was nothing that I needed to fight out there. So it was just joy. It was just Rapture.

DR JOHN: Because you were in full contact with all of your power, therefore, it doesn't leak out into the world at all.

AUBREY: And it didn't need to prove itself in the shadowy adolescent forms that the adolescent warrior will try to, "I'm tough. Let me show you. Let me show you my Dragoness. Let me burn this thing down or fuck this person up." No, no. I know I'm a dragon. I don't need to roar unless I need to roar. 

DR JOHN: Yeah, yeah. Beautiful. Beautiful.

AUBREY: The power of good symbols, as we develop universal understandings, a symbol practice.

DR JOHN: You're right. This is a deep, deep structure. With many of my students, I'll help them design their deities-- 

AUBREY: How do you get to be one of your students? This sounds awesome! Where do you sign up?

DR JOHN: Well, the website. Traditionally, if you look at the traditional archetypes, there's all these pantheons. So you can think of your pantheon as your ice cream flavors. But in traditional culture, because traditional culture hadn't yet individuated, the tendency was you were just given a practice, “Oh, you're just going to worship Apollo. Green Tara.” The ego structures of 1,000, 2,000 years ago weren't very sophisticated, a lot of them. But now, we want our own color iPhone and everything has to be right. The archetypal yoga, which is what you're talking about, which is what are the various archetypes that you're needing to bring forth and how do you integrate those? That, I believe, needs to be individuated. The individuation process is not something that the traditions were strong with. The individuation process is really one of the Western gifts, which is how do I individuate from being fused into the cultural norm? But to individuate you have to recognise what are the archetypes that are your unique configuration of archetypes because there's some that you and I just don't have. There's a mixture but you can look across the room and say that person, look at that genius, that's amazing mathematical intelligence, or culinary intelligence or kinesthetic. And these are different lines.  So both of us, we're all a combination of these archetypal energies. This is what astrology, tech astrology was all about, which was basically, and it's funny, the research on Holotropic breathwork, the one thing that they found, Grof and Thanos and these guys found that would indicate what kind of psychedelic experience somebody was going to have and a Holotropic breathwork and a psychedelic thing was their birth chart. Basically, according to the ancients, this is the configuration of the archetypes. So then if we can, from them, get a sense of the symbol, what is the soul symbol that wants to give birth to itself? And if you're meditating on that, as part of your meditation practice, so for instance, in a traditional meditation practice, you'd begin by dissolving everything into the fundamental unified field, calming the mind, dissolving to the unified field, and then arising from within that field as Dragonheart. But Dragonheart isn't just a self, he's a world as well. The way that the human self structure is built, is we're self world construct meaning Aubrey is both Aubrey and Aubrey's world. The ego structure, the self structure, is a self-world structure.

AUBREY: Fractionalization of the universe itself. 

DR JOHN: Does that make sense?

AUBREY: Yeah.

DR JOHN: So not only is that Dragonheart, but there's also what's called the mandala of Dragonheart, meaning there's a world that Dragonheart lives in. Now this is the magic, because if the world of that archetype is Eden, it is this coming civilization that we're giving birth to, to the extent that when you sit in full potency as Dragonheart and you feel the world as that, we're beginning to draw that into existence. And that's what fueled all the synchronicity that you're experiencing. It wasn't just the psychedelics, it was the identification with your central archetype, which was the archetype of self and world. If we could have Dragonheart for president, if you went all the way--

AUBREY: There'd be a lot of tables turning over.

DR JOHN: That was the function of deity yoga, of archetypal yoga is if you fuse yourself to Dragonheart, and we would refine it more, the world cannot not transform.

AUBREY: This was the idea, the alchemical idea behind, we threw a donation-based music festival, which, to my knowledge, has never been done, and is a horrible financial idea for anybody who wants any ideas. We lost our ass financially but it was a magical experience because everybody came and they just gave what they felt in their heart to give, it cultivated. And the idea was that we were going to anchor in a future world, a world that is yet to come. We called it ARKADIA. And ARKADIA has some references to that type of world in antiquity as well. The idea was that if we actually abide magically and make this not just the name of a music festival, we abide by new principles, that are true in this world, we'll actually draw the default world towards ARKADIA. And at 1,600 people, it was one of the most magical experiences I've encountered, that many people all ascribing to this idea of ARKADIA. And I think Burning Man does that in its own way as well. It drew drew that reality, We could just feel it drawing that reality is a little bit closer,

DR JOHN: Right. So what I'm, what I'm interested in doing in my work is building an initiatory structure where we get to do that and then we get to empower that over a sustained amount of time with the world's most powerful contemplative practices. So what happens when you create that, but then you have a sole commitment to your brothers and sisters in the room that you're going to maintain that and then that's charged up with practice? In the Indo-Tibetan tradition, we talk about building a mandala. A mandala is like a time machine. It's a coherent structure that is organizational, but it's also subtle energy, meaning it's built from the inside of reality out. That mandala has grades of initiation that you move through. As you're moving through, you're getting formatted into the ethos of that new culture. And at each level, for instance, you'd have certain ethical behavioral meditational components. That's how these initiatory systems were built. We have to architect and build an initiatory system to bring hundreds of thousands of people through.

AUBREY: You working on it?

DR JOHN: Yeah. Hey, I'm sitting here with you, right? The deep structure we have worked out it's like the plug and play pieces right. The psychedelic line has to be woven through. The relational line has to be woven through but, essentially, the deep structure of what that process looks like, has been worked through all the way to Rainbow body. And what I mean by that is rainbow body check is like well, if we would, so that process of Arcadia, Shakyamuni Buddha did a similar thing with a king in a kingdom called Shambhala. And the king was like, "Hey, I've heard about this meditation thing, but you know what? I've got five wives. I'm not leaving." So what are we going to do about this way of living? So the Buddha taught the Kālacakra Tantra, the Wheel of Time Tantra. So the Wheel of Time was basically how do you synchronize a whole culture? So you first synchronize in time. So that synchronization went all the way to the whole kingdom, went rainbow body. And rainbow body tech is like Jesus, the dematerialization of that whole thing. That technology, in the Indo-Tibetan tradition, is well established.

AUBREY: It seems like there are some steps missing. Synchronizing in time seems like you could all be listening to the same music.

DR JOHN: The synchronization process happens first culturally. So part of the problem that we have is that we are playing the time signature of Empire. They had defined the calendar that they were operating in right now as the rhythm that maintains the discordance. Like September, October. September means seven. Why's it the ninth month? Why is Oct, it means eight. The whole thing has been calibrated for a particular time? If you control time, you control everybody, because they're happening inside of your time. So Kālacakra is about transformation of a time. How do we literally go from one age to another age? 

AUBREY: That's the question because we got to do it.

DR JOHN: We got to do it. 

AUBREY: So building a Kālacakra, building a time wheel is like building an initiatory system that facilitates the transformation from one time to another. The outer aspect, this has got to do with timing. So the timing of practices. Well, you start with the month. Full moon and new moon. That begins to synchronize you with not only the natural planet, but the planetary hierarchy. The planetary lineages, the planetary hierarchy run on sacred time. If you want to get a synchronization of those agents who are in matter, and those agents are still in the subtle, you need to get a temporal synchronization. Otherwise, the information isn't coming from headquarters.

AUBREY: That's why all the big megaliths of the past were organized towards equinoxes and into all of the differences, both solar and lunar patterns that existed. 

DR JOHN: And those are real patterns within our bodies. So when we start synchronizing in that way, the group mind starts to synchronize.

AUBREY: So that's a great way to get people organized into time that's not in the time of empire. 

DR JOHN: We literally need to have a new time and to have enough people say, "At least, start with this configuration of time."

AUBREY: Did Gakaram, the druid, he's got to be all about that, right?

DR JOHN: Well, the druids, for sure, they have their sacred calendar. Because when you're on a sacred calendar, you're defining what the fucking time is. Whose time is it? Is it Caesar's time? We're on the Gregorian calendar? Time is money. We all feel that. You cannot not feel that as long as you're on that calendar. That would be the outer dimensions of a kalachakra is the synchronization. And, of course, the idea of kalachakras, as that becomes more sophisticated, the mechanisms of culture become synchronized with the movements of the planets.

AUBREY: And then the holidays which used to be synchronised with different harvests and different archetypal energies have been hallmarked into fucking nonsense. All the initiatory practices, all the coming of ages and the bar mitzvahs and bat mitzvahs of all cultures and all, they're all nonsense. Marriage, death, birth has all been sterilized. So much needs to be sacrificed.

DR JOHN: Those are all things that happen in time. The view of kalachakra which is similar to the view of the great Kabbalists is that the whole of the cosmos is alive. But the Solar System is an organism and the planets are various organs moving through fields. When you synchronize a culture with what's happening, it starts to awaken by itself, to itself. You know how I said, that it's already open, it's already synchronized? The issue is that we just completely desynchronized with heaven.

AUBREY: It is part of this process that science as an almost religious force has then gone about trying to scientifically debunk all of the subtle energies and synchronizations with all of these different things as well. Everything would be parapsychology, paranormality, everything from fucking acupuncture to astrology. Science with its rigorous fucking sword has been like, this is bullshit, this is bullshit, this is bullshit and through the scientific method, when you actually follow it in its own game, it will actually prove out a lot of those things.

DR JOHN: If you look at the research, all of those things are proven. Have you ever checked out the University of Virginia's Department of Perceptual Studies? 

AUBREY: No.

DR JOHN: They've been studying reincarnation there for 50 years. This is an American University. They have thousands of case studies. If you look into the research in reincarnation done in an American university by top parapsychologists, scientists, the evidence is phenomenal.

AUBREY: It's just the capture of science by agenda. I'm not trying to shit on science. Science is very important.

DR JOHN: I know exactly what you're saying. So Empire has controlled science.

AUBREY: And cherry-picked and utilized it and funded whatever it needed to do.

DR JOHN: If you tell people what's true, and what's not true, you tell them what's sacred and what's not sacred, by controlling the narrative, you cut out the sacred. When you cut out the sacred, you cut out people's access to real power. This is where the collusion between the forces of the church and the banks. Whether it's conscious or unconscious, so to speak but the collusion that keeps that new paradigm from really being born. The onus is on us. And this actually goes back to the Father Tantra piece. The father tantra piece is like, "Listen, we do have to get organized. You do have to build a dharma army." And, and then you do have to deal with sacred hierarchy, we're  going to have to deal with that. Otherwise, you can't build an organization. If 10 years from now, 15 years from now, we're still sitting around the circle, and everyone's having enough time to share their truth and we think that that's what's going to take care of Empire?

AUBREY: Elon Musk can't spend five hours a day in processing circles for his employees. He just can't.

DR JOHN: That's right. My grandmother was, much like you, it was a lot of the women in my family who held the door open for the sacred for me. My grandmother was a Dutch Baroness and skied the olympics, the 38th Olympics, downhill skiing.

AUBREY: Gangster.

DR JOHN: So she married a Jew. My grandfather was Jewish. Of course, they were all in hiding because she was an aristocrat, he was Jewish. Of course, the Gestapo came and got some of the family. My grandmother to march down to, I think it was actually the SS, the SS headquarters and demanded to speak to like the head of fucking SS there and told this guy that he had to take these people off the trains. She had this: I'm an aristocrat. But the point was when the tanks rolled in, this is the Father Tantra, when the tanks roll in, because if the tanks are rolling in on the other side of the world, it's one world, brother. If the tanks are rolling in, they're rolling in here right now. Is our spirit, is Dragonheart strong enough? Are we strong enough to be in the resistance? One of my other relatives, she was the leader of the resistance in Paris. She also died in a concentration camp. Her saying was, "This is not time to stay in bed." Particularly those of us who have the capacity to, we've got to get organized. And we've got to work out how are we going to live, how are we going to build an organization? How do we heal from the trauma of hierarchy and patriarchy? But how do we also liberate the sacred masculine so he can be of service to the mother? That beautiful village that our hearts feel and see, it needs to be protected, but it also needs to be manifested, right? There's a role for the masculine. There's a role for, what you've done building your business, that's a dimension of the sacred there,

AUBREY: For sure. It feels to me, very much, in this period, what I'm doing. And I think, at first, it was subconscious and now it's a lot more conscious, as I'm building a network. I'm building a network of people and building true bonds and alliances amongst that network. And now we're supporting each other and we're all doing our own individual thing. But there's this sense that there's going to be a time where you just say now, now.

DR JOHN: That's right, now. And it's now. This is it, the proverbial tanks, whatever they are, they're rolling. And now we stand and we stand together. I don't know when that time is coming and some part of me prays that it won't, but some part of me knows it most likely will. And also just knowing it's what I'm for.

DR JOHN: That's why you came here, brother. That's right.

AUBREY: And when I see that depicted in, I can't think about it without getting emotional, because I can get lost in my own trivialities of difficulty in my own psychodramas and bullshit.

DR JOHN: Your own psychodrama?

AUBREY: Yeah, of course. And then I remember and I have a moment like this, where I remember what I'm really here for and what I'm built for and what I chose to come here for, and then it recalibrates everything and the whole world looks a little different after that. It's like I'm home again. And the tears wash away the old frames of this little trouble and this little concern and this, oh fucking cryptos down. That was stupid of me to do that. 

DR JOHN: Painful. Right, right, right. 

AUBREY: And I see that in a movie too. You watched "300". You watch "Braveheart". They just said no. At some point I asked but just said no. 

DR JOHN: That's right. That's right. You mentioned your relationship with death, our relationship with death, the path of spiritual, sacred warriorhood has got a lot to do with resolving that relationship, being okay with that and also having a narrative, a story that's already gone through. The context is so important. Really having an appreciation that reincarnation is a real thing. And even if you don't, then at least, run it as an app long enough to see how it actually changes your consciousness. Beliefs are psychoactive. Part of tantra is recognising that if we're  going to have beliefs, which humans just do, let's build the most beautiful fucking belief system that's like a fucking bulldozer and is not going to be intimidated. And even if that is not true, it doesn't matter because if it gets the job done. The perennial traditions, the great sages of every tradition would say, and it is true. But resolving that issue around death, making death our friend. There's one practice in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition called making death as your consort. So Dragonheart, this Yamantaka figure, Dragonheart, Death Destroyer, imagine him as this, in the traditional iconography, he's a fire-breathing Minotaur. So there's one level of the Minotaur which you could think of as a dinosaur, that's the reptilian brain and then top, there's another head, which is the limbic brain. And then on top, there's another head, which is the cortex. He's full of fucking wrothful compassion. And actually, he's the deity, the practice that all of the scholar monks do in Tibet. So there's little scholars, when they're going into their room, they're visualizing themselves to being these like minotaurs in heat. So anyway, Yamantaka Death Destroyer, and he's holding, in sexual embrace, death. He's fucking death. That degree of energy is the energy necessary, builds up so that that diamond mind can cut through and make that metaphor a reality. Do you know what I mean?

AUBREY: And death is not just the literal biological death. Iit's the death of any identity structure you have. You have to be willing to move through all of that. And if that means getting cancelled on social media, or if that means whatever deep fear that we have now in a world where pitchforks come as pixels and comments on a fucking Twitter post or something like that, the fear of the mob and the fear of the death of reputation and the death of that, it's fucking that too.

DR JOHN: I think Yeshua, His walk to that cross, a big piece of it was that shame and humiliation. When I've looked at, I don't know about you, but when I look at my psyche, and the place where it jams up is shame, that place where we have extreme shame or extreme humiliation, which is the most painful relation. You mentioned that we project to defend ourselves but I think what we would be defending ourselves against relationally at some level is being humiliated and shamed.

AUBREY: Of course. To know yourself as Dragonheart but to be dragged through the street, helpless and impotent, and the humiliation of that.

DR JOHN: He says yes to that. So the archetype--

AUBREY: He fucks it. And destroys it.

DR JOHN: He fucks it. So the archetype of the victim becomes the archetype of the willing sacrifice. In the Narnia books, did you read the "Narnia" books? 

AUBREY: A little bit.

DR JOHN: They were sacrificing Aslan, the lion, which is the Christ figure on this big slab and he's like, "Well, what they don't realize is the deepest form of magic, is the sacrifice for love." The deepest form of magic is Dragonheart. Just pour it all into the heart to the extent that we can get over the humiliation we have from our Twitter feeds. I have to admit, I've never faced that humiliation, I haven't faced that yet. But to the degree that you can be exposed to that, and turn it the other way. The tantric move is to say. So Tantra is alchemy. And alchemy, it's understood that the anima mundi, that our soul isn't just what's arising here, it's also what's coming from the world. If it's non-dual, then everything out there is also your soul. And, of course, if the soul is here for its own joy, it's very Kabbalistic. If it's here for its own joy, then whatever is coming from the Anima Mundi, from the Soul of the World is here in the service of awakening soul. Jesus, as a magician, what he did was, knowing that, He said, "Yes." I'm going to say an ecstatic yes to whatever is coming at us, no matter how difficult it is, because, I don't know about you but so much of the pain is when I think that this shouldn't be happening.

AUBREY: Yeah, right. Of course.

DR JOHN: But if it's like, even this pain that I'm experiencing right now, is part of the journey, when you're throwing up, you've taken your ayahuasca and you're throwing up, I'm sure your maestro has coached you how to relate to the no to the place where the no becomes a yes.

AUBREY: It's interesting. William James said, and I don't know if I quote him exactly, but he basically said, "I don't know if free will exists or not. But my life is better if I believe that it is, that it's true." It goes back to what you're saying about belief. Having this belief that whatever is happening is happening for me. Whether that's, quote, true or not true, your belief in it actually makes it true alchemically because then your response after, almost like you're time-traveling. So your response actually changes the past and you can actually do that and time-travel back. I think that's a lot, what the psychedelic medicine, healing, especially MDMA-assisted psychotherapy does. You time travel back to experience, recodify it with a different emotion, understand that it was for you, in a way, and it's created who you are now. And then you find, ultimately through the rage, and through the grief and all the things unfelt, you find gratitude for that and say, "That was for me, for this." Whether it is or wasn't is actually inconsequential because it was because you said it was. And that's magic.

DR JOHN: That's magic. That's right. So we have to be able to do that on a cultural level. The building of mandalas such as this, is to facilitate. That's the architecture. How do you create the architecture that allows focused coherent groups to dream together? The world that we see today is the dreaming of certain people in power. And it continues to be shared by the images and the metaphors that are in the media. They are focusing the psyches of people to focus on certain things and to manifest those. What Dharma Amin used to do is he used to say, "Okay, let's do the opposite." What kind of projects do we need to do--

AUBREY: And what kind of stories do we need to write and create? And what new myths do we need to have? People severely underestimate the influence of myth. We also think of myths like they happened in the past. No, no, no, no. "Star Wars", "Game of Thrones", "Lord of the Rings", all of these things are our mythologies that we have in place that some of it can be helpful and some of it actually is pointing to something that was an old conquesting way of empire that's actually subtly infused in this, in different myths that we have. The myth of redemptive violence is something my friend Charles Eisenstein talks about a lot. Here's bad, you get powered up, you fucking crush that and that's the way it goes. Well, then what happens? Then the bad powers up. That myth hasn't been sufficiently retold in enough grand ways that it actually, people start to go like, "Oh, yeah, this isn't  going to work." We're not playing "Hatfields and McCoys" with the good and the bad over and over. Right now, Empire, in all of its forms, as you said, whether conscious or unconscious, are using and hijacking and even the algorithms themself, the magical tools of that, they're hijacking rage versus rage, side versus side, polarity versus polarity. There's all of these kinds of ways in which this new story isn't being able to develop and also emphasizing victim consciousness versus the alchemical consciousness. This was horrid and it happened for us. Now, let us figure out why and make the why happen and time travel back in time to whatever the fucking tragedy was, why are we grateful for it? That changes that reality and actually gives us our power back instead of just trying to find as many things you can pile on to the victim pile, so that you're the winner of the victim game. That doesn't fucking work. You're just the most disempowered that you can possibly be? And of course, Empire's like, "Go for it! The most disempowered you can possibly be." Excellent. Carry on."

DR JOHN: That's right. I think what's different about the time there when we say mythology, we're also thinking of mythic consciousness. Mythic consciousness is basically a rule-role mind, which is very literal and concrete, because that's how we imagine most people believed those stories. Those stories were told at the level that most people were at. The mythology that's going to be born in our time is going to be different because it's going to be real. Now what I mean by that is most people's consciousness is now fact-based. So the mythology is not going to be a mythology, it's going to be a revelation, it's going to be an apocalypse, an apocalypse in the sense of an over over of a revealing of what was true, whether it's historically like the largest cycles of the color chakra going all the way back to Atlantis, understanding our deep history as fact ,not just a story, things that happened that we just didn't know. That includes everything including extraterrestrials. We're now moving like mythology? Yeah. But what happens when that mythology lands? Then what happens is, rather than mythology, you're getting a literal sacred world. Where the story is now is not just metaphor, it's actually, "Yes, this is how it fucking is." Helios, the sun is a god. 

AUBREY: A being.

DR JOHN: It's a fucking being. It's isn't a metaphor,

AUBREY: And don't take my fucking word for it. Do enough medicine and look at it.

DR JOHN: It isn't just a metaphor. In terms of a fourth turning and in terms of a planetary dharma, that's the Tantra, that's the context, which is like a real sacred world. And we have all the pieces for that.

AUBREY: What's interesting to me and it's interesting that you mentioned this, because what's interesting to me is I've been playing with creating my own mythological world but the rule from my mythological world is I have to believe that it's true actually.

DR JOHN: Yes, that's why it's a tantra.

AUBREY: It's going to appear mythological, so I'm going to place it as an adjacent world, a different node in the multiverse on the surface level. But actually everything that is happening in there, the magic is real, everything is real, the star beings as far as I know, and, of course, I don't know perfectly whether they're real or not. I've had communications etc. Whatever. But is plausibly real, if not actually real. And the magic that can happen in Ayahuasca ceremony, what the Ayahuascero and the curanderos, their battles and all the things that are true now, but people don't think of them as true in our world, and build a world that is, like you said, a true world but it's going to appear like myth. But we're going to bring people into this world in a way that's like, and then that will actually open their eyes to wait a minute.

DR JOHN: And when we do that, that will build up a morphogenic field. So for instance, one of the technologies involved with the rainbow body, once the Kundalini is really going on full flame, is then switching to pranic nourishment, the ability to just absorb nourishment straight through the field. If you understand the level of the mind that a field or piece of bread is the same thing, then once you're locked in at that level, it's pretty good, you're able to extract energy from the field around you. This is more of an alchemical practice. This isn't something you're going to do in the village. This is more like maybe the end of your life, it's time to leave, maybe you want to leave in a trailing cloud, blaze off. So anyway, the fasting practice, I've done it myself, for like 20 days of water fasting. I'm sure you've experimented with these kinds of things but up in Tibet, they'll just roam around up on those like Wim Hof but without even eating any food. A part of that is because once the mind is that adamant that it's conquered death, it's seen through it, that changes chemistry. The problem is though when you come down off the mountain top, and you come into the village, everybody else has got a field and they're like, "I don't think I believe in that shit." So if you look at the research for people who try to do that in, in laboratory environments, they can't do it.

AUBREY: With people who don't believe it, exactly.

DR JOHN: They can’t do it. Right?

AUBREY: I've had this discussion with Matias de Stefano, who remembers a past life, he remembers many of his past lives, all of them. But remembers one in particular, in Khem, which was a post-Atlantean civilization.

DR JOHN: In Egypt. 

AUBREY: He was part of the water, I don't know if he called it clan or whatever. But they had different elements: who were magicians? And the water clan, they were responsible for actually cutting the stones with water. They would put their identity into the consciousness of the water. And they would run a line of water across the stones, and they would break the stones with water as water carves the canyons and whatever. And there were other people from different, I think it was the air clan, who could sing the stones into a vibrational state where they were light, so they could be easily moved and placed. So these great mysteries, how did we get these 20,000? Well, it could have been 100,000 people with pulleys and ropes and levers or there could have been another technology. But then I asked him, "Well, can this return?" He's like, "No, because the field of belief prevents that from actually happening in our world, because we've actually created a belief system that prevents this type of magic from existing in this time, but at that time, everybody believed it. So they had the spiritual technology, as well as the field to actually create it."

DR JOHN: My sense is that once e science is no longer co-opted by Empire, and that we begin to apply research in these dimensions, I don't see why those capacities are, I think that they're ahead of us. I mean, I don't know in our lifetime--

AUBREY: We'd have to start studying things in a different way. We'd have to start making little breaches, little belief breaches. And we just need a couple and then momentum will start to go "Oh, oh, oh, you can do this? Well, if you can do this, can you do this?" And then more and more people believe and more and more people believe. I think that can change the dynamic. It's quite possible and plausible, and Matias talks about this as well that these extra terrestrial beings are mostly, and there are some third-dimensional type of beings with crafts and et cetera, but a lot of them are extra-dimensional beings as well. And so when we are able to actually tune in, like, "When are the aliens going to come?" I don't know. When we're tapping into the multi-dimensionality of our existence, we can actually fucking see them. They're always all around.

DR JOHN: So that's one of the reasons for building a contemporary initiatory system that is more than a weekend, is that in order to build these capacities, you want to create communities that have gone on a journey together for a significant amount of time, have shared certain educational processes. That's what builds that morphogenic field backup. If you look at a mandala, it has like an inner core and an outer core, part of lowering that back down into this realm is you got to create an initiatory system, if you're hanging with your brothers and sisters who have gone through the same five-year journey that you have, there are certain things you can talk about, you don't have to cover a bunch of ground first. And then what happens when you've been on that journey for 20 or 30 years? I think that's when the magic, it's going to happen.

AUBREY: I've been a participant in some very trivial forms of this, where harnessing the magic of belief, I remember. It's always been in somewhat trivial ways that I've enacted this. So I brought a bunch of people out to our boat, and we were going to all go surfing, we're all excited. The boat wouldn't start, we try everything, call the mechanics, call everybody, 45 minutes trying, and we cannot get the engine to turnover whatsoever. It's a push button thing. It's not like I'm fucking pulling, lawnmower or something like that. Then I just had everybody, something came over me, and I was like, "Everybody, right now, we hear the engine roaring, we smell the gas, and we see ourselves on this water..." I was just leading this whole thing and then I was like, "Right now, when I press this button, this boat will turn on, at this moment," and I had enough, I guess, that people actually were like, "All right." Boom. Pushed it.

DR JOHN: What if that's 10,000 people? What if it's 100,000?"

AUBREY: What is possible? And that starts to deeply undermine some of these tenets of empire, starts to flip over some core tables that need to be flipped for a new system to come in place. 

DR JOHN: We were born at an incredibly lucky time because all of these pieces are here. Whether it's the use of cryptocurrency to essentially fund a new nation, whether it's the meditative technology, whether it's the medicine, whether it's relational technology, whether it's Circling, authentic relating, all of these pieces are on the table now. It's more about architecture. I look at this as an architectural problem. We no longer appreciate architecture. And what we're talking about here is ontological architecture, how do we create? I'm sure with your Sedona experience, for instance, you constructed and architected a particular kind of journey that people were going to be going through. So we have to learn to do that for much longer periods of time.

AUBREY: And much longer goals. Not the short term. But a much bigger,

DR JOHN: With individual and shared because I think what happens is, as we begin to, which is what's happening, we're all beginning to share our goals or recognising that we have very similar goals. And as people, as their goals become unified, particularly when it's motivated by Bodhisattva code, by the warrior code, for something larger, something beautiful and good and true is going to unfold.

AUBREY: I believe that. And I think of the opportunity to start shifting everything radically, I have a deep yearning to transcend the idea of completely individual wealth. Now, this doesn't mean just giving it all away to everybody at random, but to get the core group of people together and say, it's no longer mine, it's not my house, my money, my car, it's ours. And it's no longer my kid, it's our kid. This very simple change is revolutionary. 

DR JOHN: The way that we would do this, because I've had the same, the same ideal is that's what's what the mandala facilitates. If you know that people have gone through an initiatory process that is ethical, that is motivational, that has an effect, then you know by a certain stage that they've gone through something that you've gone through, then you know that we can commit. So it does need that initiatory process.

AUBREY: I've started to build that too, in my own way. I'm  going to share that. And I've shared it maybe a few times. I came up with this idea to create this inner circle of people. It's commemorated and symbolized by an exchange of beads. Everybody has their own set of beads. So you have your bead that represents you.

DR JOHN: That's great. I love that.

AUBREY: And then everybody else, they have their beads, and when you reach that state of just radical trust, like you and me, we're in this together, what's mine is yours, what's yours is mine, to the very end, You actually go through a ceremony, or a ritual that actually brings out anything that might be there, both Circling and conversation, and also some kind of initiatory experience where you really learn what's it like. I remember one of my best friends, Kyle, we did an iboga journey together, just me and him in a room, we had people up all night ready to go in it, but it was just me and him. And we're on this journey. Ibogas is a deeply challenging medicine, because at the end of this, if there's anything inside us or anything inside you that's not there, we'll pause on the ceremonial exchange and the ceremonial exchange includes vows. And the vows are exchanged and the beads or exchanged. I've seen myself at my death with a necklace of all of these beads and it was my most precious thing. It was the thing that as I was passing, it was like, I had this and this was--

DR JOHN: That's real wealth.

AUBREY: That was it. Of all those things in my life, that was the thing that mattered the most.

DR JOHN: That's right. To be able to build that, so it can be decentralized, once we have the new Bodhisattva codes, once we have the new Torah codes, essentially, they can be decentralized and shared.

AUBREY: That's the whole idea is that everybody has their own strand. I think one of the problems with communities is there's been like, "This is our community. Put a velvet rope around it, there's the outside, there's the inside." So the outside attacks the inside, because they secretly probably want to be on the inside. And then there's also people on the inside, they're like, "Well, I don't really fucking trust that guy." Like a fraternity, for example. I was Kappa Sigma. And you have your brothers, and you're supposed to have this... but I was like, "I''m not that fucking guy." You still give them respect and whatever but you haven't really forged that with that person in particular. So I wouldn't have traded beads with that person. I think the ability to actually have your own strand, and then the magic of when, let's say there's three people, let's say myself, and Vylana and Caitlin and Eric, we've all traded beads mutually. So there's this quadrant, where we're all actually, and it's an open loop. They can bring anybody else, their cousin that we don't know yet, who they've gone through so many things with from fucking Rhode Island. We're like, I'd love to meet that person sometime but I don't know, I wouldn't trade beads with that person. They don't belong on my necklace. But maybe someday. And anybody can start that. And anybody can start this, and just open sourcing the technology and the practice. Then also everybody who has their own home bead, you'd create this larger gathering somewhere where everybody's wearing their bead necklace, and you're meeting new people who have similar ethos, and then new opportunities to trade beads from.

DR JOHN: That's beautiful. I love that vision. Those are the pieces that fit into that architecture, that we need to facilitate those kinds of relationships. That's beautiful.

AUBREY: Yeah, man. John, I had a feeling, I had a good feeling from the moment we talked and really was insistent that we do this in person. And I'm just so grateful for the introduction from Daniel Schmachtenberger who set this up in the intuition and the yes, the mutual yes and here we are. I know it's just the beginning. 

I casually joked about how to become a student because it feels like you should have to climb a mountain top or do something particularly arduous, but you can actually find you on a fucking website!

DR JOHN: You can go to karunamandala, Karuna, K-A-R-U-N-A; Mandala, M-A-N-D-A-L-A, .org or drjohnchurchill.com.

AUBREY: So much love, my brother.

DR JOHN: Absolutely.

AUBREY: Alright, here we go. Thank you everybody for tuning in. We love you, goodbye.