The Sermon of the Sardines is etched into our very souls. Picture the scene, as dreamboat doctor Zach Bush recounts his shimmering story of swimming off the coast of Tulum with thousands of tiny heroic fish, for Rich Roll’s Tuscany retreat participants. In this week’s Bonus episode Matthew and Julian connect the dots between Zach’s quivering amphibious ecstasy, his fascist notions of holy sacrifice in warfare via “non-empathic presence,” how he praises his hospice staff for using reiki as opposed to pain meds, and inspires his listeners to have no fear of death. After all—it’s the ultimate upgrade. From Sardine to Salvation, Bush has it covered.
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Thank you.
Today we are looking at Zach Bush and the Sardines Sermon.
Oh my goodness, one of your absolute favorites.
The Sermon of the Sardines.
It is one of my favorites.
I've looked at it, I've written about it, I've dreamt about it, I think.
I think I've fantasized about swimming with Zach Bush amongst the sardines.
I think I want to be the sardines that are like floating, that are opening like a cervix around him.
Because I think some new things are coming up for me.
It's kind of like a classic.
Yeah.
Let me just give a little bit of a rundown.
He describes, he's sitting in a retreat center in Tuscany in July of 2019, and he's giving a talk.
As you do.
Yes.
This, by the way, is hosted by Rich Roll, the vegan ultramarathoner guy, and his partner, business and life partner, Julie Piat, who also goes by the name Shreemati.
She's a mystic mother and healer.
As you do.
As a mystic, she's a mystic mother and healer.
She charges 463 US dollars for either 60 or 75 minutes of a reading session in which she will help clear your past trauma.
Bada boom, bada boom. - Oh, she also.
And she also sells cheese made of nuts called Shri Moo.
So anyway, Zach is talking about the things that he talks about like, you know, biodiversity and gut biome and gut health and all kinds of nice ecological things.
The really important thing about Zach that I always want to say is that his contention is viruses are present to give you a system update.
There are millions of them around.
They never affect you badly.
When they do affect you badly, it's because they're helping your system to upgrade to the next level of optimal functioning.
Yeah, including death, by the way, which is part of his worldview, right?
Because the next level of functioning could be precipitated by death, which he actually makes clear in this sermon that he gives.
Anyway, he really gets into it.
Like, I don't know whether this is after the vegan lunch and he had some coconut ice cream or like, I don't know.
Like, he's just, he's just sailing, because I don't know whether he, I can't remember what Rich asks him, but he says, he talks about how he's swimming off the coast of Tulum, and it was at a time in his life where I think he was a little bit, you know, at sixes and sevens, he didn't know whether he was gonna get married to his current wife or not, He thought he was a monk.
She was disagreeing with him.
He was trying to sort it all out.
He's going off the coast of Tulum to swim and to look at the coral reefs and to just, you know, chill out and feel one with everything.
And then it happens.
He's surrounded by a quarter mile long column of sardines that takes 45 minutes to flow over his quivering and really orgasming body, as he describes it, ecstatic.
He has an ecstatic, beautiful experience that I wish that I could have.
I think that's part of why this is so impassioned, is that it is a very real peak experience for him, and I'm sure it was extraordinary.
And he tells it beautifully, like He's a really good storyteller.
He is the poet emeritus of, I think, the conspirituality era.
He kicks the shit out of Charles Eisenstein.
Sorry, Chuck.
But he describes this incredible experience That then ends quite suddenly, or he's jarred out of his trance because he hears and sees explosions of microbubbles all around him and realizes that the pelicans are striking at the school of fish.
And previously, just before he describes this, he says, I was so overwhelmed by all of this that I felt that I was one with the sardines.
I had the energy of sardine, like sardine with a capital S. He's embodying and merged with sardine energy.
And then when the pelicans strike and he realizes that they're being scooped up as prey into these big gullets, He has a moment of mortification where he's completely overwhelmed with empathy for the loss of his new friends because he's being eaten as well, I suppose.
And then he describes a kind of auditory hallucination where the sardines scream at him and say, no, you shouldn't have that point of view.
No, you shouldn't.
You shouldn't feel that way.
And then he realizes that the sardines are not scared of dying, that they are actually expressing some kind of continuity with the beautiful column that they were in, which itself was ecstatic And then there's this boundary difficulty here, because is he ecstatic or the fish is ecstatic?
And I think that's kind of one of our first red flags, actually.
But he basically says that the fish had no concern for their brethren.
And then there's a record scratch moment, because he says, You know, I kind of realized that that's what happens when you have a million men walking into war.
That none, that, that the concern for the individual, uh, evaporates because everybody knows that they are, uh, in, in the same, uh, you know, working towards the same purpose.
So, um, yeah, he's just like, well, let me see here.
Um, Just so I quote it directly, like that's pretty good paraphrasing.
Yeah, really good.
But he says, and there was this rise in energy happening in this thing as transformation was happening at a very, very high energetic level.
There was zero empathy for the loss of their brethren.
And you see that same thing when one million men march into war, there's a loss of empathy for the individual.
And there's only a sense of there's human suffering and there's human victory, and I want to be part of that.
And I'm just as willing to be part of the human suffering and loss of life as I am to be part of the victory.
And that is just the blind.
So I don't know what's happening in the transcript there, but let me go on.
And so I think in warfare, we can reach this state of non-empathic presence.
And so our challenge now as humans is, I believe, to reach non-empathic presence without war.
What if we cannot empathetically witness loss of life?
Arjuna.
Exactly, right?
Yeah.
Now, from what we gather, he was brought up in an evangelical home church in Boulder, Colorado.
But yeah, you can hear Bhagavad Gita all over that sucker because He's looking into the face of Krishna, who's devouring the warriors, and recognizing that they are participating in the sacrifice of life for the greater good of God.
Yeah, they are at the top of the Aztec pyramid, having their hearts ripped out with this willing knowledge, supposedly, in a romantic sense, that this is what will help the cycles of the cosmos to keep turning and the crops to keep growing and the women to keep bearing children.
The fascist underpinnings here, especially given that he brings up the The metaphor of men marching into war are just unavoidable and the sense of, you know, it's interesting because he's describing, watch how he slides back and forth, right, between inhabiting and then describing from different vantage points this revelation that he feels he's having, right?
He knows that the fish have no empathy for their brethren.
He's having an ecstatic experience that he then And the fish must also be having of what it is to just be free and swimming through the ocean, merged in this group mind.
And then he knows that this is also what these men who are marching off to war feel like.
He connects all those dots fluidly and without any sense of self-critique, and therefore we, in our practice as alternative Medicine providers, right?
Alternative healthcare providers or integrative however he's framing it at that time.
