On May 6, 1993, three eight-year-old boys - Stevie Branch, Michael Moore, and Christopher Byers - were found murdered. While there were no witnesses, DNA evidence, or concrete leads that connected Damien Echols and his two friends Jessie Misskelley, Jr. and Jason Baldwin (known as the West Memphis Three), police arrested them anyway - some say simply because of the way they looked.It became one of the biggest murder trials of our time, and after being sentenced to die from lethal injection, Damien Echols was released after serving eighteen years on death row. In this interview, he and his wife Lorri (who married him while he was still behind bars) are speaking out on life after being sentenced to die, and why he may truly never be free. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
I think people don't grasp how often this happens.
Maybe as many as one out of every ten people who are sentenced to death are innocent.
Now, if one out of every ten planes crashed, people would demand that something be done about it.
Nobody would fly anymore.
But since most people don't have anyone in their family or anyone in their immediate circle that are sentenced to death that's being executed, it's just being swept under the rug.
Hi, I'm Dr. Oz, and this is the Dr. Oz Podcast.
On May 6, 1993, three eight-year-old boys were found murdered, stripped naked, and hog-tied with their own shoelaces.
While there were no witnesses, DNA evidence, or concrete leads that connected Damien Echols and his two friends, Jesse Miss Kelly Jr. and Jason Baldwin, It became known as the West Memphis Three, by the way.
Police arrested them anyway.
Now, some say it was simply because of the way they looked.
It became one of the biggest murder trials of our time.
And after being sentenced to die from lethal injection, Damien Echols was released after serving 18 years on death row.
Today, he's here with his wife, Lori, who married him while he was still behind bars, speaking out on life after being sentenced to die, and why he may truly never be free.
So Damien, if you can, paint for us a picture for everybody of what life was like in West Memphis, Arkansas.
Describe what your childhood was like.
My family, we lived in a state of incredible poverty.
When I was born, my mother was 15 years old.
My father was 16 years old.
In our world, in our life, no one had ambitions.
No one was looking down the road for something better to happen, something bigger to happen.
It's almost like you are just going from day to day trying to survive.
And that's all you have time to think about.
You know, I dropped out of school when I was in ninth grade, and that's still more education than anyone else in my family has.
You know, if you look back through my family tree, you're not going to find, like, college degrees or high school diplomas, anything like that.
And my family in that regard was not anything out of the ordinary at all.
You know, we were, like, for our The people surrounding us, the other families around us, that was pretty much the way everyone in that area lived.
So in the middle of all this, these three kids get murdered.
And that environment contributed somewhat.
And it's not unique.
Your personal story, you're probably poorer than most, but there are other poor people in the country.
But the environment in West Memphis allowed the possibility of three, it turns out, innocent men to That's one of those things.
I think people don't grasp how often this happens.
You know, we've done talks all over the country with, you know, people involved with the Innocence Project and Southern Poverty Law Center, things like this, Bryan Stevenson.
These people are now estimating that maybe as many as one out of every 10 people who are sentenced to death are innocent.
Now, if one out of every ten planes crashed, people would demand that something be done about it.
it.
Nobody would fly anymore.
But since most people don't have anyone in their family or anyone in their immediate circle that are sentenced to death, that's being executed, it's just sort of slipping under the rug, being swept under the rug.
It's one of those things that happens all the time.
I try to make people understand that my case was nothing out of the ordinary whatsoever.
The only thing that made my case memorable is that we were fortunate enough to have a documentary film crew in the courtroom while the trial was taking place who caught the entire thing on film.
That is the only reason that I am not just as dead today as everyone else that this happens to.
So...
So, not to belabor, but you're in a community where, and I'm not supposed to describe you to everybody.
You're wearing glasses, I know, because of being in a tiny cell, which we'll get to in a second, and solitary confinement destroyed your ability to deal with light.
You've got a beard.
You look sort of like ZZ Top, but a handsome version.
I mean, that's the other thing.
You're a very handsome man, and yet if I saw you on the street, I'd be curious.
I'd be trying to figure out what's going on.
You're tatted all over, and you probably look different than most of the people that were on the jury deciding if you're innocent or not.
Absolutely.
So when these three poor little boys get murdered, and part of the reason I'm so animated about this, like I feel terrible that you were on death row.
I feel as angry that a man who's a murderer and a pedophile...
Walked free.
Exactly.
So we didn't protect the other people in West Memphis.
Exactly.
So why would they even come to you?
How did they pick the three of you?
You didn't even know one of the people that well.
That was your apparently accomplice.
It's a really long, complicated story, to be honest.
There was a...
They're not exactly police.
They were like a juvenile task force who – these were some incredibly shady people.
One of them was eventually – Forced to resign whenever he was caught molesting teenage boys.
Another one eventually went to prison for stealing from the police department.
Why would they pick you?
They could have picked anybody out of the phone book.
It was one of these guys used to come through our neighborhood and terrorize teenage boys.
He would pick up teenage boys and say, either you give me a blowjob or you're going to jail.
We were constantly at war with these people, like trying to avoid them, trying to hide from them, trying to stay out of their reach.
I mean, these people were absolutely horrendous.
And they just latched on to us.
We were the main ones that they focused on.
We weren't the only ones they focused on by any stretch of the imagination.
But for some reason, we were the main ones that they focused on.
And what was it like sitting in the courtroom, knowing you're innocent, believing the evidence supports that?
And hearing the judge say, actually it was a jury first, saying, you're guilty.
It's really hard to articulate just because you're in such a deep state of shock and trauma.
You know, people who saw the documentaries, the actual courtroom footage, always say, you know, whenever they came in and they read, they sentence you to death, not once and not twice, but three times, and you're just standing there, you know, not really...
Acting like you're upset about it in any way.
You seem so calm.
I try to make people understand what you're seeing is not calm.
It's shock and trauma.
If you've ever been severely beaten, if you've ever been punched in the head, you know that a lot of times it doesn't immediately register as pain.
It's more like bright flashes of light, a loud noise, you're really disoriented, almost like you can't keep your feet up under you.
When you are being sentenced to death, it is like being repeatedly punched in the head.
So you're put in solitary confinement, just to be clear, I wrote this down, 12 feet by 9 feet, right?
Yes.
Besides destroying your eyesight, what else did it do to you that has, even today, years since your release, still impacts you?
We didn't realize a lot of the effects that it was having on me until after I got out.
You know, keep in mind that whenever I went into prison, I was still a teenager.
My brain had not even finished forming yet.
environment, your brain does not form in the same way that people out here's brain has an opportunity to form.
So, for example, we did not know until I got out that things like facial recognition, voice recognition had all been damaged.
It was almost the only way that I can compare, you know, people think that going to prison is like this devastating thing, and it was.
But honest to God, when I got out, it was equally devastating.
The day I walked out of prison, it screwed me up just as bad as going to prison did, because I was not equipped to deal with what people out here think of as regular life.
It has taken me a long time to try to learn things that people out here take for granted.
Was there ever a moment, sitting in that cell, staring at the ceiling at 3 in the morning, because you probably couldn't tell what time it was anyway, that you just said, I'm done.
I can't do this.
Oh, yeah.
But it's not like you're making a choice to give up.
It's more like you feel like you don't have any choice but to give up.
You know, it's not like saying, I'm not going to run another mile.
It's like when your body says you cannot run another mile and you collapse.
There were several times when I would experience stuff like that.
And it happens on different levels.
You know, sometimes it's on an emotional level where you just feel completely and absolutely emotionally crippled, devastated.
So you feel like you can't go on in that way.
Other times it was physical.
You know, not just stuff like...
Being confined in a cell with no daylight, no fresh air, but you're also eating absolute garbage in there.
When you try to explain to people what you eat in prison, it's not anything that people out here understand.
It's not something that you will ever go into a store and find.
They'll say, what did you have for lunch today?
And you say, box meal.
That's the name of a food-like substance that you eat in prison.
So you suffer extreme nutritional deficiencies.
It takes a toll on you in every way that it can possibly take a toll on you.
It destroys you.
There's lots more when we come back.
One reason you should all be listening carefully to this is, and you stopped the audience down when you said this on the show, that 99.99% of people are not going to die in prison.
Exactly.
And so, when we do this to our prisoners, it's not whether they're good people or bad people.
The fact they managed to come back out.
so I'd rather spend my money to get people to be a better match for society than really sociopaths who've been so damaged partly because of what we may have done to them partly because of what they were before they went there they caused more issues for society Prison is a really big business in the U.S. You know, it is a very big source of income.
They call it now the prison industrial complex.
We know that certain things lead to lower rates of recettivism, and we know that certain things lead to higher rates of recettivism.
We give lip service to rehabilitating people, keeping them out of prison, but in actuality, the prison system is built on Making people come back.
One example is we know now that the more connections a person has in prison with people outside the prison, family, friends, support systems, the less likely they are to come back.
The prison system is designed to try to destroy those connections.
They want you to come back into prison because that's more money they make.
Speaking of connections, your wife Lori is here.
How did you hear about Damien and how did you connect with him?
And at what point, how long had you been in jail when Lori found you?
I was living here in the city and I'm an absolute, I love film.
And I always went to...
A film series at MoMA, Codnew Director's New Film.
MoMA's Museum of Modern Art.
Yes.
And in actuality, the documentary, Paradise Lost, was being premiered at that festival.
How long ago was this?
That would have been 1996. And again, just to pretend everyone's on the same page, I know this story so well, but I don't want to skip over it.
Paradise Lost was the documentary they were shooting, right, when Damien was being tried and convicted.
Right.
So you'd been in jail for about three years?
About two to three years, yeah.
And I didn't want to see the film.
I had no interest in true crime or any—it's just not a genre I'm interested in.
So a friend of mine wanted to see it, and I said, I'm not at all interested in seeing that movie anymore.
But as things happen in this world, something instinctually at the last minute said, go see that film.
Who knows?
But I ended up sitting in a rainy theater on a Monday night seeing an almost three-hour-long documentary, and I was just floored.
I mean, sitting there, the whole audience was.
But I'm from the South and was raised in a fundamentalist Christian home, so I understood what was going on with the community down there, with the satanic scare, and my heart just went out to Damien because I was kind of Explain that, because that still happens, I think, today.
It's a very Christian community.
Baptist, mostly.
Yeah.
And you're not.
No.
So, describe what you are, because you talk about it in the book.
By the way, part of the reason I want to be clear on this, this book is beautifully written.
Thank you.
It's called High Magic, with a K at the end of the magic.
And it's a guide to the spiritual practices that saved my life on death row, which...
We're going to get into it in a second, but this is what we're starting with.
If I'm a Baptist growing up in West Memphis and I see this guy walking around, I'm not sure what to make out of him.
Well, keep in mind in that kind of community too, like when I grew up, I can remember preachers just railing against things like yoga.
This is back in the really early 90s, late 80s when they were saying yoga is satanic.
This is a kind of mindset in this community where if you are a Buddhist or a Hindu, You're a Satanist.
You just don't know that you're a Satanist.
You're being misled by demons into thinking there's something else.
You know, they're taking you to this state of enlightenment, but in reality they're leading you down this path towards hell.
They literally believe this.
So when you're talking about things like ceremonial magic, you know, that takes it to a whole other level.
I'm only asking because I have friends who...
We're in cults, so to speak, and there was a satanic element.
I mean, they did practice animal sacrifice.
Is that not part of your ritual magic?
Is Satan not an element at all?
No, that's an entirely Christian concept, and these are practices, ceremonial magic.
It goes all the way back to ancient Sumer.
There are two ways of understanding mythology.
And by mythology, I mean the Bible, I mean the Torah, I mean the Koran, I mean the ancient Sumerian tablets.
There are two levels on which these things can be read, what we think of as front speech and what we think of as back speech.
Front speech would be to read them straightforward the way people in religions read them straightforward.
You know, they take these things at least to some extent literally.
You know, like for example, if you're a Christian, then you literally believe that this guy named Jesus was the son of God who came to save people from sin, take them to heaven, all this sort of thing.
Front speech becomes religion.
That's like for the masses who don't want – who don't actually spend their lives, dedicate their lives to understanding what these techniques and practices are.
Back speech, on the other hand, was sort of for the priest, the higher caste of society – The people who would be related to the king, backspeech is understanding that what you're reading when you're reading these things are encoded techniques.
What magic is, what ceremonial magic is, is the western path to enlightenment.
It starts off in ancient Sumer and would eventually spread throughout every culture in the world.
It would become every religion that we know today.
For example, the three major what we call gods of ancient Sumer would be Anu, Enlil, and Enki.
When they are transported to India, they become Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva.
You know, the Holy Trinity.
We think of the Trinity as like a Christian concept, and it's not.
It has existed since the very dawn of human civilization.
Ceremonial magic is about understanding the backstory, the back speech behind these things, and doing the actual practices.
You know, not believing the stuff like anything from animal sacrifice on one hand to, you know, stories like Noah and the Ark on the other.
You know, it's about knowing that this story is not actually about a man who put a bunch of animals on a boat to save them from a flood.
What that's referring to, you know, just this one example, and I won't go on about this forever.
But just this one example of Noah and the Ark.
All of these practices deal with star systems, essentially, is what you're looking at.
You know, for example...
Humanity has sort of progressed through this evolution of going from polytheism to monotheism over time.
Well, when you're looking at like ancient Sumer, that starts off with polytheism.
All of these stories lead one into the next.
From polytheism, you go into Judaism.
Judaism is like a very thinly veiled version of the Sumerian stories.
You know, for example, in Sumer, the moon god Sin, when you get to Judaism, he becomes Moses.
It's like what we think of as a dispensation.
All of this is based on the sun, the astrological signs.
You know, for example, in Sumer, the sun would have risen When it would have risen on the spring equinox, it would have been in the sign of Taurus.
During the age of Judaism, that's why in Sumer, when you see the kings, the gods, they're all wearing these helmets with bullhorns on them because it's the age of Taurus.
When it then progresses to Judaism, you're talking about the time whenever the sun would have risen for that 2,100 years, it would have risen in the sign of Aries.
Which is why you hear all the stuff.
It's symbolism about the Jews sacrificing rams, goats, the scapegoat.
They blow the horn made out of a ram's horn.
All of this sort of stuff.
All it is is you're changing religion based on the sun signs.
You go from Judaism into Christianity, which would have been the next 2,100 years, which would be the age of Pisces, which was why Christ was represented by a fish.
Whenever he goes to feed the masses, how does he feed them?
With two fish, the sign of Pisces.
Christ and the twelve disciples represent the sun and the twelve signs of the zodiac.
When you're talking about something, going back to the story of Noah for a second, Noah taking these animals onto an ark, anytime you hear about animals in the Bible, in the Torah, in any of these religions, what you are hearing about are coded symbols for the zodiac, star systems, constellations.
Noah taking these animals onto the ark represents someone preserving these teachings so that they will be passed on to future generations in the world, that they won't be lost due to tumultuous turbulent times in human history, civilizations, that this will be a continued lineage.
And that's what high magic is.
It is a current of energy and teachings that extend from modern day all the way back through Christianity, all the way back through Judaism, all the way back through the ancient traditions of Sumeria.
I gotta say, I'm at a bit of bias here.
I was so blown away on the show by how erudite you are, how thoughtful you are about just the words that you pick.
And how does a kid growing up, son of a 15-year-old mother, 16-year-old child in desperate poverty, quitting school in ninth grade, how did you put all these pieces together?
I think it's really two things.
One was I had almost 20 years to do a lot of reading.
So I read a lot.
You know, I'm working on now.
I'm already in the editing process for the book that will come after this.
This is my fourth book.
I think you cannot write unless you read a lot.
I learned how to write from reading.
When I was in prison, I would average, you know, anywhere from three to five books a week.
The other half of the equation, I believe, and I honestly believe this, is ceremonial magic.
You know, we know now we're learning in science about, like, different Brain states, you know, like alpha and these different states that your brain goes into.
Well, what we're learning now is that whenever you reach the really high end of this frequency and the really low end of this frequency, what sort of happens is the two hemispheres of your brain start to function as one.
You know, it's not like two different things anymore.
I believe whenever that happens, it enhances your ability to learn and remember, and honestly, it's what allowed me to get over the tremendous post-traumatic stress disorder that I was experiencing whenever I first got out, things of that nature.
So, you know, I really do think it is from reading a lot, and a lot of it is from the practices of ceremonial magic.
You basically became a monk.
I mean, if there's any silver lining about what happened to you, you're tossed in a sensory deprivation chamber.
Not the good kind.
It's better than college, clearly.
Why did I waste my time in med school?
That's exactly what happened.
When I first walked into prison, I would see a lot of people in there that would start to stagnate, degenerate.
You know, 10 years down the road, they're the exact same person they were when they walked into the door or in a worse condition.
You know, mental illness starts to set in, all sorts of things going on.
A guy told me whenever I first went in, Like within two or three days of walking into the doors of death row, he said, you're going to do one of two things in this cell.
You're going to either sit in that cell and go insane, Or you can turn the cell into a monastery and keep trying to improve yourself, grow in some way.
And that's what I tried to do to the absolute best of my ability.
Let me pick up the story that we love because Laurie is part of this.
Yeah, you just ditched her completely.
I'm also curious about when you found him, you come from a traditional Christian background.
But there are a lot of things that you talk about that are very threatening to a traditional Christian theology.
Oh, yes.
How did you deal with that?
I mean, yes, he's just very handsome, compelling.
That may not have been the lead comment to her parents.
I think it probably was like the lead, like, whoa, this guy's really interesting and handsome.
And I could help him.
I can save him.
But there are some things that might have been off-putting, given where you were from as well, no?
Absolutely.
And I think that there are still some questions being asked around my family.
Because they are very, you know, I grew up in a very, as you say, traditional Christian home.
And we're talking...
No, Southern Baptists.
Very literal in their understanding of the Bible.
And I'm very, I'm respectful of people.
I mean, certainly my family and everyone.
I'm just respectful of whatever anyone believes.
But by that time, by the time I met Damien, I had already left those teachings and beliefs behind and was kind of charting my own path.
I hadn't I mean, I'm grateful.
Damien's taught me a great deal.
So I practice magic too.
But I started out, when I first met him, he was sitting Zazen.
And so I found a local Buddhist center and I started sitting because it was just something that I knew was going to help me because I was in a very stressful situation when I got to Arkansas.
So yes, to answer your question, Very threatening to a lot of people because it threatens the foundation of their belief system.
And that's tough.
So you've got Johnny Depp, Peter Jackson, a bunch of folks get behind Damien because they see the documentary, to your point, they otherwise would not have known about it, although there are many Damien's probably in prison right now.
And there's no DNA of it is thinking you.
So they start to get behind you and start to lobby.
And in the middle of all the story, you start moving from being an advocate for reevaluating this to falling in love with them.
Yeah, that wasn't really...
In my long-range plan.
Were you a lawyer?
I was a landscape architect.
So how would a landscape architect be able to get someone out of prison?
With a lot of help from people who knew what they were doing.
But what happened was when I went to Arkansas in 1998, he had a pro bono attorney, which meant...
I mean, I love pro bono attorneys, but they don't have a lot of time to work on the case.
So I realized what we needed to do was raise funds to hire attorneys and investigators and all of the expertise that we were going to need.
But I had no idea what I was doing.
Slowly, people would come on board.
And actually, Fran Walsh and Peter Jackson, their knowledge was unbelievable.
They're in the middle of making King Kong, for heaven's sakes.
I'm getting 20 emails a day from Fran Walsh.
Go see this forensic pathologist.
Call this person.
Drive up to this courthouse in Missouri and look through there, which is what I was doing.
They would give so much direction in why they know about this stuff.
No idea.
But they were great.
And then we eventually got some really amazing attorneys and investigators, forensic scientists.
We just built a huge team.
But it cost, I mean, it was very expensive.
But back to the love part.
Oh, right.
Getting a man off death row is easy.
Getting happily married, now we're talking about a child.
That's real magic, yeah.
So, I mean, literally, you call your, hey, mom, mom, I'm getting married.
Did you manifest her while you're sitting in jail?
Somebody did.
It was, we started, I wrote to him after I saw the film.
I wanted, all I knew was I wanted to help in some way.
I didn't know.
I felt a very, I felt a connection to him just because of, I understood, like I said, because of the community.
So I wrote to him and asked what I could do to help.
Maybe send books.
I mean, I was here in Manhattan.
He was in Arkansas.
He wrote back.
We started writing.
And his letters were incredible.
I mean, you hear him speak.
His letters were just so thoughtful and beautifully written.
And before you know it, we're writing all the time, every day.
And then he starts calling me.
And, you know, within not too long, I realized there's something very, very special here.
And at the same time, there was...
A great deal of fear for me.
I mean, it's...
But it's almost like I didn't have time for the fear.
It just...
I felt like I just got into this river and started going and things just started happening.
And before you knew it, and I never looked back.
And yes, I did.
I fell in love with them.
We fell in love with each other.
And it was intense.
And it was...
There's something about, of course, the situation that just made it even more emotional because of what was at stake.
But we're both very, I think, intense people.
So no matter what was going to happen, it was going to hit us hard.
And it did.
More questions after the break.
you So as you're going through this, trying to get him off, you get married while he's still in prison.
Damien, you, meanwhile, the worst thing possible was to give someone hope and then take it away from them again.
Yes.
So as you described earlier, it's sort of a challenge.
Anyway, what was your relationship like with the other inmates?
And I know there's a story, if you don't mind sharing with everybody, about a pecan pie.
Yeah.
I mean, you don't develop friends in prison the way people out here think of the word.
In prison, the best you're going to hope for is that you find someone that you have this agreement and that you can count on where you know that no matter what, I'm going to watch your back and you're going to watch mine.
And I was fortunate enough to develop friends like that through the years that I was in prison.
But it's also very difficult.
When I first got to prison, for probably the first three years that I was there, I kept waiting for some person to walk through the door that I could actually have a conversation with.
Like a normal conversation.
I'm not talking about magic or religion or anything else.
Just like a normal conversation.
And it did not happen.
And then finally, after about three years, it hit me.
It's not going to happen because normal people don't kill people.
Your average IQ of people on death row is about 85. And that's average.
You've got a lot that are below that.
The US military won't take people in less than 82. Yes.
Because it's too dangerous to train them.
Yes.
And you would have people that, like the example that you just gave, the guy with the pecan pie, this is a man that whenever they get ready to execute him, he had shot himself and effectively given himself a lobotomy.
Shot himself in the head but survived.
They still take him to trial, sentence him to death.
When it comes time to execute him, they ask him what he wants for his last meal.
He says pecan pie.
He eats half of the pie.
Whenever they come to get him to execute him, he wraps the other half of the pie up and says he's going to save that until afterwards.
He cannot even grasp the fact that these people are about to kill him.
Oh my goodness.
So you get through this and there's that moment when you find that he's actually getting out.
I mean, how does that hit you?
Well, he said something before which was exactly the same for me.
I just went into shock because the conditions of his release were an offered plea and They had all of these—and so what the state had asked of us was we couldn't tell anyone he was getting out.
So in order to—I had no way to prepare.
We had no place to live.
I didn't know where we were going to live.
I didn't—you know, we had no money because everything I had had gone into the case.
So, I mean, it's just this sort of free-falling suddenly and— Trying to prepare for this release and then it ended up getting delayed.
We thought it was three days and it ended up being seven days or nine days.
I can't remember.
Every minute matters then.
It does.
And just trying to figure out how we were going to live in this.
And it did feel like a bomb just went off because I had to just leave.
We had to just leave Arkansas.
And thankfully, Fran Walsh and Peter Jackson gave us a place to live here in the city for a year.
So we had a place to live and...
Slowly, you know, things started falling into place, but I was faced with the knowledge that I didn't know how to take care of him.
I mean, we're talking about someone who's extremely in deep trauma.
Fragile.
I don't know what to do.
I mean, to this day, I look back on it, and it's heartbreaking to me because...
He suffered.
And I didn't know how to take care of him.
Did you find someone who could help you?
We were thrown into this media circus.
And so we were, for two years, he had a book on the New York Times bestseller list.
We had a film that came out at Sundance and then went into, you know, major distribution.
So for two years we're touring.
And on planes.
And he's literally had two nervous breakdowns that we didn't have him hospitalized.
He didn't want to be...
I didn't know what I was doing, basically.
So, I'm curious.
My idea of magic is always a way of...
is seen as a way of changing the natural...
Plane.
So, manipulating reality, for lack of a better way of describing it.
How did you use magic to deal with your psyche when you're having these nervous breakdowns?
Well, a lot of it, I think what you're describing is the aspect of magic that most people are familiar with.
That's the aspect that people think of when they think of magic.
And that could be from anything from, you know, like old stories of wizards doing this or that all the way up until modern times with stuff like...
The secret or the law of attraction, things of that nature.
So that's the stuff that people are becoming more familiar with now and realizing that, yes, we can have an effect on ourselves and to some extent on our environment and everything else due to this.
But that is like a side effect of magic.
And by side effect, I'll give you one example of what made me – like Laurie said a while ago, I used to sit in meditation.
When I was on death row, I actually received ordination in the Renzi tradition of Japanese Buddhism, which was what used to train the samurai in ancient Japan.
I had a Zen master that would come from Japan to the prison to teach me.
I sat Zazen for probably three to four hours a day.
Sitting Zazen is cross-legged?
Usually, if you're doing the traditional Japanese style, you're sitting almost on your knees.
Instead of cross-legged, you're sitting what they call Siza position.
But I did that for hours a day.
And...
Trying to experience some of the things that I had read you were supposed to experience with this kind of meditation, you know, like being more in the present moment, feeling less stress and anxiety, or feeling less anger and resentment at your situation, circumstances, and I felt like I never was really getting that.
So at a certain point, I realized that, okay, I'm going to stop doing this and I'm going to go back to the Western method of obtaining these same results.
Now, I did not, at the time, I thought magic was exactly what you just said.
I didn't realize there was an higher aspect to it.
I thought it was about changing your reality.
What happened one day is Lori came to see me and I sat on the bed and And reached over to put my shoes on and it was like a bomb went off inside my head.
I realized for the first time in my entire existence, I was actually in the present moment.
Something that I had not experienced with years of Zazen practice.
Of course, you know, the second you realize that, it's shattered and you're right back to conceptual thinking, things like that.
But I saw for the first time what was possible.
You know, I saw that I wasn't even trying to experience that.
I was just doing the regular practices of magic and that happened as a side effect.
It felt to me, you know, to someone else it might sound like...
A small, insignificant thing, but to me, it was absolutely life-changing.
I realized that doing these practices has a tremendous effect on our psyche and on our consciousness.
Give us one practice, just one concrete thing for the listener, because I want them to actually get the book, and you'll get some insights and some motivation from that.
But just an example of what you do right now, even.
Well, the main thing that I focus on, and still to this day, just because of what was done to me from people who sort of had that axe to grind against magic and didn't understand what it is, you hear the word pentagram and people automatically freak out.
They think that's something dark or satanic or whatever.
It was one of the very first symbols of divinity in the world.
There is nothing remotely dark or anything else about it.
The main practice that I do now and I think that had the biggest effect on me is what in magic we call the lesser banishing ritual of the pentagram.
The lesser banishing ritual of the pentagram.
Exactly.
When you would first go to a magical order, a lodge, whatever, and you would say, I want to learn magic.
And they would say, well, that's great.
Here, take this.
Go do this for a year and then come back and talk to us if you still want to learn more.
Most people aren't going to do it for a year.
You know, most people think that magic is like a shortcut to money and sex or whatever the hell it is they're wanting to manifest.
If you do this practice, this is the thing, you'll have some people say, I don't believe in magic.
I always think that that's not really what they mean.
What they mean is they have never tried it for any extended period of time because if you do this, it will have a certain effect on you.
But what do you do?
You have the pentagram in front of you.
Do you meditate like a mandala?
No.
No.
You use the same energy that people are using in other practices like Reiki, Qigong, Tai Chi.
You are using an energy that we have a name for in every single culture in the world except ours.
You know, like the Chinese call it Qi.
Right.
Japanese.
You take that energy.
You use that to push energy out of your surroundings.
So you're creating a sterile environment.
You're pushing all energy out of your surroundings.
Now the reason that I did that, I didn't realize that that was going to have an effect on my psyche.
The reason I was doing it in prison is because I knew energy is contagious.
You know, like for example, if you hang around people who complain all the time, eventually you're going to find yourself starting to complain.
Well, I was in an environment with people who had, you know, done things like taken hatchets to old ladies for their social security checks, or people who had molested children, people who had done every vile, foul thing that you can imagine.
I did not want to interact with that energy.
So for me, I was focusing on this practice as a way of sort of purifying myself.
Think of it as almost like saging.
That is the main practice that I do.
And what it does that I realize in hindsight, looking back, think of it, and I'll keep this short.
Think of it like a glass of water.
If you just leave a glass of water sitting somewhere, don't do anything to it.
Eventually, it's going to stagnate.
It's going to get a film on top of it.
It's going to corrode and get disgusting.
Well, if you take that glass of water, turn the faucet on in the sink, and hold that glass under it, and just let it overflow and overflow and overflow, eventually you are going to end up with a clean glass of water again.
This is what you're doing to your energetic anatomy, to your psyche, and to your consciousness when you're doing the lesser banishing ritual of the pentagram.
You're drawing in, after you push the energy out of an area, nature abhors a vacuum.
So you want to do something that's going to bring fresh, clean energy into that area so that the foul stuff doesn't just come back in whenever the barriers start to break down.
You do this in the form of invoking the easiest way for us, and I can never say this word, whenever you give something a human form, anthropomorphification, we do that in the form of archangels in magic.
So you're working with particular archangels that you're drawing on the energy of to replace the stagnant energy that you're pushing out.
You're flushing yourself out like that glass of water.
Eventually what happens is it flushes you out to the deepest levels of your consciousness and you experience the disintegration of what we think of as ego, of self.
You realize there is no self.
You know, it's almost like it's just the energetic equivalent of a blood clot.
If that doesn't get you psyched up to read more about Damien, I don't know what will.
Please pick up the brand of it.
It's called High Magic, M-A-G-I-C-K, High Magic, A Guide to the Spiritual Practices that Saved My Life on Death Row.
I am continually impressed by the sage insights you've gained about life.
Laura, you have very good taste in men.
He has better taste in women.
You have better taste in women, I was going to say.
