ALAN CLEMENTS: Author, former Buddhist monk, activist
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Okay, we are live.
My guest just stepped aside now.
All right, well, whatever.
So, hi, everyone.
I'm Carrie Cassidy from Project Camelot.
I'm very happy to be here today.
I have Alan Clements with me, and he is, well, I think something of a prolific author, very interesting man, former Buddhist monk.
And activist and got very involved in Burma with the famous, I'm not sure exactly how you say her name, Suu Kyi.
Suu Kyi is a short, Aung San Suu Kyi.
Yes.
the wonderful, I must say, activist and who has been in prison for a ridiculous amount of time for no reason.
And so...
Very nice to have you here.
I know you interviewed me about a week or two ago, and it was so fascinating, your questions and your kind of consciousness, that I thought we would have a nice time talking and my audience would love to meet you.
So here we are.
And why don't you give yourself more of an introduction?
And please do explain why you're no longer, it says former.
A Buddhist monk.
And I'd like to know, how does one become a former Buddhist monk?
From my heart to yours, Carrie, thank you for the grace to be on your program, your show.
Of course, I was very honored to interview you.
My colleague and co-producer of our book, Crystal Dien, knew about you and introduced me to you, and you now have A very intimate place in our book, Authoritarianism, Patriarchy, and the Role of the Divine Feminine in Contemporary Society, which will publish World Dharma Publications in the Fall or Winter.
Which is going to hopefully have a shorter title at the time.
I talked to her about that already.
We wanted to make sure that the title told the story, I'm kind of at two with that on good days.
Really don't like it at all on bad days.
My background, you know, I was a young man.
I grew up in the East Coast, in brief, in a military family.
Both parents were veterans of World War II.
I went to the University of Virginia.
I was an athlete.
It was my way of avoiding the draft to go to kill in Vietnam.
I hated the game, football, baseball, basketball, but I was good at it.
And I eventually dropped out of the University of Virginia when I knew that I would no longer be drafted to go kill in Vietnam against something that was utterly grotesque to my conscience and dignity.
In a nutshell, I got intimately involved in the intersection of psychedelics, poetry, intimacy, sexuality, music, theater, dance.
A lot of us in the late 60s, early 70s were just moved by a radical new exploration called human consciousness.
And so after about 100, 200 psychedelic trips by the time I was 21, My partner and I both look at each other and say, well, what's next?
So we went to India to ask questions, not so much to find answers.
And in that pursuit, Kerry, you cannot help but immerse yourself in Eastern religions and philosophies.
Just simply being in the context of India in itself is a trans-religious spiritual experience.
Affluence and antiquity and heartfulness.
But the point being, I went to India and eventually ended up in Buddhagaya with a place that it said the Buddha was enlightened.
And I became acquainted through various people with some of the fundamental teachings of the Buddha.
And it really appealed to me because it was experiential.
Cut to the chase, the last great Buddhist country in the world, as I was told, was Burma.
Myanmar.
5,000 monasteries, a million monks and nuns, virtually untouched with only a one-week visa.
So we went there.
I'd heard about Vipassana meditation and mindfulness meditation.
And so I went to the leading monk in the country, as I was told.
His name was Venerable Mahasi Sayadaw, often He told me directly that it was a dictatorship and people from the outside aren't allowed to stay more than a week.
Well, eventually I brought him to America where he led retreats that I organized in 1978.
because I couldn't be in Burma.
We brought him to America.
And at the end of that one-month trip, I was so moved...
By the meditative experience and the philosophy of the human heart and the intersection and context with people that I asked at the end of that trip in New York, could I ordain with you?
And he said, listen, I told you in Burma we have a dictatorship, but let's give it a go.
I ordained in New York, flew off the next day with him and monks to Rangoon and got a seven-day visa.
On the sixth day, I was granted the three-month extension.
And from that point on, the story is 50 years old.
I was 28 at the time.
I'm 74 now.
And I stayed in and out of the country practicing meditation under these remarkable men and women.
In a monastery, a meditation center, 20 hours a day of meditation, no talking, no food, no intimacy, no food after 12 noon.
And truth be, I just completely loved it.
I had never known that consciousness could be intimately engaged by a moment-to-moment choice called sati, S-A-T-I, or mindfulness, and you could actually enhance.
Both the dimensionality of consciousness, which we talked about in our interview, as well as the radiance in the frequency.
I know that sounds like a cliche, but I've never been more intimately engaged in energy and frequency and dimensionality than through sustained, intensive, mindful presence.
And so I became thoroughly, if there's a word for it, enthralled with that new dimension of living.
In 1984, I was told to leave the country by the dictator, and eventually I disrobed and reluctantly came back to the West, a country I had no real great interest in.
Although being an American and this and that, I rejected it.
I've written so much about this country.
And I ended up leading retreats worldwide.
And eventually in 1988, Burma's...
And the students, along with the people, nearly a million people took to the streets to challenge this dictatorship by the very man that gave me the ability to be a monk in this country.
And that's when my inner dharma...
And that led me to a relationship with many of the revolutionaries in the country, a woman that you mentioned, a very dear friend of mine, tragically, who has been now imprisoned for over 20 years.
The last time now since February 21, in solitary confinement, there is not even proof of life at this point that she is actually alive.
Rumor has it that even in the earthquake, March 28, 2025, known as the Sagain earthquake, 7.7, that her prison cell was actually radically compromised.
21,000 prisoners of conscience, Shia as a state counselor, all the elected democratic leaders, a decapitation of democracy in Burma based on not an unknown phenomena in the world.
Patriarchy embodied in Waitiko, consciousness within the male, the mind, patriarchy, dictatorship.
Authoritarianism.
And he has just gone crazy with a slow-grade genocide of his people.
And so the revolution has taken on a whole new wave in these last five years, and it's brought me to where I am today, which I just finished a more recent book called Conversation with a Dictator, A Challenge to the Authoritarian Assault.
And it's a fictional dialogue with the very man who was the dictator of Burma.
492 pages.
It's meant to be, well, it's an illustrated novel, and it's meant to be a literary feature film where anyone in the world can look into it and have, within an hour and a half, a deep immersion into the psyche, the pathology of dictatorship,
and, and I'll end with this, Which is what I learned from Aung San Suu Kyi and her colleagues, Carrie, was the beauty of the attributes of the Divine Feminine.
And I use that word to speak to reciprocities, mutuality, dialogue over death and destruction, kind consideration rather than vitriol.
Forgiveness over retribution.
She was known and the people of her country were known by the phrase, our struggle for freedom is a revolution of the spirit.
And these attributes that I just mentioned are what she led with rather than the weapon.
And as a result of that, for whatever reason, world leaders, the corporate media, we can go on and on about that.
Threw her under the bus because she so-called didn't take a side in a particular crisis in Burma with the Rohingya crisis, which is not an unusual phenomenon in Burma with a dictatorship that's persecuted every ethnic minority in the country.
The Buddhists being the most persecuted.
And she stood in the middle and said, we cannot stop this conflict by vilification, by war.
And as a result of that, she was seen as complicit with genocide and ethnic cleansing.
As a result, the dictator seized the opportunity, put her in prison, and the world has gone cricket, silent.
And so you have this noble woman who represents the people.
It's not an ideology of a woman being a queen alone.
It's like, I'm called Mother Sue in my country.
Ma Sue is her nickname.
mother of freedom, mother of democracy, mother of the people.
And so it's an archetypal battle of good and evil there.
And that's really what's attracted me post-Monasticism, because it's really taken Burma out of the context of a distant South Asian nation and brought it into kind of a global challenge to...
And Burma represents the archetypal battle.
And essentially, it's a woman who they've crucified as a global witch hunt, as not doing enough for her people.
And so I'm all in with whatever I can do and continue to do.
With drawing attention to, well, the reason I invited you and we spoke was your views on patriarchy, authoritarianism.
How do we decode the human psyche, the genome of being, with this predation to dominate, to kill?
And that's been a real lifelong journey for me.
That's what brought me into the monastery.
What is my role?
What is my role unknowingly in the collusion of denigration of other people?
And so that's really where my heart has been and where it remains is that archetypal battle of love and hatred, generosity and greed, ignorance and wisdom.
And some might call it an existential battle.
Some might call it psychedelic activism.
Some might call it Radical, you know, deception of perception, as I heard David Icke speak the other day.
You know, that you could be so enthralled with your passionate views that it's just yet another belief system.
But the battle here is very real for me.
I've interviewed well over 150, 200 former political prisoners.
From 5 to 21 years, imprisoned, either stuffed, overly stuffed into a prison cell, or in solitary confinement.
And I've asked them openly over a decade of research, how do you manage psychologically and emotionally to survive?
And I've been very sensitive not to trigger, but they've been very open.
We did a book with my colleague Fergus Harlow called Burma's Voices of Freedom, which documented So that's the short beginning to my story.
Okay, so in terms of I know that you are sort of immersed in this or were the culture and you must, I'm curious about your point of view of how past lives, Yeah.
You know, beautiful question.
I am highly resonant to that question because I've thought about it, felt it, explored it over nearly five decades.
In large part, few people know that intimate, experiential, so-called esoteric, The Buddha is fond of being quoted as being saying that rare in this world do you ever meet someone who hasn't
formerly been your brother, your sister, your lover, your father, your uncle.
to follow that instinct.
And I would say that that instinct has led me to an intimacy with people that are complete strangers, that are more familiar to me than often people I've been in love with.
And Burma was that place where we did explore.
We did explore.
They do explore.
They honor by nature that we are not just meeting for the first time in this life.
So, yes, to your question.
Right.
Because it's my experience that, especially when somebody sort of dives headfirst into certain things, which it sounds like you did.
That it's almost like there was no break between, you know, your past life and your current life.
But most people can't see, of course, beyond the obvious, behind the curtain here.
And they don't question, you know, why people behave the way they do in a context that I think even in courtrooms should be incorporated.
Into whether a person is guilty or innocent, and the extenuating circumstances that brought them to whatever place they are, whether they're the murderer or the victim.
So I think in those terms all the time, because it has impacted my life in a huge way, my past life, or what I think is, and, you know, I've had revisitations and, you know, all kinds of stuff having to do with that.
And one of the things that, for me, triggers my past life is travel.
So if you end up going to the places where you had these experiences, if you're at all aware, then you actually start getting immersed in what affected you last time around, so to speak.
And I think then the opportunity is presented to react differently than you did last time.
And that's where it gets interesting, if you will.
And it also gets into where people are triggered and what we call mind control and all of that.
Those are important ingredients in dictatorship of any kind of deciding that you can control other people.
On the external level, and now, of course, it gets into, when I say mind control, of course, that, even advertising, movies, TV, you name it, even everything on the internet is aimed at influencing.
So influencing is actually a very important term, but it's a lot more metaphysical when I say it.
I think of it in those terms.
So did you come at this and then make a transition?
or did it happen to you sort of more externally that you went from being, you know, like you say, a Buddhist monk sort of immersed in the in a certain a meditative life that seems rather secretive in its own way and very self.
Reflective or whatever, then.
You were asked to leave or at the end of your tenure, whatever you're at, however it happened.
So what I'm saying is, did you look upon that as, oh, my God, I'm being kicked out.
What do I do now?
Or did you look at that as actually it was a long time coming, which it sounds like it was.
And then.
Realizing that maybe you wanted to transition into a more activist role in the world after having done this sort of reclusive kind of existence.
I know that's a long-winded question, but I hope you get my question.
What drew me...
What drew me to Burma and to the men and women I met there that I called my spiritual family, my Dhamma family, my Dharma family, was their dedication on the one hand and their support for me in my sovereignty,
my own exploration of the meaning It's a Buddhist Pali word, vumuti, freedom.
Both positive and negative freedom.
The overcoming of interior qualities, greed, anger, delusion, and all the variations.
And the heightening of an engagement with positive, beautiful states of mind.
those two forms of freedom, that I was learning mind control development, they called it MQ, mindful intelligence.
I loved that they brought me back What do you feel?
What do you know by what you feel?
What did you learn by what you know?
And what will you do by what you've learned?
And so it was like this inner incessant dharma therapy to continually Stand with a upright in my own dignity.
And so conscience, freedom, and dignity were very beautifully supported in me by these monks and nuns and Aung San Suu Kyi and former generals in the army.
That's what drew me there.
And I think that, call it a past life association with people, but I think more of it, it's with values and principles that may have been embodied in those people, and equally people that could be adversarial.
I don't have a thing with someone who, I've learned a lot about self-responsibility a lot of my years in Burma.
Phrase within the activist revolutionary world, non-demonization, non-vilification.
What am I seeing, feeling, knowing, discerning, learning?
Take it higher.
In other words, take it off other, bring it into yourself.
So these psychological, dharma, therapeutic, call them, you know, just prompts, cognitive interior prompts to bring you back to yourself.
Yeah.
I just fell in love with a culture that had such a high regard for mindful intelligence, emotional intelligence, revolutionary intelligence, and, you know, the South African concept, which is very intimate within Burmese psychology, is called Ubuntu.
I am who I am through you.
My freedom and your dignity are inseparable.
And Burma has the concept of a bodhisattva, not a person, but I cannot be who I am without being in context with other.
Burma taught me how to do that in a way that respects myself and respects you simultaneously.
So I don't know what to say what drew me to that, but it continues.
That wasn't the question.
Okay.
I appreciate everything you just said, which is great context, but...
And what my question is, is, did you have a premonition that it was coming?
Was it a long time coming?
And when you left, did you know you were going into another kind of activism?
which it seems you did.
Maybe I have a misunderstanding of that, but however you would So you had a dramatic parting where you had to actually go in a different direction.
And I just wondered, what was your consciousness like about that?
Well, I've been told to leave the country several times during my three years and ten months as a monk.
By the dictator that you'd give us 24 hours, you've got to leave.
And eventually I came back through Bangladesh and came in and they said, no, you've got to leave.
You can't be here.
And so I disrobed at that point with a lot of tears in my eyes, reluctantly.
And I went to Thailand, to the south, and I went back to America.
And I did not feel like I belonged where I was.
There was a radical departure from intimacy, from continuity, from family, and I had to reorient to a culture that I rejected.
I had no idea what I would do except I was invited to begin to mimic the retreat experience in Burma in the West.
And we were some of the first 10 day retreats.
It was very popular and I found myself immersed in a Burma monastic setting in Los Angeles, Boston.
But a lot of Westerners who treated me as a kind of...
I didn't charge.
and they were open to donations, but I became quickly, to be very transparent, I've written about it.
I became unknowingly egoic, compromised.
Oh, really?
Yes, I became slightly, if not more than slightly, taken in by the privilege and the power and the position of being eloquent, large numbers, considering, and...
And all of a sudden, I'm only 34 years old, and I'm feeling like, oh my God, these people are amazing.
I can kind of do what I want to do.
I'm invited to conferences, and next thing you know, I am acting out in a way that felt like I was in college.
Not that it was wrong.
It was always consensual, but it was like I was going from city to country to continent teaching retreats, and there would be intimate relationships in primarily different places.
All very beautiful.
A lot of casually compelling MDMA use, LSD use.
Not that there's anything wrong with that.
Next thing I know, I started to...
Not that it was duplicitous.
It's just like, Alan, you've got to reboot the integrity of your living experience and basically share with people that this type of dharma cannot be integrated.
I think that's one of the best kept secrets of meditative life in the world is that it's not an integrated experience.
It doesn't really integrate.
It takes you out of the world the deeper you go.
And that's been my experience.
And so I eventually got deeply immersed in MDMA psychotherapy for five years.
I had to really look at what, you know, Jung's classic archetypes and shadow.
The authenticity of what I was doing, the integrity of why I was doing it.
And eventually in 1990, I don't want to, quote, lead and teach retreats.
I want to be the adventurer exploring my own expression of life.
And so that's when it coincided with, oh my God, there's a revolution in Burma.
Friends and family are wanting to get out, which we got out some of them.
Some are being killed or imprisoned.
And I just left my home in Marin County, just north of San Francisco, as you know, from being in L.A., and went in underground to Burma.
With the objective of what?
Trying to rescue your friends or do what?
I think it goes back to what you were saying.
I was unmistakably drawn to the fire, unexplainably.
And I had to see for myself what's going on with the people, because the country was closed to the outside.
Were teachers being compromised?
Were friends being raped?
And so I went in and I went, oh my God, people are paranoid about me.
And then eventually I had to flee the country, then went in underground for a couple of months to another angle.
And I met with the elected officials that were fleeing the country.
And I happened to be the first Westerner in that environment in northern Burma, deep in the jungles.
I wrote about it in my first book called Burma, The Next Killing Fields.
It came out in 1990.
His Holiness the Dalai Lama did a beautiful forward to that book.
And it was not intentional to be a writer or a journalist or an activist.
I just had to see for myself my family.
And that shattered my reality to see that, Carrie.
I'd never seen...
I've never been in jungle combat.
I've never known refugee camps where people are starving and dying.
I've never seen beheadings.
I'd never seen any of that stuff.
And it just...
I became traumatized in a very accentuated expression of myself.
More emboldened to override the trauma of that level of closeness.
Nor would I even dare speak about it because I had a passport to leave any second.
And I met people there that I was monks with that could not leave, that had to take up arms to fucking kill their own people.
And it was like an archetypal existential challenge for me to really question the fidelity to nonviolence, to peace, to compassion.
They were all very relative terms based upon a very comfortable middle to upper middle class Western lifestyle.
And so the integration of meditation into San Francisco out.
It's like, hey, man, just make love.
And when it's consensual, ask for mindful presence.
And, you know, it's a mutual intimacy.
But no, this is war.
This is prison.
This is firefights.
These are being strapped by Russian jets.
And these people are basically saying, man, it's a very different context than it was in the monastery, right?
In a very different context, white boy.
From your life in California, leading your popular retreats, white boy.
I'm exaggerating.
Sure.
But I went, oh my God, what the hell do I know?
And I began to be a bit of a student.
You know, I had one friend who heard me judging him psychically in the jungle, deep in this triple canopy, firefight-oriented jungle.
He was a monk.
And he just twisted around on a patrol one day and he threw his AK-47 in my chest and said, you know, what are you judging us for?
I mean, what if it was your wife, your sister, your brother that were being killed and raped?
Alan, what would you do?
You got your damn passport.
You could leave any second.
I wrote about this in my book, Bermuda the Next Killing Fields.
And he said, have you ever shot it?
Pick it up, shoot.
I said, hey, hey, hey, I'm a non-combatant.
Well, then shut the fuck up.
We're protecting you.
Drop into some sacred reciprocity, my language out here.
And that was what, whoa, I didn't get that kind of teaching in the monastery, but I eventually did when I went back in and did my book with Aung San Suu Kyi in 95. And I heard from them, what is it like to be mindful when you're being raped?
What is it like to be mindful when you're having your fucking finger cut off?
What is it like to have all your money and your house taken from you and you have nothing?
Aung San Suu Kyi's cousin lived up the street.
He had 20 families in his house, all of whom, because they came out on weekends to listen to her and her colleagues talk, Carrie, about freedom, compassion.
And democracy.
That was the price they paid for their moral courage.
And I went, sign me up.
This is a teaching I never dreamt that I would get.
So I don't know how that answers your question, but I did not acquaint myself very easily or very well in Western culture.
And the truth be, I don't even today.
I'm a recluse.
I'm a misanthrope.
Obsess about creative art.
I write my books.
I do my films.
And every now and again, someone comes in close who's really rad, who speaks beautifully and artistically and sovereign.
And I get, okay, cool, groovy.
But I'm not into the teaching of this stuff.
It's like messy.
And when you put all the other things that are going on in the world today, you know, In this latest book I did, The Conversation with the Dictator, it's not just about Burma's dictatorship.
It's about really the mindset of authoritarianism worldwide and patriarchy.
I take the battle to the biggest battle.
But, you know, I'm not really that good with the so-called idea of integrating, whatever that might mean or what's being...
Well, let me just wonder if you might correct that slightly, because you seem like you integrated into Burmese culture to a large degree, or at least that a certain part of the culture, being a monk and so on.
And then you had to also make a transition into some kind of acclimate.
to the jungle, you know, combat life, right, to protecting...
You were presented with a real-life dilemma of, on the one hand, sort of philosophy and what you thought might be integration of a kind with a certain culture and philosophy.
And then the reality of the same culture from a different, absolutely opposing point of view or, you know, basically saying now, how do you deal with this?
And I'm curious, so did you become a combatant or did you remain an observer, you know?
Because you had to make a decision there.
And I'm just going to bring up a certain book.
So the Bhagavad Gita is one of my favorite books.
And I'm assuming you know it, right?
I do know it, yeah.
Okay, so in that book, it's very interesting because that dilemma is talked about, you know, between Arjuna and Krishna and in the context of the book.
I'm wondering, because when you're presented, a lot of people in our culture talk a lot, have opinions about a lot of things, but they haven't actually been there, done that.
They haven't.
and maybe they never will in this life okay so it's just interesting when you I mean, you couldn't just sit down and start meditating and not do anything or go anywhere in the jungle.
I'm assuming.
You know, it's kind of a very active situation.
You've got combatants, you know, that you're part of and all of that.
So you didn't pick up the rifle, I'm guessing, but can you tell us at least a snippet of your dilemma there and how did you deal with that?
Well, I did pick up the rifle.
I did shoot it, but not at a person.
I put it back and I thanked him for the gift of both his honesty and his moral courage.
And it snapped me out of a bit of my My elitist coma.
There were lots of quiet moments.
I don't want to give an overly combatant view of the jungle.
There were lots of times around fire, moments of intimacy and quietude.
There was starvation.
There was disease.
Most of the students I was with were dying of malaria.
So there's a lot of crying, a lot of tears, a lot of intimacy, a lot of holding, a lot of feeding, a lot of wiping people's lips with water.
I eventually, after my books with Aung San Suu Kyi and her colleagues in 95, I was thrown out of the country and banned for 17 years.
But in 96, I was invited to...
To answer your question, invited to write a feature film by a very dear friend of mine whom I'd known for years.
I'm not trying to name drop, but Robert Chardoff, who did all the Rocky movies and the right stuff.
We traveled.
I brought him to Burma, actually, and to India.
He attended one of my retreats.
I married he and his wife.
He's passed away some years back.
But the point was, he liked my writing, he liked my mind, and he liked my story skills.
And he said, I would really like to see you write a film based upon what you wanted to write.
And I said, great, that's awesome.
And I said, I want to write a film on what it means to love in the time of genocide.
And so a very close friend of mine, Marsha Jacobs, was...
As a volunteer, she left her therapy practice here and volunteered as a trauma expert to deal with women who had been gang-raped, which is a whole other beautiful story.
So anyway, she then moved to Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, where I met up with her during the war, the final year of the war.
And I wanted to write the book in the context of genocide, of the film, which I did.
It was never eventually made, but Bob loved it.
It was one of those kind of films where it's like, you know, how do you get the funding for this kind of thing?
But my point is, is that I never...
It's tragic to say this.
It's a kind of the blessed, evil, sacred curse of being in that context among the Croatians, the Bosnians, the Serbians who have fleeing mutually assured destruction everywhere you've looked.
And we go out every night to nightclubs.
It's not like partying and doing MDMA, although we did that every night, but it was like philosophical, life and death, intimate.
All the deepest questions.
My point is, I was, like, way in close to a whole other reality.
And then I eventually went to Sarajevo, which, of course, just a few months after the end of the so-called genocide, we were out with my friend Marcia in Srebrenica, which was the tragic place where 6,000 Muslim boys and men were separated from the women.
The girls were executed within 48 hours by the Serbian paramilitary troops.
It was like the largest genocide in Europe since World War II.
We were there just shortly after.
And you could smell the mass graves.
You could smell putrefying human flesh.
And I remember one time, I wrote about it in my book, Instinct for Freedom, is that how easy it would be for me, Kerry, To be the person that I am vilifying and judging.
And it's like, that's when I dropped religion.
It's like, Alan, you are not safe from being wound up in your nationalistic, ideological, fascistic, authoritarian DNA somewhere down deep inside.
You could become the Nazi.
You could become the veteran of the Warsaw Ghetto who fought against the Nazi.
You've got to really rethink exactly right and wrong here.
And that in 1996 was a major turning point for me, being in that war, post-war, to go into what was the last vestige of my creative life and the thing that I had repressed the most, which was improvisational theater.
That became the only way that I could speak and share the truths that I knew in a Western culture.
So I did a show called Spiritually Incorrect for six years and traveled the world on multiple stages, doing my little best I could to bring these stories to life and to, you know, the thing I love about America is that it's freedom of thought, freedom of expression, freedom of conscience as long as we protect it.
So war zones have been equal, if not even more, provocative as learning environments for me in my present life.
Okay.
So in that context, you sort of faced your own monster side or dark side.
And like I...
So that dilemma.
Now, I know this might be a little, I don't know, off-putting to you, and I don't know who's going to listen or care, but I'm going to ask the question anyway, and then we'll see where it takes us, okay?
So don't.
I feel you're locked into a certain kind of answer.
I don't think you would, but I'm just going to preface this with that.
So let's bring all of that into everyday America today because we're in a very strange place in America, I believe.
And we're actually on the verge of many things.
I know because I have secret witnesses that give me intelligence.
Information that I have to evaluate.
And so we haven't really talked about this much, but you don't seem to have gotten killed in the course of being in war zones, etc.
So there's a certain psychic intuitive quality.
There's also the sense of protection that you may or may not have or feel you have.
And so I'm wondering, where is that?
Where's all that for you right now in everyday America?
Because I'm assuming you live in America right now, right?
No.
Oh, you don't?
Where do you live?
I mean, are you at liberty to say where you live?
No.
No, you can't say?
Okay.
But you're not in America.
But okay, so from my perspective, and because my audience is actually worldwide, but a lot of the eyes of the world are looking at America right now.
Because of the things and the changes that Trump is making, what are called the White Hats that I'm very familiar with are making.
And I don't know how much of my stuff you ever looked at or any of that stuff, but I have also a substack where I write articles where I'm actually openly critical of things that Trump and the White Hats may be doing or have been doing for the last, I don't know, six years or so.
And then also, And to the extent that they won't even let, at least so far, whistleblowers lately for the past year talk to me, okay?
Which actually interferes with my trajectory and what I've been doing for the last 20, okay?
Such that I made this transition to start working in movies as well to give my creative side an outlet in the face of what is in essence censorship on me, me in particular.
So what I'm asking you is when you look at America and you look at the political and you don't have to reveal your politics, you know, because I understand people get all upset all over all that.
But, you know.
You're now, I'm in a war zone in America.
That's the way I see it, okay?
And I know a lot about what I have to, I'm talking about the question, okay, that I'm asking you.
But I don't know what you know.
You know what I mean?
Because you focused on these other countries.
You put yourself exposed in these various ways.
You are a political activist in those countries.
But what are you, if you look at America?
From what point of view?
Are you outside America because you don't agree with some of the things going on?
Or where are you at?
Because we are also, I'll just say one more thing, on the verge of an AI revolution.
You could even say an AI clone android revolution in the world, but most people aren't aware of it.
But it is bubbling to the surface very quickly.
Along with what we call some kind of loose disclosure of the UAP UFO thing.
So where do you fall in that world?
Are you paying any attention to it?
Does it affect your daily life?
You know, and so on.
So I know it's, again, a long question, but I hope I kind of went on the parameters to give you enough freedom to answer it in whatever way you see fit.
I appreciate that question deeply.
I love America.
I love what it's given me, what it gives me.
I love that I have an American passport.
I love that my parents were veterans of a war that they stood up for.
I could not be who I am without what I've been gifted.
By our founding fathers, by all the various wars and battles, all the convulsions of our culture, the gift that I went on scholarship to the University of Virginia to be acquainted with President Thomas Jefferson, his wisdom and his hypocrisy.
I was able to speak my mind.
I was able to do LSD.
I was able to do MDMA, MDMA therapy, psychedelic therapy, ketamine therapy.
I've been able to do a lot of things because I'm an American.
And I participated in the American experiment.
I'm a believer that America is still being born.
And I'm a participant in that birth process, a rebirth process.
I love what I see and feel in America.
And yes, we are able at times to speak our mind without being censored or deplatformed.
I spoke because I respected Robert Kennedy Jr.'s book.
The real Anthony Fauci during the pandemic and YouTube blocked me for a year and a half.
You know, thank you very much, YouTube.
Really appreciate the wisdom of your story, you know?
And I've lived briefly under totalitarian regimes.
I've had friends disappeared, tortured, killed, murdered.
It's nasty.
And so my way of saying I'm a participant in the American experiment.
It's almost trans-political at this point.
It's like human values are more important than political parties.
Like, for example, just a couple of days ago, about a week ago, I wrote an open letter that was published by the Democratic Voice of Burma in Norway, a letter to President Trump and to the world leaders.
Essentially, as he was quoted in the New York Times as saying, Putin was absolutely crazy for doing what he did.
By attacking Ukraine prior to this last attack.
And Zelensky went bonkers with his unthinkably bold, audacious, multiple drone attack in the last couple of days.
Now, of course, Putin's back at it with his nationwide obliteration of Ukraine.
And I asked Mr. Trump, politely and respectfully, it's posted live, it's, you know, there are alternatives.
Then peace through strength and violence.
Selective moral outrage doesn't cut it for me, sir.
Why do you allow President, Prime Minister Netanyahu to bomb Gaza with our munitions and you condemn someone else for using them?
Isn't it time in the world, sir, where you call for peace through dialogue?
Reconciliation, old-fashioned concepts, call for the end of violence, call for the end of destruction.
And I said, that's where I stand with President Trump and with his administration.
And I admire so many things about what they're doing.
At the same time, my moral conscience contracts thinking about The horror of the children in Gaza.
Yes, the trauma of the people of Israel having been viciously attacked on October 7th and that wave of hell.
I am at two with violence and that's why I'm doing the book with Crystal, Patriarchy, Authoritarianism and the Divine Feminine.
Contemporary society.
That's why I did a conversation with a dictator.
I want to probe and encourage, as an American, worldwide, the end of Murder Incorporated.
And I know it's ideological, but I don't know if that answers your question, but yes.
I love America.
I love what we stand for.
And I love that we have the ability to be able to say what we think.
And it's really sad for me to see so many good people, so many radically woke people, no offense, that basically don't ask, like, why do you think that way, Alan?
Rather than just simply, oh, you, you, in any way like that fucking scum.
Like radical, acute Trump derangement syndrome.
Now I was, bear with me, I was highly trained on acute Aung San Suu Kyi derangement syndrome way back in 2015, 16 and 17. I lost 90% of my donor base having done a book with her and having met all of her colleagues and supported her in my own with my colleague Fergus Arlo.
No accolade, but we're forensic journalists.
We don't take sides.
We look into the information.
I was there.
The corporate media, like they're doing a lot of the times, pro-vax, this and that, they're liars.
Whatever the reasons are, you're being supported by big pharma, big lies, big gross, whatever it is that you're being driven by.
But it's welcome to America, right?
But it's like welcome to the other voice of freedom and truth.
And so my point is, is like, Aung San Suu Kyi really took it, she was a global witch hunt.
Okay, but I want to sort of steer you in a little bit different direction.
Okay, so in a sense, you seem to have done a study, like you did this book, Conversation with a Dictator, striving to understand, I guess, the mindset that would do all these horrible things that would promote war and start wars even and get involved in that, in killing.
And yet, at the same time, you've immersed yourself in the killing fields, if you want to say that.
And then, you know, but you've come out unscathed, at least relatively unscathed.
Not really.
Not really?
Okay.
Well, we can talk about that, but let me finish my question.
So the thing is that...
And most of their knowledge goes way beyond the general public.
But we do start with the premise that there is a new world order and that it is genocidal.
And that it has plans to eliminate a good part of the populations of the planet, actually.
And it's not shy about telling you that in so many different ways, telegraphing that, okay?
Advertising that, and then actually carrying out their plans, okay?
So COVID was one such plan.
It wasn't the whole plan.
There was much more to COVID that most people don't seem to know, which I know, my whistleblowers know.
So on.
But the bottom line being, have you looked at that?
So you dealt with Suu Kyi.
Okay.
You dealt with her and her dilemma and her stance, like coming from a person in government.
She was kind of a person in the democratic side of government for a time, I think.
Not sure how you would characterize that, but you know what I'm saying?
In other words, when you're looking at these monumental sort of, you know, people like Trump, you wrote a letter to Trump.
So you're dealing with people in power, so-called power, and in the world stage.
And the Dalai Lama is actually one such person as well.
And so when you're dealing with that in this world today with your sort of mindset, Are you thinking about that?
Are you actually, you know, trying to negotiate yourself around that?
Because, okay, because I'm targeted by those people.
So I have to, I had to learn about the enemy.
And thank God I decided to learn about the enemy when I was 12 years old.
But that probably came from a prior life as well.
So that's what I'm asking you.
I'm asking you sort of on a larger scale.
You've gotten into the details of it.
You've gotten into the killing fields, as I said.
But have you looked at the larger global and even beyond Earth playing field that we're all a part of here?
And many people deny all the other aspects.
You know, Buddhism, one of its attractive qualities for me was in the concept of samsara, it's called.
You may know the tongue.
It's the playing field of infinity plus some.
And it's defined by certain characteristics, change, emptiness of self-permanence, and because of inability to control outside of a small little spectrum, and even that's questionable, you're subject to the concept of dukkha, or intrinsic suffering.
Anything that's even changing that you can't control, next thing you know, your happiness is replaced by circumstances where you're very unhappy.
And so those three characteristics of defining samsara.
I was drawn to Buddhism because of that, and they also played with a very deep connection.
And I went to the University of Virginia with Dr. Ian Stevenson in the paranormal labs there later on studying that.
So also you cannot be a Buddhist monk or nun and not have an appreciation for multidimensionality and deities.
The samsara issue, Carrie, is that it's an unwinnable war within the context of samsara, other than by what they call bhavana, the beautification of evil, by non-participation and taking it higher.
You can't defeat the enemy ultimately unless you overcome the forces of greed, anger, and delusion in yourself.
I would agree.
My question is, how are you dealing with it?
How did you deal with it up to now?
And if you had consciousness of this, you know, and if you have consciousness of it in this moment right here and now, how are you dealing with it?
You know, you may have looked on my website, but, you know, four years ago, I was diagnosed with a terminal heart disease.
Oh, I'm sorry.
I forgot.
Yeah.
It was good news, actually.
It really took me to a whole other killing field, like namely my own life.
And I've had to see that a lot of the information that was told to me by the most accredited people, I love them, is a type of medical propaganda pornography.
And I went, whoa!
And so by way of saying, I fought the deepest existential battle of my life.
I was prescribed ketamine, which I think is a very, very compelling substance to help illuminate the neuroplasticistic elements of your own psyche and your own inner being.
On and on and on.
I went into deep healing.
Here I am, defying God, as they tell me from the best doctors and the best surgeons on the West Coast.
What the hell?
How have you done this?
It's like, what's going on?
And I'm not saying I did a Joe Dispenza, but it's like I beat...
So the context isn't winning the war because I'm winning the war of my own complicity and collusion with anxiety and stress and unprocessed trauma and wounding.
And it's like, oh, poor me.
And the hardest thing about dying or being given a diagnosis, and I was in hospice for two years and I was a graduate.
You know, I outlived it.
And it's like the friends, though, that love you, that's the hardest thing.
It's seeing them suffer.
And so I withdrew more and more and more into my own radiance.
And I've kind of stayed there.
And my, you know, the most vulnerable part of this battle is, can I trust that I'm going to be alive next week?
I want to make plans with my daughter to go to Bali.
She's 18 now.
And as a place in me, the medical industrial complex told you, You should have been dead four years ago, and it's like, it's not going to get any better.
Every day closer now is one day closer to the closer.
It's not like you heal it, they tell you.
You've just beaten the odds, Mr. Denial.
And I go like, whoa, man, you've got great comedy, great satire here.
So my question, my answer to myself is, do what you can do.
To do the very best you can on earth.
People ask me, why do you do films and books?
And for like little seeds in the future, Carrie, for the unborn, for the children.
You know, I got turned on to music like you did.
When I heard Jimi Hendrix for the first time, I went, my life is over.
My life has begun.
Thank you very much, Jimi.
It vitalized something in me that I knew that was deeper than what I was being denied.
The same thing all the way along the way, including the Buddha's teachings.
And deeper than that, revolution.
And all the various attributes from ketamine-assisted personal cell therapy to psychedelic low-dose micro-cell therapy to not wearing shoes and walking only in nature for two years.
All these things that are available to us, if we so choose to really come home, I want to say fight the only battle there is, but to really study consciousness and who you are inside.
And it's precious.
Life is obviously so precious.
It's almost cliché to say that.
But what will you do?
People ask me, what has meditation taught you?
Well, first you learn to watch your breath.
Then you realize, now that you're watching it after 10 years, that it could disappear any second.
And then you realize, after another five years, now what?
What are you going to do with the fullness of your breath?
You get up off your damn cushion and...
What's your dream?
And so my life is not about fighting war.
It's about, if I were to deny myself one thing that I feel I want more of, I would say that it's love, intimacy, sexuality, sensuality, and dreaming.
I don't want to be comfortable with the dreams that I have.
I want to dream anew.
I'm so carefully able to articulate my dreams.
But I don't want to be in the paradigms of Jung, Freud, Adler.
I want to be in the white hole of a new dimension where there is no violence and we have a sacred creativity that is outside of this realm of being as we know it.
So that's my most esoteric answer to that question.
Yes, I hear you.
We live in a multidimensional universe.
Though that prism in front of the light, like Sir Isaac Newton did, and you get, oh my God.
We live in a world of color.
You throw that filter across consciousness, and we live in a world of multidimensionality with deities.
You and I, as you know so well, coexist at this very second with other beings, simulated beings, AI beings, organic deities, angels, and demonic energies.
I know that to be factual.
I've done too much work That is like real.
And so I'm gratitude to the few close dear friends that you're able to create a cathedral of intimacy and love with.
Day to day, moment to moment.
And make sure that you just look back on your life and you go, resolve the regrets, update, and illuminate the future with what you want to gift the unborn.
And it's like Jimi Hendrix again.
It's like, whoa, what's the next?
I'm not saying that what I do is that prolific, but what gets me out of bed every day is the gift of giving to the future of my daughter's generation.
Did they choose to have children?
To other dimensions of being?
Thank you.
No, that's very eloquent.
Now, I have a couple of quick questions, and then I guess we're going to try to wrap this up, try to keep things around an hour, hour and a half for people's attention spans.
Now, I see that you wrote a book called A Future to Believe In.
That's on your website.
And I did put your website in the chat.
Just so you know, that people can go over there.
And then I also saw that you wrote a children's book that looks quite lovely, illustrated.
And then there's another book and an interview about sort of accepting fear of death or whatever.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Facing death.
Yes, facing death.
Okay, so, you know, I'm Do you want to say anything about those three?
Are those three recent and such that they're on your website easy to find, or did I just stumble on those?
They're easy to find if you're on my website, but they're out there on online retailers.
You know, in a nutshell, the book...
You know, it was born from something that we've been talking about.
Back in 1975, I did a one-month silent retreat, and I went into an altered, intimate reality where I, at the end of that, for the last week, coexisted with what I felt to be an angel, a Deva in Buddhist terminology.
And the room where I was staying alone was just filled with light.
And we were in conversation and I wrote down over the course of two days about 15 pages of dialogue with this deva on handwritten.
And when I was cleaning out my storage to get rid of all my belongings now that I'm going to die, I came across these 15 pages.
And I'd forgotten about them, and so anyway, that became the book.
Tonight I Met a Day was a true story, An Angel of Love.
That's a very important book for me, written to the children and to the children and all of the adults and the unborn.
A future to believe in back in 2012 was dedicated to my daughter, who at the time was six.
I wanted to give her in my intimate What are the most important teachings I've discovered in my life?
I've called them world dharma, which is like world music.
It's never one thing.
And so it's 108 songs or riffs based upon about a thousand of the most important people I've read and studied and felt in this life and brought them together in 108 songs.
Two to three pages.
And that's a very important book to me.
Pretty timeless.
was meant just to pick up and read to be inspired.
And then, last of all, fear of death.
And you obviously had to face that with your illness, right?
And so, any big revelations on that score?
You might think this is satirical.
It's not.
I think it's an overrated issue.
There are many more difficult things to face in life than dying.
I mean, death is obviously baked into the situation.
Yeah.
It's like way over-politicized, over...
It's just...
The death industry, it's groovy for those who need to do it.
But in my experience, after a bit of mushrooms, nature, Wow.
It's much more difficult to deal with rejection, sadness, loss of loved ones.
But your own mortality?
I'm all ready to take birth, Carrie, to my next destination.
I coined this concept in my own Dharma life about four years ago called rebirthing in this life.
And my teacher helped educate me about that before he died at 95. This is how you rebirth.
Choose a navigational north star and work towards that process.
And that's been my destination for four and a half years, ever since the diagnoses.
I have a destination in another life where I want to be reborn.
Okay.
I want to be reborn with the next Buddha in Tusita with Maitreya and what I call my samsaric sangha.
Well, automatically you're reborn at some age as a deva.
And I go, oh my God, you know all these people from infinite past lifetimes, and you're in this high-fidelity trans-psychedelic intimacy, and you go, whoa, this is the best place to be in the hood for me.
And I want to hear a Buddha teach, not read about a Buddha teaching.
And then he takes his last life, or she does.
I want to be there, and I want to be in that context.
You know, for example, bear with me.
You know, one of the things I've invited in my theater piece is the Dalai Lama.
All in Buddhism, they talk about flying through the air, duplicating your body, mind reading, all those things.
I want to show us.
Give us firsthand evidence of a duplicated body or flying through the air or being in two places simultaneously.
Change the world.
Why aren't you right in the middle of Gaza right now, Pope?
His Holiness the Dalai Lama with these psychic powers and basically saying, no, there's a higher way called a trans-religious freedom that's mutual to all people.
So my idea, I've got one deep existential desire.
I want to know multidimensionality in a more continuous way, and I want to know what they call in Buddhism.
I've never talked about this publicly.
The word abhinya, which is existential intelligence at your fingertips where you can do anything you want to do with consciousness in form for the betterment of self and other.
Psychic powers, in other words, not just telepathy and clairvoyance, but I want to see people who do that, I want to hear the Buddha's teachings, and I want to see enlightenment and dynamic action.
And then I'm into the white hole and they call it trans-existence.
They call it Nibbana or Nibbana.
That would be my highest hope.
And I make a prayer every day that may the dedication of my life fulfill the attributes required to actualize that.
Okay.
One comment and then I'm going to let you go and you can reply to it or not, whatever you want to say.
I think that I saw on your website that you actually know this saying, but if you meet a Buddha on the road, kill him.
You know that saying, right?
I may be paraphrasing, but it's like this.
So you understand that that is to dispel the illusion of what a so-called Buddha is.
In other words, to be able to not be...
Sorry?
Imagine telling your sacred lover that if you meet a sacred lover, kill her.
I'm just telling you that.
I know.
I've heard it forever.
You know, in a sense, it's a parable.
They don't literally mean kill.
What they mean is that in your mind, you must dispel the illusion around that, whatever that is.
You know, the person.
So let me say, in terms of the Dalai Lama, because you've mentioned him several times, which, no offense to anyone, but I'm not impressed by.
And, you know, there's lots of people out there that are super impressed by certain things and people and illusions and whatever it happens to be, right?
So I'm asking you if you've experienced that, if you've kind of done that, so to speak, or what's your experience of that?
Okay, I hear you, Carrie.
And I'm a real fanatic with language and tonality and intention.
And so the word...
For me, it doesn't hold any emotional bearing.
As far as the Dalai Lama, personally, and it's like, if you look back to the classical Buddhist texts, the Pali Canon, the Buddha's, one of his most notoriously quoted short discourses is called the Sutta to the Kalama, or the Kalama Sutta, where he...
Come and see for yourself.
No one can free you other than your own direct experience.
This is like children's talk in Burma, Thailand, Sri Lanka.
Kilda Buddha is like an adult meme to sell tricycles and lion's roar magazines.
But in Buddhist cultures, they so respect, deeply respect, it must be done for oneself.
And it can't be done without other, simultaneously.
And so, I hear you, and yes, it's the fundamental basis of meditation.
No one can meditate for you.
Even the Buddha.
Even your teacher.
I don't know.
I've never met a Buddha, per se.
So I never had the need to...
When I hear the word, I know it's metaphorical, but I personally, I think it's because of my trauma somewhere along the way, back when it all began, the way when God created a bad world, that the word kill just doesn't cut it.
I just don't like the sound of that, even when I mentioned to someone superior.
You can substitute any word you want, but dispel the illusion.
That's what it's actually.
Can be translated.
Are you familiar with Japanese?
The Japanese are doing this all the time.
And Quentin Tarantino is a Western filmmaker who kind of took it to heart.
So if you've ever, I'm not a huge fan.
Okay.
And so, but if you ever go watch his movies.
Killing is a very important part of it because that's what the Japanese also do.
They have constant movies where you can just sit and watch battle after battle after battle where all this war goes on and so on and so forth.
So what I'm saying here is that they are so immersed in the idea that death is an illusion that they keep trying to throw it in their own faces, so to speak.
In creative activities to make sure that they remember that death is an illusion.
So that's really what we're talking about.
Okay.
Now, see, you're dropping into a very favorite topic of mine.
Because I've been having to do it.
It's like death is not really, death is not an illusion.
You know, you have children, a wife, family, brothers and sisters, and the loss of them in continuity is not an illusion.
It may be seemingly like an illusion if you're on a moderate dose of psilocybin.
But the reality is you can no longer make love with them, touch them, feed them, go to the movies with them, walk with them.
That's a materialist point of view.
I've asked you already if you know that you've reincarnated.
Do you know about the illusion of death and how we perceive it and the material reality that we're in?
Okay, I hear you.
I hear you.
I'm not contesting your view as right or wrong.
I'm back into the world of spectrum.
There's an infinite level of gradations of every word we use.
Illusion has an infinite gradation of meaning based upon the individual's subjective experience.
Same thing with death.
I'm aware of this sort of obsession or exercise by, let's say, the Japanese culture, for example.
They have a spiritual point of view of what they're doing.
Listen, in Burma, for example, we were encouraged.
To go to autopsies, to burning gods, and to look at that intimately to see exactly what you're saying.
It's a real illusion that bleeds and oozes and breaks and decays and maggots eat it.
That's the illusion, but it's got a lot of levels to it.
And it's basically that we're encouraged.
That is you.
That's your mother.
That's your teacher.
That is everything.
And so I'm with you.
But the other side of it is, and I don't want to, just my own personal intimacy is, I'm more of a clockwork orange kind of guy.
That's one of the most brutal movies I've ever seen in my life.
Exactly.
But it's the opposite of killing.
In what way?
Well, Malcolm McDowell is tied.
in a chair with his eyes wide open, forced to listen to Beethoven and look at the worst, most horrific murders and rapes to decode his own DNA of proclivity to kill.
That is what I think the planet needs, is for presidents and prime ministers and popes and teachers to be in the front lines of children being mutilated in Gaza, in Burma, in Sudan, in Ukraine, and putting their face for a week in the decomposing body of those they kill in a suit, in an office, a thousand miles away.
What about Satanism?
Because a lot of those so-called leaders So they actually do what you're talking about.
I mean, you know, sorry to have to go there, but that's real.
Okay, this is where my idealism meets...
And I'm a believer.
I have failed in life.
I have made mistakes.
I've hurt people.
I've harmed people.
I've never killed anyone.
Redemption.
I was born up a mystical Christian with my grandmother.
I was the president of the Young Christian Society in high school.
My favorite movie of all time is just Jesus of Nazareth.
And I'm a believer in redemption.
They know not what they do.
And the same thing in Buddhism.
It's like, I would want to be treated with the possibility Of activating conscience beyond the belief that satanic expression is a permanent feature of the human psyche.
Sure.
That's all.
And I want to go there.
That's what I admired about Aung San Suu Kyi and most people that I know that are really frontline fighters in the revolution of the heart.
You're not the enemy.
Anger and greed and delusion.
Waco is.
This mind virus to self.
We must disrupt by projecting that evil on others.
We must correct the universe at its core level.
And that's where the clockwork orange comes in.
I think world leaders need to go to Davos and have their eyes tied wide open on a high dose of ketamine and look at the evil that they do.
That's psychedelic activism.
And I think it would really change the world.
And it may sound unhinged, but it's like, listen, as Einstein said, if we go to Fourth World War, all that's going to be left is rubble.
We're at this close to a kinetic global war with Ukraine, Russia, China, America.
This close, I think.
So that's my hope.
I'm a believer.
I think that's what I want to say.
Fair enough.
Okay.
Alan Clements, thank you very much.
This has been a lot of fun.
Very fascinating, at least to me.
And I think that my viewers are going to really enjoy it as well.
We've had some time to get into it.
Quite a bit.
And you've been forthcoming.
It's great.
So thank you, everyone, for watching, for participating in this interesting dialogue.
And I hope that it's going to be valuable.
So thank you again, Alan.
And blessings to you and on your journey.
Can I say one thing to close?
I want to thank you and your audience for the opportunity.
You know, we have a major global campaign starting June 19th, Aung San Suu Kyi's 80th birthday, in which we're using what's called the useyourfreedom.org, which is our website, to call for her urgent release.
And we're going to do a GoFundMe campaign to acquire as many books at wholesale cost to freely gift them to world leaders based on a conversation with a dictator, which is about redemption.
Okay.
And I hope people will tune into that at my website, alanclements.com, useyourfreedom.org.
And from my heart to yours, Carrie, thank you for your good work.