Russell chats to Duncan Trussell, host of ‘The Duncan Trussell Family Hour’ podcast and star of ‘The Midnight Gospel’ on Netflix.Find out more about Duncan - https://www.duncantrussell.com/episodes/Join the 'Stay Free AF' Community for access to weekly meditations, Q&As and to see interviews FIRST and IN FULL - https://russellbrand.locals.com/Come to COMMUNITY 2023 - A 3 day festival in Hay-On-Wye with Wim Hof, Vandana Shiva and Biet Simkin - https://www.russellbrand.com/community-2023/NEW MERCH! https://stuff.russellbrand.com/
Today's episode is subcutaneous, where we take an under-the-skin, deep-dive, cut-to-the-bone guest and delve into their psyche, their minds, their experiences.
Previously on the show, we've had Tim Robbins, Eckhart Tolle.
Jordan Peterson, of course, Maya Vandana, Shiva, Jocko Willink, all of those are available to watch on Rumble now.
Today, I'm joined by Duncan Trussell, who's an actor and a comedian and a contemporary shaman and a peculiar mystic star of the midnight gospel on Netflix and host of the Duncan Trussell Family Hour podcast.
But he is so much more none of those things, beyond them, ulterior to them.
Duncan, thanks for joining me on the show.
Are you kidding?
I'm happy to be here.
It's great to see you, Russell.
I feel like when I knew that I was going to be speaking to you again, I thought this would be an opportunity for me to revise where I am right now in my life.
Are you available for that experience with me, Duncan?
I am.
I feel sometimes that I lose contact with my spirituality because my life becomes either martial or active.
For example, just this transition to rumble, just having to manage that, to take on new partners, to create a model where we were Because streaming every day took a toll on me, and because sometimes you get pulled into the type of content that does well, which I really care about.
I care about anti-establishment thinking.
I'm an old-school radical in the way that I think that you are as well.
We're from different countries.
I think we have similar people that we admire, like Terence McKenna, say, or like our man Ram Dass.
You know, and like that spirituality and politics necessarily fuse, that there is a mystical component to politics, but that I think is getting extracted by sort of cold or dry rationalism in some cause of the old left.
Piety and virtue signalling in this what I would call establishment liberalism, real punkish humour on the right, but a total lack of love.
Do you, like me sometimes, feel, Duncan, that you haven't got a cultural home, that you haven't got a tribe sometimes?
How do you feel coping in this world?
Oh my God, that is a great question.
I think it's, you know, this is the What you're talking about is it it's kind of like the doldrums or something or this is the moment on the uh archetypical moment when Jesus is being crucified it says father why have you forsaken me it's that moment or what do they call it the uh
What do the occultists call it?
The abyss, where it's crossing the abyss.
So, you know, you go through these periods in your life where suddenly all the sparking, beautiful, spiritual stuff doesn't seem to be there anymore.
You're just filling out forms and you have a sense of I was just at this Ram Dass retreat and Raghu Marcus, who was hanging out with Neem Karoli Baba and Ram Dass back in the 60s in India, was telling a story that Krishnadas sold him.
Krishnadas goes over to Ram Dass' house and Ram Dass is like, Kind of depressed, and he says to Krishnadas, you're a fraud!
I'm a fraud!
We're frauds!
And Krishnadas gets a big smile on his face and goes, but we're authentic frauds!
Which is really beautiful!
But, you know, it's that sense of, like, you're not always going to get the feeling of being buoyed by some benevolent superintelligence in your life, though.
I would love it.
I'm sure you would love it.
Sometimes it's just you got to get yourself out of bed and do boring stuff.
And that, to me, that's home.
That feeling of benevolent superintelligence, my problem is that I consider that home.
And because I consider that home, I am dependent.
I too want to be continually buoyed by a benevolent super-intelligence.
which produces an imbalance in my life, but I don't mind the imbalance so much.
I too want to be continually buoyed by a benevolent superintelligence.
In fact, everything else I'm talking about is a sort of a derivative of my faith in that.
One time I chatted to Bobby Roth, who taught me Transcendental Meditation.
He, like, runs the David Lynch Foundation, who dish out meditations to people and stuff.
And I said after I'd spoken to Eckhart Tolle, I said, I can tell Eckhart Tolle lives there.
He lives buoyed by that benevolent super intelligence.
He doesn't come down from there.
He doesn't come down from there.
I can sort of feel every time I listen to him or talk to him, I feel like that guy lives there.
For me, it's like I experience it sometimes.
As you know, I don't drink or take drugs anymore.
Sometimes I want it so much and I look for, where am I going to find it?
Carnality?
Am I going to get some sort of Aleister Crowley sex magic in my life?
Or even some Vedic kind of erotica, you know, embrace Eros.
And I don't want spirituality, Duncan, to be some damn dry, sort of ascetic, astringent, no, no, some passionless, fleshless, Discipline!
You know, I want it to be voluptuous.
I want it to be real.
I need God 24-7, man.
I need it all of the time.
I guess that's why we look to them, you know, our elders are Ram Dass, they are Terence McKenna, they are those figures that came from the 60s, because we are not Indian mystics, are we?
We are Western and trying somehow to create some perennialism out of this stuff, to bolt together some kind of new faith out of the remnants Of secularism and what the dry rubble it's left us.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, you know, the best description I've heard of it is Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche in talking about how to know if you've encountered like authentic spirituality.
He says it should feel like fresh baked bread.
It should feel like, you know, fresh baked bread coming out of the oven.
There shouldn't be that stale, dry, dead, you know, or just the creepy sense that you're watching like an echo of an echo of an echo of an echo of an echo that at some point meant something but now it's just people echoing the thing you know but then i do think uh if you have a sense of this is the path then you if you're going to have a sense of this is not the path
And the Tantric idea is that when you're off the path, that's the path too.
When you're in the doldrums, really what you're experiencing is the benevolent superintelligence, is the sweetness of life, except you don't like that particular flavor of life.
You want a different flavor of ice cream, and it's training yourself to find it within every single part of the spectrum of experience.
And people like Tole Ramdas appear to have done that, but then we don't know!
We're just seeing them when they're on stage.
You don't know what's going on with them.
They might kick their dog.
Who knows?
We can't be certain of it.
So there could be a little bit of showmanship going on there.
But I know what you're saying.
When you're around them, you feel like you're standing in front of some kind of space heater that is radiating love and present moment awareness.
So it's hard to imagine that there are times when they're also kind of slumped over, feeling a little blue.
Our chat, Firegirl2020, points out that this conversation is happening during the winter solstice.
This is when we find ourselves colliding.
You mentioned that sometimes you feel like you're living in a simulacrum.
Some image so frequently repeated that there is no essence left.
I feel that that's where we have found ourselves in the culture.
A lot of the conversation I have at Duncan are with people like Barry Weiss or Matt Taibbi, the people that were involved in the release of the Twitter files.
A lot of people that are essentially attacking establishment liberalism from the left but are being condemned for being right-wing.
We're in a very unusual ideological space, I feel.
I loved it when on perhaps your most recent Rogan episode, you used the phrase, from woo to cue!
That blew my mind!
Like a lot of people that are...
You said maybe you buy a balm?
You buy a balm or something?
Like, you know, the idea that a lot of people that are anti-establishment and embrace spiritual ideas might end up believing in kind of Baroque conspiracy.
There's a sort of a necessity, I think, somehow, to Present our discourse reasonably, to not sound like hokey or crazy, or like we're part of the terrifying idea of a new right-wing movement, which I never thought that I would ever be accused of being a part of.
I just don't know how this has happened.
What do you, how do you think that we are, how do you try to present the
I, the, the, present the intersection of spiritual values and political ideals
without finding yourself in either Wu or Q territory?
Are you kidding?
A pendulum from Wu to Q?
All kinds of letters!
I mean, I love it.
I love Robert Anton Wilson.
And I love his recommendation to maintain agnosticism.
And when you're looking at any of these, like, fringe theories, just don't become a true believer.
And this is a way to inoculate yourself from becoming like, you know, Potentially being swept out into, you know, a lot of irrational thinking.
Because I think, you know, what has, the creepy thing that you've identified, and I've watched many of, lots of clips of you, like, very fearlessly talking about this stuff.
The thing we've identified is that our idea of what the left was, or liberalism was, was that there was a kind of, like, rebellion or pushback against the state.
There wasn't a collusion with the state.
Generally, there was like the radicals that we're thinking about, they were really like involved in a wrestling match with the state to try to achieve usually some kind of peace, get out of Vietnam, stop bombing people, things like that.
Now what's so confusing, I think, is that you're seeing like The FBI, the state entities, at least in the United States, who are, like, kind of in this strange relationship with people on the left who are controlling media to some degree.
And so, and the reason that they like it, I don't blame them.
Man, I was just watching this show on Netflix, something about the CIA, not a documentary, it's okay, it's a good show, but I was watching it and every once in a while, like, thinking, like, man, it looks like I think it'd be cool to work at the CIA.
That looks fun.
You get to fly anywhere you want and sneak around.
But what I'm getting at is that the people who are controlling Twitter, they liked working with the state because the state, they felt, was representing their ideals.
And it's a kind of short-term thinking, which is like, the more you allow the state to embed itself into your particular private business, you have to hope that the state maintains your ethics Your ideas of what's right going forward forever.
And if you look at the history of the United States, you can see it's penduluming between left and right, left and right.
And so it's a really, I don't think it's a safe bet.
It's like, yeah, right now it's great.
They represent what you like.
Your ideals are being represented by the state.
But what happens in eight years when something awful has happened?
And now there's some very powerful, megalomaniacal tyrant who's not as abrasive as Trump was, but more like a JFK-style fascist person who it's not half the country that likes him.
It's 70% of the country that likes him, and they love him!
And now it's like, wait, why are you, why did you say that six years ago on Twitter about this person or that person?
You know, I think you might need to be taken into a special kind of hospital.
You might, you might be mentally ill.
You might need some medicine.
And so this opens the, it's like you end up, It feels like they haven't thought it through enough.
Let's keep the state out of private business as much as we possibly can.
It shouldn't just be the separation of church and state.
Let's face it, capitalism is a religion anyway.
Let's just admit that capitalism is some kind of secret religion and follow follow through with the separation of church and state in
like capitalist enterprises. I think that's what we have to do because otherwise shit gets
really warped. Sorry for the rant.
It's a beautiful rant. I feel that we live in this place of total immersion.
When you used the simulacrum reference earlier with regard to pseudo-spirituality, the kind of phatic and impersonating spirituality that we're kind of offered in yoga centers and places of privileged retreat where the Aesthetic of individualism has just crept into another quarter.
Ultimately, spirituality for me is about dissolving the boundaries between myself and everything else.
and not living my life ultimately in the pursuit of some variant of my primal desires.
My desire for status, my desire to mate, my desire...
Like, you know, I don't want to be governed by some distortion of this bio...
the biochemical processes that are required for the survival of the species that I'm a part of.
Now, when you talk about the ideals that are being mimicked, I believe,
like in social media spaces, and utilized by the state, my concern is that they don't care
about equality, identity equality.
I think you do, and I know that I do.
I do think that, in a sense, you can see how the kind of political libertarianism ...expressed by someone like Tucker Carlson would necessarily lead to.
If you want to identify as whatever, that's cool.
How could you not?
If you ultimately want to be allowed to have a gun and live wherever you want to live and you don't want to pay any tax, how could you have a problem if someone says, I consider myself to be this gender, none of the language that's around now represents how I feel, could you talk to me like that?
And I had this conversation, Duncan, with Jordan Trussell, because I said, God, I agree with you so much.
When you're talking about myth, when you're talking about archetypes,
when you're talking about duty, when you're talking about becoming the person
you need to become, the inverted commas, the father, I agree with you.
But what's the deal with like Elliot Page?
Well, what are you getting out of that?
And of course he believes it's deeply insidious and he feels that it's like creating a radiation
that breaks down sort of fundamental components, the building blocks of our language and our culture.
And ultimately, I suppose, God, I'm trying to praise see Jordan Peterson's position for which he would not thank me.
But it seems that he believes that many of the building blocks of patriarchal traditional culture have value, doesn't he?
But the thing that I want to see, the baked bread fresh that I want there, in all of these conversations, is love.
I want to feel that people are coming from a place of love.
And I don't think that the people that stand up for the rights of people to identify however they want, on a corporate level certainly, I don't think they give a shit.
I think they're just using it.
I don't think they give a shit about racial equality.
In fact, I think they're deliberately using it because they've abandoned economic equality.
They've abandoned working class people all over the world.
And in order to distract us from that, I don't mean it in such an obviously conspiratorial way when I say they to distract us from that.
I mean to say the way that the culture is mobilized is that there is no
socialist left in terms of what are we going to do to help the millions of
Americans and people all over the world that simply don't have enough access to
resources. We're not going to do anything about that. We're going to say they're
deplorable. We're going to say they're Trump voters and assholes and we're
going to forget them and then we're going to legitimize that abandonment by
saying they don't use the right words and they're racist and they're
disgusting so that we can now demonize them. So when those kind of... so I don't
I think it's just bad in case the regime ends up in the wrong hands.
I think the regime's already in the wrong hands.
They've just got some nice, some cute understanding of the aesthetics of the cultural revolution that gave birth to many of the icons behind you, or at least the one icon I recognize.
We're from that place.
Aren't we?
We're from that place where spirituality and political radicalism were necessarily one and the same.
Where it was necessary to bring a new energy into the culture.
And I think that what we're experiencing now is the commodification of everything, the commercialization of everything, the imitation of everything, and it's fucking getting harder and harder to taste something real.
There ain't no baked bread.
There's only the fake smell they stick out in front of a McDonald's.
Oh yeah!
This is my father's house!
And then you throw the tables over and you're pissed!
It's really a... This experience, the encounter with the world, is generally the first reaction anyone who isn't dead asleep is gonna have.
If you do get into any authentic spiritual thing, you might start realizing that the The whole world is a temple.
The whole world is this beautiful place.
What an incredible place we find ourselves in this particular incarnation.
And then, when you start having that realization, and you look around and realize that this world is like actually filled with people and things that seem to be trying to distract you from recognizing that you don't really need much it's beautiful all the way through and then when it gets really maddening is when you realize oh my god
But they're not just, like, distracting us.
They're using the very same language that used to point towards how beautiful everything is to, like, sell war, to sell violence, to sell all kinds of bullshit.
And so then that's where you can really start feeling the great It's the most dizzying sense that we hear about archetypically in all the stories of the avatars.
You've got Jesus in the desert and, you know, the temptations.
Dostoevsky did a great, like in the Brothers Karamazov talks about, breaks down what each of them meant.
Like, why don't you turn the stones into bread and then you can feed the people?
And Jesus says, well, men cannot live by bread alone.
And Dostoevsky breaks that down by saying, if, you know, the priest class were just started feeding the people, then all autonomy would go away.
And then you would have a, like, it would just essentially the church would go from being a place where autonomous individuals go for connection to the divine to just some sort of Food nipple, a soup bank or something where you pretend to bow down to things to get stuff.
Anyway, Buddha is met by Mara and is visited with three temptations, one of them being death, which, you know, if you've taken enough psychedelics or if you have really plugged into that unified consciousness field you're talking about, It's not like your fear of death goes away, but it certainly will change and become a little less intense than if you haven't had that experience.
But then the second temptation was the Daughters of Mara, which is what you're talking about, I think, which is where Mara shows Buddha his beautiful daughters.
It doesn't really represent, like, hooking up or something.
It represents this is the fruit fruit of the world. You could have this with all that you've
achieved and obtained all of the cities, all of that glowing thing that you're
talking about when you run into people who have had an authentic enlightenment experience. I mean,
that could be used for lots of things other than teaching people. This is the idea there, which
is like, why don't you marry my daughters? You could be a great king of the whole world.
And so apparently, and I don't know for sure if this is bona fide, but I've heard
that Buddha said that was the most difficult of the temptations that he was visited
before his enlightenment under the Bodhi tree.
And so What you're talking about is the Daughters of Mara.
What you're talking about is that invitation from the world.
Use all of what you have learned to bring people deeper into confusion.
Use what you've learned to bring people deeper into the...
Into the demiurge, into the secularism, as you call it.
Away from the fresh baked bread and towards the shit bread in front of McDonald's.
You could do that!
At that point, if you decide to do that, you become an unholy shepherd of death!
Now you have experienced unitive consciousness, but instead of recognizing that all that's left is to try to ease the suffering of the people around you, if you can, you're like, let me trick them!
I'm going to bring them towards the pit!
I'm gonna bring them into this slaughterhouse using my nice little glow and I'm gonna get paid, baby!
And then I'll end up...
...
And that's the, that's what you're talking about, I think.
And it's definitely a very rotten thing to do.
It's a rotten thing to do, but I mean, if any of us have experienced that whisper, that little whisper, like, here, look, come on, let me show you something.
You want to see a secret?
You want to see something?
You know that lore that, come here, look, I want to show you something.
Why don't you just kind of talk about this?
Do you have to talk about that?
Russell, do you really have to talk about that stuff?
Come on.
Just a few bombs we need to drop, then everything's gonna be fine.
Everything's gonna be fine.
We just need to drop a hundred more bombs, and there's gonna be peace.
Finally, peace from the bombs.
It's finally gonna work.
And, you know, the radicals like you, their whole lives are spent saying, stop dropping fucking bombs on kids.
Can we do that?
Is there a way we can all just stop blowing each other up?
That was never supposed to be a controversial statement, by the way.
You know, like you're supposed to be able to say that with nobody being like, oh, really?
So I guess you love Putin.
No, I don't love Putin.
I want to stop dropping bombs on children.
Is there a way we could maybe just stop blowing up each other?
Oh, really?
Oh, really?
So I guess you love fascism.
You want to stop blowing up kids, huh?
Come on, you gotta break a few eggs and make an omelet.
When there are no values, when there is only the impersonation of values, these inversions become possible.
The kind of Orwellian literalism of war is peace becomes actualised.
It becomes actualized because nothing is anchored.
Now this is sort of like one of the dangers of post-modernity and this is where some of those sort of like sort of late Christian right-wing folks, J.P., Jordan, you know, like this is where they're right about the, I believe, about that post-modernity denies archetype, denies essence.
Therefore means that the pursuit of the kind of materialistic, rationalistic, individualistic goals that post-enlightenment thinking appears to have led us to become valid, in the end it becomes egregious and fascistic.
Not to bomb children.
How did you make bombing the children the right thing?
How did this happen?
But when you do the unholy shepherd of death there, Duncan, and I like that guy, I like that archetype.
I think that even across our lives, You feel that.
You feel that pull.
You know, like, I've had that go around that was a conventional celebrity go around the roller coaster, you know?
Hollywood, you know, all of the excitement, the glitz, the red carpets, the sex, all of that, you know, like, I've experienced it and I, you know, like, The reason I sort of, one of the reasons I believe in God is because of this sort of certain sense of like I kind of knew already.
I knew already.
You know the last words of the Bhagavad Gita someone once told me after Krishna has shown Arjuna the battle and who is the real ally and the way it's going to go down and you're going to lose cousins.
That apparently like Arjuna's last words, and please bring out a Vedic scholar to prove me wrong, like that Arjuna says, I remember, I remember.
That we are, of course, part of the total.
We are not separate from God.
We are a manifestation of God.
And when we find ourselves becoming the unholy shepherd... And this unholy shepherd mentality, I think, has become the dominant strand in our culture.
That this is what I believe we're sort of living through.
That it has become enough.
To ally yourself to this.
Like, when I was talking to that woman, Barry Weiss, yesterday, one of the Tweety folks, like, she's right.
She's a gay woman, married, like, got a kid and stuff.
She's clearly, like, used to work at the New York Times.
She's what would have, like, 10 years ago, would have just been a, what you'd call a normal lefty.
Now, of course, she's sort of pursued her principles.
She's ended up not being able to work at the New York Times, because she knew they were going to shut down that Hunter Biden stuff, and they were just, there was like an anti-Trump orthodoxy that was not about, you know, like, She was clearly not a pro-Trump person, but she was just like, hold on a minute, this isn't reporting, this isn't journalism anymore.
And now I feel that where we're at is no one's willing to actually do anything.
No one's willing to sacrifice.
So everything has become an impersonation.
And I don't know how these values find their way back into our culture.
When we find ourselves traditionless, when we are in like a sort of like a Baudrillard, like a nightmare scape of everything's an impersonation.
There ain't no way you're going to be able to anchor yourselves.
I think they've created this.
You know, a little while ago, Duncan, I had the thought that, you know, between, like, medieval times and late Renaissance, say, like that 500 year period, imagine, like, the total amount of documented material there would be with a pre-printing press.
Yeah, that would be printed online now in 10 minutes.
So information is moving so fast that you can't sort of like, you can't place it.
And then everyone's telling you nothing's real, nothing's real, nothing matters.
You know, during the pandemic, yeah, you've got to take these vaccines to stop the spread.
Then a few months later, yeah, we never tested them for transmission.
Hey, we're not going to make any profits out of that vaccine.
Hey, we made record profits out of that vaccine.
NATO were not involved in impeding upon Russian territory.
There was no deal between Gorbachev It's like, oh my god, and suddenly they pince a movement you into.
The only thing we can do is shut up and allow them to bomb children in a way that is clearly profitable to them.
Well, look, I mean, Child Sacrifice is one of the oldest games out there, man.
It's been going on for a long time and all cultures.
It's not a new thing.
It's a horrible thing, but it's definitely not new.
I don't know if there's any comfort in that.
I feel better now.
Thank you.
You should have mentioned that.
You should have come on and said, humans do sacrifice children.
Relax.
For a long time.
And in the Bible, of course, I mean, Jesus was a human sacrifice and you can go through all the religions and find some version of it.
So it's like a weird, I don't know if it's just some.
That's the epigenetic thing inside of us where it's like, shit, we got to like to appease the gods.
You need to blow up some kids.
And then all of a sudden that you're trying to make sense of that, as I'm sure every generation watching the child get its heart ripped out on the pyramid.
Certainly there are people in the crowd thinking, I don't know.
I don't know if this is really stopping the drought.
Like, does it stop the drought?
I don't know if that actually works.
And similarly, just like you said earlier, it's like the idea that war brings peace.
You know, anyone, like any child, any non-bomb child, will have the capacity to think, I don't think these wars are really bringing world peace.
Actually seems to be doing the opposite.
I don't know if like setting the forest on fire is putting the fire out necessarily.
I don't know if spraying water on things is drying them off.
This doesn't seem to be the right way to do it.
This is just common sense, and so what ends up happening is, and especially now because we're getting shotgun blasted in the face by disparate data streams, that one thing and then the next and the next, and honestly like the culture shifts from what's right and what's wrong so quickly.
It's like now it's a weird game of like, what's it called, where you jump around the chairs, you know?
It's like at any given moment you're sitting in a seat where like, Oh my god!
I'm fucking against the culture!
Holy shit!
Ten minutes ago I was with the culture!
Now I'm against it!
Oh fuck!
Oh fuck!
And I think maybe in that, it's becoming increasingly Easy to recognize how absurd the whole situation is.
And in that's an invitation to return to your heart, to return to something that you're not going to find on any online source, on Instagram, on Twitter, or even in any book necessarily.
And that's the, you know, to me, what's wonderful about this weird game
that we're playing is that any second, you can wake up from the nightmare
by just going into your heart and feeling loved and feeling vulnerable and recognizing
all the people on the left that you are feeling completely annoyed and freaked out by.
They also have been shotgun blasted in the face by weird streams of data.
and many of them are fucking terrified.
They didn't recover from the global pandemic.
They didn't recover from the psyops.
They didn't recover from the PR campaign, from whoever paid the money to make the things seem what it is.
They're fucking terrified.
That's real fear.
And when your kid is terrified, when you go into their room after a nightmare, you're not like, what the fuck is wrong with you?
There's nothing under your bed, you dumb shit!
Wake up!
Come on!
It's just a dream!
Come on!
You are sweet to them, and you love them, and you recognize they're scared, and everything's gonna be fine.
I don't mean in a condescending way.
You know, this is another thing on both sides that we see is condescension.
We see this awful...
It's an awful vitriol that gets thrown at one from the other.
And no one seems to recognize if someone's acting like an asshole, they're probably afraid.
That's all.
They're just scared.
On one side, they think that fascism is going to take over the planet.
The United States is going to, the government will be overthrown.
Trump will be in some like golden fucking, like wear a golden crown and dance in robes.
You know, on the other side, they think that, uh, you know, all of us are gonna, like, no longer be able to say man or woman, and that, uh, we're gonna, like, go plunging into some confused universe of madness and a biblical thing that makes Babylon seem like the Boy Scouts.
That's where we're headed!
They're fucking terrified!
Everyone's scared!
Everyone's freaking out!
That fear is being capitalized on, because there's a lot of money in fear, so you recognize that on top of that, in the shadows, there's corporations just...
They're blowing into the fire because the hotter the fire gets, the more people buy shit that they think will protect them from whatever the non-existent thing that's out to get them is.
And so I really think all you could do is first see if you can make yourself a little less afraid, recognize where you are afraid, recognize where the fear turns into anger, because Anger is just hot fear.
And then start working on yourself.
This is what Ram Dass said.
We work on ourselves so we can help the people around us.
That's all it comes down to.
Nobody after an earthquake is asking the people, they're digging out of the rubble, What's your stance on wearing masks in public?
Are you pro-vax or anti-vax?
They're just pulling them out of the rubble!
No one's swimming into the lake to rescue the people, running out of energy but going back in.
No one doing that is like asking the people they're rescuing, hey, what are your pronouns?
Will you call me by my pronouns?
They're just helping people, and I think that's fundamentally what humans are.
Underneath it all is just, we all want to help.
We're just confused about how to do that.
That impulse to help that you beautifully described there, its veracity and how indigenous to us it is, seems to me to be a derivative of unitary awareness.
On some level, beyond the mapped-on culture, We know, we are one, that love is the felt experience of unity.
So when the context demands it by raising the frequency to crisis, oh my god, a fellow human being, a part of me, a part of the whole, requires help.
Of course I'll do that.
So when we are particularised, If we are overly contextualized, more and more separated, inculcated into this state of separation, that becomes invisible to us.
This unity becomes invisible.
And I think that you can only attain those states through a spiritual experience.
You can't get there through rationalism very easily.
And even, as Karlin pointed out, and as great thinkers have pointed out, Humanism in its secular values derives its scaffold from Christianity.
The idea, you know, like what is a human right?
Why would a human have a right in infinite space?
Why would this cluster of molecules have a thing called rights?
And you can't get there without spiritual recourse, without saying there is something else.
There is something beyond this.
And when you are deluged, when, you know, as Melville said, when Noah's flood is still happening, we're still in the flood, it's impossible.
It becomes impossible, man, to sort of, like, to access that.
I wonder if I can pull up, or someone could pull up so Duncan can see it, the W.B.
Yeats poem where it says, uh, the falconer, the falcon cannot see the falcon.
The falcon cannot hear the falconer.
Something, what is it?
A square no longer shapes what?
I want you to read it and maybe we'll talk about that and then maybe you'll pull up something for us to read.
Can someone pull it up so that either I can see it or Duncan can see it?
I think it would be great to hear it in Duncan's voice.
He's done so much fucking potent evangelism.
Can you put it up on Zoom for him?
Yeah, like if you pull out, it's a WB Yeats poem.
I can't remember the name of that, but yeah.
WB Yeats, it's called The Antichrist, isn't it?
Yeah, is it The Antichrist?
Yeah, look, so if Chumama has pulled it up on the chat... I can't see it, but I can get it on my screen.
Hang on.
Here we go.
Then you can read it, Duncan.
Duncan's gonna... I would love to read this.
It's one of my favourite...
Yates poems.
Hold on one second.
And then maybe you'll pull up something for me.
I think WB Yates was interested in the occult, you know, man.
He was in the Order of the Golden Dawn.
Let's see.
Yates.
And now, I don't know this for sure, but I heard that this poem is actually Oh, it's called The Second Coming.
This poem is actually written about Crowley, because Crowley was also in the Order of the Golden Dawn.
I guess they had some problems with each other.
In the Order of the Golden Dawn.
So that's some nice context right there, because I wanted to move our conversation into some of this sort of last century or cultism, you know, because I know that you're interested in that I'm interested in Rudolf Steiner and some of his ideas.
Like he had some weird mystic shit going on and this WBF.
Cause like some of these, where else is it going to come from?
But the edge lands, you know, the edge lands is where we're going to have to go to, you know, we're entering into a period of chaos.
I know every generation has this kind of narcissism, but look, we are entering into this time of total immersion through tech, through surveillance, through centralizing powers.
But go on then Duncan, will you read the second coming for us?
I would love to.
Forgive all of my mispronunciations.
For instance, is it guy or jire?
I say guy-er.
Okay, then I'll say what you say.
Here we go.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre.
The falcon cannot hear the falconeer.
Things fall apart.
The center cannot hold.
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed in everywhere.
The ceremony of innocence is drowned.
The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand.
Surely the second coming is at hand.
The second coming!
Hardly are these words out when a vast image, a spiritus mundi, troubles my sight somewhere in sands of the desert.
A shape with lion body and the head of a man, a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, is moving its slow thighs while all about it real shadows of the indignant desert birds The darkness drops again, but now I know that 20 centuries of stony sleep were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle.
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born.
WB8, CCB's Feelings and Feelings, Duncan.
Beautifully, beautifully read.
I like the bit where it says, um, blank and pitiless as the sun.
The idea of casting the sun as not giving a shit about us.
The sun, like our early Aztec ideas, rah!
Like the god, this benevolent giver of light and life and photosynthesis does not give a fuck!
It's just, rah!
Yeah, I like that.
It also reminds me of people with seasonal affective disorder where you get depressed and the sunlight seems weird.
I think Yates might have just been in the winter solstice.
Crowley probably, he walked in on Crowley banging one of his lovers.
It's like, Fuck this.
I'm writing a poem about this asshole.
That's the beast part, you know, because Crowley called himself the beast.
So, yeah, there's all kinds of stories about, like, physical altercations between the two.
They really didn't get along, apparently, which is very funny to me, to imagine those two having, like, the smartest argument you've ever heard in your life, you know, bringing up, insulting each other with probably ancient Egyptian curses.
If you're actually in a pretty esoteric sect, like the Order of the Golden Dawn, and you can't even get on with the other members of the Order of the Golden Dawn, you've got to that point!
I disagree with the others!
There it is, man!
There it is!
We're always going to fight, and it's just how you fight that matters.
Because you can fight with love.
You can fight with love.
And this is the thing, when you lose track of the fresh-baked bread, then you don't fight with love anymore.
You fight with Ego.
You lose track of the other aspects of yourself.
You're no longer ego, intellect, and heart, hopefully in some kind of like mild harmony with each other.
You're just ego.
And then when an ego fights an ego, it's always the knives are going to come out verbally or physically.
And then that's just because it's animals fighting.
But you mix in the ego and the intellect and now maybe you have the famous debates between like physicists Which are incredible and physicists are roasting each other.
It's so funny.
And then when you bring the heart into the situation, now you can have like true spiritual discourse because you can be passionate.
You can even be mean.
You can even let your ego do its thing, but it's being illuminated by your heart.
And so now it's no longer this scary menacing thing.
And in Buddhism, I've heard this is known as wrathfulness.
In Buddhism, wrathfulness is a kind of angry energy that's illuminated by the heart space.
And so, in that situation, it might not even come out as like loud.
It might be very soft, a whisper, but it's very powerful.
And so this is, I think, what we're talking about ultimately.
And I know trying to ascribe some singular point of like where all everything's going wrong is probably a little naive of me, but I think if I had to guess, I'd say we've disconnected from our heart.
When you're in your heart, when you're with your kids, it is so, you can get angry, I get angry with my kids sometimes, but there's love behind the anger.
I would do anything for them.
I would die for them in a second, and they know that.
So behind it is just love.
But you're a parent.
You don't want them to hurt themselves.
Sometimes you've got to, like, yell, stop!
No!
No!
You're going to catch yourself on fire!
Whatever it is.
And so, heart space, right?
That's it.
We've just, we're all staring into the hypno-rectangles, and somewhere in there you lose track of your heart.
And then when you lose track of your heart, now you have a blank and pitiless stare
that Yates is talking about, because that's all you, now you've become what they call an NPC,
non-player character.
You are an AI.
Now you are fully just a series of phrases that are habitually thrown out in response
to things you're afraid of or happy with.
Why not just be grunting?
You've become a piggy as we, as they used to call them.
He watched your heart. He watched.
I think I'm insulting pigs, by the way.
Sometimes I see pictures of them, they see very much in their heart.
So I think that's the main sort of issue happening right now, is we have to get our intellect and our ego harmonized with our heart space, and then once we do that, that melts politics.
That melts all the temporary little, like, Like tiny little bits of cultural ice floating in the ocean of spirit.
It does it in a second.
It's gone.
It's gone in a second.
And that's what it's all about, if you ask me.
Get in there if you can and try to speak from that place when you can.
And when you recognize someone isn't in that place, remember they have the capacity to be And then you can find compassion, because you know what it feels like when you're cut off from your heart.
Man, it sucks.
It's the worst feeling there is that I know of.
This is the prodigal son.
This is the kicked out of the Garden of Eden feeling, you know?
It's the worst.
It's the worst.
So I think there's people who are in their heart right now and people who aren't, and we're playing a game with each other that doesn't have to be quite as severe as it is right now.
Beautiful, beautiful.
You know this, like in the information age, it's very easy to become kind of embedded in cerebralism, that intelligence becomes only data rather than intuitive intelligence.
You know, the message of Christ is a message of intelligence to live in truth.
True intelligence.
But this dislocation, we have been decapitated and placed on neurological rails, a kind of a heartlessness.
I agree with your diagnosis.
I agree with your diagnosis.
And I also am encouraged when you say that the ice can thaw and we can move back to the heart just in an instant.
I know that Ram Dass is a treasured teacher and influence on you and a few of my like thoughts on him in the moment are like that when on that documentary when he talked about when he nearly died I think when he had his stroke and he just said oh no I'm dying and I'm just looking at the ceiling and I'm just looking at the cracks in the ceiling this isn't like a powerful experience it's sort of boring I'm just a person like he felt like you know that And the other Ram Dass thing I wanted to mention to see what it sort of brings up in you is that the famous, I think it's called Letter to Rachel, the letter he wrote to those grieving parents, you know, who had lost, who had lost a child and that his ability to, because what I guess I'm trying to say, Duncan, is that you and I have these conversations that are, I pray, certainly on my part, are most heartfelt and they feel heartfelt from you as well and passionate and wise and funny and brilliant and just how I like my gear.
But there's a point where it has to You know, like you say, you find yourself parent in a child.
You find yourself in the world.
It is not in abstraction.
The only spirituality that matters is the spirituality of where you are right now and how you're behaving right now.
And are you being an unholy shepherd?
Or are you being freshly baked bread?
How do you get yourself to that place?
How do you get yourself back into your heart?
And what are your favorite Ram Dass teachings at At the moment, I'm sure they're the kind of things where you move through it, but where right now are you with that stuff?
I always go back to Ram Dass' teachings in one way or the other.
I'll answer your question.
As far as the way that I get from my head into my heart, it's gotten easier.
When I met Ram Dass, I was fully in my head, but I had sort of reached out to the Love Server Member Foundation because I was so depressed and I'd heard somewhere, when you're depressed, Offer service.
Spiritual service is a great way to help your depression.
Many other ways.
So I emailed just some email I found in a copy of Be Here Now saying like, well, I do podcasts.
Maybe I could show you guys how to do podcasts.
And then Raghu Marcus, who is the one of the people who runs that Ram Dass' foundation, reached out to me.
And then just by good karma, you know, I remember meeting him being terrified of like, not terrified, but fully prepared for disappointment.
Raghu, you know, this is going to be bullshit.
Like for sure, it's just going to be somebody wearing like embarrassing beads and like you just want some money or something.
It's going to be fraudulent.
And it wasn't.
It was just a normal guy.
Totally normal.
Totally, just like us talking, just completely nothing in there like that all the things my cynical mind at the time was fully prepared for.
It's either going to be a grift or it's going to be a cult or it's going to be something worse than that or who fucking knows.
But it was just a really normal down-to-earth guy.
I would try to offend him initially because I thought, well, if I say awful things about their guru and they reject me, good, because it's a cult.
You know, if I say terrible things, then there's, like, off-limits things to talk about, then I'm not interested.
This is a cult, you know?
I'm not interested.
It's bad.
I'd said the worst things, things that now I actually regret having gone deeper into those teachings, and they would laugh.
I would say, what if you guys were just all on...
A lot of drugs in the 60s and this guru thing is you just missing the good old days.
And what if it wasn't real at all?
And I remember walking down this path with Raghu saying that to him, fully edgelording, ready for the recoil of anger.
And he just got a big smile.
He's like, yeah, you might be right.
I don't know.
It's really awesome.
No blasphemy, at least that I achieved with him.
He took me to Ram Dass's house right after my mom died, and I was suddenly in a swimming pool with Ram Dass.
Roshi Joan Halifax, Ragu Marcus.
I mean, I was just paralyzed.
Like, I couldn't believe it.
I didn't understand what was happening.
Like, how am I suddenly getting to be around these people?
And then Ram Dass turns to me, he goes, I want to talk to you.
And then we went up into his house, and this is what I always bring to mind when I think of Ram Dass, and it's infuriatingly simple.
He wheels up to me in his wheelchair, he looks at me, and he says, We've got to get you from here to here.
Points to his head, then points to his heart.
And he goes, we can do that!
And I said, It's so difficult.
And that's when he, like, gets that radiant, like, incredible Ram Dass, beautiful, like, that thing when you're around Tole, that thing when you're around him and whatever your neurotic bullshit is, just for a second, melts away.
And it's like, it's like suddenly you're open to it.
It opens you up.
And he's like, I said, it's not easy. He goes, yes, it is. And he has this
big smile. And like, and it was in that moment I could see, oh my God, of course,
it's right there all the time. It's when they talk about hollow earth theory
and the second sun.
They're not talking about the hollow earth and the sun inside the earth. They're talking about
the sun inside your heart.
They're talking about Shambhala, the ancient civilizations, all the data reservoirs right there inside of you all the time.
All you got to do is have the guts and the discipline to some degree to go from the surface, which is up here in your intellect and your very powerful mind, and start going down into your heart.
And this is the practice.
This is it.
It's always returning.
Always coming back.
Getting lost up in your thoughts.
Everything sucks.
Holy shit.
We really are living and they live.
Oh my god.
This is hopeless.
Look at the world.
It's co-opting every beautiful thing and using it to sell Coca-Cola.
Holy fucking shit.
Is this the kingdom of Satan?
That's the head.
And then when you are able to get calm enough to go down into that beautiful heart space, all there is is just love.
How can I help?
What can I do?
How do I help?
And that doesn't require any kind of PhD, doctorate, education.
You don't need to read a bunch of Anything.
No, you don't need anything.
Just that alone will inform your next step.
That will tell you where, what, that is all the scriptures right there.
That's the singularity that contains within it every holy word ever spoken by any saint or guru or any great being.
It's all just right there because that's what they were, they were in that space and then they started talking.
And whatever came out of their mouth just ended up in things that now we call scriptures and stuff.
But it's just, I think that's why Jesus was like, probably why it was such a threat to the priest class.
Because they want you to think that they're the intermediary between the headspace and the heartspace.
They can, you know, there you have to go into the holy of holies and get permission by some dude dressed like a gnome to make connection with that divine space.
And so that's where the world kicks in.
And, you know, I think that's what you've identified.
And a lot of people have identified who right now are like, you know, very bravely, if you ask me, sort of pointing Look at that.
Does that seem right?
Look at that.
That doesn't seem right.
It's just, right now, all of a sudden, y'all are getting, like, such intense blowback that it's, I think, weirdly encouraging.
Because you only get that kind of blowback if we're getting close to something.
You don't get that kind of blowback when there's nothing there.
You don't, when someone's insecure, you know, when you hit the spot, That's when they get real angry, you know?
That's when they really freak out.
So, my dumb, naive ass likes to think that just maybe some of this shit is beginning to really crumble.
Maybe it is starting.
It's not working anymore.
The Wizard of Oz that we're about to pull the curtain back, finally...
Lifting up the veil, the apocalypse, and witness the truth.
I mean, really, I'll shut up.
I'm sorry for this long rant, but what Ram Dass' guru told him was, love everyone and tell the truth.
There you go.
There's not much, like, there's no Ten Commandments of Maharaji, but that's one thing that he did say.
Love everyone and tell the truth.
Telling the truth is great, but if you do it from the headspace without your heart, it can be quite cruel.
But telling the truth from the love space, that's where I think that you can really make real change in the world.
That's where people will really start listening, probably.
Which I think you're doing.
That was good, Duncan.
That was good.
That was good.
Thank you.
You bring it out of me, man!
It's not like I'm sitting around like this all the time!
You should just sit around and play Hearthstone.
It's weird you bring it out of me, Russell.
I don't know what it is.
Like, I'm not like...
I'm not!
Every time I talk to you, you're like a magnet!
Mahariji, you know, when they talk about him, like when Ram Das and, you know, Krishna Das, you know, see, like, on one hand, here, Duncan, you beautifully espoused, describe and demonstrate the power of the heart space, the necessity of the heart space, that it ain't, it is not esotericism that brings you there.
It is not education.
Not the burned libraries of Alexandria, but simple kindness that you may have known in your grandmother.
They're already there.
They're already there.
These people that I hector and bombard in my angry adolescence, they knew I have taken a lifetime to understand.
But also as part of the narrative of these great mystics is the axis of the sublime the axis to the sublime and that kind of stuff that I guess titillates us you know like when when they tell those stories that he would go you know why were you down by the lake you know like they'll tell some mad little story like I suppose that and in that is An indication that there is more than one science.
There is more than the measurement and observation of the material world, of the supramolecular, the expressions through material.
There are subtler forms of information, there are subtler networks, there are subtler forms of connectivity.
What do you make of that, you know, stuff?
And do you ever get like turned on by all of that?
That's one part of my question.
And then the next bit of my question is whether or not you ever want to just go via, you know, like the intermediary, you know, the priest class intermediaries, the ongoing commodification of everything, even the divine, you know, that's one thing.
And I like how you described that, you know, like Krishnamurti said, you know, truth is a pathless land.
You've got to get there yourself.
I can't do this gig.
I'm not going to be your prophet because you're all hooked up to the... You can get there yourself.
You don't need anybody else.
But what about this idea of...
So two parts.
One, what do you think of the kind of magic component?
And I know you like the miracles because of the title of your show.
And what do you think of the idea of getting there via chemicals, getting there via plants?
What do you think about that?
Or do you think these kind of things are sort of a little baroque and a little fancy and that we should just focus on the heart stuff?
You know, this is a thing that gets brought up about Ram Dass is they asked him I think the question was, what brought you to Maharaji?
How did you get to this being that transformed you?
And he said, I trusted the mushroom.
Because the whole thing started with psychedelics for him.
This was the original illumination.
The original, holy shit, our maps for the mind.
They might be accurate for a small aspect of human consciousness, but they certainly aren't mapping the entirety of what psychedelics are showing us.
So, for sure, psychedelics are Not just for Westerners who might have grown up outside of a culture where they're used sacramentally or in some initiatory way, even they're powerful enough without any of that stuff, without being introduced to the ancestors or being taken to a space where generations of your family would sit to commune with the departed.
Even without that stuff, you can still have a reconnection with your heart space, which is a huge relief for people.
To quote Ram Dass some more, death is like taking off a shoe that's too tight.
So if you are pinchered off in your head, if the tourniquet has been wrapped between your head and your heart, then it's like being in clothes that are too tight.
Something feels off.
You're always homesick, but you don't know what you're even homesick for.
You have this aching sense of wanting something.
That's where the drug addiction comes in.
That's where the alcoholism comes in.
That's where the sex addiction comes in.
And because you're just trying to go home, it's really quite tragic if you think about it from that perspective.
It's really sad.
It's like a kid lost in the forest, just trying to get home.
And it's like, you know, instead of like getting home, he's like getting lost in big piles of ketamine or, you know, whatever your particular drug of choice is.
Anyway, the point is, so So as far as, so I think psychedelics are a great way to sort of give you the GPS coordinates.
Like, look, remember?
You're not just your body.
Remember?
There's a lot more going on here.
You're not just stuck in that body thing.
You remember, don't you?
You're everything.
This is a dream.
And it won't go on forever.
And that isn't bad news.
And then when you come down from a trip like that, your depression eases, your relationships get better because that Like, nyeh-nyeh-nyeh-nyeh thing that comes from living in a world where you're lost and defensive, that softens up a little bit.
So, magic, I mean, my God, if ceremonial magic, it's, for sure, I don't practice it.
I know people who do, and oh, yeah, they certainly, there's, I think, very Difficult, very difficult techniques that let you experience unified consciousness.
And again, this is all just anecdotal.
I don't know for sure about that because I've never had the discipline to do like ceremonial magic.
I mean, this is serious shit.
You've got to draw.
I can't draw a straight line.
Like you got to draw these pentagrams on the floor and like if you've ever been to someone's house who does it it's like this is that would have to like what are you going to call someone at id home depot to come over and draw an inokian spirit board on your floor and then the robes and you got to make your own dagger i don't know how to forge I can't forge iron, whatever you use, not to mention the memorization, not to mention all the things Crowley recommended as just the sort of preschool level of magic, you know?
Like, you have to become a master of yoga, of meditation, you've got to read a hundred books, learn to read in Latin, and, you know, sorry, but I just don't have the... I'm not smart enough.
I'm not embarrassed to say I'm not smart enough.
I am not smart enough to practice ceremonial magic.
It's like when I watch Jeopardy, and I'm like, oh my god, I am as dumb as I thought I was, because I don't know.
So yeah, but I do think it must be an access point, because I have friends who practice it, and who have You know, demonstrated, you know, a lot of things that seems to point to the connect, the invisibles, whatever they are, mycelial quantum tubules that connect all of us and can be sort of played around with if you want to get into that stuff.
So, for sure there's miracles too.
The other part of the thing you're talking about is the miracle stories.
For sure!
There's miracles and, you know, if you haven't experienced them yet, just find a practice you love, take it up, and you will.
It'll go from being like, that's just a bunch of grifters or acid heads or bullshitters talking about this nonsense, to, oh fuck, oh fuck, it's real.
It's real.
Oh my god, it's real.
Holy shit, it's not just a LARP.
And then, Now you've got to deal with that.
Now you have to work with that, because that's a lot to work with.
That's a lot to work with, to realize that it's not just nonsense, that in fact, things happen around certain people that are impossible, that can't happen, shouldn't happen, that point to some kind of interconnectedness or a shared mind or, you know, some kind of I don't know, extra dimension to reality that we just haven't quantified yet.
And some people think they want to experience that, but when they experience it, it's a little off-putting.
Yeah, I remember.
I remember.
Because what happened is that to not be entirely immersed in this experience is costly.
People forget the dangerous potency of awakening and enlightenment.
At the cost of it.
You know, I love that when you describe the heart and the movement into the heart, I actually felt it, Duncan.
I felt it.
Like you transmitted it.
You transmitted Ram Dass's transmission to you in your mother's name.
God rest her soul.
I felt it come through there.
I felt it in my body.
It was good.
It was good.
And I needed it.
You heard what I said at the beginning.
I'm like, you know, I need a little bit.
I need a shot, man.
Or rather, the flavour of God that I was getting for a while was a flavour that, it served me well to actualise the conditions that I needed to actualise, but now it's time to, I need God, I need neat God, I need God straight to the brain, I need God in a needle through the cavity, I need to, straight to the heart, I need God.
You know, you've brought me back there, you've brought me back there.
And what it becomes evident to me that even in like when you use sort of the the accepted metrics of our age that we live in the liminal space that is determined by the senses and it would be a ludicrous outrageous and implausible coincidence If the range of sensory data that we had the instruments to detect was the entirety of the total range, and that is the assumption of rationalism.
That which we can measure is that which there is.
And that's mental.
That's like saying, that's like what a child would believe, like, you know, when they do that test, when they show them what's in the doll's house, but what can the teddy that's outside the dollhouse see?
They just think that the teddy can see the same thing they can see, you know?
And don't forget they irrelevantize the whatever you want to kind of scope the human body is.
So any kind of intuitive sense of anything, any kind of dream state or any kind of anything, this is just, no, no, no, we don't use that to measure things.
That's bullshit.
That's superstition.
That is not accurate.
Your gauge is off.
And so you get this, you know, in the UFO community, I love the term, they call it swamp gassing, which is, uh, like the version of gaslighting, but for UFO people,
which is like, you just saw swamp gas, you didn't see anything, you're just out of your mind.
That was just some bubble of swamp gas that was traveling faster than the speed of sound
and immediately stopped and went into the ocean.
It was doing radar jamming.
It was swamp gas where the radar was malfunctioning.
And whatever you experienced in the presence of that thing and all the visions you had,
and then the way they sent you messages telepathically, Come on, you might be schizophrenic or something.
This is called swamp gassing.
So in secularism, what can end up happening is a kind of like human swamp gassing, which is like, you know, regardless of the entirety of over half Half of the species, the human biome, reports encounters with deities, angels, intuition, moments of telepathy, clairvoyance, not getting on the airplane out of some weird sense that you shouldn't get on the airplane, all of these things, many of them documented at all, it's just, it's too random, it's not, ultimately I think it's because
Maybe there's some acceptance that there might be something there, but it's like, we can't use it.
We can't use it, and if we can't use it, then it can't be marketed.
We can't sell it.
And then at that point, who gives a fuck?
Why waste your time with that hippie woo-woo bullshit?
So it gets swept off the table.
And then, sadly, because of what can accidentally happen, Because people who seem like authorities on things are telling you that's not real.
You didn't experience a dream in which you met with your deceased relative.
That was just your subconscious bubbling up with like bad gas from grief.
It's like your brain farting out a very sweet dream where you felt like you were in the presence of a loved one or whatever the particular paranormal experience is.
It's very sad.
And because you believe that, Then you cut yourself off from the possibility of experiencing it.
And so, you know, it's a priest class.
It's a weird, new priest class.
And I think what's so dangerous about it, them, and by them I mean the people who are what are known as antinatalists, I mean, think of that shit.
Antinatalism.
There's people out there who think that you shouldn't have babies.
There are people out there who will shame you for having children.
Like, you shouldn't give them ba- There's negative fucking pop- There is negative population growth right now.
And there are people who are saying, stop having kids.
Like, this is gonna implode civilization at some point.
And all of this, I think, is connected to a little bit of confusion.
A disconnect from the heart.
Because what brings you more into the heart than, you know, being around children?
I don't know where I'm going with this, but I'm glad to hear that you landed in the heart space again for a moment, but I do have to point this out.
In bhakti yoga, there are various ways of connecting with the divine.
And one of the most profound and holy ways is not direct connection, but pining after God.
That in fact, that is considered a connection with God, and this is where the term, the longing is the grace, comes from.
That thing that you think is disconnect, that feeling of wanting it, needing it, and you want it, this is like in bhakti yoga, this is an encounter with the divine.
The longing is the divine.
Longing for it, is it wrapped up in the longing, is the experience of the thing itself.
And that's sad.
Oh God!
There's literally an entire genre of devotional Hare Krishna songs, which are just about how much they miss Krishna, how much they want to see God, and love songs but for God.
So, congratulations!
You're not in the heart space and you're just mourning some sense of disconnect.
That is the connection.
No way out.
You're too far in.
You can't get out.
Maybe you're trying to trick yourself into thinking there's some way to get out of the situation you find yourself in.
You know, once you go into the rabbit hole, you got to keep going to the other side.
It was amazing, Duncan.
Thank you for doing it.
You did me a great service there.
That was oracular.
That was bright light.
You really woke me up.
You've connected me.
Thank you.
Thank you.
You brought it out of me!
I don't do this.
I can't do this by myself.
So thank you, Russell.
I don't know what kind of crazy city you have there, but every time we talk, I feel like I go into some weird dreamy state and then it's over.
But during the conversation, I always think, oh, I wish we could talk for like, 10 hours, 100 hours together.
So thank you.
You're an incredible interviewer and I really love what you're doing right now.
It's really wonderful and quite brave.
So thanks for having me on your show.
And you brought me back on track.
I was thinking about one thing that Vandana Shiva says, that the earth is being desacralized.
We're losing our sacred connection, our connection to the sacred.
When things are demystified, overly rationalized, everything becomes measurable, everything becomes data, the inevitable conclusion is that you are an individual and you're going to die and there's nothing else so you might as well pursue profit.
And it's a deep, deep ideology and like you said, all of the mystical data that is dispatched because it's random and it can't be quantified or utilized or ultimately garnered towards profit, this is the area where we must dwell and at least now we know well What our part of our mission must be is to convey this love, to feel this love, to speak from that place of love, which you've done so elegantly today, Duncan.
You're such a beautiful man.
Your children are lucky to have you as a father.
Your mother is lucky to have you as a son.
It's fantastic to have you on the show.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you, Russell.
I love you.
Thank you for having me on.
And I hope that you have a wonderful, wonderful Christmas.
Yeah, happy Christmas, baby!
Hare Krishna.
Hare Krishna.
Merry Christmas!
Thank you.
Thank you, man.
I love you, Duncan.
That's our final show before Christmas.
We'll be back on the 9th of January.
Don't forget you can catch up on all our shows on Rumble.
There are guests like Tulsi Gabbard, Barry Weiss, Matt Tybee, Graham Hancock and Tim Robbins.
Also, we will be over the festive period dropping some new Here's the News, No Here's the Effing News presentations that take you deep into cultural issues and provide some new critiques on centralised establishment matters.
Sign up to our Stay Free AF community to join me for weekly meditations, QAs and to see interviews first and in full.
See you in 2023.
Not for more of the same, but for more of the different.
