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And welcome back to Coast to Coast George Nori with you. Matthew Pelivery back with us, author editor, somotic Explorer, his adventures of taking him through the mountains, deserts, and jungles of North, Central and South America, pursuing his studies of shamanism and visionary experiences working with plant medicines, among them ayahuasca, peyote,
San Pedro, cactus, and many more. He's been a leading popular fantastic fiction workshop at the Southern California and Santa Barbara Writers' Conferences for more than thirty years, and frequently lectures about shamanism and writing throughout the United States. He's got two books out this year, The Thinning Vale and I Am Consciousness Incarnate. Matthew, you've been busy.
Yes, sir, I am George. Thank you.
Good to have you back with us. Have you been.
I've been great, as you said, super busy, keeping my nose down on my butt up, working.
Away, traveling.
Still, yes, sir, almost too much. But you can never complain. You got to get it while you can get.
It right, absolutely, absolutely well. Tonight we're going to talk about consciousness and YouTube books like and let's talk about the two books that have come out which came out first this year, The Thinning What Veil or the IE Am Consciousness Incarnate.
The Thinning Veil came out first. I was actually writing the two in parallel because I was working on the I Am Consciousness Incarnate. I actually started and I got the inspiration for it, of all times, of Christmas Eve, and then one of my fans was bugging me, be like, Okay, we love you nonfiction, but how about some more stories. So I was doing the stories kind of in between, and it's nice to change off between two different projects kind of to get a break from each one and keep it flowing.
It is refreshating. Now, in your opinion, what is your definition of consciousness?
So, in my opinion, in the end, consciousness has to do with awareness, and it's our individual awareness of our thoughts and our memories, our feelings, our sensations, and our environments. It's awareness of ourselves and the world around us. And it's just it's as subjective experience that you need to eat one of us. So if we can describe something that we are experiencing in words. Then it's part of our consciousness, and it's interesting because it constantly shifts and
changes you. Right in one moment, you could be listening to me talk right now. In the next next you may shift over to thinking about conversation you had with your friend or you know your previous guests there, or you might suddenly think about how uncomfortable the cheer you're sitting in, or your stum might start thinking about what's going to be for dinner. It shifts very quickly and dramatically from one moment to the next, and yet there's
a continuity to it. It feels very smooth and effortless as we as we flow through it.
Is it related to the brain or is it outside of the brain?
Questions like that, I would say yes. And the reason I say that is because we are the seat of consciousness, so to speak, and how we experience the world has to do with our perceptions, and so we have the experiences that come to us through our five senses, but
we also have what comes from within us. You know, there's the expression our priori, which is how you think about something sort of before it happens, Like you can have our priori concept of house, and then you're looking to see a house, and those two connections make it become real for you and you know in your experience. They There are tons of theories excuse me, about where
consciousness resides within the brain. But there are all theories because the brain is a very complex network and it's interconnected in many ways, so you can't really pin it down to one place because it's very evasive, it's very mercurial. It moves around. And then there are tons of different definitions of consciousness and.
Where does the subconscious fit in, Matthew, So.
Subconscious kind of lies below everything else, and much of it comes through in how we talk. It's closely related to our conscious mind, but it's the things that we're not really thinking about in the moment. But we can go into our conscious awareness very quickly. Things that we don't want to look at necessarily or see are repressed into the unconscious minds. I know you and I have talked a bit in the past about shadow work. Yeah, and you know shadow work is the things within ourselves
that we consider to be unacceptable. But there are good things and bad things that are in there. And you could have an experience or a traumatic experience that sends you into shock, and your mind will automatically block it out, just like you know, if you can do a nasty car accident, you may not feel anything because your mind it's a survival mechanism. So it can come into our
awareness when we need it. Like right now, we may not be thinking about doing long division, but if we go, oh, I want to do long division, we can immediately go to that information and bring it into our conscious awareness and solve a math problem. There are other things, there are memories, other things we can access, and this happens a lot obviously being a writer, where we can go to those places. And being a writer, you have to
learn to work with your subconscious. You have to learn how to feed it and then basically forget about it and then it will deliver sometimes when you're taking a shower, sometimes in a dream. But you learn to work with it and you learn to trust it. It has all the stuff that's not immediately available to us in the moment, because if we had everything that went on in our brains happening at once, we would be completely incoherent.
We couldn't handle it all.
No, not at all. You know, we don't think I can we can suddenly take control of our breath, but breathing is really an unconscious process. Our heartbeat, our body temperature, all of the things that regulate keeping us alive we don't consciously think about. There's that whole part of our mind that takes care of those things for us, which allows us to be very present and in the moment so that we can function, you know, with all this information, and we have to follow the information that we get
in order to remain coherent. Otherwise we're just simply overwhelmed by everything.
The late psychologist William James talked about human consciousness and he said there were five major characters. What are they?
Yeah, William James is one of my favorite heroes of all time. He was brilliant and he says that kind of what I was just saying just now, that human consciousness it flows like a stream, and it's characterized by streams of thought being governed by these five characteristics. So the first one is that every thought tends to be part of a personal consciousness. The second one is that
within each personal consciousness, thought is always changing. The third is that within each personal consciousness, thought is sensibly continuous. The fourth is that it always appears to deal with objects independent of itself, and the last one is that it is interested in some parts of these objects to the exclusion of others. Those are the five primary characteristics that he observed.
Some people naturally use their conscious nub minds and subconscious minds without really even trying.
Yeah, I think, generally speaking, intuition is one of the greatest examples of that. And some people have more intuition and awareness than other people in certain situations, and some people have more knowledge of one area than in another. So I always, you know, not getting into politics, but I always like to say, if you go far enough right, you're going to end up left, and if you go far enough left end up right.
Circle.
Yeah, exactly exactly, But it all, and it does, it all kind of goes full circle. And there are things that we can do intuitively that we don't really have to think about. And anybody who has studied, you know, writing in many respects is one of them. But anybody who's a musician, I'm a musician, I'm a vocalist. I've also studied and practiced martial arts. Great sports players they don't have to think about what they're doing. There's an
expression among scientists and psychologists. They basically say, neurons that fire together wire together. So in my case, among other things, I'm a drummer, so I learned to practice there's the twenty six drum runiments and that you learn to practice them. And in the beginning you have to think about what you're doing, and you make it happen, and then the more you do it, the more you don't have to
think about it. And then of course when it's time to play music, you forget about all that and you just play. And years ago, when I was first studying martial arts, my sense i was saying that the ideal condition would be to be in a fight and be knocked unto conscious and still being able to fight because your body knows what to do. So I always kind of like that idea. And you know, same thing about
when you know other different physical skills. As examples, if you learn to ride a bicycle, you got to really pay attention to what you're doing, but once you learn how to do it, you forget. You just get on the bike and you ride.
With that old saying, it's like riding a bicycle.
That's where those cliches come from, because they're great.
I was talking the last couple hours about artificial intelligence. Is that going to play a part in any of this?
Yes, and no. I also nowhere is near the background of your previous.
Guests, Bart, right, yeah, Bart Cosco.
Yeah, but I have a background of technology, and so you know, one of the things Bart was saying was that the massive amount of computing power you need for artificial intelligence is to learn to train it. And the more you feed it all this different information, it learns and then it responds. But it can never really have emotion. You know. It can emulate it, it can be polite, but it can't change physical sensations. It can't really smell. It can't feel in the heart. It can't really admire.
What is it like to look at a beautiful rose or to smell a beautiful rose. You know, it can't go down the street like we get down the street and suddenly see a beautiful woman in your heart stops because she's so beautiful. Right, It can't do any of those things. But I like to think of it as a very complex tool, and it's an extension of our consciousness because, like Bart said, it is. It's doing what we're asking it to do, and it's extending itself to follow.
He used a great term about human I forget how he put it, but with it like human error or human agents. I think it's the word that he used, the expression he uses, so we can use it as an extension. It can certainly do wonderful things, but it can't have those spontaneous emotional things. It can't shift like we shift in the stream of consciousness from moment to moment. It can only copy what we do and how we
direct it. It's just like you can see a house and you can build a house, and you can use all the tools to build a house, but you're the one that's doing the building. You know, you can program computers to carve beautifully pieces of wood with laser and all of those things, but there's nothing like that hands on feeling of old school artistry and carpentry and you know, sculpting and things like that that we do as humans.
You talk about animal and plant consciousness, Tell me about that.
Yeah, I'm fascinated with that, particularly because of my experiences that I've had in the jungle. And people could say, well, that person is dumb as a houseplant. But I'm not so sure that the house plant is so dumb, and maybe they're even smarter than us. And you know, there's that whole thing about how maybe plants are cultivating us because they were there before we were, and there's this whole symbiotic relationship between plants and humans and other things.
So the whole idea of animal consciousness, excuse me, poses a problem of other minds because non human animals don't have the ability to express human language and they can't tell humans about their experiences. So you can't really have objective reasoning about that question, because it denial that an animal is consciousness implts it doesn't feel that its life has no value, and that harming it is not morally wrong.
De Karte has often been blamed for mistreating animals because he believed that only humans have a non physical mind, and most people believe the animals like cats and dogs are conscious, but insects or not. But the source of this is based on personal interactions with pets and other animals that have been subjectively observed. So if you think that subjective experiences yestereness of consciousness, then the nature of
animal consciousness. We can't really know. If insects have subjective experiences, then they have to embody the yesters of consciousness. Do bees like the taste of nectar? Do ants foraging for crumbs to feel better when they find one? Everyone agrees that bees can take an environmental environmental from and perform impressive computations on it, But can they feel and sense
the environment from a person perspective? Just because they can't articulate it in human language doesn't mean they're not conscious.
Where does consciousness come from in the first.
Place, Matthew, It comes from within us.
Are we born with it or do we inherit it?
I think we're born with it. I think we come into awareness initially in the womb or whenever we come into this plane of existence, and we are evolving. So when we first come into feeling and knowing and experiencing, we're definitely connected to our mothers in the womb, but we can't articulate things. We don't know what's going on until suddenly things start to change in the womb when we end up into the world, and then we start to learn as we go. But if you go onto
the basics of defining consciousness as awareness. Then the moment you have any sort of awareness within the womb is the beginning of consciousness. And of course, the more you evolve and the bigger your brain gets, and the more your sensory organs evolve, the more input you have, and the more your consciousness can evolve and develop and become more aware. And then you know, in shamanism and on the spiritual paths throughout the world, in the end, it's
all about growing awareness and becoming more aware. If somebody is working towards becoming enlightened, so to speak, then they're becoming more aware of things. And of course the more aware you become, the more conscious you become, and the better and the wiser and the better decisions that you can make. You know, within yourself and within the world, and within you know the people around you.
Does consciousness make successful people?
I think yeah, But I think consciousness in terms of success is also a subjective thing. A guy can have, you know, six gazillion dollars, and in the ways of the world of money, he could be considered to be very successful, but he could be the unhappiest people, one of the unhappiest people in the world.
That's possible. That's true.
You could have a shaman in the jungle who has no physical.
Possessions and he's happy.
He's happy. He's like, he walks ten feet and there's the banana tree, and there's a banana and he goes over there and there's his fingertips.
And he's got his little hut and everything else.
That's right. He's got no insurance, he doesn't have the I R S right and you know, uh, he doesn't have air pollution. All of the things that come in society and all the material possessions that people spend their lives after, he has none of it. And he doesn't want it, and he doesn't need it because he's really happy with who he is and where he is, because he's you know, he's in the he's in the palm, in the heart of Mother Earth, and all his needs are met.
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