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What?
What's going to happen?
What?
Welcome to the Occult Rejects this episode. You got a couple of us together and we've got a very very special guest. Somebody have been trying to get on for a while and we finally made it happen. We will have p. D. Newman joining us today, but before we get to him, let me introduce the other rejects on the channel. And we got my man the Headless Giant. What is going on sir?
How you doing?
I've got my Alchemy Monday show coming up tonight and I've got the mail Bag show with Nick coming up on Thursday. So definitely subscribe to the YouTube channel and get out there and follow me on x and on Instagram as well. Thank you very much, check out a lot of vidviews.
Definitely send in that mail and if you want, leave an adjus and you will receive some stickers. Thank you very much, my man, I appreciate you joining us and my man Jin the Ninja. What is going on?
Sir?
How will you? What is up?
Boss? Mister ninety three?
So if you want to check me out, you can follow me on x Twitter at wucom Reborn w uk O and g Reborn or on Ig at Threshold Saints and also at Threshold Saints for the show account on x Twitter, and I had the great pleasure of recently interviewing Paul Frederick from the Demonosoftye podcast with my Gray Lodge co host, not Matt Murra, but a different Gray Lodge co host, as well as Gregory Peters who wrote
the recent book The New aon Contrast. So two amazing interviews coming up and lots of episodes coming out so.
People can check that out.
And there's a recent drop I just made on Final Fantasy eight, So if you're interested in the kabbala of Final Fantasy eight and sort of like the meta ontologies and metamagic that it may or may not contain, you can check that out episode out.
Thank you guys, appreciate it.
Thank you very much, sir. I appreciate you vacing it here and perfect timing. Unfortunately, forgot, even though I told the Headless Matt was joining us today, totally forgot you were coming and I started without you. But you you made it, Matt. So maybe you can umute yourself and let everybody know what is going on and how you.
Doing except for everyone, glad to be here, glad to meet you Newman, Headless and Marx for the first time. So I'm Matt. I mean recently there was an episode here on Accoule Projects, so you can check that out. I guess it's gonna tell everything you need to know about me. And uh yeah, very glad. Let's see how it goes today.
Awesome, thank you very much, appreciate you making it, sir. And last but not least, we got the storyteller himself, Robbie Marx. How are you, sir?
Hello, hope everybody's doing great out there. I'm our Marx or Robbie Marx. I'm an artist, illustrate. I do a lot of research. You can check out all my links for my podcasts and all my very social media at link tree r M r X and that'll pull up everything for you. And it's good to see everybody here, some familiars that I love and some new faces. It's always great. I'm excited for the show and thanks for having me on.
Nick.
Of course no just during the day. I had to get you on, so I always appreciate you joining us. And finally again somebody I was very much looking forward to getting on the show. We have PD Newman, and if you're not sure who he is, he is an esoteric researcher and practicing occultist whose work sits at the crossroads of alchemy, meticism, theogy, and shamanism. He's a Freemason, a member of the Society of Rosicrucians, and also is associated with the Martinist Order, so he's coming from the
inside of Western initiatory tradition. He's published in several esoteric and Masonic journals, including the Scottish Right Journal, Knights, Templar Magazine, the Masonic Society Journal, ED Lusim and ed Lusim and others.
Some of his books are This is Great, al Chemically Stoned, The Psychedelic Secret of Female Angels of Vermilion if I'm saying that correctly, The Philosopher's Stone from d to DMT, and the book we will be discussing today is Theorgy, theory and practice the Mysteries of the Ascent to the Divine. So yeah, after that introduction, if there's anything that you would like to add, or anything you'd like to say, or any places that you would like to plug for
the people to find your stuff. Pd Please let everybody know where they can find you.
Yeah, thanks, thanks for having me.
You can find my books at all major booksellers. I recently published a follow up to Theurgy that is looking at Native American shamanism in the Mississippi Valley and their funerary rights and how they were incorporating certain ntheagenetic plants to induce what we might call out of body experience or near death experience. But yeah, I'm on all the social media platforms. You can find me under under P. D.
Newman.
If you want to keep up with what I'm researching, that's the way to do it.
Awesome. Thank you. Not to get off the topic. It is just something that you just said right now. I was like, oh, I quote my attention, and I'm guessing maybe you know from the other stuff that you've written about, maybe you might see what I'm getting at. Do you think some of these things that they might have been taking back then was to push themselves too close to an NDE. It was the extent of like, I'm going to poison myself before I actually die so I can have absolutely awesome, awesome, and.
That's that's not just an indigenous thing.
You know, even in the.
Urgy, which is really a ritual application of Platonic metaphysics. One point at Plato says that the philosophy is basically training to die, learning how to die, and he discussed this in terms of what was in counter heard by the initiates at the Elusinian Mysteries, at the Greater Mystery, And there's plenty of evidence to suggest that what was actually going on with this this kiki on potion they were drinking was that they were consuming some form of
a of a hallucinogen. A lot of evidence points towards ERGOT, which is a precursor to LSD. Normally it's toxic, but there are ways to prepare it where it won't induce gangreen and and what they call Saint Anthony's fire. So yeah, I think learning how to die, approaching death, or as Brian Morask who says in The Immortality Key, learning to
die before you die. And if you can learn this, then when you do die, you won't die because you've kind of gotten your sea legs and can can navigate that that territory.
Do you think, not to sound like crazy, do you think like maybe when you say you see legs with that almost kind of give you maybe the options of where you're going. Yeah maybe okay, all right, I like that.
Yeah, and and here, you know, and the material realm, we're very much predicated on space, time on you know, time really comes into play when we say how long will it take me to get from point A to point B traveling at a given speed? Right, Well, in that realm, that's not necessarily the case. It's not so much the quantity of space and time that determines travel, it's the quality. So it very much operates and the
way that magic operates like attracts like. So it's not that let's say you think of a place where you want to be, that's very quantitative, but if you can feel how it feels to be there, the feeling becomes the place becomes the embodiment. So travel travel is very different experientially, and the way it's discussed in after death manuals like the the Bardothodole, which is what we know is the Tibetan Book of the Dead, or in the Papyrus of Any, which is what we know is the
Egyptian Book of the Dead. Navigation is very much predicated upon the quality, the quality present within the Traveler.
Really, I love it. I love it. Not to get too far ahead of ourselves, unfortunately, and I came right off the bat with a question that was kind of like, you know, I'm sure I have to with your book, but it was just something.
That's a good question.
Yeah, no, thank you, thank you. I would love to nerd out on this, but I do want to stay on the topic unfortunately. For one thing, I do want to ask for the listeners who may not know who you are yet, how did you first get into, like I guess, the world of alchemy or medicism and theogy if you don't mind.
Taking drugs, Oh okay, it'd be totally honesty. From about age about age eleven is when I first started taking LSD and mushrooms. And you know that I live in the Deep South, where mushrooms grow and grain fed cowfields, so we were learning how to identify them and how to consume them before I was even a teenager. And back then, you know, it was a novelty. It was very much a recreational kind of a practice.
But pretty soon.
As the dose has increased and the substance has got more complex, such as with n N d MT and mescaline. I've very quickly found myself in territory that I couldn't navigate philosophically, psychologically, and that's what led me to first look into metaphysical models different religions in Mississippi. You know, it's not like, you know, I had found parallels to things I was experiencing in Eastern texts like the Dalte Shing,
the Bagabad Gita through Panish heads. But it's not like here I can go and talk to a guru, you know. And I had encountered a number of similar terms. When I was much younger, I was spending the night with a friend and there was a book on his shelf. He lived with his grandfather, and the book really attracted my attention, and when I pulled it down was looking at it. He told me, that's that's the Scottish rite, thirty second degree. That's what you get when you come
in thirty second degree. My grandfather's a freemason. And so I'm flipping through it, reading passages. I have absolutely no idea what I'm reading, but I knew right then that I was going to at some point in my life to figure out what the hell is going on?
What is this book about, but a lot.
Of the same terms that I was encountering in these Eastern tacts I found there. And masonry is very visible here. You know, the Scottish Rite was created in Charleston. Masonry is very much accepted practice in the south. The further north you get the more conspiracy kind of minded views of free masonry starts creeping in. But here you don't see that. It's very respected. And so I petitioned a lodge, never expected to get in, but I got elected to take the three degrees and it turned out to.
Be absolutely what I needed at the time.
And from there I just went on and to you know, her Meticism and Kabbala and Taro and alchemy, and you know it's still go and theurgy these days, theurgy, Neoplatonism, the Hermetica.
That's really where.
I spend my time these days. But yeah, that's how it came about.
That is awesome. I love it. One thing I did want to ask you if you don't mind h if you had to, you know, this is for like the newbies and kind of like I guess, I do have a lot of conspiracy theorists who that listen to the show.
So We're gonna ask you this question basically for them, if you had to explain theorgy to someone who only knows magic from pop culture, what's the simplest, the most accurate definition you'd give them, because you know, I'm just saying the idea we have of it from Hollywood is probably completely wrong.
So, you know, to borrow a phrase from the Christian scripture, I will be done right With magic, it's very much predicated upon the accomplishment of one's desires. It's largely ego fulfillment. It can be other things, but usually it's because I want X, and you know this spell is designed to give me that result. With theurgy, those things can still happen, but they're a byproduct of the real goal of theurgy, which is union.
With God or with the gods, or with a God.
But it's basically and when we say union, you know, it's easy to think of it's not like a hug. You know, it's not like two people hugging. It's losing your egoic perspective and for a brief moment, facing your consciousness to its root and perceiving the world as God perceives the world, or as a God perceives the world. So that's how theurgy differs. It means God work or the work of the gods, you know.
So there's also this idea that.
Man cannot affect theurgic union. That's purely up to the gods. It's the grace of the gods whether they reach down and lift that veil for you. All we can do is work on what and the literature is called epitidities, which means our preparedness, how much we've prepared ourselves to have that veil lifted. That's really the limit of what man is capable of in terms of theurgy.
Thank you. I couldn't have said it better. I'll have to say even that, like my time is being a magician or a ceremonial magician. Whatever theurgy worked, it was a different experience with that stuff. I was very, very big into that once I started having which I call magical experiences. Uh. I will say, whenever it came to maybe me feeling something, whether it could be maybe just myself being feeling good about what I just did or whatever it was during theatery like practice is actual, like
prayer and devotion to God. That is times where I may actually felt like I had contact. You know. It was very It was very deep stuff for me, you know, and I try to do I have mentioned that on the show a couple of times, but I do think just from my experience, from how I practice, I think that stuff is highly important just for me.
So I agree.
And in ceremonial magic we see analogs. Particularly, there are a few in the Greek magical PAPYRII the Book of a Bramain is a great example, you know, and that text the damon once damon a daemon is, as it says in Plato's Symposium, is any being that acts as a mediator between man and the gods. And they carry man's aspirations to the gods in the form of prayer, sacrifice, ritual activities, and in return, they bring down from the gods to man inspirations, and inspiration literally means to take
the God inside oneself. So it's we're essentially talking about possession and post exorcists.
You know.
The possessions is terrifying to most people, the idea that you can be possessed by a spirit, But in theurgy, that's the highest grace to be inhabited by a god. And there's a caveat that we should mention. And that's that in theurgy, we're never not inhabited by the gods. Everything happens because of the gods. What changes is our ability to perceive that everything down to from stones to animals.
And if if you're in if you're in our medic Kabala, you're aware of correspondences, right that if we're going to work with Tifferis, we're going to work with things, and the metal kingdom we're going to go for gold, and the mineral kingdoms, sulfur animal kingdom will go for lions, roosters. You know, well, all of these examplesn't originating Kabala. It comes from the Jews in exile encountering Neoplatonists and late Antiquity, and the Neoplatonists they don't call them correspondences.
And it's important. This is important distinction.
Because it's easy to psychologize magic and say, well, if I surround myself with red things and increments of five, psychologically I'm transcing myself into gid Bura, right. But for the Neoplatonists, it's not a mnemonic. It is the god. They call it Sunthamata and sumbola, which means tokens and symbols, and what tokens and symbols are are there? Think of them as like bractals of the God sewn throughout the cosmos. And the idea is to bring together from every kingdom
of nature the token of the God. And by doing that you make a fit receptacle what's called a Hypodokein you prepare it its epitidiities. You're increasing its ability to capture something of the ray, like a mirror capturing the ray of the sun, and it can inhabit this a statue or a talisman. So it's different in that we're not psychologizing it, which as much as I love the Golden Dawn system, I see a lot of Golden Dawn
practitioners do It's psychologize the system. That kind of thinking makes no sense to the Neoplatonists, that the orgis late antiquity.
Would you would you say that might have been like Platinus's issue with the Gnostics too, because I think when I looked into that, it might have been like them, kind of a humanizing things that weren't supposed to be humanized.
Plotinus, when you read his Eneads, you get an ambivalence from him. You know, he's got a chapter in there called against the Gnostics. But in that chapter, it's not the dualism he's attacking. It's the notion that the demiurge is evil because the concept of the demiurge comes from Plato's to mais where demiurge, which just means builder. We
might even say it means Mason. But the Builder comes along and uses the forms, the platonic forms, the ideas that exist in the news or the mind of God, the highest God, and he forms them into everything we see around us.
And then he.
Creates suke or soul to animate them, which is where we get our word anima. If you're familiar with Youngi and psychology, anima just means soul, but it's the root of the word to animate something. Well, the Gnostics they're primarily coming from a Jewish background, so they're Jews who have been raised on Genesis, on the Torah, and now they're encountering Plato and they realize that there is truth
in both. But how do I rectify it? And when you look at Genesis in chapter one, it says that Elohem created man, and when you created him, He created him a spiritual being, created him a hermaphrodite.
But then by the time.
We get to chapter two, Elohem disappears and it says that Yahweh that tut you Grammaton created man of the dust of the ground and then separated the female out of the male. So the Gnostics reading this, they come to the conclusion that, oh, Elohem must be this higher god principle, while Yahweh Tetragrammaton is this demiurgic principle and has trapped the spirit of man into matter, into the dust of the ground, and essentially created a prison for him.
That's what Plutinus is taking issue with, because the demiurge, for Platinus is the noos is the mind of God itself. So when we think about the hierarchy of being in Neoplatonism, there are three things called the hypostaces, which are they're comparable to the Holy Trinity. In fact, they inform the Holy Trinity. At the top, we have the monad or the pegae, which means the source, the one, and it's beyond being. That means it does technically, it doesn't exist
in the way we exist. It's beyond being. Now below that is the noos or the mind of God. And this is what became the logos or the Son. Right, So now we've got the Father and the Son, the logos, and then below that is suke or soul, the world soul, and this becomes the Holy Spirit and early Christianity. So what Lolotinus understands by demiurge is the same thing Christians understand by the Sun by Christ.
So this is the.
Mind of God, that is the demiurge that through its intelligence organized all of the forms into something and we could say it informed matter into something useful, meaningful with process and growth and choice, you know.
So that's what he's say.
Yesterday we had Peter Mark Adams talking about the the temples with the helped me out Nick completely blank, the in Rome no no, no in Rome, with the underground temples where they would go and line blanking on it so hard. But they were talking about how in the experience with the Yeah, in that experience they would approach the demiurge as they were and dwelt by the spirit
of God. Right, And so that was sort of their view into looking at the demi urge from the more European perspective as opposed to thinking that it had to be an evil force. And I think that's really reflected in a lot of the Mystery School teachings is is you know, the DeMier is the guy who's making all the physical stuff. Yeah, you might not like it all the time, but it's essentially good because you would resist it.
And that's essential to Platonism as a whole. Platonism is radically monast so there's a hierarchy of being with the monat.
At the top.
There is no devil, there is no evil principle. Everything exists, Everything participates in being because it participates in the good. Now we can act in a way that causes what's known as privation of the good, almost like erecting an umbrella over so that the sun won't shine on us. But that doesn't automatically create evil. It's simply is not participating in the good to the degree that one could. And instead of evil, that's looked at as more as
a tendency toward non being. So there's not good and evil, but there is being and non being, and even non being if we go back as far as amenities, non being can't be because it's not so it's acting in an illusory way. That's for something that can never happen. Right, So yeah, that's that's exactly what I'm what I'm getting at.
And but when I say that Platias was a little bit ambivalent, he still had gnostic tendencies, because you'll see him say and in another place in any Ads, he says that that matter is evil, that if if evil exists, it's it's in matter. And Plato would completely disagree with that.
Pythagoras would disagree with that. It's simply the bottom of the chain of being where all of those rays, all of those chains descending from the one, from the forms, meet and mingle and produce all of the phenomenology that we encounter. So there was a certain self loathing with Blatinus in terms of being in a body. And this translated even to his student Porphyry, who organized any ats. Porphyry it is said to have been suicidal more than one time in his life because he was in a body.
He felt so ashamed that he was in a body and.
Away for a while, go on vacation. Can he tone go away for a bit and get you glue?
You'd think, yeah, But when Yambokus. I Amblicus comes along, you know. Porphyry writes this this letter to Aniba, which is one of Iamblicus's students, and he's trying to say theogy is is.
Pointless, it's not a worthwhile practice.
And and it's Iamblicus that that answers him in the guise of an Egyptian priest. Am I think the name he chooses is but he has a very different view. So Plotinus sees the soul, part of the human soul, is always united with the one, meaning the soul is not fully descended into matter. Iamblicus wholeheartedly disagrees with this
and says, no, we are fully descended. That's why what we do matters, and that if we weren't fully descended, there would be a gap in the chain of being here, that it wouldn't connect all the way, and thus would negate the possibility of a scent of return to what's called epistrophe, return to the God. So we're in a constant motion of perrotos and epistrophe going down and going up. So he says, no, we're completely embodied. Moreover, the body
is not a prison for the soul. It's the means by which the soul can even express itself, because outside of the realm of the space time continuum, change can't happen. There's no process, there's no time. Right, so, how how can we.
Learn make our mark on the world?
How can we do anything unless we are fully descended and unless the body is that the means by which that the spirit is able to.
Make those changes.
You know, So there's even disagreement within the domain of of Neoplatonism and Plutonis. While it's it's clear he was probably familiar with theogy because he uses language that originates with the Chaldean oracles, and the Caldian oracles is where we first encounter the word theorgy. This father son Teine both known as the Giuliani. Both of their names were Julian, but they're the first ones that talk about the orgy
and corfyry. He really he gives us the schematic kind of the way theurgy works, but then later in life rejects it in favor of his master, Platonus's picture of uniting with God through purely through philosophical means. But Iamblicus rejects this, you know, he says, we can talk all day, but at some point the words run out. Dialectic can only get us so far, and when the words run out, that's where the orgy begins. That's when ritual activity picks up and and can only be the final means by
which we connect with with the gods. And at one point he's talking about the sunta mata the tokens and how they're magical items, like if we had a piece of gold to connect us with Helios. He's saying, it's not our intellectual understanding of the fact that gold corresponds to Helios. He said, if that was the case, then any philosopher would be uniting with God or with the gods all the time. He said, no, it's ritualistic actions
that are not understood by the practitioner. And the token affects our scent, of its own power, of its own connection to the God, that it's a real connection. And once you start viewing the world in that way, everything changes, because you're interacting with divinities all the time. You never there's not a moment that you can't So very similar in a way to the Egyptian religion, where when they saw an Ibis, they're not thinking, Oh, he corresponds to
thought or to uti. That's to uti right there, you know. And that's how the theorists are approaching the world. They're approaching the gods and fractal, microcosmic forms with everything they touch.
So would you consider it more of an animism type religion as opposed to being more of a polytheistic or monotheistic or monasty.
Yeah, it's it's polytheistic. But it's also.
The problem arises because you you encounter sayings like all of the gods are present in Zeus, but zeusically all of the gods are present in Herah but heroically right, So each of the gods are the one God, but this is how they manifest. And this given scenario and also our epithidiities, our preparation alters the way we perceive the God because one person might see it one way in another another way. And this is addressed in Iamblicus
and Proclus and the solution. They're saying that it's not that the God has changed, gods are changeless, it's that people are prepared differently to interact with the one Divinity, with the one God. So all of the gods are I don't want to say descended from, but they're part of what's called syra, which means chains. They're part of the chains of these forms that exists like kind of like archetypes that exist in the mind of the One God.
So they're all one thing, just like in Kabbalah, all of the Sepheral they're united in Keather right, it's only after the supernal triad that they be they begin.
To be separate.
So in the News, all of the gods are one God. These are ideas in his mind, but based on what idea is being expressed through what activity that determines how we perceive the God.
If that makes sense, par was there something you wanted to ask?
Oh?
I was going to bring up the fact that when you get into the Calvian oracles they talk about it's the whisperings of Apollo, but he always takes advice from Zeus. So again you have this chain, this idea of linking back the source. And it's interesting in regard to talking about theurgy and be like taking on the energetic view
of reality from the standpoint of the God. When you get into like vood we were talking about the other night where the gods actually come down as a writer and participate and dance with the humans, and they talk
directly to God. And then you get into like you're talking about heresies against the gnostics and these ideas of the separation between those that that are seeking theurgy and those that are externalizing it and and shying away from and so you have this this diametric cleave essentially that has been a battle. It's seemingly as far as you can go back.
Yeah, it exists today. Anytimes somebody talks about mind over matter, you know, or or or favors intellectual learning over pumping iron. You know, these are false divisions, and that you're you and just as much worship mars aries through reading sun Zoo or going and lifting some iron and a gym. You know, those practices are equally effective in terms of worshiping the gods.
It's a false division.
Yeah, you're you're absolutely right, and calls it taking on the mantle of the gods, right, you know, And I think that's what you're describing. And we have something very similar in Palo I'm a hollow practitioner. And then Palo Cambisa, which has its origins in Congo just like voodoo. You know, possession is a very real aspect of it, and even communication with the gods through simple divination practices. I'm sure you've you've encountered the use of cows and Santaia and lukumi.
We use chamlongos, which are these coins cut out of coconut husts that are con cave on one side and convex on the other. And so just like with the cowories, you know, you ask your question, throw them and the con cave side up. Those are mouths speaking. That's those are yes. So you could you know, there's a range of yes and no's and maybes, and rephrase your question. Yes with conditions, no with conditions, those kinds of things.
But even that, while.
Seeing as trivial by Judeo Christian traditions, by Islam, we take that very seriously. And no matter what the answer is, that's what you do.
You know what I mean?
Don't you don't say, oh, well, that's good advice, but I think I'm going to do something else. Part of how you imbue that practice with real power is by always doing what it says, and in that there is a show of faith, and through that show of faith, there is the increase of the ancestors, the mumpungos, the gods, the damons to want to actually give you useful information because they know that you're going to follow through with it.
And when you do, you know, you become a.
Force of the universe. You're no longer trying to carve a hole out of a mountain. You are a tidle wave because you have the movement of creation behind you, right, And that's kind.
Of let me bring one point up real quick. I've speculated over the years that the Knights Temple are logo in regard to the two riders and one horse is exactly describing this process.
That's interesting. Yeah, I've never heard.
That take, but like that headless Yeah, well, I was gonna say.
This brings in the concept of the muse. How inspiration can strike one person and unless you follow through with the with the instructions and the inspiration that's been given to you, that mus can leave you and you won't get it back in the same form, the.
Same inspiration slippery little clouds. You know, if it comes to you and you don't act on it, you better believe somebody else is going to have the same I shortly after and if they act that ship.
Yo. You know it's crazy. You know how many times I should you not? Even with other co hosts on the show, we talk about topics that we would cover and then we would never get to do it, and somebody else a few weeks later would be like fuck, man, like, what's the odds of that?
Yeah?
You got it a lot, a lot to where it's like freaky, Yeah.
Well, who I was gonna say. When you look at the Cotton Gin, there were numerous people that came up with the patent at the same time. Same thing with the Wright brothers. There was another couple of brothers on the other side of the earth. You know that there were formulations. It's this, these things are in the air. I think it's the intrinsic, fractal line nature of the growth of what we are as a whole, as humanity that's kind of persisting and pushing towards some unseen divine end.
Yeah, Darwin too, you know, Darwin with the theory of evolution at the same time is a completely unconnected researcher came up with it. And and and if we look at like Empedocles, who was a pre Socratic philosopher, but also a magician and a gooies uh, what we might today call a necromancer.
But he talks about ideas.
As conscious beings and they they come to you, and if you entertain what they are and give it voice, they will stay with you and come to you more often. But if you don't, he says, they will fly off and find someone that is more in line with with what they represent, and that person will receive the idea, and even into Christianity, there's there's this idea in Saint
Augustine where he's he mentions. He says, if you were to see an angel, he says, angels don't have bodies, they're not material logics, so you wouldn't see them.
With your eyes.
You would instead encounter them in the realm of ideas. They would come to you as an epiphany, a revelation, you know. So it's this idea that ideas are conscious and have motives of their.
Own, and if you.
Are too lazy in the moment to act on it, they don't wait. They have no patience, very macy.
Epiphany is a funny word because in Greek, you know, it means the appearance of a god. Right, that's the theophoy is the epiphany, and to us it's like, well, I just had an idea, and so we've sort of lost the concept of how sacred these thoughts can be.
And how corrected they to the rest of the universe. And how does it feel when you have an epiphany?
It comes with a sense of enthusiasm, right right, and enthusiasmos it means the God is inside me, you know, So inspiration, enthusiasm, epiphany, all of these ideas. We talk about it artistically, but really what we're dealing with is the reality of divine forces putting their fingers on us and you know, hoping probably that we we'll do something with it. But I have a feeling that there's no hope. There's no chance involved. They know if you will, they
know if you won't. And there's probably more to do with with teaching a lesson, you know, like you just said, you don't do the podcast on that somebody else does that teaches you the lesson to don't hesitate act now live in the moment. There is no future, there is no past. There's this eternal, spinning gray minute, and that's the one opportunity.
Yeah, and I guess it also comes back to what you were talking about. The I don't know the name you used, but the in Portuguese would be bouzius, which is like the concave stuff that they.
Use to get the information from.
Where it's like, whatever information you're getting there, it's most likely what should follow already, like you're in period, supposed to be already something important, So go and follow it, don't discuss it. It's like intuition. You get the intuition, follow it. Otherwise they're not, and you're gonna see, Oh fuck I should why not?
You know? That's exactly it. Yeah.
I remember one time I saw an interview with David Lynch and he was going on about the whole point of forgetting an idea, of losing an idea, and like how devastating that can be to an artist. He was saying, you may want to actually kill yourself because you don't want to lose it. Was something crazy like that, are you gonna want yeah?
Yeahs stealing for the.
You know.
Yeah?
Yeah?
Yeah. He has said some great stuff. Did any of you have other questions and stuff? I don't want to be the only one.
Well, I was going to say, as an artist myself, I have a notebook, I have post it notes. I'm constantly writing things down to remind myself for inspiration to move forward, for that enthusiasm. But it's interesting when you get into these ways of touching on these divn these divine energies. You have, uh, like we were talking about bringing the God into yourself. You have the inspiration that
comes to you. You have divination practices, you have dreams and and these things, you know, following the origins back you know, through ancient Kaldia, into the Canonites, going back to Nimrod, going to the fourth son of Noah and
learning these divinations. And they even say that, uh, the use of ecstatic practices was most likely brought into India by the Scithians, you know, so it's in it's this this this transient kind of ecstatic philosophical belief system them that has kind of branched out and connects so many of these systems, but to many is looked at even though it's one of the oldest practices, it's looked at as you know, potentially evil because of the unknown, because
of the fact that people don't understand the concepts and haven't realized that they are as well participating in.
These things right, right, all the time, yes, all the time.
We're we're always participating in the gods in the muses, but it does the idea of evil has become so prevalent with the introduction of Judaeo Christianity into the thought model. And it's ironic because both of these religions insist they're monistic.
There's one God.
But if we're going to posit a devil, we've created a dualistic framework. If he's equally powerful but opposite, we're in Zoroastrian territory. We've Leftmanism. And that's what I like so much about Orthodoxy, about the really early Christianity like origin, you know, he he, he.
Talks about.
Apple catastasis meant appo meaning not kta meaning going down, and stasis meaning stay there. So he's he's he's refuting the idea of an eternal hell, saying that that makes no sense if if Christ's sacrifice was truly absolute, there can be no remainder, not even a devil, you know. But it's it's harried so far up into modern times. You know, we look at grimoires with like goetic texts
and the princes of Hell and commanding demons. When you look at the etymologies of the names of these these demons, h at least half the time they're the names of Hagan gods. You know, they've just been recast as demons. So when you encounter Astaroth, you know, we're encountering Astarte, we're encountering Inana.
You know who is.
And and on the material plane, the planet Venus, you know, she's the one that has the power to enter the underworld and get back out again, which was unheard of.
That's really.
Like with Hades and Greece. You know, you you if you're dead, you go there and you don't get out except maybe one time a year, and it's temporary. Or if you're in there, you don't get out permanently, which is why the Eleucinian mysteries were such a big deal, because it opens the door for that possibility. That's why Christianity, originally as it was originally conceived, was so important. People don't think about the fact that when Christ was crucified,
he was crucified in a platonic cosmos. Hades is a Greek idea and in the Creed. If you read the Creed and Orthodoxy it says that immediately after he was crucified, he descended into Hades to release the saints, right, and he's going to give them mansions in his father's house. Well his father's house. What he's talking about what every Greek and Roman person at the time recognized from that language. He's talking about Olympus, where the gods live, but men
have never been allowed to go, you know. So it's interesting because he's both confirming the Greek cosmo conception and overturning it at the same time by changing the rules. But it still wasn't new, because this is what we have been seeing with the mystery traditions, with the orphic tradition.
When Orpheus, even though he doesn't succeed in getting Urides all the way out of Hades, the possibility exists, you know, so fascinating way that this stuff flip flops and we inherit this idea of demons, when really it's a corruption of the word damon and a damon. There are orders of damons, but at the top of the order of damons are angulos, which is where we get our word angels, which means messenger, just like hermis, just like we said
earlier about what damons mean. They're messengers that exist between man and the gods.
But it gets so much worse when you translate daimonis into the Roman, which then becomes genius.
So now.
By condemning the demons, you're condemning your own genius. In some ways. That's the spirit that expresses through your body.
And we think about that wrong.
You know, in modern times we think of it a genius as somebody that has a natural proclivity for a certain thing, whether it be mathematics, science, music. But that's not a genius. A genius you acquire your genius through devotional practices, through doing the very thing that your character incarnated to do, and that Socrates called it his damonion, which is just another way of saying his damon. But yeah, your genius is something that you acquire, and once you do,
you are linked up with the gods. Because the genius, the daemon is never not in line with the god above him. Right, So you become a tidle wave. Your output gets just skyrockets. Your ability to to burn through books, especially if they're books in which you're vitally interested, there's no limit, you know, And I'm sure, a lot of you have experienced that. I know when I first got on this path, had my first you know, to put it in woo wu terms like spiritual awakening, I couldn't
get enough. I'd spend eight hours a day in the bookstores. I didn't have any money, so I couldn't buy the books, but i'd sure as fuck sit in there and read them, you know. And there was no limit to how much I could fit up here, and I never never had that capacity prior.
Does anybody have any more questions before as something a little bit different?
Sure? Sorry, Nick, I'll jump in. I know I've been a little quiet. Pete.
Would you say that those higher noedic experiences, I know you said you use a psychoactive substances at the very beginning, But like when you were engaging in those noedic processes of reading, engaging with the text or the fire of perception, it's very gebbatic and hessetic at the same time, because you're bringing sort of an asynthesis into different So would you say that you were following a particular hermeneutic through those texts or a particular even an ideological or cosmological one,
Like what are the particulars that helped you sort of engage.
With that not at the time, because I didn't know anything.
Yeah, at the time, I was just gathering information. It would be a number of years before uhh, I really started getting my hands on maps like the Azhaym, the Kabbala try of life. And you know, once I had these maps and had acquired this new language, I could interpret the information that I had read and retained.
But at the time I was I was a tabolou rasa and I was I had. I had no.
Idea what was going on, and that part of that I liked. You know, there was a certain sacred kind of vulnerability being suspended in the mystery, and I think that was integral to the beginning of the journey.
But no I had I had no uh.
Framework by which to interpret even my own experience at that point. So it was simply pick it up, read it, put it down, and then as I read further texts, I'd compare contrast, you know, find analogs. If they didn't agree, the next step is rectify that. Find a text that meets them in the middle, explains why it doesn't fit. But one of the first books that I read and I haven't read it, and it's been you know, twenty years,
so I don't know how it holds up today. But it was a book by dal Malachi called Gnosis of the Cosmic Christ, which is a Sophia and gnostic approach to kabbala and that was very helpful because I was experiencing a degree of cognitive dissonance with reading Pabbalistic texts and gnostic texts, because remember I was largely going from things I had encountered in that Scottish Grite book, and there's a lot of talk of Kabbalah a gnosticism in there,
with no effort made to distinguish the two. And so once I started diving into those texts, it was clear they're not There's some some crossover, but they're not talking about the same thing. And you know, dow Malachi back then at least, like I said, I don't know how that holds up today. I don't know how I would feel about that book today, but it did. It did smooth smooth some things over for me and pointed me in other directions. And there was even a time when
I wrote him. I must have been eighteen or nineteen, but I said, I said, I can relate to a lot of things you're describing in here, because he's talking about visionary experiences through ritual, which I hadn't experienced yet. I didn't experience anything like that until I started practic to sing yoga and then got into magic. But I was saying, you know, a lot of what you're saying, I've encountered, but it was on substances like psilocybin and LSD.
And I said, where do you stand on this? Because nowhere in the book does he discuss that. And he was gracious enough to open up with a stranger about that and say, well, you know, these practices don't work for everyone. The ones that they don't work for, he said that we all everyone that comes to me.
We start with these practices.
If they continue to do them properly and still aren't getting results, he said, I call those hard cases and with them, I take them to the Native American Church and they get a dose of peyote and usually they come back and it gives them, you know, a frame of reference. They say, oh my god, I get it.
Then they go back and say, okay, let's start over and see if we can do these practices and see if you recognize any of the phenomena that you saw on the payote, you know, And I thought that was a pretty smart way to go about it.
Open the door.
Would you say, would you say, even after that you got to know and practice like magic and all this stuff, if you ever did something again, like any substances archdelics, yeah, exactly, if you felt you felt the difference like from doing it after, then you I kind of have a bit more control maybe over that kind of the.
First thing I noticed after going back to psychedelics because I took a break from them for a long time to try and get a frame of reference for that territory from from somebody who knew more than I did. But when I returned to them, the first thing I noticed was that it wasn't free anymore. I couldn't just go in there and laugh and and trip out and have a good time.
Every time. It was like, Okay, this is work, Get to work.
So that's one way that I still use them often, especially on solstices, equinoxes, full moons, new moons.
You know, I try my best.
To ritualize it, but it's always it's always work, and it's all, there are also more consequences. You know, early on there weren't really consequences, but you really see in real time the consequences not just of actions, but of intentions, thoughts, tendencies to react to the world in a certain way, like the buddhistk Sankara, your tendency to respond in a certain way, and you see that in real time, and
you know, ignorance is blitz. I was probably seeing that in real time at eleven and twelve, but I wouldn't have recognized it. But being in a place where I recognize it, yeah, it's it's absolutely changed the way I do it.
To quote Jim Eshelman, who I'm sure some of you with a.
Background and the Lima no Jim, but he said one time to me, he said, I never bring psychedelics to my ritual, but I always bring ritual to my psychedelics.
And that's that's me for sure.
Nice.
Yeah, well, sorry, Matt, I have a quick follow up for you, PD from your previous comment, but even the one you just sort of articulated now is not Would you be comfortable if you described your sort of journey into these the higher nosis as a bride perhaps traveling through that path and into your so seeing the world for the first time, like preconceptually not having names for things, and then perhaps crossing into that carnal ground of ideas, as you said, being able to throw everything up in
the air and also rectify. So that's a very yosodic kind of property, is to be able to sort of bring all things into synthesis at tiffer it, but then also bring it down back into your sead and say, yeah, this is perhaps closer to the truth, or perhaps has a contour closer to the truth.
Yeah.
Yeah, Well, for starters, I see any psychedelic drug as being related to the supernal triad at least has the potential to get you into those spaces. You might not stay there. Everything that goes up must come down. But for the lower sepharo there, I still associate.
Them with drugs.
You know, if I do a stimulant, I understand that it's propelling my psyche into oh, you know, if I do an aphrodisiac, it's propelling my consciousness into ned Zach.
I see it that way. Now, the.
Apologies in my personal journey before I had any language for this stuff, and what really made me say I need somebody to kind of give me a leg up here because I don't know what's going on.
It was.
I must have been sixteen because I was driving, so I know I had my driver's license. And my younger brother, Michael, he's on x as God Sauce, a brilliant guy, way smarter than me. But we had gone to a festival in Memphis that it's called Memphis in May, which is kind of like Memphis's Marty Gras.
I've been there a bunch of times.
I love that.
Yeah, well, if you want, if you've been there back in the nineties, you probably remember Hippie Hill where all the hippies would be playing bongos around the Elvis statue.
And yes, we.
Expressly went there for the purpose of getting LSD because every time we'd ever been there, we'd found some, but I didn't want to drive with it, you know. So we found this guy that we were familiar with, and I bought seven hits for each of us, me, my brother, and two other friends that were with us, and we
didn't have anything to put it on. So we've got this puddle of seven drops in our hand and we all look at each other and we're like, yeah, let's just down it and jump in the car and hopefully we'll be home before this gets out of hand, because Memphis is about an hour drive from Tupoula.
And.
It was a traumatic drive. I'll say that now. When we finally stop the car and we're all getting out. We stopped at the friend's house, who I'm letting We were all supposed to hang out, but he was kind of wigging out wanted to go home. So we drive him home and I tell everybody, get out, stretch your legs.
You know.
We still have to drive some more, but let's take a breather. And my brother won't get out of the car, and he's he won't communicate with me. He's not responsive, he's not catatonic, but he's completely disconnected.
From the world.
And as this evening goes on, he does some things that I can't to this day, I can't explain magical type things. And finally he tells me in this joking kind of way, He's like, you know, I don't know why I'm telling you this. You're You're just a puppet, you know. But he says, I'm God. I know, I'm God, I am the one, and I was like, buddy, you're just tripping. You know, you're you're not handling the lsd well, but you're not God. I promise. I know your mother,
you were born, you know. But he's like, no, I am God. I wore this mask my whole life and tricked myself into believing I was that mask.
He said, but but.
Now I realize I am all of you, and I am basically the only thing that's real. I work you all like puppets. And he's like, again, I'm only telling you this because I just need to say it out loud, because you don't matter. You're just a puppet, you know. And I had no idea what to do with this.
I ended up calling my mother and I'm like, Mom, I'm sorry I woke you up, but I gave Michael seven hits of acid and he thinks he's God, and I need you to explain to him that you pushed him out of your vagina so that he can understand that he can't be God if he was born, I said, because in my state, I was like, logically, that would mean you were the bigger God if you produced him.
And you still.
Oh, yes, and.
This is back when you know there were no cell phones, so we had to borrow a wireless with the long antenna phone.
And she's screaming at me, you did what you know?
And I'm like, just please talk to Michael so I can get him home, because by this point he's gotten out of the car but won't get back in. And he takes the phone and I can hear my mom screaming, and he looks at the phone and just effortlessly snaps it into two pieces and throws these pieces away. So long story Shortyes, this night, this was a very traumatic night. After about seventy two hours, he finally that look left his eyes and he seemed to be somewhat back to normal.
But to be one honest good you can go read his X posts. He's he's never fully come down. He's still he is God. He is the one we're all puppets that's never left him. It forced him into a permanent syllipsism. So I always thought at that time that that he just kind of lost his ship on LSD. It wouldn't be another for another maybe six seven months. That I took three hits of LSD with two hits of mescaline, and I saw a firsthand what he was, what he meant, what he.
Was talking about.
I was the universe, the boundaries of myself completely dissolved. Time didn't exist, space didn't exist. And I understood while he for him it was a negative, we were puppets. I didn't see it as that. It was more everyone is me that you pick up where the Danny game I play leaves off, and that's how we have completion. And it came with this idea that there is only one God and it doesn't understand itself. I don't understand
myself was the thought process. So what better way to gain self knowledge than to play multiple roles that can interact.
With itself subjectively? Right?
To gain self knowledge through this illusion of multiple players. And it was both ecstatic and absolutely terrifying. And so when I came down from that, that's when I said, uh, I'm not doing that again until I can get a picture of why that, get get a a a framework for.
Why this happened.
Some philosophically, what is going on when this happens, because now it's it's happened to two people, myself included. But again, you you know, you get into those Eastern texts and it's in the slainest language ever. Right that that you're basically wear fingers on a hand, and in certain states you can chase it up the arm, up the shoulder and get right into the head of whatever being you were just a digit on. So yeah, that that was
the journey, that that forced me into a reckoning. Now that's not what I call my spiritual awakening.
That was that was a crisis.
My spiritual awakening experience came much later after I had started working the AA system and was doing yoga every day, and i'd been doing you know, incorporating one limited time. So I had incorporated yama, niyama, asauna, and now I'm working on pranayama and the pranayama.
The breathing exercises energized me to.
Such a degree that I couldn't sleep or I couldn't eat. So I just set up and did these the asana and pranayama for almost three days and something licked like a damn broke in my chest. And thankfully it wasn't like what happened when I became God.
It was more.
This state of total ecstasy, see that I didn't know what to do with. My only thought was, how can I be of service to people, and my only solution was going I was going to all my friends' houses, washing their dishes, sweeping their floors, you know, That's all I could think to do.
And my friend Dustin, he was like, Danny, man, you don't you don't have to do that. Come here, why don't you come smoke this joint with me, you know, let's just chill out.
And I'm like, oh, you know, crying in there with joy and sweeping this floor. Everybody was worried to death about what is wrong with Danny. That's what my friends call me.
Danny was a.
Total you know, and and it and it lasted almost as long as it took to get there.
It lasted right about three days.
And by that time I had I thought this was permanent, like this was this was enlightenment, that this would never go away.
Yeah, I don't.
Want to say I crashed, but I came down and was back at my normal baseline, and I kind of mourned that it went away. And it initially led me to think that that enlightenment was a sham, that this was just a trick of body chemistry. It wouldn't be until years later that I realized that enlightenment is not that state. It's attaining that state, coming back down and allowing what you saw, what you knew in that state to inform the way you behave when you're at Walmart
or when you're in traffic. You know, that's that's in life, and that if you are in that state, forever.
You're I mean, you're useless.
You're useless to everyone around you.
You're a buffoon in a way.
But if you can come back down where you have to clock in and out from your job, you know, clean up your own mess, wash the dishes. But still, even if you don't feel it, allow your behavior to be dictated by what you saw and knew in those moments. I think that's closer to what we in the West call in an enlightened state or whatever.
Something I did want to ask you. It's a little bit different, you know, a little bit off topic, but I think it does go to your you know, definitely with your book, and I just wanted your opinion. There's been probably like over the last two years, there's been times I've covered alchemist or ocult ist poets, writers that might have been openly into the occult, and even some artists.
I don't know if it was Jim Morrison specifically, but I started noticing there was a lot of them that chose at some point to write in hexameter or hexameter, however you say it or a pentameter, and you think there's something too that besides just a way of writing, because I'm sure I think you touch on that in your book.
With dactylic hexameter.
In the English language, it's really difficult to write in daktylic hexameter. The closest thing we have is pentameter, and we see people like Ralph Waldo Emerson. You know, they're dipping into that. It's the closest analog. But that that's the language that the oracles would speaking, you know. So if you went to the oracle at Delphi, what they gave you back as your oracle was in dactylic caxameter, because it was seen as the language of the dactyls.
These these beings that live underground or in volcanoes, but they're they're these divine sometimes craftsmen, but they're crafting for you this oracle.
Uh that that.
Usually isn't just encoded and full of symbols, but it works on multiple levels, right, So it has for the ancient Greeks, it has the potential to create a statement that can be true on more than one level, and that that's somehow inherent in the form, not just the words.
Uh.
And there's probably something to be said for rhythms and cadence, just like with when we hear rhyming and good alliteration. It creates a trance like state, and I think dactylic hexameter lends itself to that.
I don't think the.
Pentameter is as successful, and it certainly doesn't have the historical weight behind it that dactylic hexameter does. But yeah, Parmenides, homer hesiod, Empedocles, Xenophanes, Heraclitis, all these guys, the earliest really brilliant philosophical proto scientific thinkers and magicians.
Wrote this way, So I spoke this way.
The Caldane oracles is in dactylic hexameter. Yeah, yeah, I definitely think it was the meat of choice.
I think the first time I came across that was when I was looking into Empedocles, and I think because of the oracles, I.
Think sympedicals is so amazing. I don't know if you've read Peter Kingsley's book Reality, highly recommend it. It's it's a it's a It's in two parts. The first part is dealing with Parmenides, the second with Empedocles. But it's not just some historians scholarly. Let's talk about what he said. Through reading it. He has this uncanny ability to lure you into that way of thinking. So by the time you've closed the book, you really feel like you have a kinship with Empedicals with Parmenides.
It's it's in the top probably the top three most important amazing books I've ever read.
Nice it's funny to be the resistance, and yet also love for Parmenides. So like all these other philosophers are reading Parmenides and he says motion is impossible, and then they're all just like, ah, you've got to be kidding me. But they loved it so much that they kept it with them the whole time. And I see that as a big influence in the monism of Socrates and all
the rest of the you know, even Platonic Neoplatonic. And he also influenced all of science, right, So this is where ontology comes from.
I was going to say, up to Walter Russell and his discussions on how light works, you know, there is no motion, you know.
Yeah, there's a great poet who is the spiritual mentor to are Schweller de Lubitch oscar Vladislavs de Lubitch Below's but he had a spiritual awakening that occurred on Christmas or Easter or any day or something. But the revelation was that that space doesn't exist, that this is all
one full suit that we exist in. And a lot of a lot of philosophers like to pit hair Aplitis against Parmenides, like they're arguing, you know, because Parmenides he's, like you said, he's saying, there is no motion, there is no change, there is only being. Non being cannot be by definition, if you can think it, it is.
If it is, you can think it, you know. But Heraclitis, he's he comes along and he says, no, you can't cross the same river twice because it's not the same river, and you're not the same man.
You know, they're both.
I don't think it's so much that they're disagreeing as they're approaching the same problem from different angles, and we might even say one one party Parmenides is speaking from a acrocosmic perspective and hair clitis from a microcosmic perspective, but both are are true, and that they're both experiential depending on where your head is in that moment. Yeah, I love those guys, the presocratics. Just there's so much
there that is misinterpreted. I think that's dismissed as pseudo knowledge, pseudoscience, but when you really dive into that stuff.
You start to see that the world might not be what you thought it was.
Describes his journey as being sort of like a drug trip, you know. So he's in this palace of the Queen of the Knight and it's guarded by you know themis or our DeKay right, and then she and right, so she opens the door for him, and then all of a sudden he gets the secret of the universe, which
is formal logic. This is the first time it's expressed, and you know the uh, you know, formula profile of A equals a and then you see that carry on to its natural conclusion, which is all motion can't be real. It's none of it's none of it's actually happening, only being others.
You'll see a lot of people say that all philosophy is a footnote to Plato. Well, Plato is a footnote to Parmenides. That's why in the Parmenides he says, we're going to have to kill Father Parmenides because we can't move in any direction until we can get this ship out of the way.
It's so true, and then it's funny, and it's funny to understand how then, would it would make sense for God to divide itself into multiple things. Seems to be because there's one thing, like.
Thing that's right, and that's that's what I saw, you know. That's why I lashed onto that so easily, because it's like, oh, I I definitely get that.
Yeah, but I was gonna say, you get these various stories within the texts of like hammering the universe into existence and the very sparks flying out where you have like Indra's net where everything is reflecting off everything else and everything is still a part of the whole. These stories very through, you know, and you can find similar stories, I mean throughout.
It's the closest analogue to something we get from mac like somebody like Max Plank, you know, when we're talking about that at the smallest level, the oxygen molecules, the everything is made up of these subatomic particles. If we could see it from that perspective, it would be a three dimensional mesh web structure, you know where, with no no set operation division among that quanta.
Yeah.
Yeah, so he there, Like I said, they were thinking far ahead of of what he would think would be common for an ancient mind.
Mm hmm. I love that you guys are so educated on this.
I never get to just just riff on riff.
You're getting getting to You're able to nerd out a little bit, right, Yeah? I uh, I did. Does anybody have any more questions? I wanted to ask one more at least before we wrap it up, but I don't want to take away from anybody.
I have one, I guess, so I don't know how what's the different things that you tried, let's say, but how did you perceive? For example, I tried I had experenses with Iota, with mushrooms, with let's see you with some other stuff. And it's it's very intriguing that each one of them have a kind of persona, if I may call it like that, like they they present themselves a little bit differently, even though like you could say, okay, the compounds maybe are a little bit different as well,
but there is a similarity in how they behave. So even if it's let's say I had different Iaska ceremonies with different people, so they were prepared differently, but in theory it was always kind of the same type of experience the same like mushrooms. I had mushrooms the same Brazil or in another place, and so in theory they
are different, but the experience is super similar. So I was wondering if from your perspective you could see that as well, and how would you if you ever tried to interpret that, like would you connect each of for example, the mushrooms. Even the Americans, the I guess Central Americans, South South Americans they call it like cult, tuna, accult or something.
Like that, like they have a name.
Exactly so, or like for Iwaska they call it like mother I or whatever. So they kind of already personify it. So even if I'm not into that, let'd say I wasn't raised in that way. When I perceive it, I see the same thing. So it's this idea of there's some kind of agrable maybe you want to call it. So it's curious, how do you perceive it?
Well, yeah, well, I mean I'm.
Very much I have a magical worldview, and I think the world is peopled by spirits. I think even the simplest things, like a can of soda, you know, it participates in mind to the degree that it is capable. Because we're not in a material, material universe. We're in a mental universe like Uxley, and I think even William James before in mind at large is what we're in. What we interpret as material, but this is a mental struct sure, and so everything participates in mind to.
The degree that it is capable.
And these entheogenic substances they've been participating in mind much longer than we have. There is a spiritual intelligence to them. There's a being there. And like you said, if you doubt that, take ayahuasca, because I promise you'll encounter a female type figure. You take mescaliner praote, you will encounter a male like figure. You take Salvia divinorum, it will
be a female type figure every time. And of course I struggled with this, especially with with LSD, you know, because the high doses veellacy, the visuals are very cartoon like, and I thought, why am I seeing? You know that mundane that I watched cartoons when I was a kid, so now I'm seeing seeing cartoons. But no, I think it has more to do with cartoons exist because just like Parmenides said.
It, if it is, it is.
And it's always been a part of this and it manifests for us in a material realm as something somebody drew and moved the pictures real fast. But that that doesn't mean that it came from a vacuum, came from nowhere, And so it raises the question, well, obviously there are no cartoons and a square of bladder paper, you know,
where is this coming from? And I only use that as an example to say that, yes, just like with a sacred location, a haunted house as people would like to call it, but there are spiritus Loki are geniuses that exist in certain locations, and there are geniuses that exist in certain substances, and when we begin to approach them that way, that's where we really enter magical territory. With these substances, you can trip on them, you know, all you want to, but the moment you meet it
as an entity, things change, the communication takes place. It's like with dreaming, right, you know, when you wake up in a spiritual awakening, it's almost like waking up and becoming lucid in a dream, because you realize in a dream it doesn't matter who you're dreaming about, what the room is, they're all you. From a psychological perspective, I'm playing the role of each person here, I'm playing the role of the room I'm in, and that's what that's
waking up while you're awake as the effect of. But if you're familiar with work, especially James Hillman, you know, he says, the worst thing you can do is look at a dream entity and say what do you represent? I mean, if if you met a new person and instead of them asking you your name, they said what does he? What do you represent? They don't even ask you, They ask themselves because you're non existent, what does he represent?
What is this? You know?
It's offensive and it's offensive to dream characters as much as it's offensive to the spirits to occupy these plants.
You know, so when when.
They appear differently it's because they are differently. They have their own personalities and the moment you approached them that way instead of a means to an end, that they are the end in themselves. I'm I'm here because I want to commune with you. You know more than I do about some things. And guess what, I got a nervous system and opposable thumbs. You can use those if you want. If I can get a little bit of access to some of the ancient mind you have, that's my approach.
So yeah, I definitely think as new age as I might come off. Man, there are spirits in those things. There is intelligence in nature, and its far surpasses anything mankind has deduced over the however, many millennia we've been running around on this planet.
There is a theory that the origination or the origin of like magical practices, especially dharma or tonto specifically Tontra dharma originated in the Yakture cults. So it sounds great equivalent of a genius loki basically like a nature fairy or a nature spirit of like a particular place tree plant. But they're often seen as very ferocious, and so what we would say as a Buddhist is that they even
as they appear, it's just existence appearance. So if you push through that in your own consciousness, then you can see what the core of what they really are, which is also sort of a reflection of your own mind often or consciousness, not necessarily. I'm not saying it's one hundred percent that there are one hundred yees.
Not psychological mind, but the mind, the primarial.
Like like rigpa is what we would call it, or like you know, like that diamond thunder is like Zeus like, but it's not really it's more yosodic to forrat like in a dialectical relationship.
Yeah, yeah, and you And from that perspective, you know, there are two valid approaches to this. There's an amusing the terms in the sense that anthropologists and historians of religion use them. There's the magical approach. There's the mystical approach. The magical approach is a ladder, and each rung has different types of beings on them. They each are objective, have different things they can.
Tell you, do with you, do for you.
The mystical approach is everything between me and the top of that ladder is an illusion. Push passet if you see the Buddha on the road, kill him, you know that kind of thinking.
The goal for me is just to get to the top the clear light. The void of nothingness.
Well, we would say aving say we would say emptiness, it would be luminousness and masselessness.
It's non void.
Void would be at fifth consciousness, and we would actually want to go a little higher. We would want to go together, if you want to use a cabalistic sort of example.
But it's not my void.
But it's no thingness, as you know, unless you're saying that it's not apathetic, that it isn't devoid of it's not such that anything you say about it would be wrong because it would be limiting it to that. That's what I'm That's what I'm trying to explain. But I'm not a Buddhist, so I know, I totally get it.
I just the.
Language would is probably going to ruffle your feathers if you are a.
Buddhist, doesn't you know?
It just is I just enjoy the engagement of like the difference of like perspective or view, right, it's very interesting.
But I think that I do think they're both valid. If you know the mystical approach. I don't care what angel stands between.
Me and the top of the ladder.
The magical approaches, Well, today I need to access that part of the ladder because I'd like to accomplish X. And I think that's the difference. But again, with these substances, I don't think it's always safe to use them as a means to an end. They're the end in themselves. So you wouldn't say I need to access X. Wrong, so I'm going to utilize X substance. Uh, that's where I think you could get into trouble because you're you're objectifying a subject.
That's what I say. What I was.
Meaning now speaking of ejectifying a subject this antidotally. I have a friend, this is years ago, that he used to sell salvia liven normum on tour and he was
a heavy user of it. And when he started selling it heavily, he had an entity come to him whenever he would use salvia, and it was a male entity that was he said it kind of looked like a Mayan warrior that had a light bar, and every time he would use the substance when he was selling it, when he went into that state he had the light bar at his neck and the warrior was just staring into his eyes and he said he had to quit selling it.
So I had to say, that's almost identical, but with mushrooms and sell the mushrooms as a kid, and had it wasn't I don't know what it was because it was so large, but a giant foot would come down and threatened to squash me. And it was as real as real, absolutely terrifying. But yeah, I never sold another mushroom after that.
Yeah.
Wow, So I had a question about Martinism. Now I'm seeing that there's a Martinistic influence in Voodoo and and Mormonism. Is there what got you into Martinism? And I know that it has something to do with the solemonic magic and how they use some of those keys as well.
So I was just wondering if you could expand on that.
Well, my interest in Martinism came with my interest in theurgy. Martinism emerged out of the first high degree system of masonry called the Elucohen, which was founded by a my named Martinez de Pascali, and it's a theurgic system that also works. It's kind of a Brammelin like in that
it also works with lower spirits. But the point being if you're aligned with your damon, your holy guardian angel, and they align with you, then you're kind of extending stalvation grace into the lower realms of the world.
You know.
That's what first interested me about it, and and also their their open use of hallucin engines, which a lot of Martin won't admit today, but they were using a number of different psychedelics in the initiation rituals of the Eluco And now after the Elucohen officially closed, Louis Claude de Saint Martin had a circle of friends around him that he would continue teaching what he called the way of the Heart. So it's no longer ritualistic, no longer theurgic.
It's more like he's doing a Potinus kind of thing. And two or three of his students or students or students eventually came together and created the Bartonist order, which is a three degree system similar to masonry, but with more Rosicrucian elements present. And once you become a Martinist, a third degree Martinist elucoen opens to you, so you can join a luko and get access to some of these theregic protocols that aren't written about openly, aren't discussed.
Of course, it's not late Antique theorgy, but you're seeing how it developed post grimoire tradition, and that that's what interested me mainly, was was trying to understand how they're fitting things like the Key of Solomon, you know, different grimoires into that model. Because you look in the Lemegaton, look in the lesser key, you know, you'll see it separated into goetic magic and then theurgy. The goetic is dealing with demons. Theorgy is dealing with angels. A late
antique theorgist would say, no, that's not theorgy. That's dealing with angels. That's that's working with demons, has nothing to do with uniting with a god, you know.
So I was mainly interested in.
It evolved through through the years, especially after the emergence of the European grew more tradition.
Thank you, really, thank you? Does anybody else have any more questions? Before I ask him something else? I guess kind of like to wrap it up, I did want to say, like I didn't want to ask I guess like the average person on the street, I guess came up to you and said, like, you know, why does all this stuff that we were just talking about, the oracles, Neil Clayton is you know, Homer and all that stuff? Why in the orgy? Why does any of that matter
today in twenty twenty five, Like, what's the point? What would you tell somebody like, yes.
Two things, I would say, It doesn't matter. You're perfect just as you are, whether you want to or not. You're still at one with God, at one with the Gods. Every thing is as it should be. But at the same time, we tend to get in our way. I think things should be one way.
We see the world as we wish it were, not as it is.
And I think that from that perspective, the Orgy can offer.
A lot of solace, a lot.
Solace in terms of how we feel when we butt up against the world, because it does imbue it with a meaning, with a sanctity that is very hard to find even in the world religions.
It's just.
It's just hard today to go outside and really feel the miracle of being.
Uh of everything.
And I think that's the biggest thing I've taken away from theogy is participating in the miracle.
Foraging.
You know, when you're foraging and I'm going out, I'm finding heliotrope, I'm participating in helios and and it just changes the entire dynamic of me.
Against the world. So that that's probably the.
As kind of puzzling as it probably sounds to some listeners. That's that's my my explanation.
I like that very well said.
I think, I mean not to speak for Jen, but I think like me and him have even discussed it for myself. You know, I mentioned before with theogy when I have practiced that before in my past, that is some of the times when I've actually really felt some sort of like emotional effect, some sort of deep feeling. I think Jenna's even said that you've been into like theatical stuff. Uh.
Yeah, blocks it can be very theoretic.
Yes, contra is definitely thurgical, and I would say we do apply our will at specific points, but we would be mindful of the karmic implication of doing so with certain practices for sure. But yeah, I agree with you Nick, it's it's it can be very we would say it's un blocking the energy centers or the channels, so sometimes I get heart center. Often you will find like people
will cry after Sodna. It's very common. So yeah, absolutely there's many and there's a you can feel anger, sometimes you can feel lost, sometimes you can feel you know different. It depends on what practice and what text you're doing. But yeah, you definitely can unblown buzz or those cliches or those skandas, those aggregates of mind that would prevent you from sort of reaching primordial consciousness for sure.
So much.
There's there's a great book that might interest you by a friend of mine named Gregory Shaw. He wrote a book called His first book was Theogy and the Soul, which.
Was a really a deep dive into Iamblicus.
But his most recent book is Hellenistic Tantra, and he's comparing Iamblicus's program to.
Abin A Gupta to.
The early Kaula Tantra, particularly Kashmir Tantra Southeast Asia. But lots of parallels, especially in the perception of the body as as almost like body as soul and vice versa. But that might be something jen that that you would find fascinating.
Thank you, ped I'll definitely I've seen it on ig people like I Baker and other people have like interviewed him. I just haven't listened to them or bought the book, but I will definitely do that.
Thank you a little bit of a pretty good too.
Yeah, actually I got I coming on and I think of a week.
Or so nice.
Yeah, uh p D, thank you so much. Before I let you plug everything and let everybody know whether where they can find you stuff. Let me just have the other people remind everybody where they can find them, jin real quick, let everybody know where they can find all your amazing stuff.
Well, so thank you so much.
PD.
I know it's a little discursive, but I know you're you're so smart and you can you can take it. And I really enjoyed it. And thank you so much for teaching me about uh, you know, the more platonic and neo platonic system, which I'm not that familiar with to be honest, so it was definitely a learning episode
for me. And thank you of course to all the O their co hosts, especially to uh Nick and Matt Murra, who is my co host on The Gray Lodge, which is our co host like Roundtable, we talked about speculative gnosissism, every Friday night and check us out on YouTube and at the True Gray Lodge dot com, t r v E True Gray Lodge dot com and on Threshold Saints if you want to follow me. And I'm interviewing the alt lit author Andrew Thompson and his new book Crowbar,
so that'll be dropping really soon. It's supposedly the book of twenty twenty five, so it's really lucky to be able to interview him. So thank you guys so much, appreciate.
It, of course, No, thank you for making me man and Headless Giant what is going on with?
Thank you.
You can find me on x and on Instagram at the Headless Giant, and you can follow my YouTube channel at the Headless Giant. If you have any sort of mystical experiences, any kind of a drug experience having to do with these entities or UFOs or anything, you can send it to. Yeah, you can go with the Headless Giant podcast at gmail dot com and we will read those on Thursdays and Nick will give you some stickers, so definitely check that out us.
Out as well.
Awesome, Thank you very much sir and Matt my man what's going on?
But thank you again thanks so much for calling me here, Nick, and nice to meet you all. Was a very nice episode. Thanks PD for sharing all the stuff. It's cool to see other people practice and get to the same places.
And you know, even if.
As obviously we're not going to share every time one hundred percent of the same thing, it's cool to understand how others thinking so and it was very fascinating stuff.
So again, thanks all for that.
And yeah, you guys can find me as it's here at Medmore nineteen everywhere to their YouTube, Instagram and TikTok anyplace. There's also my website that's Kabbala dot com k.
A A B A l a h dot com.
And yeah, there's an episode here in occult prejacts from this like very recent you guys can check it out as well.
It was very nice.
Yes, it is still up on the lives go check that out. And my man Robbie Marks, thank you so much for making it today.
Really yeah, I'm glad I could make it. Thanks for having me on and it's great to see everybody. Great to meet the nuclear PD. Excellent conversation. This is the type of information that I dwell within and kind of have kind of absorbed, you know, since like you were saying, since I was in my early teens, and it's just it's a great conversation. So thank you so much for that.
And if anybody wants to check out my stuff, you can go and check my link tree which is link tree r M r X and that'll pull up my artwork, my metamind cast, podcast, all my miscellany social media any way you want to connect with me is there. And thanks again Nick, of.
Course, thank you for making it. And finally, PD, I really want to say thank you for coming on. I know it took a while, but it was well well worth the wait. I think the other rejects on the show can even say probably within the last six months, I've gotten very interested in neoplatonism and some of the oldest stuff, so this show was really really familiar. Like I truly love the show. So thank you very much for coming on, man, and please let everybody know where they can find you stuff.
Yeah, I've had a blast. I mean, like I said, it's it's very rare that I get to to just kind of riff on this stuff. Usually I'm having to reinvent the wheel and and and you guys are already rolling.
So this is this has been a treat for me.
As far as you know, we're finding Facebook, Instagram X. I usually just post what I'm researching and you can find me on.
Under p. D.
Newman on all those platforms. Again, my books all major booksellers, and I'm working on three or four books right now, kind of juggling them. But before those come out, my colleague Ala Hawkins, he's an award winning filmmaker out of Columbus, Mississippi. We're finishing up a documentary right now on on my second book, Angels and Vermilion, kind of tracing the trajectory of Acacia in the use of DMT from Egypt to Prague to London and finally into freemasonry.
And hopefully that'll be done next spring.
But yeah, follow me on any of my social media accounts and I'll keep you updated on our progress with that. And again, thanks guys, it's been a real pleasure.
Oh, thank you again. And I do think as far as I know, we got hooked up through inner Traditions, So I guess if anybody's looking for his books, they should be on that site. So you know, he should be on the can check that out. Thank you again for coming on, and everybody in the chat, that's what's up. Even the people who don't agree with this stuff. I appreciate your opinion and jumping in on the chat. And the people that had stuff to add, that's what's up. Again.
I appreciate it, and that's why we go live and until the next one, everybody be well later