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Hey guys, it's Leo. And today we have a special episode of actualised.org, where I'm going to be interviewing Martin ball, PhD. He's an adjunct professor and Ashland, Oregon, at the university there. And what we're going to be talking about is we're gonna be talking about psychedelics, and specifically five amnio because he's a big advocate of five MEO and what it can do for us spiritually and for development. So I want to talk to him because he's got a lot of experience with all sorts of psychedelics and specifically five Meo, and he's got some amazing insights to share with us. So listen, close, because this could really change your life. If you take into practice some of the things we're gonna talk about here today. Hey, Barton, say hey, hey, it's great to be here. Thanks for having me on. Yeah, yeah, you bet. You bet. So I guess the most direct question, the million dollar question is, can fire them to actually be used to attain enlightenment, or however you want to call it liberation, or all the different words that are for this non duality thing that we've been talking about? The short answer is yes, absolutely. So we had a prior conversation just the other week. And one of the things that we talked about there is that I like to make a very clear and strong distinction between what I call an enlightenment experience, and then what is actual enlightenment or liberation, which I would define as freedom from the confines of the illusory nature of the ego and clear awareness of the true nature of the self. And that's, that's something that's different from an enlightenment experience. And it's very important to distinguish these things, because in working with five methoxy Dimethyltryptamine shorthand five Mao or five Meo DMT, is the strongest psychedelic substance that exists on planet Earth. And that, like, for example, many people take it either by smoking it or vaporizing and, and there's other methods as well. But that's the primary method would be smoking or vaporizing. And when someone is smoking or vaporizing five Meo DMT, within a matter of seconds, you go, if we want to call normal perception of reality is zero, you go from zero to infinity, in a number of seconds, it comes on very, very quickly. And if the ego can relax and surrender, during that process, which keep in mind, many egos cannot and do not relax and let go. So it's perfectly possible for people to fight with the experience all the way through. But if someone relaxes, and trust the experience, within a matter of seconds, just within the matter of one breath, you suddenly enter into this full, infinite non dual state of awareness where everything is perceived as the infinite nature of the self, that there is no subject, there's no object, there is just the pure nature of being. That is what we can call an enlightenment experience where when people have that the most common reaction that people have, in coming back from that experience, when they reintegrating in their ego, is oh my god, that was it. That whatever enlightenment is, that was it. And so people are able to perceive that and appreciate that. But what tends to happen is that then the structures of the ego reform after that experience, and then a person is, in a sense, right back where they were before, to some degree. Now, it sets a radical experience that for many people, it is kind of paradigm shattering, where prior belief systems suddenly don't make any sense anymore. Prior intellectual systems don't make any sense anymore. So it can cause people to kind of go through this rather deep process of self analysis and looking at their belief structures and how they've categorized themselves in the world. So it can be very profound, very life changing. But I don't qualify that as actual liberation, that liberation is something that is the result of a process through which people can go to unwind the ego to kind of deconstruct it to unpack places where it has created resistance or withholding within the individual. And that doesn't happen just from one enlightenment experience, or even many enlightenment experiences, because I've seen plenty of instances of people who have had many non dual experiences, but I wouldn't necessarily consider them as being any closer to true liberation than anybody else. So I like to make that distinction. But once we understand that distinction, I would say five Meo DMT is probably the most effective tool that exists on planet Earth. For anyone who's looking to make progress to uncover the true nature of the self and liberate themselves from the prison of the ego. Yeah, well, that's quite amazing that that's such a substance can exist. And you know, I've been interested in what you call non duality and enlightenment and liberation for a long time now, and we've been talking about it a lot on actualized.org and various episodes. And one of the most difficult challenges that I face is just communicating, like that radical paradigm breaking thing as a concept. Because when we're talking language, when we're just talking on YouTube and a video or something, it's just like, well, it's words, and I'm explaining something or you're explaining something, but it's like, and then they have to spend usually years or decades or 1000s of hours of meditation or something like that, to even get a taste, not even liberation, just to get an enlightenment experience takes 1000s of hours of work, and already extreme degrees of open mindedness that many people don't have. Which is why when I learned about five Meo, and I actually took it myself, like, wow, because it's like, you get even just, you know, a 10 minute preview of that infinite. Absolute state is just incredible, because it's like, wow, everything I was studying and all that stuff, it's like, okay, that's kind of knowledge in theory, but then here's like, the real full Monty, the real deal is like amazing, amazing, it, it changes your whole attitude towards this path of liberation. Yeah, and I'd really like to emphasize what you've just said here that it cannot really be communicated through words mean, language is ultimately a dualistic construct, it rests on the assumption of self and other through which there is a communication from one end to the other. So all language is built on the assumption of duality. And then words themselves are, by definition limitations that they are particular constructs that identify something as this, that or the other thing. And so we have this word, we have this word of infinite. And we, you know, we've all seen the Hubble Space Telescope photos. And so we get, you know, a little glimpse, we have this idea, okay? If it is like really, really big, and really, really vast and just goes on and on forever. But that's still a concept. And so we had this idea of what infinity is, and then we and part of the idea is, well, I can't really understand what infinity is, because it's infinite. And so it's an idea. But when you have the experience of being infinite, you very quickly realize that it cannot be contained by any word by any concept by any idea that it just, it just is. And it, the odd thing is that it can be experienced. But it can't necessarily be described. It's crazy, because when I experienced it, it's at the same time. There's such a sense of like recognition of it, and it's like, oh, yeah, of course. And it's also just like, the only words are like, Oh, my God, oh, my god, like, Oh, God. Oh, and it's me. Yeah, me. Yeah. Those are the most common expressions. There's, there's, oh, God, can we swear on your show? You say naughty words. Okay, holy shit. That's a common one. And just, wow, that those are the responses that people most often have when they have this experience. And keep in mind that these are the expressions also of people who maybe have spent years or decades in a meditative practice, or even working with other powerful psychedelics and entheogens, such as ayahuasca, that five Meo DMT opens up this experience that is so far beyond anything else, that I have yet to meet someone who is not radically impressed. And just blown away once they've had this experience yet. It's very big. Yeah. Talk to me a little bit about, we'll see, one of the issues we face here is because even this whole discussion of psychedelic use, a lot of people have a stigma around it, just because of the way they were raised and what we were taught in school and so forth. And so some people are like, they're into smoking pot, and they're into psychedelics a little bit, mostly for like recreational use, and that kind of stuff, or a little bit of spiritual use. But what we're talking about here is a little different than that we're talking about taking the field of like psychotics and also combining it with the field of non dual serious like, consciousness work and combining and then finding like the intersection point between these two circles, so to speak, and then kind of like really mastering that. So we're not talking about just we're not talking about taking like one here to find them here and then just like okay, yeah, I got it. I got it. That's it. Yeah. Okay, let's go back, you know, to ordinary life. No, we're talking about like, how do you use this substance to actually transform your entire life? You Your entire relationship to people to things to yourself who you think you are all these things, which most psychedelic users, you know, I don't see doing. And in fact, that's why there's a stigma there around it. And some people have even criticized me for and said, you know, Leo, you talk about not taking shortcuts and magic pills, and here you are promoting five Meo, as like the miracle cure for enlightenment. Like, have you lost your mind? So, talk to me a little bit about that. Yeah, well, it's important to understand that, first of all, psychedelics are extremely varied. There's a wide variety of different psychedelics, and they have different effects. I like to use the term of Energen, when we're talking about psychedelics in the sense that when we introduce a psychedelic into our biophysical system, what's happening is we're altering our ability to perceive and experience energy. And different psychedelics have different ways that they act on the body, and therefore they have different signatures, and they have different presentations and different ways of accessing our energetic nature. And so the varieties of experiences that they can engender, are very, very broad and very, very wide. And, within that, there's, you know, there's nothing necessarily inherently spiritual, about a psychedelic or inherently enlightening abiertas a psychedelic because ultimately, they are just an amplification and mirroring of the self. So someone's psychedelic experience is always a reflection of themselves. Now, some people take psychedelics because they want to go explore inner space, or some people view it as astral space, or outer space, I view it as, as an inner space as a mental projection space. So some people, you know, think of themselves as explorers, like, oh, I want to go see aliens and machine elves and really weird, fantastical stuff. And you can do that with psychedelics. And so for some people, it doesn't really go much further than that. So it's kind of a form of, you know, just as someone might want to go trek across the Himalayas and challenge themselves by climbing over mountains and encountering blizzards and snow and cliffs and things like that, that people enjoy kind of the thrill of taking psychedelics, that it can be this very exciting, very novel inner voyage. It. Psychedelics also can enhance sense, certain sensory experiences, such as music, or dancing, or art, which is why we see people taking psychedelics, when they go to festivals and things like that, that it applies itself to that sort of situation. Then, there's also a psychotherapeutic component for psychedelics that they can be can used in conjunction with traditional psychotherapy, to help people uncover their hidden traumas and their hidden assumptions and kind of go through a healing process. Then we also have, perhaps this shamanic approach where people see themselves as interacting with entities and realms and spirits and making, you know, contact with these entities for the purposes of gaining knowledge and for healing. And then lastly, we have what I would consider the non dual approach, which is something that is not seen very much in current psychedelic circles around the world, because there hasn't really been much of a discussion in that area. And really, I'm one of the only people that I'm aware of in the broader psychedelic community across the globe, who really emphasizes a non dual approach to working with psychedelics. So it's not something that's really been brought out very much in contemporary culture. Now, when we go back in time, much, much further back in time. So we're talking 1000s of years, we go back to the writing of the Rig Veda in Hinduism. And this is the oldest religious texts from a currently active religious tradition that exists on planet Earth. That's the Rig Veda. It's the first of the Vedas, which forms the textual foundation for, in particular Brahmanical Hinduism, and then also later derivations of Hinduism as well. But anyway, in the Rig Veda, at least 1/3 of the Rig Veda is devoted to the gods Soma, and the preparation of the soma drink, which also later gets referred to as Amrita. And these are some of the foundational texts that start to talk about the nature of Atman and the nature of Brahman, and what is the relationship between the apparently individual into individuate itself, and the fundamental nature of reality. And so in ancient India, they're very much was a connection between the use of psychedelics because that's what Soma is, Soma is some form of psychedelic plant on this somewhat mild and it could be cannabis on a somewhat more extreme end, it could be a form of psilocybin mushroom or even an Ayahuasca analog that we do know that there are plenty of plants in the Indian subcontinent that can be used as Ayahuasca analogs. And so they're in these ancient religious texts. They talk very clearly about them. Non dual nature of reality and how enlightenment is about uncovering the true nature of the cell free from attachment to illusion and beliefs and such. But many of the currently active religious or spiritual traditions around the world and make use of psychedelics are more within the shamanic tradition, which has a far less emphasis on non dual awakening and enlightenment. There, the emphasis is much more on practical approaches to healing. And so they're kind of like in the psychotherapeutic theater of the mind, dealing with spirits and entities can have therapeutic value, I don't necessarily think that it has an enlightenment value, but it has a very strong therapeutic value for people. And so that's where we see a lot of emphasis. And so a lot of people in the West have approached psychedelics more from a shamanic perspective, because that's where they see living traditions of use of psychedelics. So they're kind of modeling themselves after that. But their the discussion of non duality is is rather weak. I would say there's a lot of I would call it lip service where you hear people say, oh, yeah, everything's one, we're all one. So we can just love each other, whatever. So everybody says that, I think most people who say that are just basically parroting this phrase that they don't really understand what that means and haven't necessarily experienced it themselves. But they thoroughly believe it to be true. So there's Oh, yeah. Oh, wonder just love everybody. It's all okay. The, the people that I call hippies like to make fun of them sometimes. Okay, yeah, great, which is why I wanted to interview you, because you do stress the non dual component, which I found very rare. I don't see anybody out there talking about that. So tell us a little bit about what your journey was like? How did you actually use five Mao to attain liberation? Because even that seems to be also very rare. Yeah. Well, it starts and this is what's important for anyone who's I was about to say chasing after enlightenment. You know, so in Buddhism, they call it bodhichitta, that you approach the tradition, because you have a desire to discover truth and to be liberated. You know, why would anybody become a Buddhist other than you're, you're born in a Buddhist country, and so everybody's Buddhists are Buddhists. But if you actually want to become a Buddhist and become a monk, or a nun, or if you want to pursue enlightenment, there has to be the desire for it. And so that's bodhichitta. That's the awakening of the buddha mind or the Enlightenment mind? Do you have the belief that well, there is something that that actually is enlightenment. And that experience is somehow fundamentally true, it's more true than my ordinary perceptions. And that's something that I want to discover for myself. And I think that it's very important for any kind of non dual seeking is that you have to come from that position of, in a sense, it's very uncompromising. So within myself, I had this own desire, I want to know the truth. I want to know what's really real, and I don't, I don't want to bullshit myself. I don't want to just fall back on comfortable beliefs. I don't want to just believe something because I think it's cool or because I think it's interesting or even because I think it's right, that I'm interested in knowing the truth for myself directly. And immediately. Now, my assumption as an individual was, well, maybe that'll happen when I die, maybe you know, the true nature of things will be revealed to myself, and I'll figure it out. So I never really held that out as a genuine possibility. But I've certainly had that desire. Ever since I was a little kid, you know, I grew up in a secular, non spiritual household. But I was very curious about well, what is this God thing that people are talking about? And why do people believe this stuff? You know, and I would hear stories of, especially you know, growing up in largely Christian communities have this weird belief in you know, the Son of God and redeeming us of our sins. And you know, I couldn't buy any of it is just descended like a bunch of hokey make believe, to me, and the notion that some power sinners and we have to redeem ourselves, so we can go to some everlasting life, either in a place of pleasure or place, a place of pain. It just struck me as being ridiculous. But I was curious why people believe this. And, you know, we'll make maybe God's real maybe people are just wrong about what they think God is. You know, so I got very interested in physics, I got very interested in philosophy, I got interested in study of comparative religion, and kind of tried out different religions and different spiritual practices here and there found that I resonated most with Zen Buddhism. When I first encountered that I just felt like, oh, you know, I can accept what these people are saying. They're not asking me really to believe anything. They're sitting telling me to sit down, shut up, pay attention, see what happens, and observe. Observe the ongoing endless chatter of the mind. and just sort of the, the nonstop bullshit parade that is inhabiting our heads at all times. So I think that that's important, but I had that core commitment that I'm really interested in knowing what's real, and I'm not. I'm not going to give my belief to anything, just because people tell me I should believe it. So that was very important to me. And then just to quickly circle back around to your question, when I first encountered five Meo DMT, and we talked about this a little bit, because we didn't make the distinction, clear that five Meo DMT, in case for those that are not, you know, experts on this, it's very different from regular DMT. So it's not an N DMT, which is the regular DMT that people smoke and talk about five Meo, I very rarely hear anybody talk about ever, like you're one of the only people I've heard talk about it. So I just want to make that point clear. Yeah, it's, you know, sometimes when people hear five Meo DMT, they think, oh, DMT, you're talking about DMT? Well, the majority of people when they talk about DMT, that's n n DMT. And that's what you find. In most versions of the Ayahuasca drink. There are versions of iOS Oscar that are made with five Meo DMT, but they're very, very rare. So the vast majority is made with nn DMT. And Nn. DMT was very much popularized by people like Terence McKenna, and also the work of Rick Strassman and his book DMT, the spirit molecule, and in the psychedelic underground, many people still to this day, consider it to be the top psychedelic compound, that there couldn't possibly be anything beyond that. And as someone who has experienced both DMT and five Meo DMT, I'll let you know that five Meo just leaves nn DMT in the dust, which nn DMT is amazing. It's very, very powerful. It's very, very strong. It does not compare to five Meo DMT, really nothing does. And so there's hasn't been a lot of cultural discussion around five Meo DMT, when I first started talking about it, and writing about it. The only other person who was really publicly talking about it was James Orok. And he had a book coming out right around the same time called tryptamine. Palace, and is the first book specifically written about five Meo DMT. And at this point, this was back in 2008, and 2009. At this point, I would say, I've probably written and spoken more about five Meo DMT than anybody else, because I've written about six or seven books in which five Meo is one of the main subjects and I've been lecturing and giving interviews about it for the past eight or nine years now. So awareness is growing about it, but it's still ultimately very low. Now, to circle back around to your question, again, when I first experienced what I consider a full release dose of five Meo DMT. It came at a very significant time in my life, in that I had been in a marriage and in a relationship for many, many years since my ex wife and I, we first met when I was 18 years old, so I was rather young. And then we went on to get married, and we had two kids. But the reality was, that the majority of our relationship together, we weren't really together. And I was very unhappy with that relationship. But I covered that over with all kinds of spiritual mumbo jumbo about how this was teaching me about non attachment and how to overcome my desires, and teaching compassion and selflessness. And that was all just more bullshit of the ego trying to convince me that I shouldn't act on what I truly felt, which was I wanted out of this relationship. So a point came in late 2007, where I finally fully actually admitted to myself that I knew I was unhappy. I knew I wanted out of this relationship, but I wouldn't even admit it to myself, let alone anybody else. And I finally reached the point where events conspired that I was finally honest with myself, and said, You know what, I haven't been happy most of my adult life. And if I don't do something about it now, then I'm probably never gonna do anything about it. So at that point, I ended up leaving my wife and I left my job, and I left my kids. And that was definitely not an easy decision to make. But it was done within the context of this is the truth of what's in my heart. And I'm no longer going to lie to myself, or try and convince myself that I should anything other than what I actually feel and I'm going to pay attention to that. I'm gonna follow that. And of course, you know, everybody's saying, Oh, you have to be reasonable. You have to be rational. You can't do that. It's like, no, no, I'm just gonna follow my heart. You know, typical hippie line. I'm just gonna follow my bliss. Man, I'm gonna follow my heart. But the significance of that is that when I first encountered five Meo DMT, I didn't have a job, I was completely broke, I had just left this relationship, I had moved to a new community, I didn't know anyone, I, you know, all of my safety nets, all of my normal structures of my life, I had already pulled the rug out from underneath me. So in a sense, and I had this very large child support payment to make every month and I didn't have any idea how I was going to make it. So I was scared. I was just, I was ready. In a sense, in some respects, I was ready to die, I was ready to just give up because if the situation that I was in was just personally very challenging, it was very difficult. And I didn't know what was going to come of it. So when the five MBO experience started to unfold for me, I was just completely ready to let go into that I was ready to die. And that's what I thought, and that's a very common experience, as five Meo DMT starts to unfold is that the ego thinks, holy shit, I'm dying. And that right there a choice is presented where the ego can say, okay, yes. Or the ego can say, no, no, I don't want to die. And when I encountered that as like, okay, yeah, I'm ready. Let's just go, let's just go. And that was the first time I had a full non dual experience. And it's also the first time I would say, I've encountered the true nature of God. And that was quite profound for me, because I knew within seconds, it was just Holy shit. It's God, this is impossible. This is impossible. This is this can't possibly be real. But that was the immediate recognition with as I said, just before I even exhale, the hit is, oh, my God, it's God, this is it. And so yeah, that's amazing. It's amazing. How similar that estimation is, I mean, we use the word God, but it's so funny, but like, both of us have a very similar background. And both of us are non religious. And in fact, both of us are kind of like, you know, squeamish about religion. It's like, what? No, that's the wrong idea, right? It's anti truth. It's the opposite. It's like the point of it is to hold you back from discovering what's true. And what's so like twisted about it is that the people who believe in God the most, are probably the ones that have never actually had a direct experience of God. No, because most, especially in Western cultures, most beliefs about God rest on a dualistic presumption that God is the transcendent other God is the Creator. God is separate from creation, that God is everything that we are not God is the ultimate authority, that we have to submit to God that we have to obey God that God creates rules. And so it creates this notion of God as the ultimate authoritarian figure, who may be considered as loving or kind or whatever else. But it still posits the idea that God exists outside of us or outside of reality, and somehow has control over this thing that we call reality that God is the ultimate boss. And he's also got like a human figure to him, too. So it's like, whenever I think of God is always like a being it has to have like an anthropomorphic kind of like shape. But then yeah, and then what's really cool is when you have the five, Mao it's like, oh, no, it's just infinity. It's the infinity all of reality, like, once, right? And so that's what became clear to me in that experience is that God is very real, in that there is one universal consciousness and being that is, everyone and everything in it is not transcendent in any way. It actually is reality, that all of reality is God experiencing itself. And it's an also I turned to the word God having come from a Zen Buddhist tradition, that I wasn't comfortable with the concept of buddha mind, where in a lot of Buddhism, that pure consciousness or the buddha mind is described as completely empty. And, you know, most Buddhism describes itself as an atheistic religious tradition. And so here, it's not that I'm promoting the idea of a Creator God because this isn't a Creator God. But I felt more comfortable with the term God than buddha mind because it was also conscious and aware and that it is living through the vehicle of myself as an individual human being just as it is through you. So it's also the first thing that came out of my mouth. So this hit came on and the first thing and it was just thank you God. It wasn't Thank you buddha mind. It wasn't thank you all for that. Isn't consciousness it was, oh my god, it's God, thank You God, I need to express my gratitude. And I'm gonna call it God. That's what surprised me about the experience as well as because, like, I don't talk about God in my, in my content, I don't talk about God in my episodes in my videos or anything that I don't like, though, that kind of language. I prefer, like, if I'm rationally thinking about it, I prefer more, kind of stripped down scientific like language. So it's just kind of like, you know, the truth, or absolute infinity or something like that. But what was interesting when I had the five Meo, I just it's just like, Oh, my God, those are the words is, yeah, like you said, it wasn't like, oh, Buddha, I saw Buddha, or it wasn't like, Oh, this is nothingness. It was like, No, this is infinity. It's absolutely infinite. Yeah. And that's, that's important to distinguish that it's not this sense of emptiness, or nothingness, that it's the full, infinite complexity of everything eternally, and simultaneously, and it's conscious and aware and alive. Yeah, it's totally, totally. So you haven't asked the question, but I'll I'll just say this that one of the reasons that this works, the way that it does is that what we're dealing with here, this is five methoxy, Dimethyltryptamine. And tryptamine, is the basic building block of a human neurotransmitter. And so actually, all mammals run off of tryptamines, in terms of our nervous system and our conceptual system. And as a mammal, we actually naturally produce both five Meo DMT and nn DMT, that these two psychedelic compounds are present inside our bodies at all times. And also nn DMT, and five Meo DMT are very rare molecules in that they can immediately pass the blood, the blood brain barrier. And what that means is that when we ingest them, especially through something like smoking or vaporizing, there's an almost immediate translation into the full blown nature of the experience. So that there's, you know, with many things that we consume in our bodies, there has to be a complex chemical process that takes place in order for our body to utilize it. That's not the case with five Meo or nn DMT. Basically, we introduce it to our system. And our brain says, Yes, give me that, thank you, that it doesn't have to go through the whole security check system is just immediately passes. And what's happening is these molecules, these these neurotransmitters are then activating certain receptor sites on our brains. And, quite interestingly, someone that I've interviewed on my own podcast, the antigenic evolution is Dr. Thomas Ray. And he's done a wide variety of studies looking at how different psychedelic compounds either activate or deactivate different receptor sites in our neural networks. And what he's found, is that five Meo DMT almost exclusively acts, and I don't remember the exact receptor, but he says it acts specifically on this one receptor that seems to be most closely associated with the ego in individuated consciousness. And so when five Meo is introduced to the system, essentially, it holds the potential to completely overwhelm the ego, which is unlike any other psychedelic that most other psychedelics kind of have a broad spectrum of neurotransmitter receptor sites that they activate. So they have, you know, you have auditory hallucinations, visual hallucinations, out of body experiences, phantom limbs, you know, all different kinds of things that people might experience because we're activating all these different aspects of the brain. Five MBO seems to directly target the ego and says, nope, and just overwhelms it, which is why five MBO is more ideally suited to helping people enter into non dual states of awareness than any other psychedelic because, you know, for example, nn DMT is very, very powerful, but it heavily activates the visual processing centers of the brain. So when someone consumes nn DMT, it's extremely visual. I mean, it's, it's over the top visual, it's the most high definition high resolution, visual component you can ever possibly imagine, to the degree that many people who consume and and DMT thoroughly believed themselves to be in alternate universes or on other planets are interacting with aliens and other such things. But notice, when you're in a vision, quote, unquote, visionary state of consciousness, there's always a subject object to reality that's taking place there because there is a subject the self, that is observing some other some object that is perceived to exist outside of the self. So most reports from people using nn DMT, are still on a very much dualistic side of things. And then you do get very rare reports, people said, something like, well, then suddenly, everything dissolved into a white light or a golden light. And that I realized that I was that light, and that light was God, and that light was everything. So people do kind of slip into the non dual awareness with nn DMT. But the vast majority of it 99% of it is on the dualistic side of things. And part of that is due to the highly visionary nature of it, it's hard to have non dual realization through visionary content. And, for example, we see this in Tibetan Buddhism, which ultimately is a non dual tradition. But it starts novices out at a highly dualistic level, well, first, you're interacting with objects outside of yourself, then you're learning how to visualize those objects in a visionary space, then you're learning how to identify with the visual content. And then when you finally get to Zog chin to the great perfection, then you're dissolving all of it into empty space and realizing that that is the true nature of identity is that empty space that had doesn't have any specific visual content. So it starts with duality, and then gradually moves people into non duality. Where five me Oh, just says, okay, non duality. There you go. Yeah, I think that's one of the things that I urge people to be cautious about if they're doing psychedelics is that it's very easy to get lost and trapped in the visual phenomena. And people who've never tried a psychedelic, they'll say, Well, Leo, you know, like, you guys are talking about this stuff. But how do you know you're not hallucinating and just seeing stuff, which then you come back to ordinary reality, and it's not real anymore. And those people don't understand that actually, what we're after here is not the visual hallucination, or any thing that's being seen, or even thought it's a direct consciousness, which is, which is different than anything that most people have ever experienced in their life. Like, they don't even have the possibility that there is such a thing as direct consciousness, and like, what could that even be. And so that's why five Meo is a beautiful thing is because five Meo is very clear, it doesn't cloud your mind, like the way mushrooms do mushrooms are kind of cloudy, and your thoughts get kind of twisted and distorted. And so it's kind of like, maybe I'll see something on mushrooms, but maybe I'll kind of delude myself. Or I'll see some weird visuals on nn DMT. But with five Meo, my mind, my thoughts are very, very clear. And it's just like a direct or clear, just like a direct portal of consciousness opens up. Yeah. And it's important, again, to emphasize that it's not about seeing or perceiving anything, I mean, that there is a perceptual content to it. But what's more important is the feeling and the recognition that this is truth. And that mounts might sound like maybe a abstract concept, but I would urge everyone who's listening, that everybody knows the difference between when they're lying, and when they're telling the truth? Because you can feel it, that, you know, it might be something as simple as, Hey, do you like my haircut? And we say, Hey, you look great. And internally, we know is like, I just really bolstered to that person, because I didn't want to hurt their feelings. But actually, I don't like their haircut at all. So you can feel the difference. And then if if you've been lying to yourself if you've been lying to someone, and then when you finally admit the truth, there's this sense of release and relief, like, Ah, finally, like when I finally admitted to myself that actually I've been really miserable in my marriage. When I and I always put it out on something else, it was always somebody this is this problem, that problem. And when I finally admitted that there was just this opening in my heart, just like this sense of awe, finally, you're telling the truth. And it's not because that's objectively true, or that I can point to this, like, oh, yeah, it's true. And I can show you, it's like, no, I can feel it, I can feel the truth of it. And so that's what five Mao can do is help us enter into the state where we just can feel like, Oh, my God, everything really is one. Everything really is love. Everything truly is infinite. There is nothing to be afraid of even my own data, that everything is just the self interacting with the self and the truth of it. You know, sometimes people want to argue that people want to get into arguments about whether it's duality or non duality. It's like, look, when you enter into the non dual state, it's just so immediately obviously clear, there's no point in arguing past that point. And that's I'm not going to try and prove it. To you, because it's all it's up to you to experience it for yourself. And when you experience it is just obvious like, Oh, yeah. Okay, this is true. Yeah, the ones who argue are usually the ones who just want a reason to stay, like close minded base. Yeah, they want to argue about belief systems, they want to say, well, that's your belief versus my belief. And there's a very clear difference between truth and belief. And this is one of the great things that five Meo can help people to sort out within themselves. Because, honestly, people are very, very confused on this issue, especially spiritual and religious people in the new age where people talk about, well, if you believe it, it's true, and that we have to respect everybody's beliefs. Most beliefs are bullshit, there's no reason to respect bullshit. It's like, oh, you have a lovely, stinking pile of bullshit, and you're parading it around. And please honor and respect my bullshit, I'm sorry. But it's, it's still bullshit. And that there's a difference between what you believe, and what's actually true. And most of what we think is true, is not really true. And encountering Absolute Truth is so different than anything else, that it again, we can't really compare it, we can't really describe it, when you feel it, when you have the experience, you know, it, it's, and that's why five Meo, I think it's an important tool, let's say in our toolbox for developing ourselves, is that it can actually very quickly and kind of rather effortlessly reveal the difference between relative truth and absolute truth, which is something that otherwise people would never work their way towards it, because it just, it takes too long, it's too hard to sit there on your ass and meditate for, for years to get a little glimpse of it. And even then, you know, it's, it's still very challenging. So I think that that's why this can be such an important tool for, for human development. But let's, let's circle back around to how did you actually use five Meo because, yes, you had your first mind blowing experience, and I've had one or two of those myself. But I don't feel liberated. So how do I now let's say that I've tried five me a couple of times. And now I want to like, get my liberation. How do I get there? All right, get your liberation on baby. Well, okay, so my own personal process, it's kind of a long, complex story. So we're not gonna get into that. And I'll say the same thing that I said to you. When we spoke the other day that I wrote a whole book about it. It's called being infinite. And I wrote the book specifically, to address this question of, well, how did you do it? How did you go through this process yourself. So I'll speak a little bit more generally, at this point, rather than get into my own personal story. And I'd invite anybody who's interested, my book has been infinite, it's out there on Amazon, go check it out. But here's what I learned very quickly, in working both with five Meo DMT, and another other medicines during the same time period. First, I noticed this, then in myself, and then I started looking to see if this was true for other people, and very quickly found that this was true. There's a fundamental distinction. When people go into fully energetically open, non dual states of awareness and I do qualify with fully energetically open because that's different than say a meditative non dual experience, which I do not qualify as energetically fully open. When someone is energetically fully open and goes into a non dual state of awareness and experience, what happens is their bodies always open up with a perfectly mirrored bilateral symmetry, where the left and right sides body of the body always mirror each other. And nothing ever crosses this center line of the body. So people move spontaneously, or their bodies open up, and their hands may come together, but they come together right here in the middle along the center line, and then they separate and they come back together, then you can see a transition, when suddenly someone comes back into the ego. So they're fully immersed in the experience and their bodies are open. And then as soon as the ego comes in, there's some kind of break where suddenly the left side of the body is doing something different than the right side of the body. For people who don't get all the way to being fully energetically open, you give them a very powerful psychedelic, which again, is changing the energetic experience of the body. And you can watch them fight with it. And you will see that there's always some kind of asymmetry taking place in their body language when they're fighting with it or if they're still residing in their ego. So I learned very quickly that non dual states of awareness coincide with balanced bilateral symmetry and the ego almost always functions through some form of enter energetic asymmetry, which is perfectly natural, I mean, there's nothing wrong with it, I'm not trying to criticize it. But for example, I use this example all the time, my glass of water is to my right. Now, if I a subject become thirsty, and I want my water operating with bilateral symmetry isn't gonna get me my water, my water is over here to the right, so I break into subject object duality so that we can have an interaction between these two different parts of the self. So working with psychedelics, for the intention of achieving not only achieving non dual states of awareness, but also working out the distortions of the Ego means paying attention to how either symmetries or asymmetries show up within the body. So this is kind of the challenge that I give people is take some five Meo DMT, and see how long you can stay perfectly symmetrical within your body. Now, some people can ride it all the way through. And they can do that fairly easily. Many people, I would say the vast majority can't. And even those who do who open up initially, and are in this nice bilateral Senate cemetery, you will see after 10 or 15 minutes, or for some people after 30 seconds, as soon as the ego starts to reintegrate, they start breaking into a cemeteries. Now what can happen is to the ego itself. And this is also just coming out of my own experience. This is not based on anybody else's model. This is just my own definition of the egos. The ego itself is not a singular thing. It's a collection of patterns of energy. So as we're coming into ourselves, as young beings, what we're doing is we're learning different, what we perceive as acceptable ways of engaging our energy than here, I always make a distinction with my dog, okay, my dog, someone knocks on the door, my dog always barks. So there's an energetic stimulus, and she has a natural response to that. Now, when she does that, my dog does not then go and say, Did I sound too much like a cat, when I said that, or, or maybe I was too aggressive that I wonder how that person feels about that. Or I just don't feel like barking today that I'm actually feeling kind of down on myself. So maybe I'll just Wolf. Now she doesn't do that. There's an energetic input, and she has an energetic output, and it is completely uncensored and unstructured. So for the dog, it's completely natural. Everything she does is completely natural human beings. Because we have this capacity for deep self awareness that as we're growing up, we start to observe our parents, our society, our culture, our religion, whatever spirituality we're born into. And we learn, oh, there are different ways people should express themselves, there's different ways they should behave, there's different ways they should use their bodies, there's different ways that they should use their tone of voice. And so we learn how to constantly edit and censor our own natural energy. Rather than simply being as we are, that we are. We're domesticated. It's almost like an introversion, because the dog in that case is very just extroverted. It just kind of like throws it out there, and it doesn't care. And then the introvert is the one who just kind of like goes inside and analyzes everything to death. Right. And so what that does is that creates energetic structures. So that rather than just saying what we actually think, is that we learn, oh, we need to say what's socially or culturally acceptable, and what isn't going to piss other people off or make them feel uncomfortable. And then we also do the same thing with our thoughts internally. And this actually governs the entire use of our body because our body is just an energetic vehicle. Our thoughts are energy, our feelings, our energy, our expressions, our energy, our body motions are the engagement of energy. And so we create this image for ourselves, that is a collection of these patterns of energy, where we says, where we say, this collection of patterns is me and everything else is not me. Okay, so we create these dualistic divides between self and other, and then we take on all these things. And ultimately what that does is that creates a character or creates a persona in the same way like for example, if I were going to play a drunk for you right now, I had kind of really like sloshing my words and like kind of just moving around like that because I'm just so smashed and I love you so much. The I just wanted I just love you so much. Right? So that creates the drunk character, which is different from the sober Martin character, but it's different ways of engaging energy. Okay, so now, what happens when we take something like five Meo DMT is that it's so enter energetically powerful that as we've stated, it has this infinite quality to it. All of the patterns of our ego are all are, by definition are limited, they're not infinite. So we have the opportunity to actually overwhelm all of the patterns of the ego with it. I call it energetics shock therapy for the ego, okay? If we introduce so much energy, that the ego just says, I give up, I can't maintain my sense of self. And so it reaches the point where the ego can choose to surrender, and it's very important, I really stress this, no psychedelic can ever violate your free will, because it's just an amplification of yourself, there's nothing else and no one else there, it's just you. So you get to choose if you're gonna go all the way or not, that if you choose No, you can fight with it. And you can actually maintain the patterns of the ego, it's very, very difficult. It's very horrifying and terrifying. So I don't recommend it, it's much, much better, if you just say, Hey, I give up. It's kind of like getting on a roller coaster. And once you get on the top of the roller coaster, like screaming and crying to get someone to let you off, you can have a much better time if you just say we and go for it, and relax. But anyway, it can deconstruct the patterns of the ego. Now, because we have these patterns of the ego, they tend to create holdings and distortions of energy within the individual, which again, my dog doesn't have. I mean, she's just clear and clean. If she wants to bark, she barks people, if they want to bark, they don't bark, they do something else. And that creates all these blocks within the vehicle of the individual. So this is one reason why when people take psychedelics, they do a lot of purging, a lot of throwing up, or maybe screaming and laughing and crying or stripping off all their clothes or having diarrhea, it's it's not the actual substance coming out of them. That's important. It's that it's releasing stored energy. And vast majority of people are holding stored energy in their abdomens, because this is where we react energetically to fear and withholding and feelings of needs of protection versus being vulnerable. So working with psychedelics can help us to clear out the stored baggage that we've created for ourselves. And I guarantee you, everybody's got it. So there's no judgment there, everybody is just walking around with a huge pile of shit inside them that they could just let go of, but they don't know how to do it. Because most of the choices that we've made regarding the structure of our ego comes from when we're very small children. And we make choices that I'm going to behave this way and not this way, I'm going to be like this and not like that. So we're not consciously aware of these patterns now. So first of all, five MBO can get you all the way out of the ego. So suddenly, you can experience like, oh, no, this is the real, this is the real deal, this infinite Nandu Wilson, purse perception, but then the structures of the ego kind of close back in on the person, I do this with my hands, it goes, clink, clink, clink, clink, clink, and these structures come back in. And that can actually help someone become aware of, Oh, I've created myself as this kind of victim, or I've created myself as this kind of spiritual seeker, or I've created myself as this kind of Guru, or I've created myself as a musician, or as a writer, or as an happy person or as an unhappy person. And these are all the patterns I've established around that belief. And at the dualistic level, then you start to perceive, and this is how I've created the characters of the people that I've interacted with in my life, to help prop up the story of the character that I've created for myself. So it's actually all a self constructed narrative that perfectly fits and matches my own beliefs about myself, and what I think I deserve, and what I think I'm worthy of, or how I should be treated. So it can increase levels of self awareness. But see, the danger is then that people immediately start engaging in those patterns. So here's where I tell people rest in cemetry. And what you find is that suddenly one side of your body starts to become very uncomfortable, like, oh, because I want to engage this pattern that actually engages the left side of my body or the right side of my body. And that by resting in cemetry, it allows the distortions created by these patterns to come to the surface. Where then if you're working with a skilled facilitator, can help you actually work out the stuck energy and can actually dissolve that pattern. So that then you become free to choose something else for yourself or ideally, choose to live in no particular patterns and learn how to be so acutely aware of energy, that you just go with what is as it presents itself, without ever trying to control it without ever trying to edit it. In other words, people learn how to simply be themselves outside of the illusory construct of the ego. And then then rather than the ego being a prison, then I liken it to a garment of clothing that either comes on or goes off or you can change it as necessary. And actually, it all Functions automatically. So you do not ever need to do anything, you just learn how to be true. And that's the biggest thing is that commitment to the non dualistic commitment to truth. And that means being committed to truth, personally, of not committing our minds to things that we don't know for certain are true, which is the vast majority of everything. It means being committed to expressing ourselves openly and honestly. And clearly, it means not backing away from what we truly think or feel. And that can be kind of harsh for people sometimes, because a lot of culture is based on, you know, the white lie, the the casual lies that we constantly tell ourselves and other people to help society function and get along. So we all although they'll get pissed off at each other all the time, or whatever it is. But it means that we're wrapped in layers and layers and layers of lies, and we all get pissed off at each other in the end still. That's the thing is that telling people, what they want to hear, helps in the immediate situation to help smooth things over at the social level, it never helps anyone in the long run, yes. So the process of non dual liberation means you need to commit yourself to becoming aware of yourself of the choices you are making of the energy that you're experiencing, that you're either being true to, or that you are somehow compromising or editing. And that's a process. And so the enlightenment experience, the non dual experience helps with that, because you need to have the non dual experience somewhere in there. So you can actually see what's really going on. But then the rest of it is fine tuning and becoming more and more aware of the cloak of the ego and how you've constructed a character for yourself. And the problem with the ego is that it convinces us that we are the character that we're playing. But that's not true. It's just a character that we're playing this one universal consciousness is playing billions of characters simultaneously. That's who and what we truly are, is the universal consciousness. So in different bodies, we inhabit different characters. But it's, it's just a character, there's one actor playing billions of characters simultaneously. So it's learning how to loosen the grip that we have on the dualistic side of our identity and rest within the infinite nature of the non dual nature of the self. So basically, if somebody wanted to apply this, everything that you just described, if someone wanted to apply that theory, then what they could do is they could smoke or snort some five Meo, they could have this experience of absolute consciousness and truth. Infinity, and then they could see like, oh, yeah, okay, so there's something greater at work here than just myself, and I've got this ego that's kind of playing itself out. And then the ego will come back, and it'll kind of close back down and it'll, you'll come back, you're not going to be enlightened, you're just going to come back, and you're probably going to be pretty much like you were before maybe a little bit more open minded. And then if you keep doing that over and over and over again, on a weekly, monthly sort of basis, and you keep examining how your ego is coming back and closing down and ego is distorting and manipulating and doing all this kind of stuff with your energy and your thoughts and your beliefs and it's trying to cling then after you know, a long process of that, then maybe one day they reach a point where describe what happened with you, where's the ultimate place that you kind of reached? Yeah. So first, I'll just say a little bit more about the process that this process also involves lots of vibrating in the body, because again, people are kind of closed off energetically. And so a lot of shifting and opening needs to take place there. So most people who go through this, they spent a lot of time vibrating and shaking. It also might in tail, not being able to speak in your natural language for periods of time where people are just babbling incoherently glossolalia kinds of phenomenon. It also involves a lot of toning and vocalizing from people screaming, yelling, laughing, crying, some people have orgasms, some people shoot themselves. There's lots of purging that takes place. Because again, the ego has spent a lifetime trapping this energy in and it needs to sort itself out and that can be mentally, extraordinarily confusing, can be emotionally tumultuous. Most people hide their true emotions from themselves, and they have to encounter them fully. And the ego the monkey mind is constantly going to be trying to make a story out of it and say, Oh, well, here's the story for you. So people get Messiah complexes or they get victim complexes or they start to think Oh, Well, maybe I'm this really powerful shaman or something like that. And so they create stories and narratives for themselves. And the ego wants to cling on to that. So it's always like the Zen idea of look, the monkey mind is going to be swinging from tree to tree, your job is just to observe it. You don't attach yourself to any of the thoughts and you don't try and block any of the thoughts either. Let them come, let them go. Let the stories come, let them go. Now, for me personally, what happened was that there was there was God on one side, and there was Martin on the other side, and then going through this process, the line between the two got blurrier and blurrier and blurrier. Which of course, was very confusing for Martin, because, because the ego is trying to think well, then who am I? What am I? What does this mean for me? And so that's tricky, because that's where the ego can say, oh, yeah, that's me. I'm it. It's all me. Right? It's not you. It's me, because it's me. So the ego can can you know, co opt any of this stuff that it wants to? And we see this in religious traditions all the time and you know, people proclaiming Oh, yeah, I'm, I actually am the second coming of Jesus. Right. That's where the ego is, is it? Oh, yeah, it's me and creates a story about it, which is just more bullshit or I actually am Maitreya. I'm the future Buddha. Or I am the hidden the mom, you know, all the major religious traditions have this. Or when we have Hindu gurus, they mean that they're the avatar of Vishnu or whatever. Again, it's just its story. Its ego, feel free not to listen to it. Okay. Now, for me personally, when the final crack came, because my ego was trying to understand all of this, and what does it mean? And is it really real? Or am I just bullshitting myself? It when it when my ego finally just said, Okay, this is reality, this is God, I'm God, everything is God, this is just just just what it is. When I finally just accepted that it was like a switch got thrown. And as I described to you the other day, it was essentially like I was tripping five Meo DMT, all the time for several months on end, where it was literally like, I just had a pipe right here next to me was just taking hit after hit. But curiously, at times that infinite energy would come down, and everything would come back, and so sort of a dualistic perception, and then the Martin character would reappear. And this would, initially it only happened when I went to the University to go lecture, where my entire mannerisms, my tone of voice, the way that I speak, everything shifts when I'm outside of my ego. So like, right now, I'm talking to you through the Martin character. And this is what I use for 99% of my social interaction, because that's my character. And I don't have a problem with that. But initially, I describe it as you know, when little kids, when lots of little kids figure out, they can actually take their clothes off, they prefer to be naked. Well, when I really crack, that's what happened, where I would just energetically the ego is just off all the time, unless it was socially appropriate for me to have the clothing on, like when I went and go read, go teach at school. And so there was this tremendous energetic release. And it was just kind of freedom. And I also thought at that time that I probably wasn't ever going to sleep again, because I'd be lying in bed at night, it was like I was just tripping. Just constantly just non stop visual explosions and fractals and mandalas. And just infinite infinite infinite and stars and galaxies. And so I thought, Okay, well, I guess I'm never gonna sleep again. But then that took a couple of weeks to die down. And eventually I was I was sleeping again. And then eventually, after a few months, it was like I was resting more within the ego. Because it is first it's like, I just got to take this thing off, just be gone, be gone. But then it's like, okay, now I can be here. And so that's, that's kind of where I'm at now, where I wear it most of the time. But the difference is, I will never again, ever because I am conscious of how it works. Now, I will never put myself in the prison of the ego, that I'm more than happy to play the character of Martin through this particular vehicle. I've got no problem with that. But the character will never again trap me the way that it had trapped me before because I don't identify with it. It's just no I'm just expressing myself to this particular character. And when I don't need this character, the character just boom just disappears and I'm totally comfortable with that. So it used to be a very dramatic there's Martin on one end and then there's Wow, there's the infinite nature on the other end. And now it's just more of this okay egos coming off or going into non dual. Okay, non dual. Very good. Then now we're coming back into duality. Okay, come back and do two hours. So the transitions are very, very smooth. It's not this disjuncture, and honestly, this is what I've seen with a lot of people with five Meo DMT experience is that they that they have what I Call a jump, they jump from the ego all the way into non duality, and then boom, they're trapped back in the ego again. Whereas ideally is learning how to do this in a way that there's a smooth transition open and then a smooth transition closed. And then it's not this disjuncture, and for many people who experienced five Meo DMT, the non dual part of their experience is a complete blank, it's a white out, they don't have any recollection of it. And that's very, very common, that they can remember their ego saying, Oh, shit, and then they remember their ego saying, Well, fuck, I'm back what just happened. But during the non dual part, zero recognition, zero recollection of what that was. So learning how to be self aware is how to be aware of our energy in all states, not just the closed duel, but also the infinite non dual and how to ride the wave all the way open, and all the way closed again, and stay relaxed, centered, calm, and present through it all. And when you can do that, you're golden. And if you can do that, through every moment of your life of every day, because we're always confronted with a choice, am I going to freak out and try and control things are just relax and go with what is we make that choice every moment, every moment. And if you can do that 100% of the time, you're golden, you're done. And so to be clear, here, we're not really talking about using this substance just as a magic pill. Because I don't want to get to have people to get the wrong impression where it's like, oh, yeah, I'll just take some substance. And then like, I don't have to do any more personal development work. I don't have to, I don't have to introspect, I don't have to, like, think about myself and my patterns and my story, you know, it's actually quite the opposite. What you're saying is, the substance is actually the thing that opens you up, to really get into the really juicy, deep work that has to be done, that normally people don't want to do or aren't even capable of doing because their eyes really haven't been open to these possibilities. Like it's, it's really taking and pouring fuel on the sort of personal development journey from pouring fuel on that whole thing. And then just like speeding it all up. Yeah. And it's, it is not like you get to pass over stuff. It's like, the best metaphor I have is like it's giving birth to yourself repeatedly. Now, and I mean, that in the sense of the trauma and difficulty and intensity of giving birth, I have three kids, I was present for all births. And that man, that's tremendous. And this is what it's like to use medicine, these angiogenic medicines to go through this process of birthing yourself as the being that you've always been, it means tearing yourself open from the inside out and cleaning out and looking into every last little secret hidden nook and cranny of your mind and your belief system and clearing it out. You don't get to jump over anything. And it's deeper and more effective than any other methodology. And it's extraordinarily challenging. There's nothing easy about it at all. I mean, people think, oh, yeah, you're taking a shortcut, or you're just taking the easy way out. So you do not have a clue what you're talking about. If you think this is easy. UVI if you think this is some kind of shortcut, it's just accelerated, you still have to go the same distance, in a sense, you just move into a faster in a way that you are more acutely aware of what's going on. And there's also the potential for people to radically delude themselves through this process as well. So it takes vigilance I mean, you really have to be vigilant with yourself or else you just often lala land in your in hippie bullshit New Age, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, it's it's a tricky path to walk. And it's funny because last time we talked you said, you know, oh, you know, after five me oh, you know, other psychedelics. I started asking about like, what about mushrooms? What about salvia, what about other stuff, and you're like, Well, other psychedelics get potentiate it after five Meo? And I was kind of like, Yeah, okay. And then I took some mushrooms a few days ago, actually. And that was the first substance I've ever taken after my five Meo experience a few weeks ago, and it's like, wow, the mushroom experience was totally different than and it was, like gut wrenching this time because I had a couple of mushroom experience where they were just beautiful, like, very nice, very kind of like walking through lala land. You know, it's just like, heavenly. And here I take this one and it's like, what the hell is this? This is not this is not what mushrooms were before. Took mushrooms. It's like wow, this is so deep. And also a lot of like, a lot of shit starts coming up to my own shit. It's like oh, you know? Oh, there it is. My arrogance you know, the mushroom gods are punishing me for My arrogance, you know, thinking that I got it all down. And that was a very tough trip. And you know, like very emotionally, very emotionally stressful. Yeah. So So here's so here's the opportunity, when no matter what arises, you rest in symmetry. And here body language becomes important that I, the ideal body language says, I'm open. I'm relaxed. I'm embracing my experience, and I'm letting myself be vulnerable. And even though you just want to curl up into the fetal position and whimper in the corner, you open up to it, and then all of a sudden, you're throwing up and or whatever, and it's releasing, and then you feel oh, I let it go. It scared the shit out of me. But I let it go. I moved through that. And that's what I mean by the you are birthing yourself. And it's, man, it's messy. And, and oftentimes, there is sort of this sort of this flirtatious seductive quality with psychedelics, where people think, oh, man, that was just so beautiful. And see, then, then, then you think, oh, man, I've got this down, I can just relax. And it's like, okay, now I've got you. Now we're gonna rake you over the coals because your defenses are down. And that happens. It's very, very common, where people encounter a psychedelic, and they think, Okay, well, this is cool, I can ride with this. But after the smiley introduction, you know, the courtship is over, it's like, Okay, now we're getting down to the dirty work. And it's grueling. And it, it is so challenging. But it's worth it because it clears you out in a way that, really nothing else will that because they're working on us, mentally, energetically, emotionally, physically, it's crossing all the levels. Whereas you know, when we go for psychotherapy, we're mostly dealing with mental content, or emotional content. Or if you're getting bodywork, than you're getting somatic therapy. Or if you're doing a special, you know, cleanser diet, then you're getting gastrointestinal stuff. But this is, this is full spectrum across the board. And so that's what really allows all of this stuff to move in a way that's extremely efficient. Again, it's not a shortcut, it's just more efficient. Yeah, it's amazing. The first time I did five, and well, not the first time, but the first time I got my, my big breakthrough is, like I noticed it was very characteristically unique about it is that like, it kind of melted my whole body. Like it wasn't just a mental thing. And it like it melted my heart, it melted. Like, I felt like I was like energy was just like going through my whole it was that whole body orgasm kind of experience. Which is amazing. And also what you're talking about, you know, kind of the body cemetery. Like when I was going through this tough mushroom experience, I remembered your, your insights about that. And I'm like, Okay, I gotta, I gotta open up, open up. And I was trying to surrender to it. But also like, it was difficult to surrender. And there were points where I didn't surrender properly. And, and I noticed, like, during some parts of that trip was like a four hour trip. But like, I would be sitting on my couch in this very, totally twisted up manner, like, twisted up in like grotesque ways. Just like my legs crossed, like twice or three times over, like in a pretzel. What is this? So Martin was talking about, yeah, that's literally what happens. See, because we're dealing, we're dealing with energy here. And the left and right sides of the body are actually processing energy differently. And so when. So when you're really energetically open, and say your legs cross, it's like taking to live wires, where then they start, the energy starts to wrap around itself. And people can actually experience really severe cramps, when this takes place. At lower levels of energy, you'd never notice it. But the the higher level, the entheogen, the more likely these kinds of phenomenon are going to take place. And so part of the advice that I tell people, because it happens, people, you know, the ego pattern engages and people don't realize that they're engaging in. But whenever you become aware that you're twisted up, or you're asymmetrical, you don't beat yourself up, because the ego does that as well. It's like, oh, you're doing it wrong. It's like, look, just shut up, okay? I'm just becoming aware. Okay. So when you become aware of it, then you bring yourself back into symmetry. And then the same thing goes for, I have this sort of mantra of do nothing, do absolutely nothing. As soon as you become aware that you're doing something, because it's usually a projection of the ego where people think, Oh, I'm healing the sacred feminine of the universe, or whatever it is that you think that you're doing. When you become aware that you're doing it, stop it, go back to a neutral position, and just rest. Feel your breath. When you say Do nothing you mean during the trip? Do nothing. Like don't distract yourself with with stuff. Yeah. Don't distract yourself either with physical activity or mental stories or trying to figure things out or accomplish them. Thanks. So that again, this is the non dual approach. Now many people use psychedelics and they want to use him as part of a religious ritual. And they're doing things during the religious ritual for the spirits, or God, or whatever it is, or singing hymns and chanting prayers and trying to heal people. Well, that's more at the practical level of psychedelics, that's not the non dual approach. If you're if you want to approach them non dualistic Aliy, you have to learn how to do nothing, because the ego is a chronic busy body. It loves ritual and ceremony and prayer because it makes it feel like it's doing something that it should, it's all ego, it's all attachment, it's all illusion, learn how to rest in doing nothing. And when you when you actually do nothing, when you accomplish that. The weird thing is that then the body starts to spontaneously act on its own. And then people might even spontaneously start to speak on their own. And even the ego can be there's who said that? That's those words just came out of my body. But I didn't say that who said that? Okay. And so the more we relaxed the ego, the more our genuine energy is able to express itself both physically, mentally, emotionally and verbally. And then then the doing, it's like in Taoism, that they say the Dow is sage accomplishes everything, by doing nothing. In my opinion, that's exactly what's intended. Yeah, my audience is pretty familiar with it. Because I've been pushing the idea of do nothing, not only I'm not not specifically during tripping, but like, just in ordinary life, like people are way too busy, they're distracting themselves with all sorts of useless stuff. So I always talk about kind of minimalizing your life, and just have more room just to sit into, to kind of think or even don't think just sit, just sit and see what happens. Because we don't do that anymore. Yeah. And also, it applies to activities as well. So the example that I give here is, you know, I'm a musician. So I spent a lot of time making music. And that's obviously a form of doing something. But my approach to music is, generally when I record a song, I have no idea what the song is gonna sound like, I've never played it before, I don't have any particular intention, and I sit down in front of the computer. And then I just start to do stuff. And whatever sounds good to me, I just keep following that. And then three or four hours later, I'll have a complete song done. But it's not because I sat down and said, I want to make a song that sounds like this, this is what I'm going to do. Because that's a form of doing where we set an intention, and say I have a particular outcome that I'm trying to achieve. That becomes a task of the ego. You know, like, and many musicians, many performers know this, that the harder you try to put on a good performance, the worse it's going to be. Yeah, yeah, you gotta flow with it, you've got to flow with it. And so that's a form of, again, in Taoism, this is wu wei, this is actionless action, that you're letting the action take care of itself, then you become the vehicle for the expression of that. But it's not based on your intention or desire. It's just, Okay, I'm just gonna let it happen. And the more we can do that, throughout all of our interactions throughout the day, the more at peace we are, and the more present and centered and clear we are. It's, it's just that simple. So by learning how to do nothing, you can do everything that you need to do without ever getting in your own way. And that just makes life so much sweeter and richer and freer. Yeah, that's the goal. The goal is liberation, the goal is freedom from your own mental prison. Okay, great. Well, I hope you guys took that to heart. There's a lot of stuff here. And what I liked about this conversation is that it connected with a lot of things that I normally talk with you guys about anyways. So hopefully, you can see how we're talking about psychedelics. But we're also really talking about personal development, we're talking about self actualization, we're talking about how to let go of your ego and to, to discover your authentic self, your real authentic self. time in your life. Yeah. And that that real authentic self is a universal self. You know, sometimes when that language gets used, people think, Oh, well, I want to find who I truly am and what my calling and purpose is. ego, ego ego. The true self is the universal self. It's the same for everyone. So if you think that, oh, well, if I if I get in touch with my true self, I'll know what my purpose in life is. No, you won't. Your only purpose in life is to be that's all that you're ever doing. Anyway, that's all that the universal consciousness of God is doing is just being because that's all that there is to do. There's there's no goal to be achieved. There's no you know, there's nothing to do just enjoy yourself. It just exists existence is here to exist. Yeah, so just be it's cool. All right, like the dude, the dude abides, the dude abides. That's good. All right, so we're gonna wrap it up here. Let's let viewers know how they can get in touch with you and some of your work, because you do have quite a bit of work out there. First of all, I want to let folks know that you do host the annual psychedelics conference. Are you still hosting that for next year? Yeah, so that's the exploring psychedelics conference that happens at Southern Oregon University in the spring and coming up in 2017. It will be in I think it's the very beginning of June. This last year, we had about maybe 500 participants, we had 35 different speakers from all around the world. It's quite exciting. So that was our third year. So we're going into our fourth year. So that's something I've been organizing. I also organized smaller events locally here in Ashland, like just this past weekend, we had the entheogenic wisdom forums at the Peace village festival, and I had seven different speakers for that. So I have my podcast, which is the antigenic evolution podcast, which has recordings from the conferences are available there, as well as interviews that I've done and lectures that I've given. Your podcast is great. I really recommend you guys check out his podcast because I've been listening to it. And he has a lot of like experts that he interviews from the psychedelic community, and not just hippy experts, but like doctors, PhDs, people who are really doing serious research on this using psychedelics for therapeutic purposes, as well as for developing consciousness for spiritual purposes. So a lot of really great information there. I'll have links to that stuff below, in the description, so you guys can go click on those. And also tell us about your books. Yeah, so I'm quite a prolific writer. I think I've written like 17 books or something like that, you can find pretty much all of them on Amazon or Kindle the iBook store. So my web page, just Martin ball.net. I write both fiction and nonfiction. Quite a big fan of fiction writing. So I like to write fantasy, science fiction, epics, things like that all with a psychedelic band. I'm also a musician so you can find my music out there. It's available on iTunes, and I'm also an artist. So I've got a lot of visionary art that's out there as well. So I just like to express myself. Great. Yeah, I love some of your fractal psychedelic art is really beautiful. Cool. All right, Martin. Well, thank you for your time. Thanks for educating us about five MEO and keep leading the cause because I think that this is something that really has a lot of potential to transform people in the future. Excellent. Well, it's been a pleasure speaking with you and thanks for having me on your show.