Duncan Trussell is an actor, comedian, and contemporary shaman. He is also the host of the Netflix show, The Midnight Gospel, and the creator of the popular podcast, The Duncussells family hour. In this episode, he talks to Russell about his spiritual journey, how he copes in the modern world, and what it means to be spiritual in the 21st century. He also shares some of his favorite Ram Dass stories, and explains why he doesn t believe in the existence of a deity. Russell Brand is a stand-up comedian, actor, writer, podcaster, and podcaster. His work has appeared on Comedy Central, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and The Daily Show with Rachel Maddow. His music is available on SoundCloud, and he's also available on Amazon Prime and Vimeo worldwide. He's on Netflix, and you can catch him in the Midnight Gospel on Netflix on Sunday nights at 8pm Eastern. If you like what you hear, please HIT SUBSCRIBE on Apple Podcasts and leave us a rating and review on iTunes. We'll be looking out for him on the next episode of Subcutaneous, coming soon! Thanks for listening! Stay free! - Russell Brand Music: "Subcutaneous" by Ian Dorsch, "Goodbye Outer Space" by Jeff Kaale, "Good Morning America" by Haley Shaw, "Outro: How I Used To See The Stars" by Cairo Brant, "Solo" by John Singleton, "In My Mind" by Suneater, "Intro" by Jocko Willink, "Astrober (feat. by James Gray, "Thank You" by David Lynch, "The Best Thing" by Fergie, "Let's Talk About It" by Eddy, "Breezy" by Shadydave, "Noah" by Koko, "Mr. Vanellope ( ) and "I'll See You Soon" by Mr. Williams, "I'm Not Here" & "I Can't Have It (featuring You're Not Here Yet Yet Yet?" by Jeff Percibly ( ) is out Now & I'll Be My Best Friend? is out in the UK, by Kaitlyn ( ) & I hope You'll Hear This Is My Story (and I'll Hear It Soon?
00:00:00.000Hello, welcome to Stay Free with Russell Brand.
00:00:02.000Today's episode is subcutaneous, where we take an under-the-skin, deep-dive, cut-to-the-bone guest and delve into their psyche, their minds, their experiences.
00:00:12.000Previously on the show, we've had Tim Robbins, Eckhart Tolle.
00:00:15.000Jordan Peterson, of course, Maya Vandana, Shiva, Jocko Willink, all of those are available to watch on Rumble now.
00:00:20.000Today, I'm joined by Duncan Trussell, who's an actor and a comedian and a contemporary shaman and a peculiar mystic star of the midnight gospel on Netflix and host of the Duncan Trussell Family Hour podcast.
00:00:35.000But he is so much more none of those things, beyond them, ulterior to them.
00:00:41.000Duncan, thanks for joining me on the show.
00:00:47.000I feel like when I knew that I was going to be speaking to you again, I thought this would be an opportunity for me to revise where I am right now in my life.
00:00:57.000Are you available for that experience with me, Duncan?
00:01:00.000I feel sometimes that I lose contact with my spirituality because my life becomes either martial or active.
00:01:10.000For example, just this transition to rumble, just having to manage that, to take on new partners, to create a model where we were Because streaming every day took a toll on me, and because sometimes you get pulled into the type of content that does well, which I really care about.
00:01:28.000I care about anti-establishment thinking.
00:01:31.000I'm an old-school radical in the way that I think that you are as well.
00:01:37.000I think we have similar people that we admire, like Terence McKenna, say, or like our man Ram Dass.
00:01:47.000You know, and like that spirituality and politics necessarily fuse, that there is a mystical component to politics, but that I think is getting extracted by sort of cold or dry rationalism in some cause of the old left.
00:02:04.000Piety and virtue signalling in this what I would call establishment liberalism, real punkish humour on the right, but a total lack of love.
00:02:13.000Do you, like me sometimes, feel, Duncan, that you haven't got a cultural home, that you haven't got a tribe sometimes?
00:02:25.000I think it's, you know, this is the What you're talking about is it it's kind of like the doldrums or something or this is the moment on the uh archetypical moment when Jesus is being crucified it says father why have you forsaken me it's that moment or what do they call it the uh
00:02:46.000The abyss, where it's crossing the abyss.
00:02:50.000So, you know, you go through these periods in your life where suddenly all the sparking, beautiful, spiritual stuff doesn't seem to be there anymore.
00:02:58.000You're just filling out forms and you have a sense of I was just at this Ram Dass retreat and Raghu Marcus, who was hanging out with Neem Karoli Baba and Ram Dass back in the 60s in India, was telling a story that Krishnadas sold him.
00:03:20.000Krishnadas goes over to Ram Dass' house and Ram Dass is like, Kind of depressed, and he says to Krishnadas, you're a fraud!
00:03:46.000But, you know, it's that sense of, like, you're not always going to get the feeling of being buoyed by some benevolent superintelligence in your life, though.
00:05:32.000I guess that's why we look to them, you know, our elders are Ram Dass, they are Terence McKenna, they are those figures that came from the 60s, because we are not Indian mystics, are we?
00:05:42.000We are Western and trying somehow to create some perennialism out of this stuff, to bolt together some kind of new faith out of the remnants Of secularism and what the dry rubble it's left us.
00:06:02.000Well, you know, the best description I've heard of it is Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche in talking about how to know if you've encountered like authentic spirituality.
00:06:12.000He says it should feel like fresh baked bread.
00:06:15.000It should feel like, you know, fresh baked bread coming out of the oven.
00:06:19.000There shouldn't be that stale, dry, dead, you know, or just the creepy sense that you're watching like an echo of an echo of an echo of an echo of an echo that at some point meant something but now it's just people echoing the thing you know but then i do think uh if you have a sense of this is the path then you if you're going to have a sense of this is not the path
00:06:47.000And the Tantric idea is that when you're off the path, that's the path too.
00:06:52.000When you're in the doldrums, really what you're experiencing is the benevolent superintelligence, is the sweetness of life, except you don't like that particular flavor of life.
00:07:04.000You want a different flavor of ice cream, and it's training yourself to find it within every single part of the spectrum of experience.
00:07:14.000And people like Tole Ramdas appear to have done that, but then we don't know!
00:07:20.000We're just seeing them when they're on stage.
00:07:22.000You don't know what's going on with them.
00:07:30.000When you're around them, you feel like you're standing in front of some kind of space heater that is radiating love and present moment awareness.
00:07:39.000So it's hard to imagine that there are times when they're also kind of slumped over, feeling a little blue.
00:07:48.000Our chat, Firegirl2020, points out that this conversation is happening during the winter solstice.
00:07:56.000This is when we find ourselves colliding.
00:07:59.000You mentioned that sometimes you feel like you're living in a simulacrum.
00:08:03.000Some image so frequently repeated that there is no essence left.
00:08:09.000I feel that that's where we have found ourselves in the culture.
00:08:12.000A lot of the conversation I have at Duncan are with people like Barry Weiss or Matt Taibbi, the people that were involved in the release of the Twitter files.
00:08:21.000A lot of people that are essentially attacking establishment liberalism from the left but are being condemned for being right-wing.
00:08:28.000We're in a very unusual ideological space, I feel.
00:08:32.000I loved it when on perhaps your most recent Rogan episode, you used the phrase, from woo to cue!
00:08:49.000Like, you know, the idea that a lot of people that are anti-establishment and embrace spiritual ideas might end up believing in kind of Baroque conspiracy.
00:09:00.000There's a sort of a necessity, I think, somehow, to Present our discourse reasonably, to not sound like hokey or crazy, or like we're part of the terrifying idea of a new right-wing movement, which I never thought that I would ever be accused of being a part of.
00:09:19.000I just don't know how this has happened.
00:09:21.000What do you, how do you think that we are, how do you try to present the
00:09:25.000I, the, the, present the intersection of spiritual values and political ideals
00:09:32.000without finding yourself in either Wu or Q territory?
00:09:47.000And I love his recommendation to maintain agnosticism.
00:09:50.000And when you're looking at any of these, like, fringe theories, just don't become a true believer.
00:09:55.000And this is a way to inoculate yourself from becoming like, you know, Potentially being swept out into, you know, a lot of irrational thinking.
00:10:07.000Because I think, you know, what has, the creepy thing that you've identified, and I've watched many of, lots of clips of you, like, very fearlessly talking about this stuff.
00:10:20.000The thing we've identified is that our idea of what the left was, or liberalism was, was that there was a kind of, like, rebellion or pushback against the state.
00:10:32.000There wasn't a collusion with the state.
00:10:34.000Generally, there was like the radicals that we're thinking about, they were really like involved in a wrestling match with the state to try to achieve usually some kind of peace, get out of Vietnam, stop bombing people, things like that.
00:10:49.000Now what's so confusing, I think, is that you're seeing like The FBI, the state entities, at least in the United States, who are, like, kind of in this strange relationship with people on the left who are controlling media to some degree.
00:11:08.000And so, and the reason that they like it, I don't blame them.
00:11:12.000Man, I was just watching this show on Netflix, something about the CIA, not a documentary, it's okay, it's a good show, but I was watching it and every once in a while, like, thinking, like, man, it looks like I think it'd be cool to work at the CIA.
00:11:26.000You get to fly anywhere you want and sneak around.
00:11:30.000But what I'm getting at is that the people who are controlling Twitter, they liked working with the state because the state, they felt, was representing their ideals.
00:11:40.000And it's a kind of short-term thinking, which is like, the more you allow the state to embed itself into your particular private business, you have to hope that the state maintains your ethics Your ideas of what's right going forward forever.
00:11:57.000And if you look at the history of the United States, you can see it's penduluming between left and right, left and right.
00:12:03.000And so it's a really, I don't think it's a safe bet.
00:12:06.000It's like, yeah, right now it's great.
00:12:09.000Your ideals are being represented by the state.
00:12:12.000But what happens in eight years when something awful has happened?
00:12:17.000And now there's some very powerful, megalomaniacal tyrant who's not as abrasive as Trump was, but more like a JFK-style fascist person who it's not half the country that likes him.
00:12:32.000It's 70% of the country that likes him, and they love him!
00:12:37.000And now it's like, wait, why are you, why did you say that six years ago on Twitter about this person or that person?
00:12:44.000You know, I think you might need to be taken into a special kind of hospital.
00:13:34.000It's a beautiful rant. I feel that we live in this place of total immersion.
00:13:40.000When you used the simulacrum reference earlier with regard to pseudo-spirituality, the kind of phatic and impersonating spirituality that we're kind of offered in yoga centers and places of privileged retreat where the Aesthetic of individualism has just crept into another quarter.
00:14:05.000Ultimately, spirituality for me is about dissolving the boundaries between myself and everything else.
00:14:13.000and not living my life ultimately in the pursuit of some variant of my primal desires.
00:14:20.000My desire for status, my desire to mate, my desire...
00:14:24.000Like, you know, I don't want to be governed by some distortion of this bio...
00:14:29.000the biochemical processes that are required for the survival of the species that I'm a part of.
00:14:34.000Now, when you talk about the ideals that are being mimicked, I believe,
00:14:38.000like in social media spaces, and utilized by the state, my concern is that they don't care
00:14:53.000I do think that, in a sense, you can see how the kind of political libertarianism ...expressed by someone like Tucker Carlson would necessarily lead to.
00:15:03.000If you want to identify as whatever, that's cool.
00:15:07.000If you ultimately want to be allowed to have a gun and live wherever you want to live and you don't want to pay any tax, how could you have a problem if someone says, I consider myself to be this gender, none of the language that's around now represents how I feel, could you talk to me like that?
00:15:21.000And I had this conversation, Duncan, with Jordan Trussell, because I said, God, I agree with you so much.
00:15:26.000When you're talking about myth, when you're talking about archetypes,
00:15:28.000when you're talking about duty, when you're talking about becoming the person
00:15:31.000you need to become, the inverted commas, the father, I agree with you.
00:15:34.000But what's the deal with like Elliot Page?
00:15:37.000Well, what are you getting out of that?
00:15:39.000And of course he believes it's deeply insidious and he feels that it's like creating a radiation
00:15:44.000that breaks down sort of fundamental components, the building blocks of our language and our culture.
00:15:49.000And ultimately, I suppose, God, I'm trying to praise see Jordan Peterson's position for which he would not thank me.
00:15:55.000But it seems that he believes that many of the building blocks of patriarchal traditional culture have value, doesn't he?
00:16:01.000But the thing that I want to see, the baked bread fresh that I want there, in all of these conversations, is love.
00:16:07.000I want to feel that people are coming from a place of love.
00:16:12.000And I don't think that the people that stand up for the rights of people to identify however they want, on a corporate level certainly, I don't think they give a shit.
00:16:24.000I don't think they give a shit about racial equality.
00:16:26.000In fact, I think they're deliberately using it because they've abandoned economic equality.
00:16:30.000They've abandoned working class people all over the world.
00:16:33.000And in order to distract us from that, I don't mean it in such an obviously conspiratorial way when I say they to distract us from that.
00:16:42.000I mean to say the way that the culture is mobilized is that there is no
00:16:46.000socialist left in terms of what are we going to do to help the millions of
00:16:49.000Americans and people all over the world that simply don't have enough access to
00:16:52.000resources. We're not going to do anything about that. We're going to say they're
00:16:55.000deplorable. We're going to say they're Trump voters and assholes and we're
00:16:58.000going to forget them and then we're going to legitimize that abandonment by
00:17:02.000saying they don't use the right words and they're racist and they're
00:17:05.000disgusting so that we can now demonize them. So when those kind of... so I don't
00:17:09.000I think it's just bad in case the regime ends up in the wrong hands.
00:17:12.000I think the regime's already in the wrong hands.
00:17:14.000They've just got some nice, some cute understanding of the aesthetics of the cultural revolution that gave birth to many of the icons behind you, or at least the one icon I recognize.
00:17:35.000Where it was necessary to bring a new energy into the culture.
00:17:38.000And I think that what we're experiencing now is the commodification of everything, the commercialization of everything, the imitation of everything, and it's fucking getting harder and harder to taste something real.
00:17:57.000And then you throw the tables over and you're pissed!
00:18:03.000It's really a... This experience, the encounter with the world, is generally the first reaction anyone who isn't dead asleep is gonna have.
00:18:20.000If you do get into any authentic spiritual thing, you might start realizing that the The whole world is a temple.
00:18:28.000The whole world is this beautiful place.
00:18:30.000What an incredible place we find ourselves in this particular incarnation.
00:18:35.000And then, when you start having that realization, and you look around and realize that this world is like actually filled with people and things that seem to be trying to distract you from recognizing that you don't really need much it's beautiful all the way through and then when it gets really maddening is when you realize oh my god
00:18:59.000But they're not just, like, distracting us.
00:19:02.000They're using the very same language that used to point towards how beautiful everything is to, like, sell war, to sell violence, to sell all kinds of bullshit.
00:19:15.000And so then that's where you can really start feeling the great It's the most dizzying sense that we hear about archetypically in all the stories of the avatars.
00:19:25.000You've got Jesus in the desert and, you know, the temptations.
00:19:31.000Dostoevsky did a great, like in the Brothers Karamazov talks about, breaks down what each of them meant.
00:19:37.000Like, why don't you turn the stones into bread and then you can feed the people?
00:19:41.000And Jesus says, well, men cannot live by bread alone.
00:19:44.000And Dostoevsky breaks that down by saying, if, you know, the priest class were just started feeding the people, then all autonomy would go away.
00:19:54.000And then you would have a, like, it would just essentially the church would go from being a place where autonomous individuals go for connection to the divine to just some sort of Food nipple, a soup bank or something where you pretend to bow down to things to get stuff.
00:20:09.000Anyway, Buddha is met by Mara and is visited with three temptations, one of them being death, which, you know, if you've taken enough psychedelics or if you have really plugged into that unified consciousness field you're talking about, It's not like your fear of death goes away, but it certainly will change and become a little less intense than if you haven't had that experience.
00:20:32.000But then the second temptation was the Daughters of Mara, which is what you're talking about, I think, which is where Mara shows Buddha his beautiful daughters.
00:20:41.000It doesn't really represent, like, hooking up or something.
00:20:45.000It represents this is the fruit fruit of the world. You could have this with all that you've
00:20:50.000achieved and obtained all of the cities, all of that glowing thing that you're
00:20:55.000talking about when you run into people who have had an authentic enlightenment experience. I mean,
00:21:02.000that could be used for lots of things other than teaching people. This is the idea there, which
00:21:08.000is like, why don't you marry my daughters? You could be a great king of the whole world.
00:21:13.000And so apparently, and I don't know for sure if this is bona fide, but I've heard
00:21:17.000that Buddha said that was the most difficult of the temptations that he was visited
00:21:21.000before his enlightenment under the Bodhi tree.
00:21:24.000And so What you're talking about is the Daughters of Mara.
00:21:28.000What you're talking about is that invitation from the world.
00:21:34.000Use all of what you have learned to bring people deeper into confusion.
00:21:40.000Use what you've learned to bring people deeper into the...
00:21:45.000Into the demiurge, into the secularism, as you call it.
00:21:51.000Away from the fresh baked bread and towards the shit bread in front of McDonald's.
00:21:58.000At that point, if you decide to do that, you become an unholy shepherd of death!
00:22:04.000Now you have experienced unitive consciousness, but instead of recognizing that all that's left is to try to ease the suffering of the people around you, if you can, you're like, let me trick them!
00:22:17.000I'm going to bring them towards the pit!
00:22:19.000I'm gonna bring them into this slaughterhouse using my nice little glow and I'm gonna get paid, baby!
00:22:30.000And that's the, that's what you're talking about, I think.
00:22:33.000And it's definitely a very rotten thing to do.
00:22:36.000It's a rotten thing to do, but I mean, if any of us have experienced that whisper, that little whisper, like, here, look, come on, let me show you something.
00:23:49.000You want to stop blowing up kids, huh?
00:23:54.000Come on, you gotta break a few eggs and make an omelet.
00:23:59.000When there are no values, when there is only the impersonation of values, these inversions become possible.
00:24:07.000The kind of Orwellian literalism of war is peace becomes actualised.
00:24:14.000It becomes actualized because nothing is anchored.
00:24:17.000Now this is sort of like one of the dangers of post-modernity and this is where some of those sort of like sort of late Christian right-wing folks, J.P., Jordan, you know, like this is where they're right about the, I believe, about that post-modernity denies archetype, denies essence.
00:24:34.000Therefore means that the pursuit of the kind of materialistic, rationalistic, individualistic goals that post-enlightenment thinking appears to have led us to become valid, in the end it becomes egregious and fascistic.
00:25:12.000You know, like, I've had that go around that was a conventional celebrity go around the roller coaster, you know?
00:25:19.000Hollywood, you know, all of the excitement, the glitz, the red carpets, the sex, all of that, you know, like, I've experienced it and I, you know, like, The reason I sort of, one of the reasons I believe in God is because of this sort of certain sense of like I kind of knew already.
00:25:35.000You know the last words of the Bhagavad Gita someone once told me after Krishna has shown Arjuna the battle and who is the real ally and the way it's going to go down and you're going to lose cousins.
00:25:47.000That apparently like Arjuna's last words, and please bring out a Vedic scholar to prove me wrong, like that Arjuna says, I remember, I remember.
00:25:57.000That we are, of course, part of the total.
00:26:03.000And when we find ourselves becoming the unholy shepherd... And this unholy shepherd mentality, I think, has become the dominant strand in our culture.
00:26:13.000That this is what I believe we're sort of living through.
00:26:21.000Like, when I was talking to that woman, Barry Weiss, yesterday, one of the Tweety folks, like, she's right.
00:26:25.000She's a gay woman, married, like, got a kid and stuff.
00:26:29.000She's clearly, like, used to work at the New York Times.
00:26:31.000She's what would have, like, 10 years ago, would have just been a, what you'd call a normal lefty.
00:26:36.000Now, of course, she's sort of pursued her principles.
00:26:38.000She's ended up not being able to work at the New York Times, because she knew they were going to shut down that Hunter Biden stuff, and they were just, there was like an anti-Trump orthodoxy that was not about, you know, like, She was clearly not a pro-Trump person, but she was just like, hold on a minute, this isn't reporting, this isn't journalism anymore.
00:26:55.000And now I feel that where we're at is no one's willing to actually do anything.
00:27:03.000So everything has become an impersonation.
00:27:06.000And I don't know how these values find their way back into our culture.
00:27:09.000When we find ourselves traditionless, when we are in like a sort of like a Baudrillard, like a nightmare scape of everything's an impersonation.
00:27:18.000There ain't no way you're going to be able to anchor yourselves.
00:27:22.000You know, a little while ago, Duncan, I had the thought that, you know, between, like, medieval times and late Renaissance, say, like that 500 year period, imagine, like, the total amount of documented material there would be with a pre-printing press.
00:27:38.000Yeah, that would be printed online now in 10 minutes.
00:27:41.000So information is moving so fast that you can't sort of like, you can't place it.
00:27:45.000And then everyone's telling you nothing's real, nothing's real, nothing matters.
00:27:48.000You know, during the pandemic, yeah, you've got to take these vaccines to stop the spread.
00:27:53.000Then a few months later, yeah, we never tested them for transmission.
00:27:56.000Hey, we're not going to make any profits out of that vaccine.
00:27:58.000Hey, we made record profits out of that vaccine.
00:28:01.000NATO were not involved in impeding upon Russian territory.
00:28:05.000There was no deal between Gorbachev It's like, oh my god, and suddenly they pince a movement you into.
00:28:11.000The only thing we can do is shut up and allow them to bomb children in a way that is clearly profitable to them.
00:28:19.000Well, look, I mean, Child Sacrifice is one of the oldest games out there, man.
00:28:25.000It's been going on for a long time and all cultures.
00:29:04.000And then all of a sudden that you're trying to make sense of that, as I'm sure every generation watching the child get its heart ripped out on the pyramid.
00:29:13.000Certainly there are people in the crowd thinking, I don't know.
00:29:15.000I don't know if this is really stopping the drought.
00:29:23.000And similarly, just like you said earlier, it's like the idea that war brings peace.
00:29:29.000You know, anyone, like any child, any non-bomb child, will have the capacity to think, I don't think these wars are really bringing world peace.
00:29:40.000Actually seems to be doing the opposite.
00:29:41.000I don't know if like setting the forest on fire is putting the fire out necessarily.
00:29:49.000I don't know if spraying water on things is drying them off.
00:29:53.000This doesn't seem to be the right way to do it.
00:29:56.000This is just common sense, and so what ends up happening is, and especially now because we're getting shotgun blasted in the face by disparate data streams, that one thing and then the next and the next, and honestly like the culture shifts from what's right and what's wrong so quickly.
00:30:12.000It's like now it's a weird game of like, what's it called, where you jump around the chairs, you know?
00:30:19.000It's like at any given moment you're sitting in a seat where like, Oh my god!
00:30:30.000And I think maybe in that, it's becoming increasingly Easy to recognize how absurd the whole situation is.
00:30:38.000And in that's an invitation to return to your heart, to return to something that you're not going to find on any online source, on Instagram, on Twitter, or even in any book necessarily.
00:30:52.000And that's the, you know, to me, what's wonderful about this weird game
00:30:57.000that we're playing is that any second, you can wake up from the nightmare
00:31:01.000by just going into your heart and feeling loved and feeling vulnerable and recognizing
00:31:08.000all the people on the left that you are feeling completely annoyed and freaked out by.
00:31:15.000They also have been shotgun blasted in the face by weird streams of data.
00:31:21.000and many of them are fucking terrified.
00:31:24.000They didn't recover from the global pandemic.
00:32:19.000On one side, they think that fascism is going to take over the planet.
00:32:25.000The United States is going to, the government will be overthrown.
00:32:28.000Trump will be in some like golden fucking, like wear a golden crown and dance in robes.
00:32:36.000You know, on the other side, they think that, uh, you know, all of us are gonna, like, no longer be able to say man or woman, and that, uh, we're gonna, like, go plunging into some confused universe of madness and a biblical thing that makes Babylon seem like the Boy Scouts.
00:33:00.000That fear is being capitalized on, because there's a lot of money in fear, so you recognize that on top of that, in the shadows, there's corporations just...
00:33:09.000They're blowing into the fire because the hotter the fire gets, the more people buy shit that they think will protect them from whatever the non-existent thing that's out to get them is.
00:33:22.000And so I really think all you could do is first see if you can make yourself a little less afraid, recognize where you are afraid, recognize where the fear turns into anger, because Anger is just hot fear.
00:34:10.000They're just helping people, and I think that's fundamentally what humans are.
00:34:15.000Underneath it all is just, we all want to help.
00:34:18.000We're just confused about how to do that.
00:34:20.000That impulse to help that you beautifully described there, its veracity and how indigenous to us it is, seems to me to be a derivative of unitary awareness.
00:34:34.000On some level, beyond the mapped-on culture, We know, we are one, that love is the felt experience of unity.
00:34:44.000So when the context demands it by raising the frequency to crisis, oh my god, a fellow human being, a part of me, a part of the whole, requires help.
00:34:56.000So when we are particularised, If we are overly contextualized, more and more separated, inculcated into this state of separation, that becomes invisible to us.
00:35:12.000And I think that you can only attain those states through a spiritual experience.
00:35:18.000You can't get there through rationalism very easily.
00:35:21.000And even, as Karlin pointed out, and as great thinkers have pointed out, Humanism in its secular values derives its scaffold from Christianity.
00:35:35.000The idea, you know, like what is a human right?
00:35:37.000Why would a human have a right in infinite space?
00:35:40.000Why would this cluster of molecules have a thing called rights?
00:35:44.000And you can't get there without spiritual recourse, without saying there is something else.
00:35:52.000And when you are deluged, when, you know, as Melville said, when Noah's flood is still happening, we're still in the flood, it's impossible.
00:36:03.000It becomes impossible, man, to sort of, like, to access that.
00:36:08.000I wonder if I can pull up, or someone could pull up so Duncan can see it, the W.B.
00:36:12.000Yeats poem where it says, uh, the falconer, the falcon cannot see the falcon.
00:37:39.000So that's some nice context right there, because I wanted to move our conversation into some of this sort of last century or cultism, you know, because I know that you're interested in that I'm interested in Rudolf Steiner and some of his ideas.
00:37:52.000Like he had some weird mystic shit going on and this WBF.
00:37:55.000Cause like some of these, where else is it going to come from?
00:37:57.000But the edge lands, you know, the edge lands is where we're going to have to go to, you know, we're entering into a period of chaos.
00:38:03.000I know every generation has this kind of narcissism, but look, we are entering into this time of total immersion through tech, through surveillance, through centralizing powers.
00:38:13.000But go on then Duncan, will you read the second coming for us?
00:38:56.000Hardly are these words out when a vast image, a spiritus mundi, troubles my sight somewhere in sands of the desert.
00:39:05.000A shape with lion body and the head of a man, a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, is moving its slow thighs while all about it real shadows of the indignant desert birds The darkness drops again, but now I know that 20 centuries of stony sleep were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle.
00:39:28.000And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born.
00:39:42.000WB8, CCB's Feelings and Feelings, Duncan.
00:40:23.000I'm writing a poem about this asshole.
00:40:26.000That's the beast part, you know, because Crowley called himself the beast.
00:40:30.000So, yeah, there's all kinds of stories about, like, physical altercations between the two.
00:40:35.000They really didn't get along, apparently, which is very funny to me, to imagine those two having, like, the smartest argument you've ever heard in your life, you know, bringing up, insulting each other with probably ancient Egyptian curses.
00:40:52.000If you're actually in a pretty esoteric sect, like the Order of the Golden Dawn, and you can't even get on with the other members of the Order of the Golden Dawn, you've got to that point!
00:41:33.000And then when an ego fights an ego, it's always the knives are going to come out verbally or physically.
00:41:39.000And then that's just because it's animals fighting.
00:41:41.000But you mix in the ego and the intellect and now maybe you have the famous debates between like physicists Which are incredible and physicists are roasting each other.
00:42:03.000You can even let your ego do its thing, but it's being illuminated by your heart.
00:42:09.000And so now it's no longer this scary menacing thing.
00:42:13.000And in Buddhism, I've heard this is known as wrathfulness.
00:42:18.000In Buddhism, wrathfulness is a kind of angry energy that's illuminated by the heart space.
00:42:26.000And so, in that situation, it might not even come out as like loud.
00:42:30.000It might be very soft, a whisper, but it's very powerful.
00:42:34.000And so this is, I think, what we're talking about ultimately.
00:42:37.000And I know trying to ascribe some singular point of like where all everything's going wrong is probably a little naive of me, but I think if I had to guess, I'd say we've disconnected from our heart.
00:42:49.000When you're in your heart, when you're with your kids, it is so, you can get angry, I get angry with my kids sometimes, but there's love behind the anger.
00:43:58.000I think I'm insulting pigs, by the way.
00:43:59.000Sometimes I see pictures of them, they see very much in their heart.
00:44:03.000So I think that's the main sort of issue happening right now, is we have to get our intellect and our ego harmonized with our heart space, and then once we do that, that melts politics.
00:44:17.000That melts all the temporary little, like, Like tiny little bits of cultural ice floating in the ocean of spirit.
00:44:30.000And that's what it's all about, if you ask me.
00:44:32.000Get in there if you can and try to speak from that place when you can.
00:44:36.000And when you recognize someone isn't in that place, remember they have the capacity to be And then you can find compassion, because you know what it feels like when you're cut off from your heart.
00:44:58.000So I think there's people who are in their heart right now and people who aren't, and we're playing a game with each other that doesn't have to be quite as severe as it is right now.
00:45:11.000You know this, like in the information age, it's very easy to become kind of embedded in cerebralism, that intelligence becomes only data rather than intuitive intelligence.
00:45:26.000You know, the message of Christ is a message of intelligence to live in truth.
00:45:47.000And I also am encouraged when you say that the ice can thaw and we can move back to the heart just in an instant.
00:45:57.000I know that Ram Dass is a treasured teacher and influence on you and a few of my like thoughts on him in the moment are like that when on that documentary when he talked about when he nearly died I think when he had his stroke and he just said oh no I'm dying and I'm just looking at the ceiling and I'm just looking at the cracks in the ceiling this isn't like a powerful experience it's sort of boring I'm just a person like he felt like you know that And the other Ram Dass thing I wanted to mention to see what it sort of brings up in you is that the famous, I think it's called Letter to Rachel, the letter he wrote to those grieving parents, you know, who had lost, who had lost a child and that his ability to, because what I guess I'm trying to say, Duncan, is that you and I have these conversations that are, I pray, certainly on my part, are most heartfelt and they feel heartfelt from you as well and passionate and wise and funny and brilliant and just how I like my gear.
00:46:49.000But there's a point where it has to You know, like you say, you find yourself parent in a child.
00:47:10.000How do you get yourself to that place?
00:47:12.000How do you get yourself back into your heart?
00:47:15.000And what are your favorite Ram Dass teachings at At the moment, I'm sure they're the kind of things where you move through it, but where right now are you with that stuff?
00:47:27.000I always go back to Ram Dass' teachings in one way or the other.
00:47:37.000As far as the way that I get from my head into my heart, it's gotten easier.
00:47:43.000When I met Ram Dass, I was fully in my head, but I had sort of reached out to the Love Server Member Foundation because I was so depressed and I'd heard somewhere, when you're depressed, Offer service.
00:47:58.000Spiritual service is a great way to help your depression.
00:48:05.000So I emailed just some email I found in a copy of Be Here Now saying like, well, I do podcasts.
00:48:11.000Maybe I could show you guys how to do podcasts.
00:48:14.000And then Raghu Marcus, who is the one of the people who runs that Ram Dass' foundation, reached out to me.
00:48:21.000And then just by good karma, you know, I remember meeting him being terrified of like, not terrified, but fully prepared for disappointment.
00:48:30.000Raghu, you know, this is going to be bullshit.
00:48:32.000Like for sure, it's just going to be somebody wearing like embarrassing beads and like you just want some money or something.
00:48:43.000Totally, just like us talking, just completely nothing in there like that all the things my cynical mind at the time was fully prepared for.
00:48:51.000It's either going to be a grift or it's going to be a cult or it's going to be something worse than that or who fucking knows.
00:48:56.000But it was just a really normal down-to-earth guy.
00:48:58.000I would try to offend him initially because I thought, well, if I say awful things about their guru and they reject me, good, because it's a cult.
00:49:08.000You know, if I say terrible things, then there's, like, off-limits things to talk about, then I'm not interested.
00:50:45.000And that's when he, like, gets that radiant, like, incredible Ram Dass, beautiful, like, that thing when you're around Tole, that thing when you're around him and whatever your neurotic bullshit is, just for a second, melts away.
00:50:59.000And it's like, it's like suddenly you're open to it.
00:51:26.000They're talking about Shambhala, the ancient civilizations, all the data reservoirs right there inside of you all the time.
00:51:33.000All you got to do is have the guts and the discipline to some degree to go from the surface, which is up here in your intellect and your very powerful mind, and start going down into your heart.
00:52:35.000Just that alone will inform your next step.
00:52:38.000That will tell you where, what, that is all the scriptures right there.
00:52:41.000That's the singularity that contains within it every holy word ever spoken by any saint or guru or any great being.
00:52:50.000It's all just right there because that's what they were, they were in that space and then they started talking.
00:52:55.000And whatever came out of their mouth just ended up in things that now we call scriptures and stuff.
00:53:01.000But it's just, I think that's why Jesus was like, probably why it was such a threat to the priest class.
00:53:08.000Because they want you to think that they're the intermediary between the headspace and the heartspace.
00:53:14.000They can, you know, there you have to go into the holy of holies and get permission by some dude dressed like a gnome to make connection with that divine space.
00:53:24.000And so that's where the world kicks in.
00:53:27.000And, you know, I think that's what you've identified.
00:53:28.000And a lot of people have identified who right now are like, you know, very bravely, if you ask me, sort of pointing Look at that.
00:55:21.000Every time I talk to you, you're like a magnet!
00:55:24.000Mahariji, you know, when they talk about him, like when Ram Das and, you know, Krishna Das, you know, see, like, on one hand, here, Duncan, you beautifully espoused, describe and demonstrate the power of the heart space, the necessity of the heart space, that it ain't, it is not esotericism that brings you there.
00:55:58.000These people that I hector and bombard in my angry adolescence, they knew I have taken a lifetime to understand.
00:56:08.000But also as part of the narrative of these great mystics is the axis of the sublime the axis to the sublime and that kind of stuff that I guess titillates us you know like when when they tell those stories that he would go you know why were you down by the lake you know like they'll tell some mad little story like I suppose that and in that is An indication that there is more than one science.
00:56:34.000There is more than the measurement and observation of the material world, of the supramolecular, the expressions through material.
00:56:44.000There are subtler forms of information, there are subtler networks, there are subtler forms of connectivity.
00:56:51.000What do you make of that, you know, stuff?
00:56:54.000And do you ever get like turned on by all of that?
00:56:57.000And then the next bit of my question is whether or not you ever want to just go via, you know, like the intermediary, you know, the priest class intermediaries, the ongoing commodification of everything, even the divine, you know, that's one thing.
00:57:12.000And I like how you described that, you know, like Krishnamurti said, you know, truth is a pathless land.
00:58:24.000The original, holy shit, our maps for the mind.
00:58:29.000They might be accurate for a small aspect of human consciousness, but they certainly aren't mapping the entirety of what psychedelics are showing us.
00:58:38.000So, for sure, psychedelics are Not just for Westerners who might have grown up outside of a culture where they're used sacramentally or in some initiatory way, even they're powerful enough without any of that stuff, without being introduced to the ancestors or being taken to a space where generations of your family would sit to commune with the departed.
00:59:05.000Even without that stuff, you can still have a reconnection with your heart space, which is a huge relief for people.
00:59:13.000To quote Ram Dass some more, death is like taking off a shoe that's too tight.
00:59:18.000So if you are pinchered off in your head, if the tourniquet has been wrapped between your head and your heart, then it's like being in clothes that are too tight.
00:59:48.000It's like a kid lost in the forest, just trying to get home.
00:59:52.000And it's like, you know, instead of like getting home, he's like getting lost in big piles of ketamine or, you know, whatever your particular drug of choice is.
01:00:02.000Anyway, the point is, so So as far as, so I think psychedelics are a great way to sort of give you the GPS coordinates.
01:00:28.000And then when you come down from a trip like that, your depression eases, your relationships get better because that Like, nyeh-nyeh-nyeh-nyeh thing that comes from living in a world where you're lost and defensive, that softens up a little bit.
01:00:45.000So, magic, I mean, my God, if ceremonial magic, it's, for sure, I don't practice it.
01:00:52.000I know people who do, and oh, yeah, they certainly, there's, I think, very Difficult, very difficult techniques that let you experience unified consciousness.
01:01:08.000And again, this is all just anecdotal.
01:01:11.000I don't know for sure about that because I've never had the discipline to do like ceremonial magic.
01:01:22.000Like you got to draw these pentagrams on the floor and like if you've ever been to someone's house who does it it's like this is that would have to like what are you going to call someone at id home depot to come over and draw an inokian spirit board on your floor and then the robes and you got to make your own dagger i don't know how to forge I can't forge iron, whatever you use, not to mention the memorization, not to mention all the things Crowley recommended as just the sort of preschool level of magic, you know?
01:01:56.000Like, you have to become a master of yoga, of meditation, you've got to read a hundred books, learn to read in Latin, and, you know, sorry, but I just don't have the... I'm not smart enough.
01:02:09.000I'm not embarrassed to say I'm not smart enough.
01:02:12.000I am not smart enough to practice ceremonial magic.
01:02:15.000It's like when I watch Jeopardy, and I'm like, oh my god, I am as dumb as I thought I was, because I don't know.
01:02:24.000So yeah, but I do think it must be an access point, because I have friends who practice it, and who have You know, demonstrated, you know, a lot of things that seems to point to the connect, the invisibles, whatever they are, mycelial quantum tubules that connect all of us and can be sort of played around with if you want to get into that stuff.
01:02:59.000There's miracles and, you know, if you haven't experienced them yet, just find a practice you love, take it up, and you will.
01:03:07.000It'll go from being like, that's just a bunch of grifters or acid heads or bullshitters talking about this nonsense, to, oh fuck, oh fuck, it's real.
01:03:23.000And then, Now you've got to deal with that.
01:03:26.000Now you have to work with that, because that's a lot to work with.
01:03:29.000That's a lot to work with, to realize that it's not just nonsense, that in fact, things happen around certain people that are impossible, that can't happen, shouldn't happen, that point to some kind of interconnectedness or a shared mind or, you know, some kind of I don't know, extra dimension to reality that we just haven't quantified yet.
01:03:56.000And some people think they want to experience that, but when they experience it, it's a little off-putting.
01:04:45.000Or rather, the flavour of God that I was getting for a while was a flavour that, it served me well to actualise the conditions that I needed to actualise, but now it's time to, I need God, I need neat God, I need God straight to the brain, I need God in a needle through the cavity, I need to, straight to the heart, I need God.
01:05:06.000You know, you've brought me back there, you've brought me back there.
01:05:08.000And what it becomes evident to me that even in like when you use sort of the the accepted metrics of our age that we live in the liminal space that is determined by the senses and it would be a ludicrous outrageous and implausible coincidence If the range of sensory data that we had the instruments to detect was the entirety of the total range, and that is the assumption of rationalism.
01:05:34.000That which we can measure is that which there is.
01:05:39.000That's like saying, that's like what a child would believe, like, you know, when they do that test, when they show them what's in the doll's house, but what can the teddy that's outside the dollhouse see?
01:05:48.000They just think that the teddy can see the same thing they can see, you know?
01:05:51.000And don't forget they irrelevantize the whatever you want to kind of scope the human body is.
01:05:57.000So any kind of intuitive sense of anything, any kind of dream state or any kind of anything, this is just, no, no, no, we don't use that to measure things.
01:06:12.000And so you get this, you know, in the UFO community, I love the term, they call it swamp gassing, which is, uh, like the version of gaslighting, but for UFO people,
01:06:23.000which is like, you just saw swamp gas, you didn't see anything, you're just out of your mind.
01:06:27.000That was just some bubble of swamp gas that was traveling faster than the speed of sound
01:06:33.000and immediately stopped and went into the ocean.
01:06:51.000So in secularism, what can end up happening is a kind of like human swamp gassing, which is like, you know, regardless of the entirety of over half Half of the species, the human biome, reports encounters with deities, angels, intuition, moments of telepathy, clairvoyance, not getting on the airplane out of some weird sense that you shouldn't get on the airplane, all of these things, many of them documented at all, it's just, it's too random, it's not, ultimately I think it's because
01:07:24.000Maybe there's some acceptance that there might be something there, but it's like, we can't use it.
01:07:30.000We can't use it, and if we can't use it, then it can't be marketed.
01:07:41.000And then, sadly, because of what can accidentally happen, Because people who seem like authorities on things are telling you that's not real.
01:07:53.000You didn't experience a dream in which you met with your deceased relative.
01:08:03.000That was just your subconscious bubbling up with like bad gas from grief.
01:08:08.000It's like your brain farting out a very sweet dream where you felt like you were in the presence of a loved one or whatever the particular paranormal experience is.
01:08:30.000And I think what's so dangerous about it, them, and by them I mean the people who are what are known as antinatalists, I mean, think of that shit.
01:09:03.000Because what brings you more into the heart than, you know, being around children?
01:09:08.000I don't know where I'm going with this, but I'm glad to hear that you landed in the heart space again for a moment, but I do have to point this out.
01:09:22.000In bhakti yoga, there are various ways of connecting with the divine.
01:09:28.000And one of the most profound and holy ways is not direct connection, but pining after God.
01:09:37.000That in fact, that is considered a connection with God, and this is where the term, the longing is the grace, comes from.
01:09:46.000That thing that you think is disconnect, that feeling of wanting it, needing it, and you want it, this is like in bhakti yoga, this is an encounter with the divine.
01:10:10.000There's literally an entire genre of devotional Hare Krishna songs, which are just about how much they miss Krishna, how much they want to see God, and love songs but for God.
01:11:02.000I don't know what kind of crazy city you have there, but every time we talk, I feel like I go into some weird dreamy state and then it's over.
01:11:12.000But during the conversation, I always think, oh, I wish we could talk for like, 10 hours, 100 hours together.
01:11:29.000I was thinking about one thing that Vandana Shiva says, that the earth is being desacralized.
01:11:34.000We're losing our sacred connection, our connection to the sacred.
01:11:38.000When things are demystified, overly rationalized, everything becomes measurable, everything becomes data, the inevitable conclusion is that you are an individual and you're going to die and there's nothing else so you might as well pursue profit.
01:11:49.000And it's a deep, deep ideology and like you said, all of the mystical data that is dispatched because it's random and it can't be quantified or utilized or ultimately garnered towards profit, this is the area where we must dwell and at least now we know well What our part of our mission must be is to convey this love, to feel this love, to speak from that place of love, which you've done so elegantly today, Duncan.
01:12:47.000Don't forget you can catch up on all our shows on Rumble.
01:12:49.000There are guests like Tulsi Gabbard, Barry Weiss, Matt Tybee, Graham Hancock and Tim Robbins.
01:12:55.000Also, we will be over the festive period dropping some new Here's the News, No Here's the Effing News presentations that take you deep into cultural issues and provide some new critiques on centralised establishment matters.
01:13:08.000Sign up to our Stay Free AF community to join me for weekly meditations, QAs and to see interviews first and in full.